Bienvenido a Reality, Cabrón

h/t Gateway Pundit

(BAJA SH*THOLIA) President Trump on Thursday evening announced that a 5% tariff will be imposed on all Mexican imports beginning June 10th and will gradually increase until the illegal immigration stops. 

“On June 10th, the United States will impose a 5% Tariff on all goods coming into our Country from Mexico, until such time as illegal migrants coming through Mexico, and into our Country, STOP. The Tariff will gradually increase until the Illegal Immigration problem is remedied at which time the Tariffs will be removed. Details from the White House to follow,” Trump tweeted earlier. 

Over 100,000 illegal aliens are entering the US every month making bogus asylum claims only to be released into US communities. 

Just hours after President Trump announced he will be imposing 5% tariffs on Mexican imports over illegal immigration, Mexico’s president Lopez-Obrador sent Trump a letter begging for a meeting to work toward a solution.

Funny how that works, isn't it, Andres?

If you weren't letting people by the millions every year come here illegally to vent the pressure on your failed country, we wouldn't have this problem.

So now Uncle Donald has decided to piss in your cornflakes every day until you learn to stop letting that happen. And it's going to be an expensive lesson - for you.

Ask China how that's working out for them these days.

 

Curiously, not a peep from the media about why this approach wasn't tried by Presidents Obozo, Dubbya, Fat Bill, Daddy Bush, or anyone else since Eisenhower's Operation Wetback rounded up every stray north of the Rio Grande.

Because they already know no one else WANTED to stop illegal immigration before now.

I Don't Do This By Throwing Darts At A Board While Blindfolded

Just one of 10,000 outrages in the past 25 years

From comments to the last piece:

"The rot of PC had already thoroughly infected the U.S. military by the time of Gulf War One; in order to predate the pernicious influence of Cultural Marxism (PC writ large)upon the armed forces, you have to go back before the advent of the much-vaunted but somewhat overrated "all-volunteer force" (AFV) during the mid-1970s.

The uncomfortable, inconvenient truth for those who think the current AVF structure is ideal, is that it has a very mixed record when it comes to winning wars. Moreover, the AVF has never been tested in combat against a peer opponent."

Sorry, but no, my time placement was accurate.
I was pointing the time of peak military capability, not to the last time there was some mythological ideological purity of thought, which has existed within the military never, and no place.
The point of choosing 1991 was that at that time, we hadn't yet started RIFing out entire squadrons and regiments.

And we had no peer nor even near-peer opponents, anywhere in the world.
Which was the entire point.

Iraq was the sixth-largest land army extant, and we completely rolled it up in 6 weeks of air campaign, and three days of ground combat. Its air force had completely ceased to exist.
Doing the same with #2 through #5 would merely have been an exercise in additional time and ordnance, at that point, had we been so inclined.

It also marks the last time the US military was used as a military, rather than as the Meals-On-Wheels Diversity Scout Patrol.
Nota bene how well it works when you use an axe as an axe, and not as a butter knife. Nor some perverted fetish sex toy.

It turns out the reverse of the former Soviet military philosophy is also true:
Quality has a quantity all its own.

And after that, we started ruthlessly culling men, equipment, and capability, of a type that could have taken on the pre-AVF military from anytime between 1946 and 1976, and stuffed it in a wastebasket with one hand tied behind its back.

The Navy peaked at 592 ships in 1989, but in 1991, we had 15 aircraft carriers.
Now we have 10.
In the late 1980s, we had 69 destroyers, 115 frigates, 102 attack submarines, and 39 ballistic missile subs on patrol.
We now have, respectively, 59, 29, 53, and 14.
We went from 592 ships at our peak, to 267, (+ 8 Little Crappy Ships that cannot do anything useful, and would be, in wartime, a liability, not an asset). USN Ship Strength, year by year

The last time it was as pathetic as it is now was from 1923-1930, and even then, bridge officers managed to not run into civilian shipping, as a general policy, and were qualified watch standers.

Yet we still have 271 admirals: virtually one per commissioned ship!?!
This is far beyond recockulous, and I'm betting we could fire 240-250 of those braid-heavy @$$holes with no loss, and probably a great improvement, in naval efficiency. Not to mention the savings in salary and pensions.

The Air Farce was slashed even more drastically. Like halved.

And the Army went from 3/4s of a million men to hovering at around 500K, most of that taken directly from frontline capability, going from 17 active duty divisions to 10, currently. We got rid of two armored and five infantry divisions. The entire US Army, in one place, would be a speed bump to an actual peer adversary, and we couldn't get the entire army to one place anywhere if we had to in less than a year, probably more like three, and only by stripping it from five other commitments which it cannot keep either, even at present.

Strategists have long recognized that we are trying to play "Twister" with an octopus, strategically. That won't end well.

(For reference, the entire active US Army, 10 divisions at present, is smaller than the 14-division Third Army that General Patton commanded, and used to break the siege during the Battle of the Bulge. We had more troops in Vietnam at the height of that conflict than the entire US Army has at present. Think about that.)

That would be bad enough, given that our overseas commitments since 1991 have doubled, rather than halved, but add on top of that the vigorous gaying and diversity-cornholing of the military, to the point that now transgenderism, instead of being a medical and psychological bar to enlistment, is actively encouraged, and the uniform lowering of all standards in all units for every metric that matters. (If you think Chelsea Bradley Manning's treason was an aberration, I have a bridge for sale, cheap.)

You have sailor-chicks who can't handle basic damage control tasks, which means you have 95-pound weaklings who can't pull a hose pack through confined spaces, or heft DC 4x4s into places to plug a hole in the hull.
That means ships will die.

The pregnancy rates and non-deployability of women on sea duty is legendary.
They are, in short, a disaster for the Navy. At least, if it was meant for combat.
Clearly, that's now a tertiary function.

You have Air Farce ground service troops who can't heft basic ordnance into place and plug it in by hand, even with 150-200% of the requisite male staffing for that function.
That effects manning levels required, aircraft turnaround, ability to operate at high tempo, and basic combat readiness.

In the ground combat arms, Army and Marines, you have the can't-cut-it Combat Barbies who're either going to be literally carried when war comes, or fragged in self defense, whether enlisted or officerettes. (And I'm cheering for the latter, if you're wondering.)

One fouled up Barbie can take out a platoon.
One fouled up platoon can screw up a company, a battalion, and a brigade, and undermine an entire operation.
All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The first thing they need to do is expunge women from service outside of CONUS, or in any combat arm or position they are simply incapable of performing, under non-elastic standards from Before The Rot. That would be, by actual reality, about 99% of them.
Ditto for gays, although they, at least, can claim to meeting equal standards in times past, unlike any women in the service since 1865.

Let's be clear; the military's job is to kill people, and break things, as a team.
If you have any legal-historical evidence that women, gays, and the other 57 genders can do that better than the military did prior to their deliberate inclusion, or even as good, on the whole, bring it out. I'm open to rational discussion. But the military's fundamental purpose isn't and never should have been to "look like America". It was, and always should be, to make America's enemies look like blobs of festering chum. Anything that doesn't advance or improve that mission has to go, and that means 98% of the chicks and the queens should be gone, forever, and good riddance.

Including them has been a disastrous social experiment, that has chiefly proven that the derelict officer corps and careerist NCOs will fudge any rules and lower any standard, knowing full well that those rules and standards were written in the blood of earlier generations.

Anybody in the current military with stripes or brass is therefore complicit in getting future generations killed. If the boot fits, wear it.

It's like cops that look the other way when the criminal fraction within them go hog-wild: the blue wall of silence goes up, and they all become the problem, not the solution.

So just as an entire police department becomes a criminal gang, the entire military becomes a criminal conspiracy to defraud the nation and weaken the US' military capability, because no one will put their rank and career on the line to tell the obvious truth.

Total number of general (or any other rank) officers to resign over these lowered standards, to date: 0.
QED

Thus the honest and conscientious types get out, and/or refuse to go in, and the military's decline becomes a death-spiral. We are now decades into that terminal spin.

Nations have been at this crossroads before.
Like Rome, at the point when they stopped demanding citizens serve, and turned defense of the entity to foreign-born mercenaries.

The end that follows is not pretty.
And anyone espousing some magical return to pre-1900 isolationism, and/or cheering on the inevitably following Dark Ages is an ahistorical idiot, and a five-star jackass.

Our military is near-hopelessly broken. It would take woodshedding the abortion of which we've been gifted with a meat axe and a flamethrower, and throwing trainloads of money at it we don't have, because we gave it to giant banking cartels instead. We're beyond broke, we're 90 years in debt.
What cannot continue, will not. And the bill is going to come due, sooner or later.

That makes what comes next rather predictably horrible.
I yell because I care, but the patient is probably terminal at this point, and that's only the first-order effect.

You don't even want to think about the second-, third- and fourth-order effects to that inescapable reality.
But you'll see this material again, kids.

Flag On The Play...

h/t Cold Fury

Let's take a look again at the instant replay:

“America’s armed forces are the finest that have ever existed. The young Americans who populate it, regardless of their individual reasons for taking the oath, are the very best of us.”

Look, I'd like to be able to agree with Fran on that, truly I would. But tragically, it just ain't so. And like mutual fund prospectus warnings, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns". You could not measure my sadness and disgust at what I'm about to say even using the seismographs at the Nevada Nuclear Testing Facility.

It's pure codswallop, born of ignorance. They're hordes of freaks and geeks, socially promoted like the retards in Common Core to grease the retirement skids of a pack of careerist Courtney Massengales not fit nor capable to pour piss out of their own boots even with the instructions stamped on the heel.

Else we wouldn't have Rangerettes who can't climb a short wall, Navy officers who can't conn a ship without hitting everything afloat,  as they dredge up parts from museum pieces to keep their current aircraft flying, Air Force generals pimping for a white elephant plane that cannot fly, missile officers cheating on their proficiency tests, Marine recruits in combat arms who can't throw a grenade without killing themselves, or "combat leaders" who couldn't pass a ruck march, West Point "leaders" who condone open communism from faculty and students, and promote a pack of Affirmative Action cadets who couldn't pass a PRT or meet basic weight and appearance standards, while flashing Black Power signs in uniform. We wouldn't be doing gender reassignment surgeries instead of physical therapy for combat wounded, we wouldn't be spending more money on gender sensitivity counseling than on marksmanship training, and we wouldn't be wavering the insane and drug-addicted into the military in record numbers, just to appease a pack of blue- and pink-haired SJWs.

The US military is broken.

Hugely so. Nearly hopelessly so.

Nostalgia for a time long past when it was otherwise won't paper over the reality that right now we're as weak as kittens, with a military that's going to have its own ass handed to it on a platter, and body bags filled by the gross, because it's so hamstrung with PC that it cannot accomplish the most fundamental missions assigned to it, eight days out of seven.

It took over a decade of ceaseless effort and dump truck loads of money to fix the hollow military of the post-VN era, when we had the will and resources to try.

Now, we have neither.

It's time to stop lipsticking that pig, come to Jesus, and face that fact.

Until we do, we're just whistling past the graveyard of the inevitable failures and casualties we will suffer, and quite possibly the demise of the entire nation.

This isn't just "the Corps was tougher in my day" American Legion bar bullshitting.
It's a dispassionate assessment of factual realities.

You cannot fix a problem until you acknowledge that you have one.

We reached peak military in 1991.
Everything since then has been diminishing returns, turning into full rout.

And if we don't drastically and fundamentally alter where it's headed, that's going to be the de facto state of the American military, until such time as it, and we, cease to exist.

Sooner, rather than later.

Because Nature abhors a vacuum.

Don't Be Surprised

Today's riff-tastic starting point:

“Of major trends to miss, underestimating the amount of energy available for society was a doozy, even though he had the CIA, NSA, and every military intelligence agency working on that question.”

Looking at a prediction success rate of the above that makes weather men and stock market analysts seem like Nostradamus, if anyone can’t take that data point and extrapolate the predominant maximal stupidity and mental powers of the above-referenced groups, I cannot help you any further.

(For Reference:

 Major Missed Calls
Iron Curtain
fall of China
Korean War
Cuba
Berlin Wall
Sputnik
Missiles In Cuba
Vietnam debacle
at least three Mideast wars
Rise of OPEC
Berlin Wall coming down
Fall of Soviet Union
Invasion of Kuwait
9/11

And that’s just the major cluelessness since 1945, not even getting into the everyday weeds where they’re less informed than most).

 

So if the "experts" have no clue, what can you do?

 

Easy.

 

Most major life emergencies can best be solved with a passport, a credit card, and $20K worth of small bills in cash, in your hand.
(Concealed pistol optional.)
Everything else is second best.

But that’s still only most emergencies, not all.
For the rest, canned goods (both #10, and the olive drab kind) take rather more precedence.

A prudent person who prepares for not only the worst case imaginable, but also for the unimaginably bad case (what Mr. Sec. Rumsfeld referred to perspicaciously as unknown unknowns), will always do the best, overall. Because the main preps for SMOD versus looting at the local Food King versus an F5 tornado coming up the road are remarkably similar.

This is why your great-great-great-grand-relative and mine all still trace their ultimate ancestry to Noah & Sons Cruise Lines, LLC.

So, for anyone's general reference, a cubit is a unit of measurement 18 inches long.
And you should know a wee bit about marine architecture, in a metaphorical sense.
Because everyone laughs at the ark-builders.
Until it starts to rain.

Somewhere Off The Coast, At 3000'...

 

 

Brennan is hyperventilating, Comey is tweeting like a monkey on crack, and nobody's buying it.

 

None of them want to be the guy without a chair when the music ends, and they can hear the fat lady warming up.

 

Overseas, the globalists are taking it in the neck at every turn.

 

Britain, France, Hungary, and Germany all flipping back to sanity.

 

Gonna be a long, interesting summer.

Disney-ana

For some goodly amount of years, I've lived a very short trip's distance from the original D-land. Close enough to hear the fireworks nightly, esp. in colder seasons, when they boom and echo quite nicely some miles distant.

Having attended the park regularly since a few years after it opened, once I moved this close to the park, I got an annual passport. I enjoy the park as precisely that, a park: a place to people watch, get a meal, go on a couple of rides or watch the fireworks up close, and then split. An average year would see me there twenty to forty times, briefly, rather than doing the family-typical Annual Bataan Death March visit, and trying to do it all in a day.

Lately, however, the minions of Mauschwitz Corporate HQ have seen fit to make the park experience into one that has reached both peak expense, and maximum guest annoyance, and there seems to be no end in sight to that policy. I've never been to the larger version in Orlando, so I leave it to those east of Big Muddy to speak to that experience. I suspect, like the parks, it's just as bad as it is here, just on a bigger scale.

And as the nominal cherry on the whole poop sandwich, this year they're opening StarWarsLand, AKA "Galaxy's Edge", to help milk the last dollars from pay off the $6B they paid to George Lucas to loot and pillage the franchise lock, stock, and barrel. The movies of late should give you a great idea of how that's gone for long-time Star Wars fans.

But no matter what, some people will always strain out the crap to get to the parts of the whole thing that still appeal to them, and the impending opening of a new land will be no exception.

Having blown their one chance at a proper opening (May the Fourth, obviously; Disney imagineers, you had one job, and a two-year head start to get it right on cue, and you choked massively...) they will be debuting it on May 31st hereabouts, with an August 29th opening for the not-quite-identical version in Orlando at Hollywood Studios.

To (partially) stem the inevitable human avalanche this will create, they figured out a way to piss off just about everyone, by time-limiting the initial opening visits - only if you have a reservation - to four hours through June 23rd. Eventually, they hope things will stabilize, and it will be just another part of the park. Sh'yeah, probably around 2025. Or, you can stay at their hotels, and visit early during special hours (literally, 6AM-9AM, before the park's general public opening) to help assuage the room rates.

At any rate, the experience of late with the main park having gotten beyond annoying as hell (and believe me, I'm understating it), I haven't renewed this year's passport, nor will for another year or two, to give the stupidity attending this opening a good long chance to mellow out.

I should mention that they were originally going to hire cast members to help populate the Cantina Bar, but with the inundation of Orange County with people not from anywhere around here over the last 20 years, just letting the usual local People Of Walmart hereabouts into the park will more than approximate the crowd from Tatooine without any additional assistance from casting.

But if you were wondering what to expect there, in case you ever manage to get inside (or if you're prudently planning to skip the whole thing for some time like I am), I give you a couple of their insider sneak-peaks at what to expect. If they hadn't already soured a lifelong enjoyment of Walt's genius with their shenanigans of late, I might be more enthusiastic. Instead, this vicarious tour is probably all I need to see of it for some months, before I ever experience it in person.

In Remembrance

It will come as a shock to the 97% of Americans who never, ever served in its armed forces (but probably not so much to any readers of this blog) but today was not instituted to get you an excuse to BBQ, drink beer, or get great deals on linens and TVs.

It was originally "Decoration Day", the day to go and decorate the graves of the honored dead who fell in military service to this country. Don't thank me, or anyone else you meet who served, for our service today. Because we're not dead. So this isn't our day.

It's the day for people you probably never met, nor ever will, because they gave up all of their tomorrows, so you could enjoy your today. They lie in ranks, row upon row, on at least four continents, covering hundreds of acres of ground. They spoke nearly every language you can think of. They came in every color of the rainbow of humanity. Their average age is probably around 20 years old. Forever.

It's still okay to enjoy a steak or a hot dog, knock back a beer or two, and get a killer deal on a big screen TV today. For most values of People Who Have Died In Service, that's exactly the best thing you could do to remember them, if you could ask them.

Just remember those people who made it possible, and live a little more, for them.

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

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

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

- Maj. Michael Davis O'Donnell

KIA, Cambodia, 1970

Sunday Music: Petula Clark

In honor of the good folks in Old Blighty having the good sense to kick their PM RTFO, some happy music from the most delightful British Invasion export of the 1960s.

First, courtesy of the would-be bumper intro to Bill Whittle's YouTube Stratosphere Lounge vlogs (before the copyright bahstuhds made him cut it out):

 

Which was the follow up to this one that absolutely rocked, all the way to #1:

 

 

Memorial Weekend Tie-In Bonus Points if you can remember this being blasted out in the cockpit of a cinematic A-6 Intruder by Brad Johnson and Willem Dafoe over Hanoi, after unauthorizedly shacking SAM City:

 

 

But yes, I much prefer Petula's version.

 

 

 

TV Review: Yellowstone




Yellowstone, with the original cast.

I'd seen the trailers, and Costner generally manages to be likeable and interesting in just about anything he does, even if it sucks, so I figured I'd give this one a look.

He is, and this does.

The Good
This is better TV than 99% of what's out there now.

The Bad
How low that bar is cannot be measured with existing instrumentation.

The Ugly
I'd seen teasers for this last year, mainly in movie theaters (because no one who can help it watches TV anyways, apparently). So when it appeared in the store as a complete season, I figured it was worth checking out as a binge-watch, commercial free, because what's come out as movies lately has been every bit of dung-heap stinky for most of 2018 and 2019.

So, you get to see Kevin Costner as a cowboy (which, after Silverado and Open Range isn't a bad thing). And you think you're going to be getting an anti-PC take from a character who the whole world is coming after, in a turn worthy, or at least vaguely reminiscent, of John Wayne, back from the dead, however dimly.

Instead you get something you've undoubtedly seen before.
Allow me to explain.

Long about Episode 3 of the first season, you realize what you're watching.
It's not the saga of the patriarch of the Dutton clan bravely holding on to a piece of Montana "as big as Rhode Island".

What you're actually watching is Don Vito Corleone thuggishly protecting the Family business, in this case the Yellowstone Ranch, right next to the national park of the same name.

Except, no surprise, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Talia Shire did the whole thing so much better, with Francis Ford Coppola telling the story.

Don Vito starts out the wronged man, beset by the Tartaglias, who want to build a condo development in Corleone territory. Connie is out of control and alcoholic. Then the Solazzo mob rustles his cattle. Sonny gets whacked stealing them back, and war hero Michael avenges that, but it costs him the life and relationships he was cultivating outside the family business. Connie is out of control and evil, and Tom Hagen saves Sonny, only to become Fredo, because he's not a war-time consiglieri, leaving Don Vito with only Connie and Michael to stand with him against the cops, TPTB, and the rest of the Five Families.
That's all of season one in a paragraph.

Like I said, you've seen this before.
Except the original cast was far more compelling, much better actors, and the story was more interesting before they all put on cowboy hats. And it's beyond tough for Costner, surrounded by a cast of basically nobodies, to carry this whole thing by himself, try mightily though he does.

It's well-shot, and the scenery is nice for not being NYFC or anywhere within the Thirty Mile Zone centered at Beverly and Vine, with intermountain Utah doubling for Montana. (I leave it for actual Montanans to tell me how well they do with making Utah pull off Big Sky country. My guess is it's okay, but not quite the real deal.)

And they keep pulling off a few human interest moments to misdirect you into not noticing that Costner's character is just a criminal p.o.s. with a better legacy and better real estate location.

I'm telling you this to save you time, and possibly money.
I've worked on countless TV shows where the plot was a 42-minute version of Any Great Movie You've Ever Seen, and they always turn out exactly like you'd expect of lobster and champagne, time compressed, and shot on a beer and Cheese Whiz budget.

This is a teensy bit better than that in the looks department, but the drama suffers, and the plot literally comprises every point I outlined above, and that's 10 hours of TV, which means 10 weeks of production minimum, to get something Coppola did better in 6 hours over two movies.

The only reason I can figure for Hollywierd doing this series this way is to undermine decades of the Ponderosa, the Barclay Ranch, the High Chaparral, the Wilder farm, Paladin, Matt Dillon, Bret Maverick, and everything you might remember of that and countless other beloved Western shows, to the point that by the fourth or fifth season of this crap, you'll be rooting for the Indians and the EPA when they both swoop in and peck this miserable criminal enterprise to death, pick the carcass clean, and crap it out.

This is lazy storytelling rebranded and camouflaged, and mediocre TV at its most mediocre, and the only hero in this whole sad tale will be anyone with the sense to switch channels or turn the damned box off. Having done that a decade and more ago, experiences like this confirm the perpetual wisdom of that decision.

Unless the whole thing goes belly up before they can pull that off.
Which, judging by Season One, should probably happen about 3/4ths of the way into Season Two, if there's any Nielsen box office justice involved.

Never have I seen a show that more richly lives up to The Biz standard T-shirt punchline:
 

Theater is life.

Film is art.

Television is furniture.

More's the pity. They could have made a modern classic Western show.
Instead, they're just filling bags of rose fertilizer, straight from the steer's southern end.

Tip: If you want to see Costner in something far, far better, watch Tin Cup.
And then Draft Day.

Movie Review: John Wick III - Parabellum

Best described elsewhere as a training film, I'll get right to it.

Imagine if William Shatner beamed down to the planet of zombies with just a sharp stick, with the entire non-name cast as the crew of the Enterprise, all beaming down to the planet with him as redshirts.
That's pretty much the pitch room plot for this one.

I enjoyed the original John Wick.
I tagged along for JW II, even though it was as big a set-up for the inevitable sequel as was The Empire Strikes Back.
But seeing this one was almost a chore.
Thankfully I paid matinee price earlier this week, not full boat in prime time when it opened last week.

To its credit (and rather more because this has been one of the most god-awful box office years for Hollywood in some time, when last I checked), a mid-week midday matinee was still half full. Which says more about how atrociously craptastic the "competition" was the week before Memorial Day.
Unfortunately, the main reaction was groans and laughter at the panoply of ways the writers found for Mr. Wick to exterminate all comers with extreme prejudice, from beginning to end.

As best as I could tell (I didn't bring a clicker, but should have) his final body count was 103, by actual count. Somewhere around #10 they jumped the shark, but Keanu Reeves rode that bitch right up to the end of the movie, hanging on to the dorsal fin right until the finish.
But not content there, they decided to go for a grand slam as well: they set up the inevitable John Wick IV: Moar, Harder, Faster! in the last scene.
Maybe he'll up the body count to north of 150.

Saddest part about III was that the snotty b*tch most deserving of a sticky Wickian ending out of this ride walks away scot-free at the end, an oversight they desperately need to correct in the next training film.

And as always, Ian McShane is worth watching in any film, even if he's just reading a toothpaste tube.

The best news about him is that someone finally pulled their heads out, and Hollywood is apparently releasing a Deadwood movie shortly, to make up for the early and abbreviated Season III cancellation of the most profane Western morality play ever to grace cable TV.

Al Swearengen is one villain/hero c**ksucker who's needed to make it to the big screen for years. They'd better do him justice.

By all accounts, Reeves is a good guy IRL, and put in the hours of prep to learn how to handle firearms for real with live rounds well enough to make this look effortless. And rides and designs his own motorcycles, thus probably did a lot of his own bike riding for the flick as well. For a two-fer, AFAIK, he hasn't pulled the usual Hollywood two-face, and mock decried the guns that have given his career an endless boost since the first Matrix flick.

But the last movie that transitioned a character from presence to farce like this was Schwarzennegger in Commando, (to which I did bring a clicker).

Having seen the first two in the series here, I wasn't expecting Shakespeare, but this was like eating a five gallon bucket of unbuttered popcorn, just because it was there.
If the screenwriters for the next go-around take more inspiration from Aaron Sorkin and less from Sam Peckinpah, it wouldn't be a bad thing. Just saying.

Unless you thought Dexter and The Walking Dead were comedies, skip this one until it's in the fin bin at WallyWorld. Forget about TV or cable: they'd have to cut so much out of it to broadcast, it'd be 30 minutes shorter. Maybe even 120 minutes shorter, IDK.

OTOH, if someone ever commits the supreme sacrilege of remaking The Great Escape, Reeves will have the mileage and chops to almost pull off a creditable turn if they cast him in Steve McQueen's role. Not asking for that, mind you, but if they did, they could do worse. And have.

My Rating: Once more into the breach.
But with the proviso that nobody shoots this many people in real life for the same reason nobody shoots up bricks of .22 by themselves on a Range Day: you just get sick and tired of all the reloading.

Things That Make Me Go Hmmm; and Grrrr!...

...and pretty much thoroughly piss me off at the same time.

A national hot dog company we shall not name used to sell their product in a resealable ziplock pouch, because some of us don't eat eight hotdogs at one sitting, and we don't like the green ones we find when we put the open package back in the fridge for a few days. Then, some eager halfwit flunkie trying to make a name for himself in the marketing department took that feature away. So now, we buy zip lock baggies to fit, and the hot dogs of a different brand as punishment to the idiots who "improved" something that worked as designed. Feeling bright now, jacktards?

When we stop there, why do the counter idiots at the drive-throughs put onions on the mustard and onion dogs as if they were free by the ton, such that more onions fall off into your lap than go into your mouth, try as you might to avoid that, but then backwardly apply the mustard with an eyedropper like it was actual gold, and coming out of their own paltry paychecks? Were their parents never married or something, or were they just bred and fed on lead paint chips?

What corporate retards at Levis, Wrangler, Dickies, et al, decided that it would be a good idea to make a beautiful, simple, functional actual real leather belt, rather than some plastic synthetic "leather-like" piece of $#!^, and then screw up the execution by cheaping out to save 50¢ on the whole thing by putting on some half-assed buckle with a pot-metal cross-bar that will catastrophically fail the very first time you wear it (ask me how I know this), instead of a solid hunk of brass buckle that will function flawlessly for a lifetime, and still be around when your grandkids find it? {Word to your mothers, retards, I have a local leather store that sells solid brass buckles, I own a rivet kit and heavy duty sewing awl, and I can thwart your cheap-$#!^ nonsense in about twenty minutes, and make a belt that will outlive me, and you. But I shouldn't have had to do that, should I? You @$$holes.}

I get that the Fourth of July is coming up in a paltry six weeks, and it sneaks up on retailers with a tedious predictability every 365 days. But why in blistering f**k does any retail genius think that they should start making cupcakes that far out, as though we were going to start stockpiling them over a month and a half in advance?

Whose brilliant idea was it at the FDA and frosting companies to make food coloring for icing that's indigestible, to the point that you make Technicolor turds in brilliant blues, verdant greens, and blood red that would make a hospital lab assistant pop their eyes wide open if it were submitted as a sample?

And while we're on the subject of red and blue, who decided, long about 1992, to flip-flop the party colors? Democrats have always been the Reds in this country, and Republicans have always been Blue. I live in a Red State, complete with the hammer and sickle most days, not a Blue one anymore, and not the other way around. Did they really think no one would notice, or that we'd stop associating communist-lite with the real thing, just because they changed the color scheme that was in play from about the late 1860s?

And so goes another Saturday.

Bring back corporal punishment for such stupidity: make companies hold an open house annually, and have a designated executive on hand for the bitch-slapping to commence.
We'd be a better people and a better country for it.

DLTDHYITAOYWO

h/t Borepatch

After doing everything in her miserable grasp to thwart the clearly expressed wishes of the British people regarding Brexit, Prime Minister May December has finally heard the squeaking of the tumbrel cart wheels, and can see the torches and pitchforks of the distant mob approaching, and will be leaving her office after the mother of all drubbings in the recent parliamentary elections.

(LONDONISTAN) Standing in front of 10 Downing Street, Mrs. May said it was in the “best interests of the country for a new prime minister” to lead Britain through the Brexit process.

Good riddance to bad rubbish. Pity she's clinging to the office for another few days.


She's indeed fortunate that her leaving isn't for a piano-wire necklace at the end of a lamppost, after being ritually scourged from 10 Downing Street to Traitor's Gate.

Apparently the actual British citizens remaining there would have had to blow up the Chunnel to get any respect, if politically beheading the ruling party at the polls didn't send the message across clearly enough.

I had written No Longer great Britain off completely, but perhaps there's still some life in the old corpse left.

And after the examples of Trump, Bolsonaro, Oz, and now this, I wouldn't go long on the chances of the Evil Party here in 2020.

Cheer up: things are not as bleak as they seem. And they never are.

(For those inevitably wondering about the title, it starts out "Don't Let the Door Hit You...". You can work the rest out for yourselves.)

Word

h/t Irish

Boring is The New Black. And It Always Has Been.

I like John Wilder's blog.

Can't help posting this clip. I love it.

That's why I added it to the Blogroll over to the right --->
the first day I found it. (And binge-read about two years' worth.)

Today's offering is another good one. He talks about a familiar Hollywood trope.
And I share his opinion, yet again. Our agreement so frequently is an indisputable measure of how brilliant he is.
(Although I do not share his fascination with PEZ. I would just buy a bag of candy, and forego the ritual of loading tiny candies into a sawn-off dispenser decorated with someone's head, because I'm a cut-to-the-chase kind of guy.)

Today's post put me in mind to reply there. But it got too long, so he lost a long comment, and I get a blog post. And now, so do you.

One of many differences between Hollywood scripts and Reality v1.0:

IRL, the hero-become-bum doesn't wake up, decide to turn himself around, and become Rocky.
He lives in squalor, catches a cold, works it into pneumonia, and he dies, right there in that rat -infested alley.
Every. Single. Time.

People IRL with their crap together never become the bum in the alley, because they're not that stupid to begin with.

To stab another trope in the heart, they don't get on the suicide mission with the Hero, not even with a parachute.
Because they never get on the Plane Ride Of Death to begin with.

Kids have fairytale storybooks.
Grown ups have movies.
Some of them are valuable, accurate, and teach valuable life lessons, or they're just hella good entertainment that scratches our cultural itch for a happy ending. (Not many of those lately, but the few we get tend to be exquisite.)

But the best life lessons don't make good theatre.

Stay in school.
Graduate.
Get married before you have kids.
Stay married.
Live within your means.
Save for what's important.
Make prudent preparations for tougher times.
Don't play stupid games; don't win stupid prizes.

B-O-R-I-N-G.
Amiright?

There's a stack of those scripts in a landfill, because no one would pay money for such predictably obvious common sense.

Hollywood (like some blogs) has learned that Bad Decisions Make Good Stories.

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

We've noted in these pages that the ironclad recipe for every drama, good and bad, is always the same as the template for every episode of Rescue 9-1-1:
a) Intractable forces of Nature
b) Human stupidity

E.g.:

"A rattlesnake crawls into the yard.
Marge left her three-year-old toddler playing outside unsupervised, so she could concentrate on her soap opera.
Let's see what happens next."
Or

"The Coast Guard forecast a full gale warning.
But Biff has a shiny new 25' cabin cruiser to take out for his first day on the water, with no radio or safety gear.
What could possibly go wrong?"

That's not just Rescue 9-1-1 melodrama, it's every day life.
I work in the ER. Ask me how I know.

"An M-80 has a substantial amount of explosive force.
Timmy elects to hold a lit one in his hand anyways, because beer.
What happens next?
Tune in tomorrow to hear the sad ending of 'My New Nickname Is Lefty.'"

This sort of reality-that-isn't-news is true in courthouses everywhere.
And jail booking desks.
And unemployment counters.
And loan shark offices.
And every search and rescue call center, since about ever.
And casinos from coast to coast.
And on and on and on.

Take either component A or B away, and you lose the whole drama.
(And hey, good luck getting Nature not to be intractable.)
So that leaves the one variable that can always be changed.

Skid Row is full of people who jumped into "B", with both feet.

It's never to early to not make poor life choices.

But the world is full of people who realize that after they jump into the enclosure to pet the polar bears.

We call these people "examples".
And if fortune smiles on their efforts, we call them Darwin Award Winners, First Class (no offspring).
Because those genes aren't going to cull themselves.

Quoted For Truth

This embiggens.

And with one flowchart, he undid the last 40 years of Guns&Ammo, Guns, Gun Digest, twenty-seven lesser rags, two FBI weapons selection tests, and the last three military attempts to find a new standard service pistol…

RTWT over at Commander Zero's internet bunker.

Storm Warning

From comments:

Aesop, do you anticipate any of that (the indictments and prison time you mentioned) actually happening? I have zero faith that it will. Zero.

You may be right.

I know what should happen, but not what will.

That uncertainty alone is cause for great alarm for anyone with any common sense.
The entire point of law is that it be fixed and reliable for all.
Without that, when it's random and capricious, it's worse than no law at all.

If there aren't indictments, trials, and convictions over what's gone on, I can tell you what I do have faith will happen: there's going to be war.

Not a tantrum, or a disturbance, or a riot, or even some low-intensity nonsense.
It's going to be a full batshit war. It will come in its own time. Maybe slow unfolding, maybe all at once. But come it will.

People are going to start looking for an excuse, any excuse, and then they're going to find one, and hunting season will be open. And once it starts, it's going to spiral out of control, like things do, and one side or the other will become extinct before it's over.

The social construct in this country is that every two to four years, we have peaceful revolutions at the ballot box.

Now one side doesn't want to play by that any more, and has spent two years subverting every branch of government to support a slow coup against an elected president. Either we nip that nonsense in the bud, and people responsible pay with their lives spent in prison for a decade or two, or we're going to start getting governments by hard coup, with all the trimmings, and we've seen how that's played out, from Russia in 1917 to Venezuela yesterday.

Folks won't wait to be rounded up, they're going to go looking for the troublemakers, and standing them up against the nearest wall.

And anybody, including police, government, or military, who picks the wrong side, will get stood right up against one too, to the last man.
And if they're very, very fortunate, we won't go looking for their wives and kids after that.
If.

That's the lit road flare the current crop of jackholes in Congress, and the perpetrators of the Russian collusion hoax, are juggling in a wading pool of gasoline.

They're about one more cover-up, one gun grab, or one attempted impeachment, away from finding out what the old rules look like in practice. When you have to take a hand, and you won't be left in peace, there's no percentage in sitting it out for another day, and a lot of people are going to start taking a close interest in their neighbors, with a view to culling the problem from hell to breakfast, until they work their way all the distance to the top of the totem pole.

I suspect a lot of other societal dysfunction is going to get a blowtorch up its tailpipe as part of the show.

The prospect of such times frankly scares the hell out of me, but not as much as the prospect of sitting on my hands and watching the crooked communists in power march ever onward, and plant 100M of their friends and neighbors in mass graves.

Because that's where we are headed if nothing happens, and no one cares.

Now imagine if, ten or twenty or thirty years ago, someone had told you such a thing would be discussed seriously.

As CA says frequently over at WRSA:
This is where we are now.
Imagine where we'll be.

The Robbespierre Denoument

All revolutions turn around and bite their instigators.
Ask Trotsky.

Comey, Clapper, and Brennan, along with twenty to forty lesser-tier crooks and thugs, should be looking at the ass-end of 10 years in the federal pen for committing fraud, abuse of official office, conspiracy to violate civil rights, and the treason of a slow coup for everything they did from 2015-present, and it should probably drag in a couple of former AGs, a former Secretary of State, and Hopey Dopey himself.

Minimum.

Otherwise this is purely a banana republic, and you'd better get ready for what happens when the Chavistas are back in power, because all bets about any law will be null and void at that point.

You will either be shooting your way out of socialism afterwards, or on your way to the cemetery or the gulag.

Same old same old will no longer be an option. They want you dead.
This is how you get a civil war, wanted or not.

Sunday Music: Gimme Shelter

The pre-eminent rock anthem of all time, unbelievably 50 years old, and if I were pressed to do without all of the Rolling Stones catalog but one song, the one I would choose.

Dedicated to local weather, which was shorts-and-t-shirt July yesterday, but schizophrenically cold, drizzly March today.

Dig it.

What Is Best In Life?

h/t daily timewaster

Stolen shamelessly. Great work to whoever did it.

And, and from earlier/further down in his blog (which should be a daily visit) yesterday, in 2016 when the Trumpinator took office, Rs were outnumbered on the federal Ninth Circus Court (most overturned bastion of liberal jurisprudential stupidity in the entire country) by Ds at a worse than 3:1 ratio,  by an actual 19:6.
It is now 16:11, and about to be 16:13.

That means if 2 more Democrat Communist judges retire or die on the 9th Circus before Trump leaves office, we flip that sumbitch for the next 20 years. With about half a dozen lawsuits regarding Califrutopia's asinine firearms laws on the pending docket. (At current trajectory and speed, the Ninth Circus will become where stupid gun laws go to die.) Oh, and once the majority flips, those jackasses in robes in Hawaii issuing injunctions against common sense will be en banc slapped silly, and told to STFU, in about a New York minute.

BTW, the Ninth Circus has jurisdiction over AK, HI, and seven Western states: CA, OR, WA, ID, MT, NV, and AZ.  So this affects the BLM grabs the Bundy clowncar was about, the nonsense at Malheur, and everything else west of the Rockies all the way to Micronesia.

The NeverTrumpTards out there can shove that and a pound of C-4 up your tailpipes and self-detonate.

Queen Alheimer's, Doing What She...Um...What Was I Saying...?

h/t 100% F'ed Up

Posted with only one comment:

Second (after the V.P.) on the list of Presidential succession.

Let that thought sink in, and remember who voted her into her leadership position.

Kleine Nazis On The March

The absolute Thought Nazis over at Wordpress continue their reign of terror, unabated.
(And if your site is over there, you should be hearing the goosesteps coming at you by now.)

This week alone, they've knocked off Chateau Heartiste, and now Creeping Sharia.
Both were just occasional reads, but the trend is clear: the Leftards will silence all dissenting views.

What this leads to is either a monotone 1984 world, where all non-SJW speech is binned and banned; or else a bifurcated world, when someone decides to provide a safe space for the Right, and does the exact same thing to liberal asstard attempts at sites, but lets right-wing speech stand unopposed.

Which just fuels the Them/Us paradigm, fractures the culture a little deeper, and makes going from a war of words to one of actual conflict that much easier.

Which, evidently, is what the Thought Nazis think they want.

They won't like us when we're angry.

And when the mob comes to pull the WordPress Nazis out of their bunker, I'll be one of the guys tying a hangman's noose for the ones who surrender.

But I'm thinking rather than a quick yank, we'll be wanting to lift them slowly, a few seconds at a time, and gradually lengthening the levitation period.

For entertainment.

Education Occurs. Reality Hits. Hilarity Ensues.

h/t Gun Free Zone

Keyboard Alert!

IANAL, but she isn't just a thief.

Taking the sign constitutes an assault by bodily force.
When asked if she has ID, she first says no.
When asked again, she confesses that yes, she does have ID. That's making a false statement to a police officer during an investigation.
And she could probably be charged with damaging the sign, which was in fact damage to private property.

But the look on her unprepossessing face when she realizes that laws are real, and she's about to get her criminal ass hooked and booked, is priceless.

So the next question is what the university's policy is on students who are multi-offence violent criminals, committing crimes on university property, and what the taxpayers of the state  of NC have to say about letting such violent criminals continue to attend a public institution where she might offend again, against their precious sons and daughters.

I would suggest a class-action lawsuit against her, her parents, and UNC officials should be pursued with vigor, by all potentially affected parties, if she's not expelled. That would include speakers on the campus and vendors thereto, as potential crime victims as well.

Then there's the federal case for deprivation of civil rights, by someone almost certainly receiving federal funds at the time.
That has to be about ten federal crimes, and none of them likely to be misdemeanors.

Snowflakette is about to become an awfully popular person.

Maybe she can do her future scholastic efforts online, after she finishes her community service and probation, and after getting her ass kicked out of UNC for what must also be black-letter law violations of the official campus code of conduct for students and faculty at an official state-run public university. She can probably be banned for life from all campuses.

Best wishes getting a job anywhere (except NOW or NARAL) with no degree, and a criminal record, Cupcake.

That education is going to be the best one you ever got.

MOAR of this, please.

A Good Rant Requires A Fact Or Three

Sorry, but just no.

Here’s a classic case of media slant:

Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

This is what we non-journalists call “complete bullshit”.  In the first place, neither Germany or California “bet” on anything.  Germany closed all their nukes in a panicked reaction to the Fukishima disaster in Japan, and California deliberately closed their existing nukes and prevented new ones from being built because Californians are a bunch of fucking Green morons (as, by the way, are the Krauts).  There was no “gamble”, because everybody already knew that Green “technology” would be totally incapable of completely filling anybody’s power needs except maybe for the average sub-Saharan African country north of the Limpopo River.  For Germany and California?  Not even close.  And when even Al Gore is calling California foolish…

Natzsofast, Guido. While the origin of the headline slant may be exactly as described, this is what we sane people call it when kneejerk rant is faster than neurological processing speed. This is a classic case of letting your prejudices write your article before engaging your common sense, let alone 30 seconds of research.

Japan got into trouble with nukes (reactors, not the matching bookened gifts from Paul Tibbets, Curtis Lemay & Co.) because of...why, cupcakes?

Oh, right, that little 9.0 earthquake on a faultline right off the coast made a wee little tsunami thingie.

Maybe some of you read about it; I think it was in most of the papers.

Fortunately, there are no such seismic problems anywhere in California.
Oh wait, turns out there are.
Just a wee bit.

For the benefit of those who flunked or skipped basic geography and geology, California has a coastal mountain range running the entire length of the state, and the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range well inland of that, because the Pacific Ocean Plate is grinding against the North American Plate, to the point that the highest mountains in the Lower 48 of North America, i.e. not including Alaska, are not the piddly-ass Rockies, but Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevadas. (Sorry, Coloradoans, but facts and reality are harsh. If it makes you feel better, the Rockies are probably prettier.)

There are a bit fewer faultlines in NE California, because Mt. Shasta and surrounds are only fucking dormant volcanos!

"Dormant"? Here's how geologists define that term.
Mt. St. Helens ring any bells??



"Dormant" volcano, Oregonian version. Note the missing real estate.

Because when they speak of dormancy, they're expressing it in terms of geological time, which makes dog years shorter than the teenage years of fruit flies.

Now look, I know how tempting it is to bash our succession of Califrutopian moonbat leaders, and the Birkenstock-wearing tofu-slurping soyboi minions from West Hollyweird and San Franshitsco who elect them, even though 75% of them are actually the expat cousins of your own toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk in Bugfuck and Pigknuckle, transplanted here so they can pick a gender and save the whales. If you want to bash them, go ahead on. Take a number. The line just on this blog, is four miles in length, and 50 persons abreast.

Look, I've even got quite a sense of humor when it comes to bashing TPTB here in Califrutopia (as that name itself should suggest). But if you have an IQ higher than fungus, and two neurons to rub together, we should probably be able to agree without too much difficulty that the last goddam place to put more nuclear plants is next to an ocean, in a state with 100-something active faults (and that's just the ones we know about, now), all overdue for a huge seismic relocation event, and most in exactly the coastal zone such plants would be built upon, and half a dozen "dormant" volcanos in the vicinity of most larger rivers and water supplies. The best place to put California's nuclear plants would be in eastern Arizona, or Utah, or Texas, or maybe Kansas. Give a holler when they're interested in that. Last I looked, we can't even get Nevadans to agree that their desert mines are the best place for nuclear waste, even when they are.

And let's remember that the entire nuclear industry was touting the near impossibility of a nuclear plant malfunction ("a one in a BILLION likelihood"), and the safety of the industry,

President Peanut Brain's photo op did more for nuclear power in the Western
world than the Hindenburg crash did for airship travel.

right up until the evening news had shots of POTUS wading around in hazmat boot covers inside Three Mile Island, the same month that The China Syndrome opened. So you can thank Metropolitan Edison not just for a nuclear power debacle, but also for reviving middle-aged Hanoi Jane Fonda's flagging movie career. Thanks a pantload, guys.

Thus attempting to pin the anti-nuclear power urge purely on deranged Greenophilia is flatly silly, and descending into Fred Reed territory, and last I looked, you had to move to Mexico, sell your soul, and lose your mind to do that on a blog. Best not undertaken.

California does have solar energy in abundance. Not, nota bene, as a primary source, nor ever could be, but taken advantage of properly, it would make enough of a difference in total use to both cut demand on the deliberately antiquated grid, making mandatory brownouts unnecessary, and oh, BTW, make the average person with a wee bit of foresight and a few spare bucks completely independent of both random seismic events and the whims of the morons in Sacramento.

It's not good because it's cheaper (which it absolutely isn't) it's better because it's priceless when the grid falters or fails.  

We've also had morons in charge hereabouts who halted all offshore drilling since the series of spills in the late 1960s ruined miles of beaches. Goddamned tree-hugging hippies.

That can be fixed with a few penstrokes (and will, someday, when people get desperate enough). Because people aren't going to freeze, or sweat their jingly bits, or pass up literal billions of dollars just sitting there a couple of miles off the coast, especially if it mainly pisses off Barbra Streisand and her ilk.

And BTW, the San Onofre nuclear plant was shuttered, not because of "green" concerns, but rather because of critical parts failures, and the revelation that the whole thing was waiting for one jiggle to shatter miles of obsolescent and about-to-fracture piping, and the cost to replace/repair it would have bankrupted Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Just the thing you want, in a plant next to millions of people, and $M homes, right next to an ocean, and a key military base, is a nuke plant with pipes made of glass. Or just old, rusted, and ready to shatter, spewing nuclear contamination into the atmosphere and offshore.
As Casey Stengel used to say, "you could look it up".

So if we're going to stick to actual common sense energy policy, let's try it from that tack, and save the kneejerks for when the doctor is doing your annual physical.

Just a humble suggestion.