Oopsie?

 

Prigozhin has appeared in a new video from Africa, where he notes that
reports of his death have been greatly exaggerated.
$64 Question: Is it live, or is it Memorex?

The video obviously could have been shot shortly before his death, and thus has been overtaken by events. Bummer for Priggie, who would thus be an ex-parrot.

But if another video pops up, some FSB assclowns are going to discover the meaning of "defenestrtration", experientially. Bummer for Vlad.

My money's on success, based on historical precedent and Putin's experience in capping his enemies. Time will tell, but it's not on Vlad's side in this. Grab some popcorn.

If he successfully nipped his Wagner problem in the bud, Vlad had better habeas a pretty damned convincing Prigozhin corpus, and do it tout de suit, or speculation on his continued incompetence is going to be the kind that moves his Makarov retirement party a couple of uncomfortable notches closer to kicking off.

A Century Of US History In One Panel

 h/t daily timewaster

Equal opportunity? Fear not.
The Republicans put the air in your bike tires.

Seek Tranquility

h/t Odd Job

Bubba Chump

h/t Irish

Nonsense, Based On A False Premise

 

Jonas Nightengale had a better grasp of Christianity in Leap Of Faith 
than most members of Congress have since ever.

Vox thinks Conservatism failed Christianity, because it "failed to conserve anything".

This is feather-headed nonsense on so many levels, including both religious and political, it's hard to know where to start.

But let's agree, arguendo, to grant the recockulous premise.

Barry Goldwater wrote Conscience Of A Conservative in 1960.

FTR, his actual walk-the-walk commitment to Christianity was virtually invisible, then or ever.

So:

A) List please, for the class, all the actual conservatives in the U.S. House of Representatives, and the U.S. Senate, from 1960 to now, inclusive. (Hint: If you're very good, you may be able to come up with as many as 5 such, in that entire 63+-year period of time.)

B) Show which year, or years, those conservatives ever held a majority in either body, let alone both at the same time.

C) Tell which of those majorities were elected by conservative Christians, who have ever been a minority within their own faith.

D) While you're up, tell us which Christians put Kennedys in office every year from the 1950s onwards.  And which Christians elected any 57 black politicians from Shirley Chisholm and Mad Maxine Waters onwards. Which way did those politicians vote, while you're at the chalkboard? Which Christians gave you Mittens for a Senator? None of those Christians voted for any conservatives, and most never intended to do so. Let me know when the penny drops.

Once you suss out the fact that conservative Christians never elected anyone to run the country, nor ever could, tell us again who failed whom.

Any fool, religious or not, who ever expected a bunch of failed game show hosts and used-car salesmen to accomplish anything worthwhile on the public dime, in benefit of either the culture, or any particular religious faith, is the sort of fool who'd sell the family cow for magic beans.

And if we ever, so much as once, get a conservative majority in either federal house, let alone both of them simultaneously, give a holler.

That would be noteworthy for being the first time it's ever happened in the history of the republic, 1789-ever.

Vox, like millions, is guilty of a basic error: Confusing anyone with an [R] after their name on a ballot with any sort of conservative, let alone any sort of Christian.

One can't fail to accomplish something they never had the power nor authority to undertake in the first place.

The fundamental mistake is not understanding that reality.

Sunday Music: Bad To The Bone

 

Cultural icon anthem that never charted, from 1982.

Also the marching song of the 45th president. If he somehow becomes the 47th as well, this song should replace "Hail To The Chief".

This Is The Way

The Posse Should Be Well-Mounted; And Leave The Married Men At Home...

 h/t WRSA

Ever notice...?

Plus Ça Change...

h/t  OddJob

This flat out cracked me up.
And I'm ashamed I didn't think of it first. Kudos, NTM.

This Always Bears Repeating

Best Laid Plans

And They're Gonna be Hurting For Weeks...

Who won the GOP debate last night? TRUMP.

UPDATE:

Faux News GOP debate: 12.8M views.

Tucker Carlson Trump interview: 248M views.

If you're keeping score at home, that's GAME OVER for the entire 2024 primary season.

America just wants the guy they elected the last time to get into office this time. Period.

We've seen how Fox treated Tucker, and it's about like the GOPe treated Trump.

Fox should stop the charade, and just move any future Faux News debates over to CNN or MSNBC, and have them moderated by George Snuffleupagus, or Don Lemon. If not Jill Biden.

It won't affect Fox's ratings, which went in the sh*tter the minute they fired Carlson.

It's 2025. Meet The New Boss...

Don't Get Fooled Again.

 

Putincide Strikes Again

 

Prigozhin bizjet crashes of Suddenly™, all aboard eat shit and die.

Just a week after another Russian senior general running things for the Ministry of Defense, lately jailed, also succumbed to a mysteriously coincidental case of Suddenly™.

Maybe Putin's making them all get COVID boosters. Or something.

Where they'll die of Suddenly™.

Whatever it is, if Putin's army could kill Ukrainian troops as well as Putin gets rid of Russian generals, they'd be parked around the Ukrainian parliament building in Kiev on T-90 tanks, and enjoying a late summer tan in Odessa, instead of getting pushed back in Luhansk and Donetsk, at a snail's pace, but always rearward.

And the Usual Suspects will still convince themselves that the Wagner mutiny "wasn't really a coup attempt."

Every Silver Lining Has A Cloud

 h/t Eaton Rapids Joe

Sh'yeah, Right. That'll Work...

How do you know it's a party organ?
It only plays one note.

Hilary After-Action

USS ELEANOR ROOSEVELT puts to sea to avoid getting wet and
melting, ahead of a rapidly weakening tropical hiccup
so mild that no damage was recorded anywhere in San Diego Bay.

And that about covers that.

I can guaran-fucking-tee that 2000 Marine recruits at MCRD watching the TR flee this cloudburst were even less impressed yesterday, probably doing PT and close order drill out in the rain.

As noted in Comments:

I get the underlying rationale.

But it's only sound if you accept that they couldn't tell the difference between Chicken Little's inflated doomporn, and actual actionable weather intelligence.

It's like launching nuclear missiles because someone's radar detected a squadron of pelicans incoming.

They still look like idiots, obviously they don't have any better intel than Joe Schmuck, and they fell for the vastly inflated hype, rather than actual accurate weather reports.

If they did this as a readiness exercise, they're just stupid. If they did it because they couldn't tell the difference, they're stupid morons.

They look like not just pussies, but incompetent and gullible pussies.

There's no way to salvage this for them, and they wasted metric fucktons of fuel and money for no good reason, while sharing with near-peer adversaries their total inability to tell a real threat from a fake one.

You can bet Russia and China were taking notes.

FIFY

 original from WRSA

Bluff Called: I'll pay anyone $1 for every one of them born here,
if they'll give me 10¢ for every one of them who wasn't,
and I'll buy a Ferrari for cash from my winnings on that wager.
Take your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk back home. 

Tropical Mousefart

 

2AM - Clear as a bell, dry, some very high altitude thin stuff moving up from the SE.

4AM - The softest drizzle seen in these parts in some time, not even loud enough to hear from inside the house. Light breeze, maybe 5-10MPH.

6AM - Cloudy, no rain, no wind.

Now - Barely daylight, raining almost hard enough to call rain, wind 6MPH from the NE

Updated forecast for the day: Maybe 1-2 inches of rain, wind gusts up to 30MPH, mainly 10-20. Thunderstorms possible. Your asthmatic granny could blow harder than that putting out birthday candles. Santa Ana winds gust up to 60MPH, FFS, and people are out walking in them since ever.

I'll probably sleep through this today.

Gone by Monday noon.

Yawn.

This isn't likely to hit hard enough to wash the truck.

Hurricane Hilary was already downgraded from Cat 4 to Cat 2 just from dragging along the Baja Peninsula.

Looks like another overhyped weather-pocalypse that fizzled, up here.

Mexico may be another story. We'll see.

UPDATE: 1320 Local - If the media hadn't hyped this like it was going to drown the state, and there were no weather satellites whatsoever, this would have been regarded as a slight summer shower day. Like we've had half a dozen times here since Memorial Day, with several of them being orders of magnitude windier and rainier than this has been.

Oh Noes!!!

 

Cartel drones drop 33 bombs on Mexican peasantry in a gang turf dispute

Another load of rock salt in the ass for The World's Foremost Expert on using drones (COTS: Commercial Off The Shelf models, not ginormous professional models) as weapons, with the five-millionth report of somebody using them to drop explosives on soft targets, like some of us told you years ago was not only going to happen, it already had.

We also speculated that it wouldn't take much beyond the sheer will to do it that would let someone make a soda-can thermite grenade, and pay a visit to any oil or LNG storage facility anywhere in the world, and wreak havoc for a paltry couple of grand in U$D. So don't come crying to us when that happens.

Color us shocked: Bad people will find bad uses for neutral items.

We only have metric fucktons of videos proving the theorem in the years since we first warned you about this potential, against the extensive expertise of the Canuckistani Drone Maestro in crashing his RC toys while half-potted. So you can continue to believe him. Or, trust your lying eyes.

We offer Herr Dronenkapitan some balm for his ailment, as we struggle not to laugh aloud at his predicament.

Sunday Music: Steal Away

 Robbie Dupree's #6 hit from his 1980 debut album. No overproduction. No pitch-bending. Music from when you had to be good to cut a record. Ars gratia artis. Enjoy.

For Comparison

 h/t WRSA

This is Hurricane Shrillary, not Hilary.
The death toll is 186, so far, that we know about...
And as a reminder, Epstein didn't kill himself.

A Bitch Named Hilary

Windy. All wet. Over-hyped. Unwanted. Bringing nothing but misery. Stop me if you've heard this one.

Except this isn't the criminal maven of Little Rock, it's the once-per-century Cat 4 (currently) hurricane rolling up the Baja California coast and set to cross right over the most populous stretch of the CA coast from San Diego to L.A. from Sunday night to Monday morning. Bummer for Sea World and Disneyland, but that's the breaks.

Baja, especially Ensenada, looks to be going to get royally hosed. You won't hear as much about that, because they're Mexicans, but those people living in shithole shacks and on trash heaps up countless canyons down there are about to get washed away, and make 150 or so dead Hawaiian citizens look like a sorority pillow fight by comparison. I'll be amazed if it doesn't wipe out hundreds of them.

But the media, breathlessly gearing up for a real live Califrutopia catastrophe - with 48 hrs notice, unlike an earthquake - will focus on the SoCal part, where by the time it reaches us, it won't be the Cat 4 hurricane, it'll be a rapidly weakening tropical storm with 50-60MPH winds...IOW, a wet Santa Ana wind, from the other direction; and 2-6 inches of rain, which will overwhelm the flood control channels and storm drains due to rapidity, not volume, and flood some intersections and lows spots on the freeways.

The deserts to the east of L.A. are in for a rough flash flood time, more than likely.

Power may even go down in spots for a day or so.

Otherwise, a rare instance of August rain hereabouts.

I was picking up mail this morning, and the supermarket next door saw every person coming out with bundles of bottled water and batteries. BTDTGTTS. I'd make fun of them for waiting until now, but at least they're getting them ahead of time. The real idiots are the folks with nothing, who won't even make that little effort to take care of themselves beforehand.

I'll be on duty Sunday night in the ER as it crosses the border, so it'll be raining from before I head in, until the end of my shift, if the NWS has things right.

I predict a lot of nothing at work: people will stay home in droves, mostly. Probably call out sick Monday too.

But there's definitely a silver lining I can see on the horizon: any number of homeless wastrels camping in river beds washed out to sea and fed to sharks and crabs, which will cleanse the local river systems for some weeks. Expect to see dramatic news footage of some meth-head dipshit being winched to safety when his dirt island in the middle of the Santa Ana or San Gabriel or L.A. River floods away, in a stirring and melodramatic waste of taxpayer time and money. But it keeps the fire guys in practice.

We'll probably also lose some Mcmansions on hillsides where houses should never have been built in the first place, and Eyewitless News will try to tug heartstrings when millionaires who should have known better get to pay for their view, and live like common folks for a couple of weeks at the Hilton, like they do in the winter every rainy season. Boo frickin' hoo. News flash: gravity works, and adobe hills become adobe washes at the bottom, just like every year since 0.

Assuming power, I'll post an after-action Monday. Otherwise, I'm more worried about - and at greater risk from - the jackholes on the freeway to and from work than I am about the coming deluge/windstorm. Unless NWS gets it gloriously wrong, we get an actual hurricane coming ashore in SoCal, storm surge and all, and this turns into an Irwin Allen/Michael Bay wet dream. Literally.

If I wasn't working that night, I'd put on a burlap robe and Father Time beard - and a life jacket - and carry a sign that said "The End Is Coming" through downtown L.A., just to scare the bejeezus out of the weak-minded.

Dollars to donuts some local station will decide to program a showing of Evan Almighty or Noah (if not both) Sunday night. Comedy gold, right there.

Nothin' Left To Lose...

Two posts by Divemedic:

Freedom

Three Decades

RTWT. Both times.

"Busted flat in D.C. ..."

It's Exactly Like That

 h/t Chief Nose Wetter

FIFY

 h/t WRSA

Oopsie

 

(Forbes) Why I'm not getting so much of the spam screeds in comments telling me of the strength of the ruble.

The Dog That Hasn't Been Barking - MOAR RUSSIAN WINNING!: 

"Russia’s ruble slipped past 100 per U.S. dollar on Monday morning, a nearly 17-month low that has sparked internal discord over monetary policy as economic pressures from its ongoing war in Ukraine mount and international sanctions erode Moscow’s income streams."

Crayon drawing for the slow learners:

Dear hardcore retards:

Currencies go up and down. I haven't cock-a-doodle-dooed about this before now, even as the ruble slipped back to reality (starting last winter), for the same reason you shouldn't have been doing it when the ruble temporarily went up last year (for about seven months).

The dollar is shit, because we've inflated it beyond reality. That's bound to come in for a landing one day, sooner or later. And yet it's still better off than the ruble (currently by 10% overall), compared to five minutes before Pootie-poot got all grabby about other people's countries. Suck on that. There's also more USD being held as the world's reserve currency than there was several months ago. So news of the dollar's utter demise is a wee bit early, even if it's fundamentally less sound than Emperor Poopypants' memory.

The ruble is shit, because all Russia has to back it with isn't gold (they're not handing that over for rubles, jackholes, never were, and never will), it's commodities. Which revenue stream has been halved since Putard's asinine invasion, and which they're only selling (at fire sale prices) to India and China, both of whom are ecstatically happy to profit from Russia's stupidity, and get cheap energy while they can.

Whether there are long-term consequences and punishment from the rest of the world towards India and China when the dust settles remains to be seen, but neither has anything long-term to look forward to.

But FFS, stop pointing to the ruble as some bastion of stability. It's the Mexican peso in Cyrillic writing, with the inherent worth of Zimbabwean dollars. Even more so as long as they're an international pariah. Their economy is currently a fraction of what it was 20 months ago, and it isn't going to get better until they end this war, withdraw from Ukrainian territory in haste and for good, and probably pay hefty reparations on top of that. That's what they've bought themselves. Get over it, snowflakes.

Kremlin PANIC: FORTUNE: in-panic-mode-after-ruble-plunges-below-a-penny-russia-rescues-vladimir-putin-from-humiliating-currency-collapse-with-emergency-hike

Sunday Music: Low Rider

 

I passed two of these guys on the way home this morning; both classic black Caddies, one a '56, one a '69, both sailing along the freeway about 2" above the asphalt.

If this 1975 classic can't help you get your mojo going, you're past help.

More cowbell, before cowbell was cool.

Candor and Clarity

Secret Service Codename: Depends

Operation Juggernaut

How It Really Is

FAFO: Slow Learner Edition

From Curtis LeMay and the USAAF's Greatest Hits album, featuring Hirohito and the Briquettes.

Totalitarian Two Step: A One And A Two...

Floridians can keep this worthless motherfucker.
The nation will miss him like a dose of clap.
I'd piss on him if he was on fire, but only if I got to first 
light him on fire. Contact the blog if such can be arranged.

 

From an essay on American Thinker today:

"They lied to FISA courts for surveillance warrants, gaslit the media and American people, and are rewarded with book deals, university faculty appointments, television commentary gigs, none receiving even a slap on the wrist. They all conspired to rig or overturn an election with no special counsels and no indictments. Such propaganda and elimination of political opposition fits the definition of totalitarianism.

...

Where is the GOP on this? Is there any GOP outrage or pushback? So much for checks and balances and co-equal branches of government. Where are the GOP primary candidates on this outrage that awaits them should they ever make it to the White House, and unlike the Bushes, actually push back against the deep state?"

RTWT.

¡Viva!

FAFO: Grandmaster Level

 

Sunday Music: Magic

I have this on the car MP3 rotation, but can't figure out how I missed moving it onto the Sunday Music list. Oversight: corrected. I already liked Olivia Newton-John long before this song came out. But when she guest-hosted the Midnight Special on July 26, 1980, I watched the whole show. And watching this performance of a great song by her, I only spent the next 43 years (so far) completely captivated by this woman.

Live TV?

Two versions, same show for different time zones, with band/no band, and a costume change:

I definitely remember watching the white version on the West Coast. When this aired, the song was #2 on Billboard's Hot 100. The next day it moved to #1, and stayed there for the next month.

The beauty of video and YouTube is that ONJ gets to be this hot and effortlessly talented forever, despite what her tombstone says. >sigh<

They Can Only Hang You Once

But nota bene, they can hang you. Sometimes the lemon is worth the squeeze.
(My version. Oleg Volk, IIRC, did the original years ago.)

Food For Thought

Takeaways:

1) Ukraine will never stop fighting short of annihilation. (We told you this from the get-go last year.)

2) Russia cannot afford to stop fighting. Even if Putin goes away somehow (actuarial tables, coup, whatever.) Their elites are trying to re-establish the Soviet Union borders, as a means of internal security from perceived external threats. And that typical Russian paranoia is bringing about the exact external threats that didn't exist in January of 2022. NATO is now bigger than ever, meaner, and more anti-Russian than any time since the Berlin Wall went up in 1961.

3) Half of current "Russia" isn't made up of Russians. Moscow feels this in their bones.

4) If Moscow revolts, the whole enterprise collapses.

5) Russia has a history of riding forms of government right into the smoking hole of history. {cf. both Czarist Russia, and Communist Russia.} There's no reason to think they won't ride the current system right into total collapse either. It's what they do.

6) Besides destroying 1/3 to 1/2 of their ground combat power since 2/22, Russia has driven fully a third of its draft-aged males out of the country. They've got a lot fewer folks to draft, and the people running things at every age group and demographic aren't being replaced. That's everything from farms to manufacturing to research labs to nuclear power plants - and nuclear weapons. Most of their best minds who could get out are long gone, and the actuarial brain drain accelerates with every passing year.

7) Pushing generals out of windows isn't making the Russian Army leaner and meaner. It's just cutting off its head, as Stalin's purges did to it in the 1930s. Which is why Hitler's armies were able to push them to the brink of destruction for four years before total mobilization and Western aid finally turned the tide. 

8) There's no aid coming this time, from anywhere, least of all China, and they're currently begging countries like the Norks and Iran for any scraps they can spare. China and India are simply buying Russian oil and gas at fire-sale prices, but it's less than half of what Europe was buying, in hard dollars, which isn't helping Russia's economy much. It's mainly just slowing the collapse.

For the perennial fucktards out there with a room-temp (at the North Pole) IQ, that isn't saying anywhere that Ukraine is "winning". Yet again, look at photos and reports from France circa 1919, and tell the class what "winning" looks like when your front yard is the front line. 

Ukraine winning looks like national survival. And week on week, them eventually regaining Crimea looks likelier and likelier, and eventually pushing Russia completely out of Donetsk and Luhansk isn't beyond belief either. 

Leaving Russia, just as after their Afghanistan debacle, with nothing to show for their effort but international embarrassment, crushing economic decay, and a large heap of dead Russian troops for their trouble.

What it does foretell is that as long as the West is resupplying Ukraine, Russian short-term prospects get bleaker by the month, and their long-term prospects died early last year. Their long-term future is as a shell of their former self, split up internally, their population gutted by war losses, refugee/draft-dodger flight, and the march of time.

Most of the -stans are already getting restless. And Putin has no one left to send if they all tell him to f**k right off.

MOAR!