JUSTICE!

h/t Daily Timewaster

The U.S. District court for the Southern District of California ruled Friday that California's ban on ammunition magazines holding more than 10 rounds violates the Second Amendment.

On June 29, 2017, it was reported that U.S. District judge Roger Benitez blocked the implementation of California's "high-capacity" magazine ban just two days before it was to go into effect. He noted the ban could not survive the test of Heller v. D.C. (2008), noting: "When the simple test of Heller is applied...the statute is adjudged an unconstitutional abridgement."

On July 17, 2018, a three-judge panel from the Ninth Circus Court upheld Benitez' ruling, voting 2-1 against the ban, and sending the ruling back to Benitez.

On March 29, 2019, Benitez again ruled against the ban, issuing an order barring CA AG Xavier Becerra from enforcing the ban.

Benitez again relied on Heller, noting that "millions of ammunition magazines able to hold more than 10 rounds are in common use by law-abiding responsible citizens for lawful uses like self-defense. This is enough to decide that a magazine able to hold more than 10 rounds passes the Heller test."

The case is Duncan v. Becerra, No 2:17-cv-56-81 in the US District Court for Southern California.

Hoist a tankard with me, folks.

Best served fresh and hot. Vintage 2019.

Let me know if you're getting tired of winning yet.
And now, more music apropos for the day:

Sunday Music: Herb Alpert

Herb Alpert doesn't just make music, he is music.

He was the A in A&M Records.
He had Grammys and gold records aplenty, and was known for his instrumental hits by the barrel with the Tijuana Brass, when out of nowhere he did a very rare vocal, of the Burt Bacharach hit above, which upon release became his first piece to go to No. 1, in 1968.
Years later, on essentially a comeback album after a decade running his label, he racked up another No.1, this time an instrumental, Rise, making him the only person to hit No. 1 with both vocal and instrumental hits.

Now 84, he's still releasing albums.

Sophomoronic

Earlier mid-month, I recounted the absolutely true-as-described tale of a sales clerk too simple-minded and uneducated to grasp that "half a dozen = six". (I still get shivers when I contemplate the future of a society that she and 50M of her idiot cousins inhabit.)

Now, the other end of the spectrum.

A physician wondered aloud whether there weren't too many people, planet-wide, because there wasn't enough water. (Posited, exactly, as if one day we'd wake up to 20B or 50B people, and all of us thirstily eyeing the last glass of drinking water. I Schiff you not.)

So, clearly, it's possible to take literal years of basic science, starting with chemistry, the building blocks of life, the universe and everything, and biology, moving to anatomy and physiology, and still remain wholly ignorant that 2/3rds of the planet is covered with water, and that all the water everywhere comes from this, and is deposited by clouds hither and yon by the whims of climate. Since forever.



For those who passed an MCAT, but struggled with 4th grade science.
Yardstick across the knuckles optional, but strongly recommended.

I noted that there was no shortage of water, only a shortage of potable or otherwise-useful water in a given locale, owing to the misfortune of misdistribution. Folks in the Midwest about now, or those in the Amazon Basin or the vicinity of the Everglades or Louisiana bayous would take about a New York minute to assent to this obvious nugget of truth.

We don't have too little water, just too little we can drink, or with which to irrigate, when and where we want it, and horrific surpluses in other places.

Living in California, subject to wet years and dry years, this has been obvious since my youth, and to anyone anywhere with the merest capacity to observe and correlate bog-simple facts.

To a physician musing about his probably recockulous socio-political agenda, not so much.

No matter how many times I had recourse to the historical facts about the entire expansive history of this state in particular, and the American West in general, being the quest and fights over water, and the herculean efforts that have allowed the thriving settlement of the American Desert by moving the resources from where they are to where we want them, and the reliance of this state on Sierra snowpack far more than imported resources, he continued to deploy the deflector screen of blockheaded "I don't believe that."

I see, Doctor. So this is to be rather a religious discussion of your unsubstantiated dogma, and not one of independently verifiable historical and scientific facts? Well played, sir.

I like my job, so I tried (and mostly succeeded) to not stoop to explaining to the doc, like an errant child, that the problem isn't too little water, it's one of mere distribution, abetted hereabouts by the idiot son of another governor, which patriarch had made plans for Califrutopia, for example, sufficient to water and feed and move 50M or even (God forbid!) 80M Califrutopians, until his simple-witted son, after two separate cracks at destroying the Golden State, undid all that by adherence to the same Ehrlich-driven Malthusian pessimism about the carrying capacity of their Mother Gaia, and cancelled aqueducts, reservoirs, power grid expansion, and highway projects with wild abandon, in order to make life here so miserable that people would kill themselves (and, nota bene, their unborn children, QED) rather than birth burgeoning generations of happy, healthy, well-fed children in such a beautiful and hospitable homeland. And who, to date, has succeeded beyond the dreams any sane man would have dared hope.

To be sure, there is an absolute carrying capacity limit on the planet. Probably in the hundreds of billions, provided we were to approach the problem rationally and sanely, which hurdle has felled most civilizations going back only to the Tower of Babel.

But the entire earth's population at present could live quite comfortably and contentedly inside merely the area of Texas, with a population density that wouldn't cause any more stress than most modern cities (provided we didn't put Democrats in charge of city hall nor the public utilities thereof).

Leaving, in that example, all of humanity only 6 and 9/10ths remaining uninhabited continents upon which to raise food, recreate, and frolic, with little further distress, and far more natural harmony to the lesser members of the biosphere.

The twin pitchforks of this dilemma are an over-estimation of humanity's importance and influence, coupled with a self-loathing that rises to a suicidal wish for self-destruction.

This is, inevitably, what happens to anyone, a nominally educated doctor, a society, a civilization, when they decide that Man is the measure of all things.

It can, indeed, be corrected, provided the allowance to use a big enough hammer.

Like Archimedes with his lever, I can fix all stupidity,
if you'll only let me use the right hammer.

In Case You're New To The Discussion

Remember the kid late to class, yet who always wanted to answer the question first?

"As the dems take control of the US they will disarm the reps. The dems will stack SCOTUS and translate the 2A to mean you are allowed muzzle loaders only.
The patriots in the US are not organized. No state militia, no national militia. Individuals won’t stand a chance. ‘Might makes right’ No organization = you are done when they send out the jackboots."

Yeah...not so much.

Most of us are up on our Solzhenitsyn:

“And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

And we're much better off than Alex was.

There are probably more deer hunters in just Penntucky and Michigan alone than the total number of local, state, and federal jackboots. Even if you spotted Team Antigunz the entire DoD, active, reserve, and NG, there are over 36M licensed hunters in the US. Even 10% of them outnumber the entire active US military at all but its Cold War peak.

As a legendary Swiss general noted once, the correct response would be to “shoot twice, and go home”. Confiscation would end about noon Tuesday, and then the real bloodbath would begin – at city hall, the statehouse, and ultimately, on scaffolds in D.C.

Because there are also about 150M gun owners. Most of whom, proving Hemingway’s maxim, don’t have hunting licenses, because “those who have hunted armed men long enough and liked it, never care for anything else thereafter.”

“They’re coming to take your guns” won’t work, as has only been noted about a thousand times by anyone who could pass fourth grade mathematics before Common Core.

That doesn’t mean they won’t try; it just means the outcome would unravel things in about an hour, and the next election after that would find the entire Congress solid [R], if not all hardcore freedomistas rather than the usual squishy hacks, there being few surviving [D]s to run at all.

Because most of the country, like most people who read and post here, have two settings:
1) Vote
2) Fuck it, kill every last one of them.

We move to #2 slowly, but it's nigh irrevocable once it happens, and unstoppable until we run out of targets. Which will happen long before we run out of ammunition.

This will not be the Alamo x 1000.
It will be Little Big Horn.
And this time, we get to be the Indians.

More than a few hereabouts are already wearing bibs every day to contain the drool at joy of such a prospect.
Most of the rest, while rather horrified, are quietly resolved on the inevitability of the coming bloodbath, and have their hipboots and bandoliers ready.

The internet moves pretty fast, but this is ten-year-old news.
Keep up, please.

And I didn't put the fish in the barrel, but am always happy to shoot them when I find them.

Teach Your Children Well

Lexicon Update

As noted everywhere, most recently by Peter over at Bayou Renaissance Man, Rep. Adam Schiff (D - Coprophilia) has a credibility and sanity problem, a paraphilia that's rather unpleasant to behold, and a certification of his obvious and undeniable psychosis.

This deserves suitable recognition, which we henceforth grant, with full authority.

Pray note: henceforth, that word will be added to the lexicon in lieu of the former expletive, until further notice. e.g.:

"While out walking, I stepped in some dog Schiff."

As a long time aficionado with frequent flier miles on that term, expect to see it with some regularity.
As National Prank Day approaches, I must also observe that appropriately flagging restrooms on their doors as "Schiff Rooms", whilst including a picture of the Founder of The Frolic appended, would be wholly appropriate.



Let's take a little rhetorical heat off the inventor of the modern water closet
appliance, Mr. J.D. Crapper, shall we?

This is in the exact vein as noting that Europeans have been merkeled by the policies of a certain European leader, in the exact same manner as Mohammedans do to goats and young boys.

Vidkun Quisling and Benedict Arnold mustn't hog all the glory.

Schadenfreude: DNC Edition

For Anglophones, the word is "epicaricacy".

"Joy at the suffering of others."

Enjoy.

NO. COLLUSION.

Surprising exactly NO ONE, Special Witch Hunter Robert Mueller has found "no evidence of any collusion" on the part of neither candidate nor President Trump to conspire with a foreign power, and alter the outcome of the 2016 election.

Every word to the contrary has been Fake News.

This, despite vacuuming every bedbug from hundreds of rugs, the total abuse of the FISA secret courts system (which itself, in its entirety, is a putrid stench in the nostrils of liberty and the entire republic), after turning over every slimy stone, and burning up taxpayer money by the trainload.

This was all started when douchehag Shrillary and her crooked campaign paid a slimeball to make up, out of his ass, a phony dossier of imaginary events.

Crooked partisan Mueller knew this from the outset.

So did crooked then-FBI Director James Comey.

So did crooked James Clapper.
So did crooked William Brennan.
So did every Obozo senior appointee in the crooked DoJ.

So Obozo's crooked AG and crooked DoJ conspired with Madame Borgia's campaign to lie to a federal court multiple times to illegally surveil the campaign of the leading candidate of the opposition party, with the full co-operation of crooked FBI agents, a crooked FBI director, a crooked CIA director, a crooked National Intelligence director, and in all probability, the full knowledge of the crooked AG and the criminal poseur President of the United States, Barack Hussein Gay Muslim Not Born Here Obama, and his former Secretary of State, Lady Macbeth Shrillary Borgia Clinton, in order to prevent the election of the nominee of their political rival party's candidate, cover up eight years of undisguised and massive amounts of actual criminal conduct, and then, after the fact, effect a soft coup of a sitting president, when all of their plans went pear-shaped, and Trump won anyways.

Boo frickin' hoo.

Then, the serial liars at ABCNNBCBS covered themselves with MOAR! glory by spreading the lies of such known liars, not because they were true, but because they wanted their lies and fevered imaginings to be so, utterly destroying the country, the media's already lead-plated reputation, and creating havoc, dissension, acrimony, and multiple incidents of Trump Derangement Syndrome, including one deranged Leftard whackjob trying to blow away the entire Republican congressional softball team. The only saving grace is Leftards are as bad at marksmanship as they are at telling the truth. In neither case can they ever hit the bullseye.

And now, they're not happy the elected President of the US is demonstrably not a crook.
Instead, they're all wailing, gnashing their teeth, and trying to find new excuses to continue the pointless witch hunt, because they can't get over the fact that they ran a crooked hag with worse people skills than the love child of Jezebel and Attila the Hun, and got their political asses kicked from the day he became to nominee in 2016 to noon EST today, inclusive.

Literally the entire Democrat Party in both houses of Congress, and every media personality at the New York Times, the Washington Post, ABCNNBCBS, should go out into their back yards and slit their bellies open, or draw a warm bath and slit their wrists, in shock and shame at the treasonous coup they've attempted now for 26 months and counting.

They should be rounding people up in busses at FBI and DoJ for criminal conspiracy, and then take a convoy over to the DNC, and also round up every member of the Clinton campaign with knowledge of this monstrous conspiracy as well.

They should be tried in batches like Nazis at Nuremburg.

And everyone from Quisling Ryan to Joe Sixpack, trying to stab this administration and the president's policies in the back at every turn should be tarred, feathered, and run out of towns across this country, on rails.

Lets be crystal clear: President Trump was never my guy.
For reasons beyond counting.
But he was the nominee, he was light years better than Shrillary would have been on her best day (when she wasn't too drunk to stagger down the stairs from the residence to the Oval Office), and he's governed as more of an actual conservative than any president since Calvin Coolidge, even besting Reagan, and this with 500 out of 539 members of the House, Senate, and SCOTUS opposed to everything he's tried to do, to the point of actively sabotaging it 24/7/365.

And the only people cheering that are people like the hags on The Spew, Rachel Madcow, and the moronic minions of NeverTrumper psychosis, including such distinguished demonstrations of senility as George Will and William Kristol.

Walk tall, fucktards.
You found out today that you got your asses handed to you, by the only man who could ever have withstood such an undeserved and thoroughly malicious shitstorm of vitriol and batshit-crazy insanity.

And now the feeble-minded want to latch on to "obstruction" charges.
On the dubious theory that a man demonstrably and knowingly guilty of nothing would attempt to prevent a witch hunt with infinite funding resources and unlimited investigational reach from finding out that he didn't do anything. 

Sh'yeah, as if.

If any of this hits inside your perimeter, get a crowbar, break suction, and pop your heads out of your asses:
You're pathetic, sociopathic, and deranged, and the best use for anyone who wants this to continue is as a bullet sponge, or a suitable weight to test breaking strength on a sturdy hangman's noose, preferably from a scaffold in Lafayette Park, in front of the White House, for the entertainment of the residence's occupants, and an instructional lesson to the other residents of the nation's capital.

May it only be that guillotines go up, and the guilty are trundelled there in tumbrel carts, with all dispatch.

Your attempted coup is over, and you're not going to like the pendulum that's swinging back in your direction.

With any luck, it has spikes on it. If not hungry pitbulls with AIDS.

I may even need to put on a second pair of pants today, just to keep from laughing my ass off.

Sunday Music: Georgy Girl

Long before Australia exported Steve Irwin, Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee, Olivia Newton-John or Helen Reddy, they had an official national brand.

It was The Seekers, and fronting for them was the woman who had one of the most perfect voices in pop music history. I've had a crush on Judith Durham since I heard her singing this, back when could count my age on my hands in one go, and this clip of their triumphant return home concert in 1967 is 150 seconds of musical perfection.

It also stands the test of time; here's their original foursome's 50th Anniversary concert from 2017:

And I'm pretty sure I still have a crush on Judith Durham.

Weather Man

We've linked to the work of Mike Olbinski before.
His day job was as a Phoenix-area news videographer, AFAIK.

His new hobby is chasing and filming storms and weather. In 4K.

He should be getting short-subject Oscar nominations for what he does.

If you didn't see his 2017 magnum opus, watch Pursuit.
On the biggest screen you've got, in High Def, with the sound cranked up.

If I ever hit the Powerball, I'm sponsoring this guy to sit down with the NASA archives and the KUSC music library for a year or two, to see what he can come up with.

Signs Of The Apocalypse

h/t Kenny

Srsly: Who thought re-doing Gary Larson's The Far Side IRL was a good idea...?

Stupid Idea Dept.

Story.

Always Testing

h/t Daily Timewaster

Of course, the hardest part is loading the frozen moose into the launching cannon for the tests.

DNC 2020 Platform

Sunday Music: Baker Street

You couldn't get away from this song in 1978, and over forty years later it still wails.

The State Of Stupidia

Warning: Smarter than actual sales help.
Hole in head optional.

Myself, at the local chocolatier's establishment yesternight:
"I'd like half a dozen thingamajigs, please."

Retarded Minion of Stupidity employed by said chocolatier:
"How many thingamajigs would you like?"

Myself:
"Half a dozen, please."

Retarded Minion, now looking thoroughly bumflustercated:
"Um...how many would that be?"

Myself, thankful that Retarded Minion is juuuuuust barely beyond range of a polite roundhouse slap to the side of the head sufficient to loosen fillings:
"That would be six thingamajigs, please."

Retarded Minion, flooded with obvious relief at being freed from further mathemagical distress and consternation:
"Ah!...Yes, six, got it."

Gobsmacked: Not only an actual thing, but frequently also the solution to the problem.

The bill for the thingamajigs was then announced as $6.96, whereupon I handed her a $5 bill and two singles, and I swear for a moment it looked as if she was going to have to take off her shoes to count, and failing that ploy, be forced to use her lifeline to call the engineers at NASA to correctly calculate that she owed me 4¢ in change thereof.

Which is by way of noting that she was old enough to vote, and English-fluent, but that clearly second grade mathematics had completely kicked her ass, and she should be beaten with a stout rod until she could master the fundamentals of basic math.

That the common phrase "half a dozen" baffled the blistering fuck out of her suggests that the manager there is similarly a lackwit in urgent need of a new job in either the custodial maintenance or street-level recycling industries.

Retarded Minion's (undoubtedly Common Core public education) teachers, to the last one, should be horsewhipped until their flesh is ripped off and the bones show, and then put up against a wall and shot.
Slowly, starting at the toes, and working up to more important parts.
Put in charge of the firing party, I should make them each count the rounds as they were fired.

I swear to Buddha, I'm going back there tomorrow, and if she's still employed there, I'm going to pay her with $2 bills and $1 coins, just to watch her head explode against the walls.

And these sorts of fucktards are going to get $15/hr in a couple of years?
The economy will collapse. Civilization is doomed. You read it here first.

Ron White was wrong: I can fix this kind of stupid, but you've got to allow me to use a big enough hammer.

At any rate, a couple of more of these incidents, and I'm going to abandon all civility, and start going full-on As Good As It Gets on these morons, to reduce them to tears as a policy, and sport.

Related: Peter runs into similar distress at the local hospital.

Whether Report

"The fog creeps in on little cat feet..." - Carl Sandburg

From Linda Fox, via Cold Fury, the following:

It's here. Now.

 

They hate us. They have contempt for us, and no hesitation about displaying it openly. They viciously attack us in public, in our homes, and use thug tactics to threaten our livelihoods, our safety, and our ability to function in a modern society.

 

When it's all over, there will be a putative victor (because a fight so infused with hatred must end in complete surrender for one side), but there will not be peace. It will end in bitterness, lasting distrust, and unwillingness to associate with the other side in any way. It will be the end of the United States, as we have known it.

 

Logic has not stopped their lies. Resort to the courts is a lost cause. They have taken over the legislative bodies, maligning and intimidating any opposition, threatening the established leadership, and using underhanded means in their climb to power.

 

I don't see an end that doesn't culminate in death - many of them.

While we agree with the observations, we must dispute the theme.

No, it's not "here now".

Because they aren't killing you on the streets, neither singly nor in batches, nor are you doing that to them.

Yet.

And that, plainly, is the only way you'll know when we are "there now".

But we aren't far from it, though as yet it hides somewhere out amidst the fog.
Which is clearly the Fog Of War.

It's visible, but it hasn't yet rolled in, save in small wisps.
Know what it and its arrival portends, and make the most of the time left you, however much or little that may yet be.

Neither will the aftermath be the long twilight distrust you imagine.
When the civil conflict you imagine arises, it will be a war of survival, and extinction, and there will be but one victor left standing afterwards. There will be no Marshall Plan, no Appomattox kindness and conciliatory welcome of separated brothers.

This will be Rome vs. Carthage, for all time.

One side only shall leave the field triumphant, the other side shall cease to exist for all time.
So it must be, and so it shall.

One doesn't make peace with a cancer.

It will indeed be war to the knife, and knife to the hilt.
But afterwards will be cleansing the locus of the disease with fire, and salting the field that brought forth the error, lest anything ever live or grow there again.

It may prove to be a chainsaw amputation, but it will be equally permanent as any done with the finest medical laser.

Communism delenda est.

2063 Years Ago Today

"Tragedy is me stubbing my toe. Comedy is you falling off a cliff." - Mel Brooks

Or, getting stabbed to death by your entire Senate.
(President Trump, call your office. Turnabout being fair play, perhaps in commemoration, today the president could stab a few senators. I have a few suggestions if he's interested.)

Go read today's essay. Have fun.

No, John, not Joan.

BTW John, apropos of the day, I found you a pencil holder.

Get Your Mind Right

You're leaving a million-dollar resource untapped if you're skipping the sort of things the folks in Meatspace Training Opportunities are putting out.

The in-person classes from one and all are probably a bargain at twice the price, and all full of needful things, no matter who you are nor where you are.

Mosby (aka MountainGuerrilla) has been putting out five-star advice, as usual, when he takes the time. Lately on fieldcraft, but pretty much if he says it, you can take it to the bank, and count on your thumbs the number of times you'll be disappointed or steered wrong.

Jason Hanson (at Spy Escape & Evasion) chisels away every day at stupidity and ignorance, and provides simple, everyday suggestions about how and why you can improve your own situational awareness and situational preparedness for things that could and do happen every day. You don't live in Mayberry, and it's not 1950 anymore.

And the latest public podcast from "Sam Culper" at Forward Observer is worth every minute of your time, like the other education he gives gratis, and as the courses he charges for are.
Set aside half an hour, and pay attention to the pearls he's dropping on the ground for any that notice. He says, in so many paraphrased words:

Imagine what you'd do if you woke up tomorrow and the power was out, cell service was inoperative, the internet was down, and it didn't look like any of it was coming back any time soon. An Area Study gives you intelligence about the things that will affect you most, immediately and locally. Intelligence analysis isn't to predict the future; its purpose is to reduce uncertainty about what's likely and what's unlikely. You should prepare for the follow-on, second- and third-order effects that are going to occur locally.

Stop worrying about the colossal monster catastrophes, like SMOD or the eruption of the Yellowstone Caldera. A relay tripping in New England blacked out a dozen states, and that was quite catastrophic enough.

And pay attention to the concept of second- and third-order effects.

First order effect
The power is out.
Second order effects
The food in the freezer will defrost, and what's in the refrigerator too, and they'll spoil.
ATMs don't work.
Power-driven communications like the internet are gone.
Gasoline stations cannot pump fuel.
A/C and stoves that require electricity won't work.
Traffic lights are out.
TV and radio stations, hospitals, and emergency response dispatch are running on back-up generators, for a few days.
Pumps don't work, so water supply and sewage will fail.
Third order effects
Fresh food will dwindle, become scarce, and run out.
Traffic will be horrific.
Emergency services will be crippled.
Cash on hand will be all there is, because EBT card and debit card balances cannot be processed, even at your local bank.
Medieval disease outbreaks from lack of cleanliness and sanitation we now take for granted will become far more likely.
 
And that's just from a power failure.
 
You can keep stacking up the dominoes, but even someone as thick as a bag of hammers will begin to realize in short order this is a bad day, an even worse week, and if it lasts as long as a month, things will be well past the stage best described as "sporty" anywhere such a situation is a rare occurence.
 
Look ahead, and plan based upon what you can see, and foresee.
 
The time will come when these preparedness resources you have access to now will be unavailable, and it will be too late then to redeem the time you've wasted. So don't. You don't have to live and breathe beating drums of war, but set aside an hour, an afternoon, or a weekend or two, to learn some things you don't know, and start you thinking along paths through an unknown future from a fresh perspective foreign to your experience and ways of thinking. It could save your life, or the lives of your family, whether in a small local disaster, or in much more ominous and widespread circumstances.

That's part of what we mean when we commend to you to "get your mind right".

Do it.

Kleptocracy Dies In Gunfire

Mike at Cold Fury has noted again the spreading dumpster fire that is Venezuela.

I sympathize with the plight of Venezuelans starving and dying, and getting exactly what they voted for, good and hard.
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

We shouldn't send them one single troop, or even $1 in US treasury funds.

But we should have submarines and clandestine flights dropping off those cases of captured AK-47s and ammo from our 1983 Grenada vacation adventure, and passing them out with bandoleers of ammo to any Julio in-country willing to start shooting at Maduro and his minions.

It's sort of a local tradition to inaugurate new presidentes via gunfire thereabouts, so why screw around with what works for South America, going back nearly 200 years?

Sunday Music: Year Of The Cat

"She comes of the sun in a silk dress running like a watercolor in the rain..."

Another wasn't-supposed-to-be-a-hit six-and-a-half-minute masterpieces.
One of those songs you wish would just keep playing.

And The Drum Beats On...

h/t WRSA

Today, this thoughtful essay from Malcolm Pollack:

"'Because the next Democrat president might be the last president of a free America, and then we will have to shoot our way out of socialism.' -[from Sarah Hoyt]

That’s it exactly: we are desperate. We know how close we are to the edge, to the dissolution of civilized order into chaos and tyranny. We can feel in our bones the implacable hatred of our would-be commissars for everything we believe is good and right and true — along with a growing understanding that their hatred doesn’t stop at our traditions and beliefs. As long as we live and breathe, we are a threat. If the blood-soaked history of the twentieth century can teach us anything at all, it should teach us that it will not be enough to see us displaced and destroyed. They will want us dead and gone.
One of the milestones along the road to civil war is the normalization of violence as a rational response to a dehumanized enemy, followed soon after by an eagerness for general conflict."

RTWT.

We, along with many others, have been telling you the same thing, for years.
When the legacy media pundits are starting to trip over it, we've already passed Peak Reality. This one is just another datum to add to the graph.

When 200 compasses all point north as being in the same direction, you're got a pretty good handle on which direction you're heading. True in the actual wilderness, and true in the wilderness into which national political discourse has wandered. Nothing looks right, but there's a lingering overcast, and an oppressive heavy stench of decay, with a faint whiff of death nearby, but just beyond the fog and undergrowth.

We are entering what Sun Tzu called "death ground".
The place where wise generals dread to fight, and where the consequences for the loser are permanent.

There will be no retrograde, no feint, no headlong retreat.
We are heading into the civilizational Thunderdome:
Two men enter, one man leaves.

And the man who leaves will not be the same one who entered, when the contest is all over.

For those slower on the uptake, these are the Good Old Days.
Ahead lies a terrible struggle, endarkenment, and horrors better left unimagined.
Talking about them now would bring skepticism; describing them in the moment would show the poverty of mere words to contain them, and be wholly gratuitous at that point.

Steel your hearts now to what's coming. Savor the sights and sounds and smells of what is and what was in your lifetime, that some among you may someday convey them to generations unmarked by what is to transpire, that they might by some means restore and someday surpass the things which daily become but fond memories.

Get your grieving out of the way now. There'll be no time nor place for it in coming days, and afterwards, the weight and enormity of what you'll know would slay an elephant. Learn this lesson from history: there are no end of letters and books and stories and movies about the Second World War, terrible as it was. But of the great European slaughterhouse that was the First World War, scarcely a generation earlier, there is comparative silence. Hundreds of thousands of corpses filled a mile-wide No-Man's Land from the North Sea to the Alps, and the corpses were trodden and shelled and chewed up by rats for four long and horrible years. The scars mark that continent to the present day, a century later. Much of that generation was completely erased, crippling those countries even now, and hastening the demise of that continent under the relentless tide of demography.

For most of my lifetime, we rejoiced that our Civil War was a century earlier, and the whole of the continent itself entirely unscathed by either world war. And we were right to do so.

But that is about to change. Anywhere from a week to a generation from now, the relentless drumbeat of idiocy that cannot abide free men going about their days, and must control every waking moment, every word that escapes their lips, every thought that flits through their minds, and ultimately, every beating of their lifeblood, will be satiated with nothing less than victory, or a bayonet to the heart.

They think they want the conflict they would foment.

And they've abandoned any moorings of reason, logic, self-interest, or common sense, and any boundaries of decent or morally-bounded behavior to accomplish their nightmare of ultimate total control of all, by their chosen few, whom they assure us are oh-so-very-much-smarter than we Deplorables.

They are going to have to be not just beaten back, but utterly destroyed. All memory of them wiped from human reckoning. Not just their army destroyed, but their women killed, and their babies' heads smashed on rocks, and all those who cheered them on eliminated to the last man. Their livestock slaughtered, their temples of error pulled down until one stone lies not upon another, and their fields sown with salt, that nothing will ever grow there again. Like Carthage after the Third Punic War, which policy ensured for all time that there never came a Fourth Punic War.

And their calling cards are the same ones throughout history.
They want to shut you up.
They want to disarm you.
And then, free of your arguments and your arms, they want to kill you.

That's why they now openly proclaim the outright plan to strip the clear acknowledgements of the First and Second Amendments, and muse before God and everybody how joyful and pleasant it would be to come and round you up, and kill you.

Take such thoughts and such people exactly at their word.
Some historically-minded wonder what it would have been like if only someone had strangled Hitler in his crib. It would never happen, for the same reasons you aren't doing it now. You have half a Congress full of would-be führers, gruppenführers, and gauleiters, openly telling you what they want, and will do given the slightest chance, and yet nobody's fired so much as a single shot. And likely, nobody will. They wait until the columns march into whatever suffices for Poland these days before they'll recognize they let things go too far, and only pay attention too late. Pray the response is not too little.

The Jews who said "Never again!" got it wrong.
The truth of human history is "Again and again."

To believe otherwise is but delusional wishful thinking.
It's a warm and comforting psychosis much like end-stage hypothermia: one just nods off, and enters oblivion.

Life is struggle. Sometimes less, sometimes more. We who have known little struggle are about to get all too familiar with more. Life forms unequal to that struggle are culled mercilessly and pitilessly from existence.

Many of us try to stockpile needful things. Some of us limber up. Many pine and itch for the trumpet to finally sound, before time and infirmity render them unequal for the tasks they could compass in their younger days. Those too young to know what's to come chafe at that ignorance, wishing now they were in it, not knowing that when they are "in it" they would wish themselves at home in their beds, or anywhere else but where they shall be, if only wishing made it so.

Stock your larders. Sharpen your weapons. Fortify your walls. And gather your friends.
The hard-hearted ones. The ones who can deal with adversity. The ones who can laugh in the darkest days, and push on through the darkest nights.

Crybabies and mama's boys may die as well as any other, but they waste resources, and bring nothing of value.

What's going to come, eventually, is going to be a problem for two types of people:
Those who have no idea of what's coming.
And those who do.

SCOTUS Update

h/t Eatgrueldog

A Political Campaign We Can All Support

h/t Theo Spark

 

 

Sunday Music: Classical Gas

Definitely a classic. And totally a gas.

QED

h/t WRSA

What we warned you about a year ago, and many times prior, has come to pass:

"Like academe and the mainstream media, the American military bows before the altar of political correctness, offering up sacrifices of its very being and purpose in order to satisfy this jealous god. The indoctrination into the sacred rites begins early in a Marine’s career. For me, it started at The Basic School (TBS), the 6-month initial training for newly commissioned Marine Lieutenants. Throughout the course, the new officers attend a variety of social mixers with senior Captains and Majors in different occupational fields in order to discern which job they wish to be selected for at the end of the training. 

The staff of TBS and the Infantry Officer Course (IOC) set aside one of these mixers for women and minorities only, so they could plead with these groups to join the combat arms—artillery, infantry, and tanks. While the staff fêted the “oppressed,” the white males returned to barracks to clean. 

After the mixer, the Commanding Officer of IOC made an appeal to our class as a whole to join the infantry, while reiterating the need for women and non-whites as platoon commanders for the grunts. In his words, “Without diverse leadership that looks like America, future marines would not respect their officers.” 

This kind of favoritism for “marginalized peoples” was manifest throughout my entire instruction. The treatment of women was especially egregious. Female Marines rarely carried squad or platoon gear such as radios, machine guns, or batteries. They were more likely to fall out of hikes. Their injury rate was higher overall."

RTWT.

This entire outrageous read is the tip of the iceberg of the rot in the military.
Strident beneficiary Lori keeps trying to square that circle in Comments, but the reality is that troops don't respect anyone, enlisted or officer, who can't cut it.

Women can't.
Ever.
Period.

And this nonsense is going to cost us a squad, a platoon, a battalion, a battle, a campaign, and a war. Then a nation. A society. A culture. 
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The shrieking about drafting women into combat is nonsensical.
Since Congress has decreed the combat arms open to them, of course they must register for a draft, and be drafted, and get maimed and die in combat.

Anything less, besides being a hypocritical sexist double standard, also admits the realities of biology:
They can't cut it in combat, they shouldn't be there, and at that point, why have them in the military (especially one shrunken to a fraction of WWII wartime strength) at all?

And if the Sisterhood admits those realities, the game is over: there are once again just two sexes, they differ in fundamental ways, and there's no place trying to shoehorn under-qualified women into positions that will get themselves, and the men around them, killed for trying to pull their weight and save their bacon.

Admit that, and the whole feminazi agenda goes under.

And PC and the Sisterhood cannot be having any of that, so in a choice between truth and fantasy, they'll take fairytales, like:

                                           Women = men.

The Gods Of The Copybook Headings are going to cull a fearsome price from us for embracing insanity.

They always do.

And a blast from the past (banned by YT, but mirrored):