Sunday Music: You Wreck Me

Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers playing pure rock, straight ahead, no compromise, the way it ought to be played.

RIP GVDL

Gerard Van der Leun, 1945-2023

The world bids adieu to Gerard after a sudden and brief battle with cancer.
He was a perennially kind and thoughtful soul, and thoroughgoing gentleman, who occasionally commented here, and kindly linked our own thoughts and essays more times than we deserved at his American Digest blog, and which has lately informed we, his legion readers and admirers, of his final struggle, and his death yesterday in the wee hours of the morning.

Like all, we are saddened at his passing and the stilling of his voice on the web, and the world is poorer for his passing, but we are all richer for having known him and partaken of his thoughts and musings. We wish nothing but solace and comfort to his family and friends in the days of their grief at his passing. We shall miss him.

Blogs don't last forever, and eventually get memory-holed as if they never were. Exactly as we've seen enough times to know whereof we speak. If you can spare some time to go visit the gardens of his mind while it yet remains, it will be time well spent.

Huh.

According to Blogger's counter, that last post was #4000.

Whoopee. 

Kept me off the streets, I suppose. And it's gluten-free. So there's that.

Slàinte Mhath!

Haggis is strictly for tourists and suckers. For this Burns Night, we'll be having a slab of prime rib, as usual.

Place Your Bets

With her announcement that " We are fighting Russia," I'm taking bets on how long before the dipshit running Germany's foreign ministry has her retirement announced.

But for those who think one person saying it, or that sending tanks to Ukraine proves it, tell the class how Russian SA-2 missiles around Hanoi triggered the US to nuke Moscow in 1965.

[Moscow is no more likely to take the bait on this than the West was likely to pre-emptively strike Russia the 27 times Vlad's minions threatened nuclear holocaust over Ukraine. Learn a lesson from that.]

For those who think a public official saying something makes it so, you ought to think long and hard before setting that precedent.

Long and hard. Just saying.

Good To The Last Drop

 h/t daily timewaster

"It's A Major Award"

FAFO Medal:

Bronze tombstone-shaped device, inscribed "Fucked Around Found Out", suspended below a ribbon, argent. 

 "For conspicuous stupidity and jackassery, generally in public, usually resulting in pain or great bodily harm to self, to no good ending, and frequently awarded posthumously. (Bronze cluster for subsequent awards. Gold star for posthumous awards.)"

We're thinking of having a medal company whip up a batch of these. But we have a feeling no matter how many we have made, demand will always exceed supply.

Quiet Pastimes

 h/t WRSA

Natzsofast, Guido

 

h/t WRSA

"...will not accept defeat, no matter the cost."

 

Oh really, Professor?

I didn't realize we were posting comedy as explanation these days.

Conference call for you: Tokyo 1905 on Line 1, and Kabul 1989 on Line 2.

Beware of analysis where the "anal" part means "pulled out of somebody's @$$."

[Pro Tip: When your pronouncement crashes and burns on the rocks of actual history, it isn't history that got it wrong.] 

And the Samson Option? Samson committed suicide, for those who went to Common Core Sunday school. That means the end of the existence of the Russian nation and people, pretty much forever.

Russia has accepted military defeat over and over in its history. It's nothing remarkable, and nothing new for them. And unless Russia's drunken buffoons pull their heads out of their back ends soon, Kiev is liable to be phoning in on Line 3.

When and if that happens, in the words of Bill Engvall,

So maybe instead of wishcasting, it would be more helpful to wait and see how things turn out.

Sunday Music: Crystal Blue Persuasion/Suavecito

 

Tommy James #2 hit of 1969 "Crystal Blue Persuasion", and Malo's 1971 Top 20 hit "Sauvecito". Officially, they're two separate songs. Musically and stylistically, I wouldn't want to be defense counsel trying to prove to plaintiff in a copyright suit that the latter didn't borrow/steal heavily from its predecessor. They're both great, so you get a double shot today, of beautiful music from happier times.

"Welcome To My Masterclass"

 h/t John Wilder

"The light that burns twice as bright lasts only half as long." - Dr. Eldon Tyrell, Blade Runner

Re: Baldwin

 

So, apparently the NM prosecutor wants to finally pee on the electric fence, and after only fifteen months(!) without any prosecutorial movement, has finally decided to charge somebody (actually, more like everybody that wouldn't cop a plea in return for a wrist slap) with involuntary manslaughter for the wrongful death of Halyna Hutchins on the doomed production of the low-budget piece of guaranteed schlock known as Rust. (We leave it for legal aficionados to explain how Baldwin could face two counts of manslaughter for one death, but maybe New Mexico D.A.s took Common Core math. We suspect it likely that NBC correspondidiots simply cannot count nor use English adequately, and the reality of the charges will be explained in due course.) Desperation in court is a poor legal strategy, and letting one of the criminally culpable guilty parties plead out for six months' probation, which will likely be over before this even goes to trial, isn't going to play well in Albuquerque, or anywhere else.

We refer all and sundry to our previous posts on the topic, most particularly this one.

Other than that, we reiterate that Baldwin's indisputably an anti-gun five-star asshat who deserves all the karma he gets from this, and it pains us to note that unless he brought the live weapon to the set himself, and loaded it with live rounds himself, in violation of every procedure of every movie and TV production set going back decades and decades, his demonstrable criminal culpability in this incident remains at nil.

Starting with the obvious questions (by either side) in open court:

"According to industry wide safety regulations, whose sole and entire JOB is it, on production sets, going back to before anyone of the RUST set was born, to handle, load, supervise, and ensure the total safety and inability of prop weapons to cause death or injury to result on set from the use of any such prop weapon, barring a blatant violation of the safety rules?"

Rend your garments and gnash your teeth all you like, but unless you have new information at this point (a likelihood expressible as somewhere between dubious and naught), further blather will be pointless. And that barring severe mental retardation in court (not unlikely in the current legal climate) we suspect most of you are going to be even more pissed off after the trial than you've been in the days between the incident and this indictment.

Learn to live with monstrous disappointment.

We cannot lose here, as either Baldwin walks - which would be the proper legal judgement based on the facts at large - or in a gross miscarriage of justice, he goes to prison. Win-win, from a karmic perspective, and heads-I-win-tails-you-lose from the standpoint of justice in a court of law. If you wish to scream and froth in praise of poor jurisprudence, you're at the wrong address.

We've already had blood relatives prove themselves incapable of any dispassionate and rational discussion on the subject, and have neither the time nor inclination to referee and shovel the leavings of frothing anonymous idiots of the internet yet again on this topic. The horse has been beaten to molecules months and years since. Put the stick down, and wait for the unparalleled comedy-tragedy of the actual trial. Bring popcorn.

The Plural Of Anecdotes Is Not "Data"

 

Today,  WRSA linked to a Market Ticker post.

RTWT. Then forget everything you read, flush it, and jiggle the handle to take care of anything that remains.

The Good

There is nothing good nor useful here. It's meaningless, which sadly tends to be what happens too many times when Market Ticker ventures into medical topics. It's not data, but it is "bad", just not in the way either party intended. We shall explain.

The Bad

a) The Puerto Rican example mentions "177 individuals", "aged 8 to 84".

This is statistically irrelevant. Meaning it's ass gas, on its best day.

The smallest statistically meaningful data would be a sample of 1200-1500 randomly selected subjects, meaning a cross section of age, race, sex, and no volunteers. In fact, it'd have to be more than that, because you'd want two such groups: a control group of unvaccinated persons, and a similar sample who took the jab. So we're talking a sample 15-20 times as large as that group. So any conclusions from such a pitifully inadequate sample are diaper spackle.

b) The military group is worse, in that no size is mentioned beyond a "large number", and as the sample size is hopelessly skewed in favor of young fit males, rather than equal amounts of both (and there are only two) sexes and a more diverse set of age groups, it's totally worthless, except insofar as predicting for that narrow bandwidth of subjects. And for all we know, it was 20 guys. Or even 200. Doesn't matter. 

Once again, diaper spackle.

The Ugly

None of the allegations have been published, meaning they're essentially wives' tales, unreviewed by anyone in any scientific or medical community, nor could be, for the exact same concerns we have already noted.

And the allegation at the source only alleges "cardiac markers", not actual cardiac damage. That's survey weasel words for "we may be full of shit".

Conclusion: 

There is no objective evidence to reach any conclusions, other than a real set of studies, with sufficiently valid random sample sizes, ought to be done, controlling for all variables except whether a subject did or did not get Not-A-Vaxx, and quantifying any cardiac damage (or lack thereof) subsequently discovered.

It doesn't mean Not-A-Vaxx conclusively causes cardiac damage.

It also doesn't mean it doesn't do so.

No small part of any confusion or dismissal of those claims is because none of the vaxx manufacturers did any such human testing, including, as Deninger notes, simple lab and cardiac workups prior to administering the Not-A-Vaxx varieties to any test subjects.

Which has been the entire problem from the get-go.

Peawits have tried to paint us as being pro-Jab, when we were never any such thing.

What we were, was pro-vaccination, if a COVID vaccine was ever developed, in the same manner as every vaccine in history has been.

All of humanity still awaits any such thing, and in vain. We never got a vaccine for COVID, and it's obvious no such thing was ever sought to be produced, and our statements regarding an actual vaccine were conditional upon the creation of nothing less than an actual vaccine. What we got instead was slapdash crapola cross-bred with genetic experimentation, and as soon as the culprits let that wee tidbit of information out at large, we said not just no, but Hell NO, and encouraged all and sundry to do likewise. And at a certain level of duplicity, the effort slides from incompetence to actual deliberate malice, even for the deaf and blind investigator.

It may be that the Not-A-Vaxx causes widespread cardiac injury. We suspect no less, based on mountainous piles of anecdotal evidence.

But we're similarly convinced no such honest, valid, and comprehensive studies will ever be done to move from anecdotal hearsay to statistical proof, because to do them would be to pull the curtain back on the greatest act of genocide in recorded planetary history since Noah's Flood, followed, in short order, by torches, pitchforks, tumbrel carts, and mass guillotine executions unrivaled since the French Revolution.

And TPTB ain't got time for that.

That suspicion is not the same thing as proof of it, however, and as usual, Deninger plunges into the swamp without a compass or a clue. Just as globull warmism is anecdotal and anti-statistical bullshit, so is this latest attempt to pull science out of someone's underpants with accusations about as reliable as the FBI agents who investigated Trump.

Research and logical conclusions require statistical facts. Accept nothing less. 

And stop listening to confirmation bias backed by anecdotal fairytales. It's no more correct from our side than it is when the lunatard Left does it. And it's embarrassing to have to remind people that there's no pass for entering contestants from the Special Olympics in the academic decathalon.

Being suspicious and skeptical is fine. We share your suspicions. But we don't call them "data", nor confuse one with the other.

Worst of all: WRSA, Deninger, and Steve Kirsch may all be correct, someday, but will be laughed out of the ballpark long before that day for trying to claim a home run without stepping up to the plate, hitting the ball, and doing the requisite legwork.

More's the pity.

Or, as my namesake noted, you'll get the wrong sort of reputation.

Bad News, Kids

 

"Welcome To My Masterclass"

h/t daily timewaster

 

Vaxxhole "Logic"

Most of the vaxxed don't want to talk about it, but I keep hearing this from a few true believers at work. Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. I'm guessing that it'll take a few of the youngsters there dying of Suddenly™ before the penny will finally drop for them.

Troll Level: Jedi Grand Master

 h/t WRSA

That's genius right there.

If anybody has a source, we want 100 of 'em.

Sunday Music: Bye Bye Love

One of seven great tracks from The Cars debut album in 1978, and yet another reason they became an instant classic group.

Bandwidth Issues

Seems that over-using YouTube for a TV has throttled one's internet access lately. Should be sorted out by Monday, but it's still annoying.

PSA For The Thinking Impaired

 

Swing away.

We get comments, for most of which we're grateful. But a non-zero number of which, if not outright straightforward trolls, lead us to despair the dearth of common sense and critical thinking of the average population.

Case in point:

About that whole "Russia's artillery usage is unsustainable" thing...

https://www.zerohedge.com/military/decision-arm-ourselves-or-arm-ukraine-navy-secretary-admits-crisis-us-defense-stockpiles

Ignoring the obvious question ("Since when did any appointed idiot in the Biden fustercluck become an authority on anything military, let alone factual?"), we're aware we get a bad rap on this blog from certain reasoning-challenged people, because compared to them, we come off as a never wrong know-it-all. (T'aint so.) That's because to anyone sufficiently primitive, modern technology is indistiguishable from magic, and to anyone sufficiently stupid, common sense, reasoning, and applied intelligence seems like witchcraft.

We get that just because this is the internet, this blog looks easy, because you've got keyboards too, so how hard can it really be? So maybe if we break down what we do before we reply, readers who inhabit the left edge of the bell curve could level up their game somewhat. (We live in hope.)

We're wrong on occasion, but damned seldom, because we know how to think, and because we check and double-check the relevant facts. Which do not include random quotes, but rather actual numbers of actual things.

We will break it down for the diligent. Have another look at the above comment.

Go to Durden's linked post. RTWT.

Then follow the link in our reply to that comment.

Therein we find that the annual US military budget is over 15½ times greater than that of Russia.

Think about that for a minute. The US spends, in any month, more than the entire Russian military spends in a year. Every. Single. Year. Since they stopped being Soviets, and simply became a Turd World failed nation with a nuclear arsenal.

Do some more research. Knock yourself out. Look anywhere. Google. Even Wikipedia, worth every penny you pay for it, but better than throwing messages in a bottle and waiting for a reply. Whatever.

So ask yourself a couple or three questions:

How big is the Russian military?

How big is Ukraine's military?

How big is the U.S. military?

Then ask the same questions about the military budgets of those three countries.

Call those questions 1a, 1b, and 1c, and 2a, 2b, and 2c.

Now calculate the military spending per capita for each country's military.

Call that 3a, 3b, and 3c.

Answers*:

1a: 1M active, 2M reserve

1b: 246,445 (pre-war)

1c: 1.35M active, 800k reserve

2a: $65.9B

2b: $10.4B

2c: $782B

3a: $22k@

3b: $42.2k@

3c: $363.7k@

We now arrive at the common sense portion of today's lesson:

What kind of military do you think Russia is getting, spending the ruble equivalent of $22k per troop? How do you think those troops compare to Ukraine's, at twice that level of spending, or the U.S.', at eighteen times as much?

(Masters-level students: we get it's not this simple, but it illustrates the basic point.) 

Do you think Russia is able to field and equip someone by spending 8% of what the U.S. spends for the same product?

Looking at those expenditures, are you really that surprised that Ukraine, with a huge influx of more equipment and munitions from the US and Europe since last March, is kicking the shit out of a Potemkin army that runs on vodka, lies, and graft, and hasn't won (nor even fought) a serious conflict with anything close to a peer in over 75 years? Srsly?

Have you seen videos of modern US recruits barefoot, unfed, with rusted over weapons, or no weapons? Where are the YouTube videos of recruits at the rifle range yelling "bang!" because they don't have any bullets, or even rifles? With Russia, that's the last six months.

So, what do you think happens to Russian military adventures, when motivated but poor Ukrainian troops, who hate Russian invaders with a passion, are given a sudden shitton of the best weapons America can produce?

And finally, given their respective budgets, which military do you figure is more likely to run out of ammunition first: that of the U.S., or Russia? Show your work.

With that in mind, and recent articles showcased on CDR Salamander's website at the front of our mind, we suggest Navel (not a typo) Secretary Shitforbrains would be better off spending less time talking out his bilge outflow, and more time supervising rust and paint details, so that half the US Rustbucket Navy isn't decertified for combat operations because it's rusted to the pier.

USS Zumwalt Rustbucket

And people who think the substantial but relative pittance of military largesse we've showered onto Ukraine's military this year is going to leave the US military defenseless, probably need to learn to count without taking off their shoes before they swallow the kind of codswallop that Shitforbrains is pimping.

Is the US military short of ammunition in its war stockpiles, and for annual training?

Fuck YES!!! And has been for over 50 years, since even before Jimmy Carter's regrettable presidency, and counting, because congressweasels keep buying boondoggle pieces of shit like the F-35 Thunderjug, Little Crappy Ships, and carriers like the USS Edsel, while underallocating funds requested for things like maintenance, training, training, training, training, and war reserve stocks, while fully funding Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, gender reassignment surgery for confused mental defectives, and staffing the TO and E of the 69th Intersectional Dildo Brigade of LGBTEIEIO Transdykefaggotry Force, in preference to paying for fighters, bombers, destroyers, submarines, armor, artillery, and by-God combat troops, let alone the munitions they need to train and fight wars. That problem didn't start last February, it's been an open scandal for decades.

Ukraine's contribution to actual ammunition shortages is so small as to be negigible by comparison, and anybody with 5 minutes' actual time in military service knew that without being told any of this. Which is why the never-served contingent of Internet featherheads are so baffled by that obvious truth. They have no idea how much they don't know about how much they don't know.

And they're too f**king lazy to waste five or ten mouseclicks self-educating, when they could be obliviously bloviating far beyond their IQ or experience.

Which is why, with them, you get what you get, and get dumber the more of it you read.

Suture self.

And ponder that every cabinet secretary since Benjamin Franklin was postmaster has complained that his trough needed more government funding to do its job, and that maybe they're talking out of their ass for mercenary, rather than factual, reasons, before throwing their quotes and any extrapolations based thereon at us as if they were actual information, or contained any relevancy to any topic under discussion.

A quick follow-up would be to ask anyone quoting them to name every competent person appointed by the current administration to any position of trust and responsibility.

We'll be right here while you work those two things out.

*[We used Wikipedia for illustration, purely for speed/simplicity. You could have tried any number of other sources, if only for comparison. Whatever else the Agency f**ks up, the CIA's annual World Factbook online is a five-star excellent and reliable resource. So is anything published by Jane's. Ditto SIPRI (for facts, not politics). And many others. The answers will thus be slightly different, but like bullets, will fall in a grouping on the target not drastically far from each other if you don't choose bullsh*t references from the outset. Like some whackjob's axe-to-grind website, where they pull information out of their underpants and pass it off as facts. Now guess why some people who do that are accused, rightfully and precisely, of eating other people's sh*t. Don't be That Guy.]

Woke Translator Activated

 h/t Odd Job

Not so pretty when you deconstruct it.

And Now You Know

h/t WRSA

CA Flooding? Not So Much

More proof, if you needed it, that Ellen Degenerate is a featherbrained moron.

California, despite the hype, is not drowning.

It's raining hard. That's about it. Coming at the end of a multi-year drought, that's a good thing.

By the numbers:

Montecito, where Degenerate lives, is a seaside/hillside community of 8000 people too rich for Beverly Hills. You could look it up. The average household income is over a quarter of a million/year. It sits in low hills, at the base of the even taller Santa Ynez coastal range, which wrings moisture out of clouds before it gets to the Central Valley like a dish washer does with a sponge. It doesn't flood there. The water runs down the hills to the sea. As it has for tens of thousands of years before the hillsides there were infested with multi-million-dollar mansions on 40-acre plots. Hell, guest houses in that neighborhood go for mid 7-figure prices. Degenerate buys and sells Montecito estates for $20M profits like Donald Trump used to play Monopoly with actual Manhattan properties. I know Montecito, because I lived in SB for 2 years. Montecito is the old rich, and the brighter Hollywood types smart enough to GTF out of the Hollyweird Hills.

It rains there all the time, every winter. And creeks flash with flood waters, because every summer, there are huge brush fires in the surrounding hills, as there have been since lightning met trees. A creek that rages 4 days out of 365 isn't a dreaded unnatural catastrophe, even in the land of mansions and tennis courts.

Telling us that the hillside creek behind her mansion never runs heavy is just Ellen telling us she hasn't lived there long enough to see otherwise. Rain falls on mountains, and runs downhill. That's not us being bad to Nature, Ellen, you incredible blithering fool, that's called gravity. STFU, go back inside, and turn up the gas fireplace.

It also doesn't flood in Califrutopia. At least, not the way people in the Mississippi basin think of flooding. 

Actual Mississippi flooding. When it happens, it's biblical.

It rains here, when it rains, which hits the mountains, and gets jetted out to sea by flood control channels. Here today, gone tomorrow. People who build houses at the bottom of the mudslide, on hillsides, or other stupid places, find out what dumbasses they are every 5-10 years or so. But they like the view, and rebuild, and it repeats the next time we get a wet year. Other than stopping government subsidies for idiots like that, and letting them drown or get buried under mudslides, there's not much that needs to be done, other than getting the dozers out tomorrow, and plowing the mud off the roads everyone else uses.

People want to blame Gov. Gabbin Nuisance over this, but it isn't really his fault. If it were, I'd happily tag him for it. He inherited it. This is owned completely by Gov. Moonbeam, and four terms of anti-growth lunacy. Moonbeam's dad, despite running the state into the ground in so many ways, wasn't a total moron. He built dams, aqueducts, power plants, and freeways, that made life here what it is. And they were built on the reg, until his idiot son, Moonbeam, decided that the way to get people not to come here was to stop building more freeways, and power plants, and reservoirs. So they came here anyways (mostly the toothless banjo-playing liberal idiot kinfolk from the other 49 states, plus mega-fucktons of illegal immigrants). Without a single dam, reservoir, water project, power plant, or freeway built since Moonbeam's first term, and all the money going to useless eaters and shiftless layabouts, instead of people building things. Everything wrong with America, in microcosm.

And consequently, in dry years there isn't enough water, there isn't enough power any year, the freeways are pot-hole infested turd world parking lots most hours, seven days a week, and the money collected to build more of them has been squandered on welfare for the exact liberal idiot lunatic drunk drug addicted banjo-paying kinfolk, and millions of illegals and their illiterate gang-banger anchor babies. Diversity is our strength! Said no one ever.

Which anyone who's been here longer than Ellen and her idiot carpetbagger ilk knows in their bones, from firsthand observation.

Hereabouts, it's rained about 2" since yesterday morning, and 1" of that is since midnight. Wind gusts up to 30MPH. People in New England go sailing it that kind of weather, FFS. The last time I saw a storm this ferocious, was the last wet year here. Or any spring or summer afternoon in mid-Georgia, round about 2PM.

Farther north, it's been a harsher storm, and parts of the Central Valley, being flat as a pancake and bone dry, will take longer to dry out than the coastal regions do. But it's nothing that hasn't happened time and again in these parts, and won't happen again. Unless you got here yesterday, and leave tomorrow, like most of the career locusts here from Anyplace Else.

Supposedly, this storm and attendant flooding have killed 14 people. Darwinism in action, in most cases, with only 19,999,986 more to go to return this once-golden state back to what it was before the carpetbaggers, Okies, and hippies from everywhere-but-Here fucked it all up.

Rain? Storm? It is to laugh. Welcome to California. Now go home.

Triple Dog Dare

$500 cash to whoever affixes this sign to the door
to the Oval Office. No questions asked.

 

Sunday Music: Suddenly

Beautiful Top 20 hit love song duet from Xanadu, sung in 1980 by the now recently and sadly departed Olivia Newton-John, and Cliff Richard. Also the chorus that pops unbidden into my head every time I hear about another person dropping, dead or crippled, of Suddenly™, which Not-A-Vaxx is probably going to kill many multiples of persons more than the original strain of virus ever did, and cripple or sterilize even more. In the dictionary under Kill Shot. Today's Sunday Music is dedicated to the tens of thousands of Suddenly™ victims so far, and the millions more yet to come. What a brave new world.

Oxygen Thieves

 

This is my shocked face.

Breaking News: Admitting The Obvious

(WASHINGTON DC) Amidst the backdrop of a record-breaking fourteen failed attempts to elect a House Speaker beloved of the chamber of commerce bought-and-paid-for hacks making their party what it is today, before finally settling for the newest king of mediocrity, knowledgeable GOP sources leaked news that the RNC has gone ahead and changed party mascots. 

Speaking on condition of anonymity, they stated "It's time for a new look. We're dropping the elephant as outdated and near extinction, and our new mascot is what we're all about: ancient, near-sighted, lumbering, fearsome, destructive, dangerous to anything moving, and an evolutionary dead end. This choice fits exactly who we are, and have been for quite some time."

Other sources were conflicted, stating the change is only an interim mascot choice, as talks are already underway to adopt the pentagram-wearing horned goat on Beelzebub's throne as the final mascot, for when the Dems and Repubs finally announce publicly the permanent and formal formation of the Uniparty, sometime in the next few years. "We're just waiting for the Antichrist to reveal himself. Then we can rid the country of these destructive internecine party fights forever," stated gin-soaked hag Pelosi, in between swigs from a box of Boone's Farm Strawberry Delight.

Somewhere Near D.C.

Be Still, My Beating Heart

 

Finally! Entertaining Sportsball

Much funnier than watching Moscow try to take Kiev, and almost as funny as watching Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants try to form coherent sentences without crapping himself.

And for all the punditry that claims "conservatives" never conserved anything: HTF do you expect them to do that, when there are apparently only 20 of them out of 222 nominal Republicans in the House? (And that's probably a high-water mark in the last 50 years.)

BTW, we note in passing, there is no requirement anywhere whatsoever that the Speaker of the House be a sitting congressweasel. Which means, just for giggles, that the Republicants (not a typo) could, if they so chose, elect President Donald J. Trump to the post, and there's fuck-all anyone else could do about it. He would thus preside over the entire run of the 118th Congress in the House of Representatives, assign committee seats, decide what bills moved forward for voting, etc., yet without a vote himself on any bills.

Just for the comedy factor, it'd be a YUUUUUUUUUUUUUUGE win, while emphasizing the smallness and ineptitude of Emperor Poopypants to serve as the selected Fraudulent.

Just saying.

2023 Quincy Adams Wagstaff Lecture

"You asked for this lecture, and you're going to get it, good and hard.
These are my principles.
If you don't like them, I have other ones."

Ladies and gentlemen, faculty, students, and friends of Huxley College,

When 2022 dawned just a short year ago, like the janitor watching the cattle train pull in at the Chicago stockyards, we had no idea what a colossal load of reprocessed hay and grass was about to descend upon us from every direction.

So rather than waste your time recounting the byproducts that even the finest steaks and ribs left behind last year, we focus our attention on the things you need to keep in mind, rather than the sorts of things that come and go faster than your retirement savings.

One

You need water to stay alive. A cup will buy you a couple of hours. A canteen might get you through a day. And a barrel might help you see the end of the month. If you want to live longer than a month, you're going to need more than that, and a way to get all you need, for as long as you'd like to live. And you're going to find out all too soon that a tap to city supplies equals exactly nothing when things get tough. And they're going to get tough. And then they're going to get even tougher.  When they do, it's too late to look for someplace to drill a well. Stop waiting.

Two

"Man shall not live by bread alone." He won't live without anything to eat for very long either. Inflation, real inflation, on food, is running about 100% over pre-COVID days' prices. That's right, about 100%. There are some exceptions. Take advantage of them, while you can, and stock up. In several places. Find someplace to put some away. Then put away some more. Then more than that. It still won't be enough, but it will buy you enough time to avoid the panic, avoid crowds, and come up with another plan. And if you haven't got it together by then, don't worry. Your problems will all be over in about 40 days. The chances are, if your ancestors hadn't gotten enough to eat, you wouldn't be here. Learn from that.

Three

A place of safety, all yours, that provides continual water and food isn't a luxury. It's a vital necessity. People living with modern conveniences and distribution have ignored that for a century. They're about to get the sort of reminder on that score that sets civilization back every thousand years or so. You're here because your ancestors made wise choices. Whether you become an ancestor will depend upon you doing the same.

Four

War. Famine. Disease. Death. Those are the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse. Unlike in the Bible, the above order is also how they appear IRL, as a rule. You've got  them all pawing up dust in the barn right now. Get busy before they come out of the stall and go for a stroll. The past few years have seen the total abdication, by modern medicine, of any pretense of following the Hippocratic Oath (and to which they'd only paid lip service for a generation anyhow) or ethics anything like it. That means you're entering the era where you are your own doctor, nurse, and paramedic. This lesson is graded pass/fail. Fail means someone dies. Maybe you, maybe a loved one. Knowledge, tools, and medicines are relatively cheap, for the moment. They'll become priceless in the blink of an eye, and five minutes late means failure.

Five

Precious metals are money. Fiatbux are finely engraved toilet paper. Since ever. Keep enough actual greenbacks (a few months' worth of expenses), because while they still work, they'll solve a host of minor problems time and again. Until they don't. After that, it's precious metals, period. 

In order of value, those are

Lead and brass: This comes in plain paper boxes, and olive drab cans. Unless you're drowning or on fire, you don't have enough of that. And it should go without saying, you need the heavy metal and training to send that precious metal in the direction of those who most desperately deserve it. This last is covered by the Rittenhouse Theorem Of Precious Metal Distribution: two to the chest, and one to the head.

Silver and gold: Old circulating coinage is the most handy. Silver for everyday usage, and gold for a compact store of value. And once again, all you can get still won't be enough, but it can be a great help. Like eggs and baskets, don't keep everything all in one place.

Six

Timeless knowledge, skills, and experiential hands-on training. That means you need a library that doesn't live in digital ones and zeros. And the experience to put things into practice, instead of learning to do them five minutes after it's too late. Get self-sufficient now, while there's no penalty for coming up short. Sure, get all the things you can while you can get them, but learn how to work around not having them or how to come up with the alternatives from the last generation, or from a century or two before, say, electricity. People who are jacks- (and jills-) of-all-trades will be resilient, useful, marketable, and likely to last a lot longer than specialists with no practical skills will, in any place and time. Let alone any number of possible futures even as little as a year hence.

And while you're training your minds, and your hands, get up off your fat sofas and lounge chairs and train your bodies. 

Seven

How far can you walk in a day? Draw a circle that big around where you are, or will be. Keep in touch farther than that, and keep an eye on the horizon, in every way possible. But get used to the idea that anything beyond a day's walk is far less important to you and yours than what lies inside that distance. The people most likely to make trouble for you are inside that day's walk-sized circle. Including all the trouble in the world. Aliens from space aren't likely to vex you nearly as much as any mob of idiots from less than five miles from where you're sitting in front of the computer or TV screen each night.

The same is true of the people that can help you the most. If they're inside that circle, those are 3AM friends. People aren't going to come flying in to save you on air cavalry gunships from the next county or state over. But the friend or neighbor two plots over, or a block down, is much more valuable.

Not least of which because you can't have too much of everything, but if you and twenty friends each have too much of something, chances are each of you will have too much of something different. Now you've got people to trade and barter with, and everyone makes out better with every deal. Then, and now. (Bonus: there's no sales or income tax on trading a jar of jam to someone else for a dozen eggs or a quart of milk, nor trading charging up somebody's batteries for an oil filter or a fuel pump, or any ten thousand other things you could think of.)

Last

To even keep the above is going to be exceedingly hard to do. It was so for your parents and great-grandparents when all they had to worry about was the weather.

It is overwhelmingly likely that you're going to have to fight to have and keep that. And we don't mean bloody noses and silly buggers at the playground.

You're going to have to be willing to face killing and dying. Theirs, and yours. Until you're sick of it. And then, some more. And probably, even more than that. You should ponder the full meaning and import of words like insurgency, underground, and auxiliary, chiefly because you are liable to have far more firsthand experience with them, and all applicable lessons regarding them, in the coming days than anyone has ever had in the last generation or two.

The list of, and numbers of, those who are already ready and willing to take everything - including life itself - away from you and yours is growing by the tens of thousands, every single day. The proof of the pudding is they aren't even shy any longer about telling you outright, in public, even to your face, exactly that. Trust them.

And God help you, if you aren't ready and willing to take them out at the drop of a hat, the minute they so much as twitch a muscle forward on their plans, yet again, you won't have to worry about later on. "The quick and the dead" isn't just a poetic phrase. Be the former, or you'll default to the latter.

Those issues are the subjects upon which we at Huxley College commend to your higher education, with the firm hope that you will willingly and cheerfully apply yourselves, in order to achieve the restoration of the civilization and liberty some of us are yet old enough to fondly remember as being the birthright of free men everywhere, and throughout all time.

May it be so again. 

No one else is coming to save you. (They never were.) 

You're going to have to save yourselves. Godspeed.

"Any Day Now...": Delusional Psychosis, Part 313

 

Pro Tip: "delusional" ≠ "people smarter than you
with better analysis and more accurate sources"

Case in point:

19th Ward chicago: "Today there is propaganda, some of it so absurd that it is laughable."

He's absolutely right about laughable propaganda, but not in the way he thinks.

E.g.:

"Until recently, Putin left the Ukraine alone except for the Donbass area."

And the guy who wrote that, sourced at the OP, is calling those who disagree with his crackpot analysis "delusional"? It is to laugh.

Other than illegally seizing Crimea outright in 2014 (because he could) amidst the chaos of the Ukrainian uprising, and then immediately afterwards doubling down, and sending Spetsnaz and airborne troops into the Donbas in wholesale batches, minimally camouflaged in civilian clothes, and then claiming they were "popular uprisings" against Kiev, Putin left Ukraine alone.

Which would be like saying that "Except for seizing California and Texas, and annexing them back into Mexico, Mexico has left the United States alone."

Anyone who can support that level of psychosis can rationalize anything.

"the newspaper's delusional writers claim that Russian attacks are no longer effective as Ukraine's Western allies have shored up Ukraine's air defenses. Why then is half of Ukraine without electric power?"

This is like me saying I have a credit card, and then you asking me why my tires are flat.

One statement has nothing to do with the other, and ignores the obvious.

For the terminally clueless, I'd go out on a limb and say it's because before Ukraine's Western allies shored up their air defenses, Russian saturation missile attacks, with only 25% effectiveness at the height of the bombardments, still managed to knock out a lot of Ukrainian power grid infrastructure. In other news for the criminally stupid, water is wet, and fire burns.

Thus half of Ukraine is without power because prior Russian strikes hit electrical infrastructure that's hard to replace (the fragility of the world's power grids has only been covered in Ukraine's specific case, and for the U.S., about a million times in the last ten years, from Hell to breakfast by everyone in creation), and necessary replacement parts are available from a very limited number of sources. Much of which is Russian itself. Gee, let me think why it's still dark in the areas of the Ukraine where Russia has landed drone and missile strikes...

Meanwhile, that effort has affected Ukraine's battlefield campaigns...how, exactly?

Talk turkey, not b.s.: Is the front moving towards Kiev, or towards Moscow?

And in which direction has it been moving, inexorably, since late August?

Get back to us, and tell us who's really being delusional.

How it ends remains an open question (Retards, Pay Attention: Russia nominally has 10 times the military and resources of Ukraine, and yet, they continue to flail endlessly to no good result), but failure to acknowledge the currently obvious situation is the textbook definition of outright insanity.

You want to argue Russia will make a comeback? That's fine. 

First, explain why they need to, and on the way there, own up to their serial failures to date.

Then explain how they've learned from their colossal blunders thus far, and made needed reforms, and from what bodily orifice they're suddenly going to pull a military that's powerful, competent, motivated, and intelligently led, rather than a bunch of drunken buffoons led by prevaricating nitwits who keep falling out of windows, or shooting themselves in the head six or seven times, back at HQ.

That would be a fascinating read, if it's not all fairytales running on pure hopeium.

Russia's going to win? Already won?? Show your work.

Buuuuut, that necessarily requires an explanation of why they're still they're if they've already won, why they're moving towards Moscow and not Kiev if they're "winning", or barely breaking even, why they keep scraping the bottom of the barrel for more conscripts and convicts if they're slaughtering the Ukrainians in job lots, and owning up to everything that's gotten them where they are, which is back-pedalling towards the Rodina in haste, leaving their dead and wounded behind in droves, and how they're going to pull off this hitherto impossible military triumph in order to get where you think they're going to get.

I repeat: Show. Your. Work.

I get that Emperor Poopypants egged this on to cover his clan's criminal corruption there. I get that you think Zelensky's just as crooked. (But undeniably, whatever else he is, he isn't Putin's bitch, unlike every prior Ukrainian leader since 1990, and that's what rankled Putin the most.) I'll even give you a pass on your delusion that Putin's anything but a jumped up KGB thug and mass-murderer with delusions of grandeur. That's nice, but I don't give a fuck about any of that in this context, and it has no bearing on the topic under discussion. IDGAS about what you fondly wish would happen, I care about objective reality. If thinking is hard for you, this is where you're going to trip on your dick, and step all over it with sharp cleated spikes.

Bluff and bluster in service of your narrative is just so much bullshit and spin. Try facts. Verifiable sources. Actual data. If only for the novelty. Hyperbole and horseshit in equal measure is selling in Moscow at ₱2/metric fuckton. Actual evidence is pretty thin on the ground, largely because it's non-existent. Bring us a Bigfoot carcass, or a unicorn skull, and we can talk this out like grownups.

Can't do that? (And that would be the entire Rootin' For Putin contingent, web-wide, since March of last year to date, just to be accurate.) Letter grade of F. Obviously.

The narrative from the Rootin' For Putin side since August has been "Any day now, Russia is going to do...something!"

It's January. It's been 300+ days already. In seven weeks, this will be a full year of military debacle for Russia. 

For a war Putin was going to win in three days.

And for nearly half of which, Russia's military has been in full-scale retreat. And still no "something".

Russia's been the Black Knight to Ukraine's King Arthur in this conflict for ten months. Sorry, but there it is. Suck on it.

Please explain how you can be "winning", and yet take 10,000% longer than initial expectations. The rough equivalent would be WW II lasting until the year 2345. I'll wait while you work that out.

Just saying.

FTR, We'll leave this topic alone when people stop spewing bullshit with snowblowers.

Sunday Music: Name

 Beautiful song. Instant classic. Double platinum #5 hit. Still haunting 28 years later.