Administrivia

The steam-powered statcounters hereabouts record as many unique pageviews this year alone as in the total of the prior seven years' of active posting, the same story regarding comments, and just shy of a blog record of posts this year alone (which we would have beaten handily, if not overtaken by the lingering December Crud, and a healthy dose not giving a f*** about the Usual Shenanigans by the Usual Suspects). Including a tripling of average number of daily visits, which either means I'm getting this mostly right, or else the NSA data miners have gone off the deep end, and I have a black bag awaiting me on Troublemaker Round Up Day. Perhaps both.

For all those looks, the generous linkage by a number of folks and their blogs, and the comments on our brain droppings, the host of the blog generously thanks one and all responsible. (Excepting the schmuck who keeps trying to spam us from Bangladesh, whose posts go to Spam-blivion.)

A Happy New Year to you all.

We'll try and do better in 2018.

Teddy Roosevelt Lives

h/t CDR Salamander

SecNav Spencer travelled to A-stan for some chats with the troops (above).

Note the pic above, and see if you can spot what an actual leader does when he's doing it right.

This, sportsfans, is a wartime consigliere.

Non futuis nobiscum.

Still Getting Tech Wrong

h/t Gates of Vienna

Note please that George is screwed whichever end of that thing he goes off of.

There's a lesson or two there.

In an interesting article at GoV, the discussion devolves to the ongoing attempt to sustain the Welfare State via Third World population importation, and the socially taboo alternative option of geronticide was the topic.

And then, in comments, it goes completely dipshitical, including the inevitable "Everything will be automated, and we'll all live in mud huts" codswallop.

Um, no.
I/we beat the robot-overlord automation nonsense to death with the arguments for/against self-driving cars (TL;DR: It ain't coming, sportsfans) both here and over at Silicon Graybeard's blog some months past, but for a refresher:

Dystopian nonsense, unconnected to reality.

Cars only cut the number of jobs for horsecrap shovelers, but the number of jobs from that tech upgrade increased for everything but horses, to the present day, for everything from car washers to road builders and street sweepers to oil drillers and refiners. In fact, there are now far more cars, trucks, and tractors than there ever were horses, by orders of magnitude. That's what technology does.

Computers and software magnify jobs, they don't decrease them, mainly because of GIGO problems.
Call me when software becomes flawless.
I'll wait.

"Robots" may take away jobs from burger flippers, but only by increasing the jobs for those who load them with frozen patties and ketchup, service them, program them, repair them when they break, and design and rebuild their inevitable upgrades.

You're not going to replace people in most jobs, ever. You may change the nature of some jobs, but the idea that you're going to see whole swaths of the labor force displaced is rampant nonsense from watching too much Star Trek as if it were reality gospel, and doing too little actual work, let alone running an actual business.

And anyone who thinks AI will take over driving or airline piloting is ignoring the inevitable Hindenburg/Titanic moments that will get that nonsense cancelled in about a minute.
Those who disagree can show me their ticket stubs from the White Star Line or Greater Reich Graf Zeppelin Corp. for their last transatlantic crossing.

So tell me: did jetliners create less jobs than ocean crossings, or more?
And the reason you need so many drivers now is because shipping went from odd pieces to truck-borne cargo containers. The future of technology inevitably looks more like The Jetsons ("Jane, stop this crazy thing!") than it does or ever will Star Trek.

 African countries have a pyramid, because there is no social security (except kids who will hopefully help support you in your dotage), coupled to a continent that whacks people with every natural and man-made population cull known to 10th century man, which is what most of that under-developed continent lives under to this day.

Dirt roads, mud huts, barbaric sanitation and lifestyle practices, and scads of helpful wildlife like lions and hippos, let alone malaria and Ebola, cull people even more ferociously than combining distilled alcohol with motor vehicles does hereabouts. Hence their demographic graphs.
(For a first-person explanation, read Kim DuToit's excellent 2002 missive: Let Africa Sink.)

The simple fix to the demographic "problem" is the obvious one, entirely overlooked in all of the above: what government cannot sustain (Social Security/Medicare) will implode and collapse.

What cannot continue, won't.

Once you don't have to worry about the nanny state's "safety net"/noose, demographics is irrelevant. Population at that point, like it has for time immemorial, will devolve to a question of how many kids, and thus mouths, you can support, and the life choices involved that each person makes. People who juggle lit road flares while standing in a vat of gasoline for a living won't, for instance, need to worry about a pension. Burn salve and bandages would be a better investment.

Anything else attempted is a race to becoming Zimbabwe, including the inevitable round-up and execution of the bureaucrats and dictator involved, and unless you re-introduce grizzly bears and wolves to NYFC's Central Park and the DC metro area, you can't get there and sustain it.

Importing the Third World to the West is merely a way to bootstrap draconian bloodbath wars between the current civilized populations, and the non-native invasive species.
All the present is, is a warm-up for that exact bloodbath.

Trying to extrapolate a future trend, without including the inevitable response to the current machinations, is a failure of reactive physics and sociology on a global scale, akin to suggesting that one could increase the zebra population of the veldt without the lions, leopards, and cheetahs paying the newcomers any mind or taking any action.

If you're rightfully worried that government immigration or healthcare policies don't have your best interests in mind (because they don't) the solution will be to take their choices away in both cases, not yours, and thus secure your borders, buy your own damned health insurance, and fund your own f**king retirement/pension, like you should have been doing since forever. The man who thinks he will sit in government's lap while it feeds him peeled grapes until he dies, wasn't paying attention in every history class since Socrates was teaching in Athens.

The simplest solution, in both cases, is to build a barrier wall from Brownsville to San Diego for the former, and one around the District of Columbia in the latter, and let no one from the other side get across in either instance, enforced with mines, machineguns, and flamethrowers a la Escape From New York.

If election to Mordor was a one-way terminal ride with no re-entry privileges, the enthusiasm for undertaking the trip would sufficiently fade to make further measures unnecessary, and the republic would look like Théoden's "after" picture once Saruman was dis-possessed.

Failing that, the increase of The Diversity and the impending financial collapse of the Nanny State should long ago have suggested to anyone with the wits the two most obvious conclusions:

Things are going to get sporty.
You don't have enough ammo.

'Tis The Season

Ne plus ultra.

The day is about gift-giving, yes. About elves, toys, reindeer, and snowmen, not so much.
Best wishes to one and all today, of all days.

'Tis The Season

Chills.
One-take perfection.

'Tis The Season

Note to singers, like those in the 42 versions I listened to and discarded before posting this one: When it's a Christmas carol, that is who the star of the piece is.

Stop jazzing, soloing, and tarting it up, which is just the petty talent's cry of "Me! Me! Me!"
Your own skills and talents show best when you focus on the music, with as much artistic perfection as you can muster, and not on inserting your own flourishes.
Tomorrow, a case in point of how that works.

Hope This Clears Things Up For Ya

h/t Freedom Is Just Another Word

War - Boom - Bust - Crisis.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
You could look it up.

'Tis The Season

Best version I could find of one of my absolute favorites of the season.
In my next life, I'll become a symphony conductor with a minor in recording engineering, just so I can get right what so many have butchered.

RIP Dick Enberg

(SAN DIEGO) Died Tuesday at his home in La Jolla, aged 82, of an apparent heart attack, after a truly legendary broadcast career.

I was fortunate, growing up in SoCal, to have the likes of Dick Enberg to listen to broadcasting football for the UCLA Bruins and the Rams, Chick Hearn doing the Lakers, and Vin Scully doing the Dodgers. If that isn't a sportscasting version of Mt. Rushmore, there isn't one. Only Scully, retired just last year, remains among us.

It's probably also why so many lesser lights sound to me like the leftovers and also-rans they are, and why it's so hard to listen to the second- and third-string understudies.

Enberg finished his career doing a decade of Padres baseball, but he also did everything else: Wimbledon, the Rose Bowl, and countless other events for multiple networks. In fact, if you ever saw the only version of Rollerball worth watching, with James Caan, you get no points for guessing who did the play-by-play for all the rollerball games throughout that iconic 1975 flick. Enberg could truly do anything. And, it was noted, the only thing keeping Enberg from being the best sportscaster in Los Angeles in the 1970s was Vin Scully amidst his 67-year run with the Dodgers.

The only good thing about this, if there is anything good in it, is I don't miss the games as much.
And absent the grace imparted by such masterful storytellers, there's little point paying them any mind.

Picking At The Scab

h/t WRSA

Folks just can't seem to let go of the idea of another civil war.
Probably because they stupidly view the first one to occur in these parts far too romantically, and have a tenuous grasp of what battlefields covered in dead and wounded looked like, sounded like, and smelled like, but that's a question for forensic psychologists.

Lately, a few more recent efforts have popped up, kicking it around yet again.
At American Thinker.
At Christian Mercenary.
At Cold Fury.
And Forward Observer.

They vary greatly, in reality and accuracy, with the caveat that this is all in the realm of crystal-ball-gazing. One may note, however, that a prognosticator who predicts horses rather than zebras has pure statistical likelihood on their side, and is miles closer to reality than the person who confidently asserts unicorns.

Bear in mind, this dead horse was pretty well beaten to molecules a year ago, and that was people more or less on my side whinging about the pending civil war because Shrillary lost.
The people on the other side unleashed footie-pajama-clad cocoa-sipping Snowflakes and Trigglypuffs, with the result since then that the handiest place to find Antifa these days is on the back of a milk carton.

(I seem to recall that they were going to rant to the heavens last November, and begin overthrowing President Trump. Last I looked, he just watched a monster tax cut passed, including the repeal of the individual ObozoCare mandate, driving a stake through its reptilian heart after the Senate failed to kill it outright three five eleventy times. So color me somewhat unimpressed by the whole idea the Left is going to unleash the kraken.)

But assuming things do get worse, as is likely, what might it look like?

Look at failed states, and see how they fail.

Nothing, and nowhere in history, does a gigantic black hole form that sucks all of reality down into itself.

Some areas are relatively unscathed, at least by violence.
Others are apocalyptic hellholes.
Most fall somewhere in between.

Expect the same in any future difficulties where you are.

Baltimorons, Chicongo, Bahstun, DC, and NYFC could expect a rather rough time. Dallas, Miami, Buffalo, not so much.

I doubt we’ll see anything like a civil war, as such.

What we’re liable to get is things working less, or not at all, especially in areas where the margin between functional everyday life and disasterpiece theater is thinner than others.
There will be shortages. Areas that can’t be served by the central government, federal or state, and require more of that 24/7/365, will degrade.
Areas with lesser reliance on Big Brother will fare much better.

Human interactions and governance is called politics. Politics is getting along with everyone else, to the maximum extent possible. War is a continuation of politics, by other means.

Everybody lately likes to yak about DeepState. That’ll be every federal, state, and county employee, in all likelihood, not to mention the dependents of same, and retirees tied to their pension paychecks.
That’ll be every retired cop and firefighter, and every former bureaucrat, every retired teacher and administrator from K-Ph.D.
That accountability list is getting pretty fucking huge at this point.
Add in all the people (snowflakes, airheads, useful idiots, entertainment do-nothings et al) who don’t think like you do, and it’s approaching 50% of everywhere. Or worse.

Those of you in tax-haven Red State heaven may find you have one helluva lot more pension teat-sucking fifth columnists than you imagined, all of whom have, as their first interest, the maintenance of the entire status quo, who won’t be subscribing to your newsletter, marching in your parade, and will likely dime you out given half a chance and any enticement from TPTB.

And they’re in your AO, and they all get a vote too; either at the ballot box, or via Rule 308. You have a limited option-set for accommodating them or exterminating them, and every choice has its pros and cons.

Functional society lives in a very narrow pH range between totalitarianism and anarchy; anyone who thinks they’re going to yank the lever very far in either direction and fix everything by killing everyone who disagrees with them will pull the walls of the trench onto their own head, whether we’re talking political power, legitimacy, or getting zipped into body bags. Which all tend to be fairly correlative, especially in sportier times.

There ain’t gonna be no Grand Strategy where you carve out a Redoubt, a New South, or a Flyover Paradise.
Ain’t. Gonna. Happen.

Ask a Milosevic what happens when you try.

If you’re very lucky, you may have a coherent state (as in One of the Fifty), and one that has your best interests at heart. Worst case, it’ll be coherent, and want you dead, gulaged, re-educated, or whatever term of art applies come the day.
Most folks will have a county, or a few counties, with roughly similar interests. Large counties, with geographic barriers, may devolve to civilizational outposts, surrounded by No Man’s Land areas or varying functionality.

In short, things are liable to look more like the Wild West than the Walking Dead.
Things will become better, and worse. Rougher, simpler, meaner, and more focused on your choices and day-to-day existence. There will be bandits, savages, and brigands in the wastelands. They’ll all want to come to the bright lights of the city for all the reasons folks do now, and did then.

But there aren’t likely to be front lines; scores will be settled far more personally, in back alleys or bar room brawls. Some people will try and build industry and commerce, and the order of civilization and prosperity.
Others will try to burn it out, rob it, and subjugate it. Like always, everywhere.

This, boys and girls, is why we study history: lessons from Deadwood, Tombstone, or the South Side of Chicago circa 1930 will have as much to do with reality then as now.

Expect devolution, not revolution.

This is why how big your ranch is, and how many ride for your brand, and WRSA's host’s none-too-subtle reminders of local, Local, LOCAL should be your guiding principles.

If you’re in unfriendly territory, you aren’t going to take down the next Hitler or Stalin. But you damned sure better know how to get around the local goon squad, know who your friends and allies (and the collaborators) are, and plan for monkeywrenching bad things and bad people to the extent of your capabilities.

Or, be prepared to hide, and ride things out.

A nighttime partisan (or twenty) can make it through.
A known outlaw, enemy of the state, or a refugee, is one step from a cattle car, and oblivion.

Plan accordingly.

As an added bonus, the ability to get along in rough times confers a lot of skills and capabilities that also work if, contrary to likelihood, things do go all apocalyptic at some point.

Nobody survives on a desert island unless they’re actually that isolated and alone.

Everywhere else, you have to deal with things slowly getting shittier.

If people really wanted things to get that way, they’d either cut the cord now and withdraw, or start instigating the collapse.
Neither of those are in any evidence, to date.
You can assume that means people either like things as they are, or would prefer them to be better.
Work to make them better, while preparing for them to get worse.

And don’t get all butthurt when your wildest fantasies don’t happen.
You won’t get what you like, and you won’t like what you get.

Invest what you have to in order to get to the other side of bad times, and invest what you can spare to stave those bad times off for as long as possible.

We had about 50-60 years where that wasn’t so much the everyday struggle it was for the other 6000 years of recorded history.

Coffee break’s about over.

Maybe For The Manson Family

Surprise! The nearest Target turns out to be on your kids' back.

So, while undergoing some retail therapy yesterday, I found the following two hard-R flicks were cleverly located by Le Boutique Targét in the "Family Favorites" section of their video entertainment department:

 

Now look, as someone who doesn't have any children (at least as far as I know/yet), far be it for me to tell you the minutiae of precisely how to raise yours. But I think we can agree that sado-masochism and a non-stop (albeit hilarious) never-ending stream of F-bombs and exquisite gory slaughter probably isn't what Mr. & Mrs. Average had in mind for plopping little Jack and Sally in front of on a Saturday afternoon for some light entertainment and wholesome family fare.

 

In the immortal words of noted thespian Ryan Reynolds in the latter flick,

"What the $#!^ biscuit?!?"

 

To be fair, when I brought this little holiday non-sequitir faux pas to the attention of the manager on duty, politely and light-heartedly (because let's face it, this isn't a billion people dying of hunger), she not only agreed with my assessment that it was inappropriate, and also probably not what TPTB at Dayton-Hudson Corp. want to read about going viral on FaceSpace if I or someone with a lesser sense of humor found it and took a cell-phone pic,  she proceeded immediately to the offending (literally) rack to relocate said fare to a more appropriate section of the shelving.

 

But you do have to wonder exactly what sort of Common Core-graduate left-edge-of-the-IQ-bell-curve stocking clerks they've hired who'd have plopped the videos there to begin with, without maybe, y'know, getting a second opinion from someone with a few spare IQ points, and a dollop more of common sense.

 

But maybe I'm expecting too much from a company that can't see why letting middle-aged cross-dressers with a tenuous grip on reality into the same bathroom as little girls might be a problem for most parents. Especially in states with must-issue CCW regulations.

 

At any rate, one video department is now a wee bit safer for letting kids be kids a little longer, at least until Rihanna and Pink release their new cover and music video duet of I Saw Mommy Whipping Santa Claus.

And for anybody dipshitty enough to even attempt to justify either flick as being suitable  "Family Fare" in any way in comments, please tell me you're childless, have been suitably spayed/neutered, and prepare nonetheless to be mocked mercilessly and with malice aforethought.

Just Saying

This is simply no fun. It's not like I'm Ferris Beuller, and I get a day out in a Ferrari with Mia Sara. It sucks feeling like crap, going on and on, and I can't do anything about it; can't even go out much, since five minutes outside and I sound like Typhoid Mary, horking up a lung (but I suppose it'd thin out the line at checkout quite a bit).
Someone mentioned "Whooping Crud" in comments. That's as apt a descriptor as anything, at this point.

I got a pertussis booster with my last tetanus tDAP update, so this isn't actual whooping cough. Thank a merciful heaven.
But I've never coughed up so much crap for so long that my ribs and abs hurt.
Until now.
Just...oww.

And waah.

Yakkity Yak, Ain't Got Jack

1) Flu shots work. Against flu.
They do jack and squat against a cold.
Oh, and all the little piggies out there who don't wash their grubby little hands and stay home when they're sick should die, slowly, from dick cancer.
After being skinned alive, and then slowly lowered into a vat of rubbing alcohol.
Just saying.
I never get sick at work. It's always from the hoi polloi everywhere else, and while I wash my own hands, I can't wash the prepared food I buy. (Soggy freshly-scrubbed burgers and fries kind of lose the gastronomic appeal of the warm, dry variety.) Douchepigs.

2) Number of things going on in the big wide world I can find that even interest me at the moment is hovering right at 0. Some of this is due to the still-hanging-on coughing fits from a cold that won't die. Most of it is due to the Usual Idiots simply being the Usual Idiots.

I'd love to have something here but this. Unfortunately, there's just nothing I can find the motivation to scribble about. Maybe I'll go see a movie.

Susbtitute Teacher Day

Read the next chapter in the text. Aesop is a little pre-occupied at the moment, but should return shortly.
Enjoy your weekend.

DLTDHYITAOYWO

(MORDOR - ABC) Minnesota Sen. Al Franken will resign from the United States Senate "in the coming weeks" he announced Thursday, a day after a number {That number would be 23 at last tally, or half of all the Democrats in the US Senate. -A.} of his Democratic colleagues called for him to step down amid mounting allegations of sexual misconduct against women.

Resigning...the minute he and the Demotard governor of Minnesota can agree on a suitable Vichy senator from the extreme left to appoint in his stead, until next November's special election.

He was also quick to note that he didn't recall ever doing anything bad, and that he was resigning because he didn't do anything dishonorable when he didn't harass all the women who misremembered him harassing them, in depth and detail, going back to even before he was in the Senate, with photographic proof and corroborating witnesses. ("Fakes! Lies!" shouted Franken-stein's psyche.)

What a fat, festering pus-bag.
He can't even go back to Hollywood, because they're binge-purging their shitweasel molesters too.
How sad.

Shitweasel. Douchebag. Unemployed.
Hat trick!

How Quickly We Forget

Seventy-six years, an hour, and about forty minutes ago, the first of about 300 Japanese Zeroes, Vals, and Kates swooped in over Pearl Harbor Naval Base, Territory of Hawaii, and several other military installations and air bases on the island, and with the work of a few hours rendered over 2,000 sailors, soldiers, and Marines into compost for military cemeteries, while crippling the US Pacific Fleet.

I'm not diminishing what happened, nor getting all up about it, as it's all been done, in rich detail, about 70 times before now. And if you're inclined, or it's new to you, you should read up on it. If you ever get the chance, take the tour, and visit both Arizona and Missouri. If only because it's seldom that the place the war began and ended sit a hundred yards or so apart, let alone because of the company of the heroes in whose eternal presence you'll walk.

A shiny young 17-year-old Seaman Apprentice then is a ripe old 93-year-old now, and probably all but a handful, perhaps almost single digits, of any combatants present on any side are long dead and buried. Even kids living in Honolulu who witnessed the attack and can remember anything at all would be into their 80s today.

Sometime, visit the national military cemetery in the Punchbowl, the Arlington of the Pacific, to gain an appreciation of what price our people have paid to be a world power through three conflicts on that side of the world - so far.

Paradise always has a hidden price tag, and this one is far more than most people would ever imagine.

If you can't visit, ever, at least do the cinematic history: see a flick about that day.

Japan was soundly thrashed, and we're nominally friends now. The only Mitsubishis they send our way now get great gas mileage.

Nonetheless, the country remains wholly ignorant of not only the original sacrifices of the honored departed, but the lessons it should have taught us, a lesson which bears fruit unto this instant.

Once again, like it's 1940 all over again, we have the weakest, most inept, hollow, incapable, and underwhelmingly weak land, sea, and air forces of any time since that day.

Once again, we've let a pipsqueak nation from the region get to a position of being able to threaten our interests and our national safety, largely through disinterest and pure chicken-shitted short-sightedness in our nominal leadership.

And once again, we've forgotten the proper way to deal with intransigent militant religious fanatics, by explaining our side of the argument to them by the kiloton, using the White Ball Of Enlightenment.

As a result, the likelihood - not possibility, but overwhelmingly near-certainty - is that we'll be forced to re-learn every last one of those lessons again, in the near future, and experientially, not by a simple audit of the prior course materials.

Mark my words: because of our national policy of head-up-the-ass stupidity and a national memory shorter than the presidency of William Henry Harrison, we'll end up having to surge up a massive war machine, rebuild a massive naval fleet, re-learn large-scale amphibious assault and island-hopping tactics, get involved in another land war in Asia, and pop nukes on cities to get certain peoples' attention, and settle the argument. All over again.

Can there be anything so foolish as the nation that would get itself into the same predicaments over and over?

I Was Afraid It Would Come To This...

California isn't on fire. (You unhappy bastards in the other 49, put away your marshmallows, untuck your sad little chins, and uncurl your pouty little mouths.)

There are a few fires, exactly like what's happened here every year since the local Indians told the history orally, some hundreds of years in the murky past before Sir Francis Drake cruised offshore in the 1500s.

That's what happens when Santa Ana winds of 80MPH in the canyons whip through, and some assholes don't have spark arrestors on their decorative chimneys, and homeless meth-heads' cooking fires blow over while they're stoned out and tweaking in the canyon camps they inhabit.

Mostly, this is lesson #353 in Why "Homeless" People Are A Blight On Humanity, and lesson #32,000,684 on Why Homes In California Hills Should Be Mandatorily Made Of Concrete, With Firefighting Water Monitors Required On The Rooftops Plumbed To The Swimming Pools.

Both of which fall under the heading of life selecting this year's Darwin Awards nominees.

Build a million-dollar mansion in the hills with a wood shake roof, and the insurance check you get should be a bill from the fire service, and a note from your insurance company telling you to attempt self-fornication. Zero fucks will be given.

Only inebriated bottle-blonde nitwits suffering the dementia of late-stage syphilis start whining instead about the apocalypse. (Chelsea Whorehouse, call your pimp's office...)

But, with little else to talk about because Al Frankenstein hasn't decided to fall on the molester grenade quite yet, and encouraged by the long-standing policy of KABC-TV in Los Angeles to bump everything including the moon landing if there's a news copter over a local fire, the media-tards are swarming over this minor nothingburger like it was about to consume millions of people, all trapped in the concrete Coliseum, which would require USC to be playing UCLA for a spot in a bowl game just to happen.
And, being concrete as well, and 40 miles from flammable countryside, still be no threat of anything whatsoever.

Nearest fire to where I'm sitting, beyond the Orange Curtain from L.A. County: 40 miles.
Percentage of the 10-20 million folks in the L.A. Basin and surrounding suburban valleys affected by the fires: less than 5%, max.

The bigger issue is that several of the fires currently or recently straddled the I-5, S-14, and I-215 routes from L.A. to Las Vegas, and Central California. Which means it hurts Vegas slightly (the airports are wide open), and truckers going from San Diego to Seattle, who were briefly annoyed when the I-5 was actually shut down. For a few hours.

Folks ignorant of reality have carped about Gov. Moonbeam "finally" authorizing water bombers. Except that was because with 80 MPH winds, their use was problematic, and the fires weren't that much except to a few unfortunates in Charcoal Central. When a brushfire happens with outside winds gusting to hurricane force, there's no fire agency gonna do anything but stand back and watch.The fires simply aren't that big, or that big a deal. But this is only half a century of local experience with them talking. You can always believe the breathless brainless yapping gits at ABCNNBCBS.

Traffic in PhotoshopLand.

Someone else has had a photo fake of a 19-22-lane L.A. freeway at a standstill related to a 200K person evacuation order over these fires. As if.
(That many lanes should have been the first tip off that photo was not taken in SoCal, but rather in Photoshop.) If we had 19-lane freeways anywhere hereabouts, the average rush hour speed would be 75MPH, 24/7/365. And that'd be the on-ramps and truck lane. The I-5, the central freeway transit artery from Irvine to Oregon and points north has been exactly 3-lanes wide from OC to downtown L.A. since it was built in 1954, and only now is part of it being widened in that stretch. Most of it will still be 3 lanes wide forever, because unlike his daddy when he was governor, Moonbeam doesn't believe passenger cars and cargo trucks (nor dams, aqueducts, power plants, houses, people, jobs, and a functional state economy dependent on the preceding) are a good idea. So he and the criminal legislature still collect the highest gasoline taxes in the nation, required to go for road maintenance and construction, and use them for more welfare for illegals, and boondoggle low-speed rail projects to nowhere.

But a 200,000 person evacuation?
Pffffft!
That's the daytime traffic on any stretch of freeway within 50 miles of L.A. per hour, from 5A-9P, since 1980.
When you get to 2,000,000 evacuees, give a holler.

So stop believing the nonsense, and kindly chill the f*ck out about a couple of relatively piddly-ass fires. They're a problem to those unfortunate enough to lose homes to them, but they're far from the statewide calamity the media would whip up. If I hadn't heard about them on the news, they wouldn't even be a thing around here. That's what living in a 100 mi. x 100 mi. megalopolis means. If they'd been in the Central state, instead of a short copter ride from L.A., no one would be covering them outside of Fresno and Bakersfield local news.

Cancel the CaliHater tailgate parties too, sil vous plait.
It's 72° F. here daytime, and at night, it drops almost to 50°. Three weeks from Christmas. The snow tires for my truck look like handi-wipes, and a bottle of ArmorAll.
Winter clothes here come from Coppertone, not Columbia.
I'm not without sympathy for the colder parts of the country this time of year. Why just last night, when I was scooping fresh ice cream to beat the afternoon heat coming in through the windows, my hand got cold, for almost 30 seconds, and I almost spilled ice cream on my shorts.

This fire season, in the wettest year in CA history after 6 years of the worst drought, isn't even worth mentioning, which is why I hadn't until people started losing their minds about it.

The only fires in this state worth talking about would be the capitol and governor's residence going up in flames, while occupied.

I live in hope.

Breaking: New Vacancy in the Michigan 13th

Another shitweasel rides the bus.

WASHINGTON — (NYTimes) Representative John Conyers Jr., who faces allegations that he sexually harassed former employees, announced Tuesday that he will leave Congress immediately, and he endorsed his son, John Conyers III, to replace him.

It was sweet of him to try and bequeath the office to his son, but fortunately, that appointment will be made by Michigan's governor and/or special election in the interim, and per the US Constitution, congressional offices aren't hereditary. Ask the Kennedys.
Nice try, douchebag.
Bonus points if the allegations of sexual harassment against his son start by tomorrow.

It seems 88 y.o. serial pervert Conyers has decided it'd be healthier for his bank account if he can GTFO of Dodge before the inevitable lawsuits start cleaning out his retirement piggy bank.

So long, scumbag!
Good riddance.
DLTDHYITAOYWO

Early Christmas!

Shocked, I Say...

h/t Kenny

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is warning that House Leadership plans to merge Obama-style gun control with national reciprocity for concealed carry.

(DUNGISTAN, DC --BREITBART )This news comes just days before Rep. Richard Hudson’s (R-NC) national reciprocity legislation, H.R. 38, is supposed to go the House floor for a vote.
Massie explains that the Obama-style gun controls are contained in the “fix-NICS” legislation, the very legislation that House Leadership “plans to merge” with H.R. 38. He used a Facebook post to explain the “fix-NICS” legislation would allow “agencies, not just courts, to adjudicate your second amendment rights.”

It's always nice to hear that some loyal Democrat Republicans think there's some acceptable amount of horseshit to mix in with sirloin to make a good meatloaf.

Call your representatives, and set their asses on fire.

Bonus points if one of yours is one of these shitweasels on the Rules Committee, scheduled to consider this merger at 2PM EST today:

Pete Sessions, (R) Texas's 32nd, Chairman
Tom Cole, (R) Oklahoma's 4th, Vice-Chairman
Rob Woodall, (R) Georgia's 7th
Michael C. Burgess, (R) Texas's 26th
Doug Collins, (R) Georgia's 9th
Bradley Byrne, (R) Alabama's 1st
Dan Newhouse, (R) Washington's 4th
Ken Buck, (R) Colorado's 4th
Liz Cheney, (R) Wyoming's at-large
Louise Slaughter, (D) New York's 25th, Ranking Member
James P. McGovern, (D) Massachusetts's 2nd
Alcee Hastings, (D) Florida's 20th
Jared Polis, (D) Colorado's 2nd

U.S. Capitol Switchboard: (202) 224-3121

Light 'em up.

Fleet Weak 2017

h/t Mike

Not too far from truth if we keep it up. Bonus: Still more seaworthy than the 7th Fleet.

Mike at Cold Fury looks at how our military stands regarding readiness, and looks at the lies we tell ourselves about the nation.

"America is the richest nation in the world. America is the most free nation in the world. The American military is the strongest in the world, is effectively invincible, and will always be so. Slashing its budget can therefore do no real harm, and there is no chance of anyone daring to take advantage of any erroneous perception of decline and weakness on our part."

We are the richest nation in the world, any way you'd care to measure that.
But we've spent ourselves deep in a hole, and mortgaged our present and future.
Debt is slavery, and chaining us to everyone else won't save anyone when we all start to slide into the hole.

We are the freest country in the world, by any measure whatsoever.
I've seen the competition, and you can have them.
But we're far less free than we were twenty, let alone seventy years ago and more.
And we keep heading the wrong way on that, every day.

And we do have the most powerful military in the world, period.
We spend more per annum than the next dozen armies.
But we are not therefore invincible.
We have been shrinking by leaps and bounds under the studied neglect of four presidents, and the distance between our potential enemies and ourselves has closed apace.

In 1990, we were King Kong, alone atop the Empire State Building, and no one in the world dared touch us.
We now have all the admirals and generals we had then, every single one, but only 1/3 as many E-7s, E-5s, or E-3s as we did then.

We now have an army and navy nearly as small as what we had on hand around the Great Depression.

And the armed might we wielded as recently as 1990 was barely a patch on the machine we dismantled in 1946, after doing the heavy lifting to win two world wars.

That's what happens when you cut defense spending precipitously, plow the money into stock bubbles, housing welfare, etc., and in the process crash the economy hard twice.
And after all that quantitative easing, we're headed for a brutal third crash that will make 1929 look like a church picnic.

And between the two bubbles, we squandered a serviceable but barely adequate military on adventurism and asinine you-break-it, you-bought-it "nation building" in two of the most illiterate and utterly worthless sh*tholes on the face of the earth.

We traded a family cow's worth of military power for the magic beans of Middle Eastern democracy, and we don't even have a beanstalk to show for it afterwards. Just a dead giant.

But we burned out the troops, burned up their airplanes, wore out their weapons, and mothballed our rusted navy, because affirmative-action generals like Colon Powell never read Alfred Thayer Mahan.

What you see now is what happens when you entrust leadership to idiots, in an organization dedicated to the Peter Principle as a promotion tool.

Militaries cost money and brains, and both Congress and the Pentagon have been short on both for decades. And there's no easy fix for that, either place.

But the tests will come, ready or not.
The only good news is that the country has a president up for the job for the first time in 40 years.
But that's a thin nail to hang our hat on.

Slow Learners

h/t Ol' Remus

After the Shrillary uniform suggestions became moot,

the Army is taking a new approach...

We admit to bagging on the Big Green Army hereabouts from time to time, but only because, like a kid in school from the short bus, they come in the schoolhouse door with a "Kick Me" sign pinned to their knapsack, and their tongue tracks are still wet on sticky inside the busses' windows. (And anyways, it's our retarded family we're talking about.)

And while they can't seem to prosecute so much as one communist 2d LT, properly sentence one treasonous traitor, or hold the line on standards for Rangers or SF in the face of underwhelming Amazon Barbies, they've finally leveraged admitting transgendered Rainbow Warrior snappy dressers to their ranks by the pink busload into something that may actually benefit the entire force:

Fifty years late, they've finally recognized their mistake in going to bus driver uniforms, and will be returning to the WWII-era "pinks-and-greens" style of dress uniform.

Good enough for Grams and Grandpa; good enough for today.

I hear they're even adding the missing waist belt, too. Good call.

While we, and any few millions are both familiar with the famous "Two Armies" quote of Jean Lartéguy, and would of course choose the second army he mentioned in preference to the first, unlike our baby brother we managed to serve in one that has accomplished both missions with equal measures of ferocity and style for a couple of centuries or so.

So it's nice to see Big Green, two generations later, admitting they stepped on their wedding tackle forcefully (and ground the cleats in), and finally making the effort to untangle themselves, and stop embarrassing legions of warriors with uniforms that looked like they came from the Acme Janitorial Uniform Company in Piscataway, NJ. The change is due in no small part to 60 years worth of serving troops telling them they'd screwed the pooch, and at last, the Army is listening, after first exhausting all other options.

As long as they don't go full monty, and literally adopt hot pink in "pinks and greens", we applaud the service for finally getting their crap together, and for bonus points, not looking like the Air Farce, which as the sole remaining branch sporting abysmal style, might consider a return to the fashion sense from back when their leaders were named Spaatz and Arnold, and their minions didn't look like doormen, bellhops, and nightclub waiters.

Seriously, doggies, nice work on the uniforms. Like the story of Androcles should have taught you, it only hurts until you pull the thorn out of your paw.

It's a small change, but perhaps if the ranks of a given service start to look like warriors instead of waiters, they'll grow a spine, find a pair, and return to behaving like warriors.

It's still the Army, but it could happen.

It might even start a trend: they've got a decent shot to win on Saturday. (shudder)
Go Navy! Beat Army!

Odds, Ends, Random Bits

This has nothing to do with the post; I'm just trying out décor ideas.

Government remains the one branch of the entertainment industry everyone can enjoy, but lately the show has become rather one-sided.

Item:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court on Monday allowed the Trump administration to fully enforce a ban on travel to the United States by residents of six mostly Muslim countries.

Item:

 WASHINGTON (AP) — President Donald Trump gave embattled GOP Senate candidate Roy Moore a vigorous formal endorsement Monday

 Item:

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Republican National Committee is once again supporting embattled Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore after President Donald Trump formally endorsed him Monday.

Item:

WASHIGTON (NBC)---approximately 15 percent of federal judgments are vacant.

This is unprecedented and provides Trump with an extraordinary opportunity to reshape the entire judicial branch of government.

And let’s remember why the makeup of the federal judiciary is so important. Federal judges are appointed for life and hear a myriad of cases dealing with federal statutes and the Constitution.

I must admit, I've always enjoyed watching Democrats go down to defeat, but the thwarting of those Democrats in office within the Republican Party has been the sweetest victory in all of this.

And after Britistan harpy PM Mays' snotty whinging, Trump's state visit to the last remaining shadow of the former empire has been postponed by American diplomats indefinitely, possibly for as long as she, worse from the Labour party, or any other pro-jihad apologist, holds the semblance of power in that branch of the caliphate. Boo frickin' hoo, losers.

Meanwhile the Senate, in a last-gasp left-handed recognition that a number of them are up for re-election next year, managed to find a way to make ObozoCare optional (which still has to get past the House, and come out of conference intact), which would gut the original thieving wealth redistribution scheme, and make government pocket-picking optional for the vast majority of people who want nothing to do with it, and never did.

This while the Left, from the Senate to Hollyweird, is happily forming ad hoc circular firing squads on their dearest and most esteemed progtards for any whiff (and usually an entire festering sewage pile) of scandal about their footie-pajama beta-boys' serial rapes, molestations, and sexual battery of the simple-minded lunatic feminazis who finally break the shackles of Stockholm Syndrome to note that all their own heroes are waging a War on Women, and have been since the 1950s. Just like everyone from Phyllis Schafly to Anne Coulter have told you they were, from then until five minutes ago. (Yet again, ladies, if you can get past your own foolish pride, there are Real Men on the Right, in hordes, which is generally the only place you'll ever find any. But be advised, they won't put up with your silly bull$#!^, so you'd better get your heads straight beforehand.)

Antifa, which was supposedly going to launch the Zombpocalypse a month ago, is now found primarily on milk cartons from coast to coast, looking for all the world like the Wicked Witch after getting a bucket bath from  Dorothy, and virtue-signaling is now the next best thing to yelling "Pull!" on a skeet range.

Which may get even easier to do in reality, if national reciprocity hits CCWs from coast to coast.

So while there's still dismaying amounts of muck in the swamp, both nationally and locally, still needing some comprehensive drainage applied, the water level, like the shrieks from the offended, are receding, and there don't seem to be enough liberal tears left to refill the quagmire anytime soon. They've been too busy cock-a-doodling about managing to stave off right-wing challengers in the outskirts of DC, and NYFC, with a (D) population that numbers around 80% of all residents. Well-played, progtards. Next, you can tackle shaped blocks.

Color me happier, while I attend to more pressing matters, like watching movies, stockpiling PMs like gold, silver, and lead, and sandbagging a tidy pallet of staples and canned goods for the day, now hopefully more distant, when the pendulum begins to swing back again.

And I'm getting much closer to moving the blueprints for Camp Snoopy from the planning stage to the active file, yearning for the day when living here in Castle Anthrax is but a distant memory, and the only thing I hear in the morning is songbirds, roosters, and gunfire from the backyard range.

It'll be a longer drive to Disneyland, but I'll get over it.

"F***k you, you ignorant sanctimonious retarded bitch." Strong Message Follows

If Angela Merkel had a retarded British cousin, she would sound exactly like the twit (or something like that with one vowel changed) running formerly-great Britistan.

"Islamic terrorism does not exist."

Hey, thanks for clearing that mystery up too, you shit-headed ignoram-ass.
I never thought ordinary expletives in English could ever be found so wanting, but to describe anyone with their head shoved this far up their ass adequately would beggar the language of Shakespeare and Milton, even if we trolled the docks on the Thames or in Liverpool for helpful linguistic suggestions.

You've single-handedly probably sold more blood pressure medication there to Tories under NHS than HopeyDopey sold guns here in eight years of concentrated fucktardation.

Seriously, you'd have to feed your baby lead paint chips every meal, drop her on her pointy head daily until it went flat, and shake that baby until her eyes rolled like a doll's with every jiggle to begin to approach the level of pure, unmitigated c*ntish stupidity she manages to pack into just that brief minute and forty eight seconds of codswallop, claptrap, and fermented steer manure.

Thank a merciful universe we kicked your silly asses all the way back there in 1787, because for a dollar, countless Americans would happily go to 10 Downing Street just to have a go at slapping the stupid out of such an airheaded pratt. And you could owe them the dollar. The trouble is, it'd be a wasted trip, because all there can be in such an empty head is nothing but stupid, otherwise her skull would have sunken in from atmospheric pressure long ago.

Enjoy becoming Islam's bitch, and anybody who voted for such an irredeemable mound of pompous dung deserves to get her for prime minister, good and hard, until Big Ben is replaced by a minaret with loudspeakers for the muzzein.

The only problem with your right wing, you monstrous quisling, is that they haven't seen fit to drag you out by the hair and hang your head from Traitor's Gate. But I live in hope.

And when the temblor caused by Winston Churchill's body spinning ceaselessly at St. Martin's Church finally ceases, and one of your jackassical successors - should your embarrassment of a nation survive long enough for same - comes begging again for help to survive, we already gave, both in 1917 and 1941. You're on your own from here on out.

Unless your emissaries come with your stuffed head on a platter, humbly asking our pardon for the idiotic remarks of someone clearly out of her depth since first form, in which case for that, and the OED renaming the bowl in every watercloset the Theresa May in your honor, the answer will be a hearty and heartfelt suggestion that your entire festering nation attempt self-fornication. At least, the ones who survive growing up being serially raped by your Muzzie imports long enough to get to adulthood.

If President Trump had half the balls he should, he'd name Ann Coulter the permanent ambassador to your country, with instructions to hector you ceaselessly and publicly until she had successfully instigated another war, just so we could kick the door in, haul you out in the street, and give you the public spanking mum and dad obviously failed to do so many years ago, unless your own long-suffering people beat us to it. And if he were half as devious as he's accused of being, he'd be running guns and ammo by the ton to your right wing bootnecks.

Shut your festering gob, and stop embarrassing a once-great nation with the realization of the levels to which it has sunk.

You'll have to excuse me for now, PM Shitforbrains, I'm off to the Theresa May to box your Christmas present. Will that be one lump, or two?

And the next time some not-so-smart-bomb goes all Aloha Snackbar, and grinds a few sodding peasants into pate on the sidewalk, remember, loyal subjects of PM Retardia, Queen of Hearts, it's the fault of all those backwards people who insist Britain should be British. She only barely left off calling you all "a basket of Deplorables".

What a malodorous sack of pus to put in such a theoretically important position.
Your country is now a laughingstock, your history so much kindling, and your leader an embarrassment even to stupid people.

 

Comic Book Movies

h/t to Silicon Graybeard

SiG went to see Justice League, which is apparently worth a look.
He's probably right, but I won't know for some months.
And let's face it, "Best DC Comics movie in a long time" is a fairly low bar to get over in the grand scheme of things.

Got it: Avengers - DC version, but not quite as good. Now that Marvel's unlocked how to do comic book movies near flawlessly, Warner Bros finally has a bare hope of aping their success, by rote, with the DC 'verse. (They had to do something. Harry Potter is over, and Eastwood's in his 80s, so they can't lean on his talents forever to keep the lights on.)
After failing on almost every prior outing, with the occasional decent flick scattered throughout three or four decades, including the Dark Knight trilogy, which they've now thrown out completely.

This is like the time everybody was making a volcano eruption movie at the same time.
See film tropes: 17th guy to say "I am Spartacus!".

I'll absolutely take SiG's word for it on the quality. When it hits the discount bin at ChinaMart, I'll be there to check it out.

But since there's already a great comic book franchise, and DC isn't it, maybe WB could focus on the once-every-five-years resurrection of a decent western. Disney pretty much screwed that pooch with their craptastic everything-but-the-kitchen-sink attempt in Lone Ranger, and I have it on good authority that the long-departed Louis L'Amour only has about 70 bestselling western novels that still haven't made it onto the silver screen yet, including most of the Sackett storyline. And as a bonus, L'Amour, unlike Stan Lee, isn't around anymore to require getting a cameo in every flick. Downside: since he's not around, unlike Stan Lee, there's no one handy to keep them from screwing around with success "because they can", and doing to his westerns what they did to DC Comics.

Every once in awhile (Harry Potter, LOTR/Hobbit) Hollyweird - particularly WB - finds directors and producers who don't gut the written work and actually make decent flicks because of that restraint. (I'm always amused when twenty- and thirty-something directors and producers with nothing notable in their resume think they can "improve" the work of beloved and best-selling authors. In a grab-the-vomit-bag sort of way.)

Then there's all the other ones they make, which usually they couldn't get the dog interested in, even if you tied a pork chop to the flick.

Thanks for the heads up on Justice League.
When they can get four good ones in a row, I'll pay closer attention.

It took Avengers in the first place to get me to see any of them, and it was good enough to get me to go back and watch how they tied multiple backstories into a continuing narrative, which was done exactly no times prior to that idea in Hollywood. Now that Disney has bought Marvel outright, and basically told them "You make the movies, and we'll roll the trucks loaded with money back to the bank to fund them", their continued success is unlikely to peter out any time soon. (Until Stan Lee dies, and Disney turns loose the team that's absolutely fornicated the entire Star Bores franchise into the gastronomic equivalent of craft paste, sprinkled with cinnamon, and lets them take a crack at screwing the Marvel-verse pooch in like manner. Mark my words, they won't be able to help themselves. Look no farther than what Paramount has done to destroy the Star Drek cash cow. Or UA/Whoever Sam Mendes-ing in their pants with the last deplorably awful and regrettable Bond flick. F***ing up franchises and stories is what Hollyweird does, and it's their only actual superpower. People who can do show and business at the same time are few and far between, as they've proved in Tinsel Town for over a century.)

But seeing the bargain version of Avengers doesn't exactly thrill me with anticipation.
Christopher Reeve made a pretty good Superman. Christian Bale put all the lesser attempts of Batman to shame. Trying to burp forth a tentpole franchise, congealed with bits of all the previous craptastic attempts strewn into the recipe, strikes me as a doomed quest, but I'll wait and see.

Maybe someone from DC has broken some producers' hands every time they try to monkey with his work, and they've got a shot at longevity. But it's long odds.

Hysterical Dramaqueen Crybabies

Shaquan driving through downtown Dover listening to rap music

with a subwoofer would be more serious.

(Chickenlittleville, DE) A 4.1 magnitude earthquake struck Kent County late Thursday afternoon.

The quake struck about 7 miles northeast of Dover Air Force Base at 4:47 p.m., according to the U.S. Geological Survey. It was originally labeled magnitude 4.4 before the USGS lowered the scale of the temblor

Let's bear in mind that a 4.1 is what you get when any host of The View falls off the toilet seat, and roughly equivalent to a heavy freight train passing by a quarter mile away.

Two fat people doinking in an old third-floor walkup, or Trigglypuff having a meltdown on a trampoline would be a 4.4.

Anything less than 4 is officially a mousefart on the Richter scale, and if the mouse didn't eat bad Mexican food first, it doesn't even get to a 3.

Buncha pussies there need to calm the f*** down.

NYFC and Chicongo get more seismic action when the el train goes by.