You Know You Can Hear Him Saying This...

We Hate It When Reality Does That

h/t WRSA

Sunday Music: Wrapped Around Your Finger

Second single released from the Police's Synchronicity album, making a Top Ten hit (peaked at #8 in the US), helped by this video lip-synched and played at double speed, then slowed down to normal speed, making all the musicians appear to be moving in slow-mo.

FYI

Research, photography, research, interviews, research, and travel, plus cajoling a major corporation into co-operation, and writing the thing, all while maintaining full-time gainful employment.

Plate: full.

Something has to give, so until we have more time, this page is dropping down on the list of Things To Do Today, for the near future. We shall get back to it infrequently as and when we have the time.

FTR, Kamala Harris is a moronic twatwaffle with delusions of competence, whereas Trump, despite being horrible by some measures, has already governed as the most conservative president this country has had since Calvin Coolidge.

Vote accordingly.

Either way, the republic, or what's left of it, is in for rough days ahead, worse than anything most living people have witnessed, and you'd best be seeing to your own affairs for when those days shift into overdrive.

Best wishes.

Sunday Music: Taxi

 

Harry Chapin's Top 40 single from 1972, debuted on The Johnny Carson Show, which garnered such an overwhelming response Carson had Chapin back for an unprecedented second night.

There's No There There

X Gets The Square: R.I.P. Peter Marshall

Long-time game show host Peter Marshall dead at age 98, of kidney failure, at home with his family in Los Angeles. Best known for spending fourteen years on TV giving quicker-witted stars a chance to come up with outrageous ad lib answers to trivia questions.

I lost track of how many sick days from school his show was the only highlight of a day where the rest of daytime TV was filled with nothing on but horrendous soap opera melodramas or asinine "reality" freak shows, which meant turning the tube off, and actually doing my homework.

Just Wondering...

 

O Please, O Please, O Please...

h/t WRSA

This country, and especially this government,
are long overdue for a good housecleaning.
Jump, you commie pigs, if you feel froggy.

The math on this kind of stupidity has been done to death, but for the Baby Duck Retards in the meme who shat this genius idea out their tailpipes, let's go over it one more time:

The late, great blogger WeaponsMan, shortly before his untimely passing, calculated conservatively and accurately that the actual number of privately-owned weapons in the United States was somewhere north of not 200M, but rather a number in the ballpark of 600,000,000, at the lower end of estimation. The upper end could be more than one billion private firearms.

With over one trillion rounds of ammunition. Which is more than the ten largest armies in the world have, combined.

But let's tie one hand behind our backs: we'll stipulate only 100M gun owners.

We'll make it even easier, and say only 10% of them have AR-15s.

Then we'll say only 10% of them strenuously object to confiscation.

That's only one million people, one helluva lot more familiar with that weapon system than 95% of the military and all law enforcement in the entire country, federal, state, county, and city.

FTR, there were only about 50,000 Taliban in Afghanistan, and half the Army, most of the Marines, and a large hunk of the Air Farce and Navy forces were ignominiously driven out of A-stan after failing to oust them despite ten years' earnest efforts, where the Taliban still runs the show.

So we're talking twenty Taliban-sized armies, except home-grown, on their home turf.

You wanna confiscate guns, starting with AR-15s?

Before those million gun owners have worked through their first magazine, they'll already have wiped out every soldier and LEO in the country (that's before we see how many of the military and police will turn their weapons on their would-be overlords first), leaving them nothing better to do than go after the politicians that instigated such shenanigans, followed by the Leftard @$$holes who voted them into power in the first place.

The stampede of violence that ensues will be for folks to collect notches and count coup, before Team Liberty runs completely out of targets to shoot at, from Canada to Mexico and coast to coast.

Washington D.C. will be an uninhabited park for the next century, and the mountain of skulls that results will make a pyramid of liberty that free people will marvel at for decades, if not centuries.

Please, PLEASE, go right ahead on with that plan.

Otherwise, somebody ought to clue in Senator Kneepads and Governor Chickenshit and tell them to be careful what they wish for, before they get themselves all Mussolinied and Ceauçescued.

If you thought the Secret Service was underqualified before, wait until they have half the country cheerfully taking accurate potshots at their bosses.

A Coward. And A Liar. Period.

 

"Dear Gov. Tim Walz:

There's no way to dress this up prettier, nor any further need to embellish on it.

As Sen. Kneepads' choice for VP on the Democrat ticket, you, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, are quite simply and fundamentally a coward. When it counted most. And an unceasing liar.

It is inarguable that you were a Master Sergeant in your unit of the Minnesota National Guard. Where you, by all accounts, served as a weekend warrior honorably, right up until it counted. But when, having been "frocked" (IOW selected for rank advancement, but not yet actually promoted) to Command Sergeant Major, the highest enlisted rank (other than the Command Sergeant Major of the Army, of which there is only one), you learned that your artillery unit was to be activated for duty and rotated into combat in Iraq in the immediate future.

At that point, not having attended the requisite training academy, and with two years' obligation remaining on your service enlistment commitment, you elected to turn tail, and leave the Notional Guard, rather than go with your artillery unit into a combat zone in Iraq, evading the responsibility of your office and job, abandoning your comrades in the profession of arms at the exact time they needed you the most, and breaking your solemn oath of obligation.

The word for that is cowardice. In this case, in the face of an armed enemy.

There is no greater or viler offense against good order and discipline in the military other than treason itself, and there is no lower form of manhood of any stripe than such naked and inexcusably pusillanimous gutlessness.

People don't hate you enough, and you should die in a fire, with dick cancer, after falling on a bed of spikes, while the fire department hoses you down with concentrated acid.

And then, already having demonstrated to all humanity exactly what sort of an arch-reptilian douchebag you are, you began lying about your exploits in running for political office.

You did not "retire". You were never a Command Sergeant Major. You did not fulfill your oath of office. And there is nothing honorable or circumspect in knowingly and deliberately lying about what you did, and what you failed to do, or the circumstances of it.

It's as if being naked in the town square was not enough proof of your total lack of character or leadership, and you decided thereupon to go a step further, and smear yourself in feces from head to toe. And then resolved to walk around like that for twenty more years.

There is no lower form of life on this planet than what you showed yourself to be, down to your rotted putrescent marrow.

And the people of Minnesota elected you to be their governor, despite there being, per current census data, only about 1,400,000 better-qualified men aged between 21 and 65 years of age in that state with demonstrably fewer defects as both men, and human beings.

You shouldn't simply drop out of the presidential race. You should resign as governor on the grounds of open, naked cowardice, dishonesty, and unabashed and continued fraud, and  should seriously consider whether your shortcomings as a man and human being oughtn't recommend to you the necessity of retiring to a quiet room, alone, putting a loaded pistol in your mouth, and opting out of the human race, if there was any shred of human worth possessed in your morally bankrupt meatsuit.

That you won't do even that little to redeem yourself with the least little shred of human dignity left to you should tell anyone in creation exactly what sort of an absolute waste of skin and oxygen you are.

And you should have your nose rubbed in that fundamental character deficit until the last moment of your execrable existence on this planet, and the scorn and derision of the entire nation should be the last sound you hear on earth before you die, and then go straight to Hell.

At your service, pond scum. RSVP: Regrets only, please.

Worst wishes,

-Aesop"

If a 250# bag of excrement had legs and a face,
it would look exactly like Gov. Tim Walz.

Sunday Music - Modern Love

 

First track on Bowie's "Let's Dance" album in 1983, released as a single in early fall, and peaking at #14 on the Billboard Hot 100 that year.

Boeing DIE: Where Quality Is Job None

Reminders From Our Sponsors, As Sporky* Time Draws Nigh,

 

*(Sh*t Pants, Or Rooftop Korean, Yo)

Legacy Media Hard At Work

You think you hate the media enough.
But you don't.

Be A Man Among Men

We Toldja So: Leaving Him With Nukes Was Going To Be A Problem

He Really Stuck That Landing

Sunday Music: Pretty In Pink

 

Just a song from a 1981 Psychedelic Furs album which didn't even chart in the States, but somehow spawned the title (and became the title track) of a 1986 John Hughes '80s cult classic, and suddenly it became an Almost Top 40 hit, and gave the band a career-boosting second wind.

Change My Mind

In the dictionary under "Fail Upwards"...

Putting the "Anal" In Analysis

You are a NO GO at the Tall Enough
 For The Internet station, bumpkin.

If you're going to take a whack at derpsplaining things on the Internet that are clearly beyond your basic grasp, maybe - just spitballing, mind you - some folks should pull back on their heads first until they hear a loud popping noise, and it suddenly gets brighter and easier to breathe.

Case in point:

This soopergenius codswallop from some halfwit who knows Jack and Shit about what he opines upon.

"Crooks’ canted his rifle to the left — which means the ejection port was facing to the left at about an 11 o’clock position — for the first three shots."

For the three non-gun-inclined folks reading that, and thus not falling about themselves on the ground in paroxysms of laughter, we post a reminder pic of a typical AR-15-style weapon: 

From this one pic, we can state authoritatively that this Internet Soopergenius has clearly cracked the case on how Rooftop Retard could miss anything as large as Trump from within Wrist-Rocket range:

That's because to "cant the rifle to the left" and get the ejection port to face 11 o'clock, Crooks would have to hold the rifle almost upside down.

Nice analysis, Dipshit.

(Unless he was holding the rifle assbackwards, and pointing it at himself. But were that the case, we don't think he'd have managed to fire 8 shots into himself, as the first one would have done the job it took the authorities several seconds to accomplish. So yeah, no, you're still an ignorant idiot for making this entire suggestion.)

Let's help Dr. Derpalot out, since he's obviously never fired anything resembling an AR-15/M-16 rifle in his life, and we'll use bright colors to point out reality:

So to eject cases to the left, by canting the rifle, Crooks would be holding that pistol grip at or beyond the 2 o'clock position, 2/3rds of the way (120° out of 180°) to completely inverted.

Odds that's what really happened: a gajillion to one, against. Duh. As GED dropouts in any ten basic training platoons could have told you in 0.2 seconds, going back only 50+ years to about 1966.

Maybe Dr. Derpalot should bone up on physics and common effing sense, not to mention basic riflery. Just a thought. In his dictionary, the word "beclowned" just has a mirror mounted in the column.

Just saying...

Don't quit your day job, Homer.

And maybe don't talk about things you're totally unfamiliar with, because then you won't be putting an ice pack on your wedding tackle every day, after you trample it with cleats on.

And if you're linking or excerpting this kind of ass-tastic analysis on your blog for anything but comedy relief, you probably need an ice pack for your own junk too, on a regular basis.

But thanks for a lay-up post for today. Those fish in the barrel weren't going to shoot themselves.

Blogging: Much easier if these are not your default footwear.

Natzsofast, Guido

 h/t WRSA

In the linked post, CA takes note of a Substack blogpost discussing the book in the header.

We read that very book a couple of months ago, and reached entirely different conclusions.

First, Jacobsen can write at grade level.

That's the good part of the book.

Now, the bad, and then the ugly.

Most of the people she's talking to about nuclear scenarios haven't been within a country mile of the operating parts of strategic response for anywhere from 20-40 years.

Pardon me all to hell for noting that in strategic planning, that's about three entire lifetimes. If Jacobsen had set out to write a book about the topic in, say, 1985, this book would have been brilliant. It also would have broken about 50 NDAs, and at least three national security felonies. Which would have put most of her confidantes, and herself, in Supermax to this day.

That's the bad.

The ugly?

She concocts her entire "This is plausible, I swear!" scenario around one very specific set of circumstances. One, out of a universe of 10,000 such scenarios.

This is like looking at one of Edison's thousand failures at inventing a working incandescent light bulb, and then focusing all your effort at straw-manning just that one, then damning electric light on that sole basis.

In the book, for GAK (God Alone Knows) Reasons, the Norks pop off a nuke at the U.S., then follow it up with more canned sunshine.

Then, she, from her decades of no experience in nuclear warfighting and planning, decides that the U.S. response would necessarily be to launch nukes over the North Pole, necessitating overflying Russia and China, yet cleverly without informing either of them of this idiot savant strategy.

Leaving those poor boobs in both countries, with inferior predictive abilities, to conclude that the US was attacking them, instead of the Norks.

Leading directly and happily to Jacobsen's nightmare 'Use them or lose them" orgy of everyone launching everything at everyone else. All life in the Northern Hemisphere ends.

QED.

Point Of Order, Shit-For-Brains: Maybe nuclear war planners at the Pentagon, having wargamed that scenario out, from both sides of the chess board, about 10,000 times before it occurred to you, might have, y'know, figured out for their own goddamned selves, a reason or ten why obliterating Norkistan by launching missiles on a polar route over Russian and Chinese territory might be a bad idea, for a few hundred thousand megatons of reasons, and so they wouldn't do that, even without the ankle-biting genius of some half-bright writer coming up with a flaw in that plan all by her lonesome.

Maybe they'd elect to respond with missile subs closer to Norkistan, and leave the Minutemen in their silos.

Or just conventionally bomb the shit out of Norkistan, all the way to the Yalu River. We've seen us do that before.

We're just spitballing here. Meaning it's theoretically possible that someone whose sole military experience is watching movies and talking to people who retired from the military when Daddy Bush was president, might not be privy to the highest levels of military thinking 10, 20, 30 or more years later, and may be talking out her other end about all the things she doesn't know she doesn't know.

SecDef Rummy called those unknown unknowns. Jacobsen's not even familiar with the concept.

Granted, the recent leadership at the Five-Sided Puzzle Palace leaves a lot to be desired, and the lack of military intelligence is a chasm with no discernible bottom, but the steely-eyed missile men who planned and ran SAC when we had such a thing seemed to have a pretty good handle on the whole smart vs. galactically stupid thingie. And they didn't throw out all common sense in the SIOP just because the Soviet Union folded.

In others words, Jacobsen is no Tom Clancy. She's not even a Fred Clancy. Clancy The Clown, maybe.

In fact, most of her nightmares were better covered, and more succinctly, with none of Jacobsen's lurid verbosity, way back in 1972, (fifty years before this topic even occurred to Jacobsen, if you're keeping score) in a spiffy little tome called When War Comes, by Martin Caidin, whose sci-fi book Cyborg was the basis for the whole Six Million Dollar Man television programs, along with books-turned-into-films like Marooned and The Final Countdown.

If you want the actual nuclear, chemical, and biological nightmare list, and just the facts, without any gratuitous advocacy, you should get a copy (nearly free for the asking from the Internet Archive link above), or hunt down a dead tree edition (you can't have our copy, well-thumbed since the 1970s), and bone up on the topic. Little of it is any less applicable as far as it goes than it was the day it went to print.

But that's because Caidin was a stickler, in his fiction and non-fiction, for actual facts.

Jacobsen starts by describing the indescribable horror of a nuclear holocaust, and then works backwards to make one inevitable, simply by assuming she's the smartest person in the room, having the entire US Strategic Command fight this imaginary scenario in the most asinine way she can concoct, and finding the one way such a thing could be stupidly inflicted on humanity, then riding that pale horse to death, whipping it there with unmatched frenzy, and bankrupting a couple of ink companies in the telling.

Which is why, after reading it, we didn't review it or recommend it to anyone. We're simply not cruel enough to do that.

It doesn't age well (as in, by the time you get to the end of the book, you're wishing you'd spent your time on something profitable).

It is, in point of fact, nothing but someone trying to flog the whole premise behind the excremental TV melodrama The Day After, which focused solely on the horrible effects of a nuclear war, and sought to put wind in the sails of the whole Soviet-sponsored nuclear disarmament movement during Reagan's presidency, but which all looked jackassically stupid and short-sighted by 1990, after the Soviet Union imploded, taking the entire premise with it, not least of which all those Soviet rubles for Useful Idiots' astroturfed peace movements.

If Jacobsen had wanted to do society a service, she could have documented that the major reason nuclear war is even being discussed recently is to only an infinitesimal degree the proliferation of nukes to morons like the Kim Family Crime Syndicate in Norkistan, and overwhelmingly a thing again mainly because the darling superhero despot of the half-bright, Vladimir Putin, has rattled Russia's moldering and rusty nuclear saber about 40 times since his disastrous invasion of Ukraine, to try and bluff and bluster his way to a military conquest he cannot win on the ground.

Write a book on the megalomania it takes to think threatening the release of canned sunshine is a reasonable and rational way to achieve ground conquest, and talk about the threat to world peace that is (recognized as such by such shrieking warmongering political partisans as 250-years-neutral-until-Putin Sweden, and every single country that was under Soviet Russia's thumb from 1945-1991). FFS, not even Stalin nor even actual Hitler got Sweden to abandon its centuries-old neutrality, but Putin accomplished that in less than a year of trying.

Print it in Russian, and send copies to Moscow. What the hell, what's 50 years in a Siberian gulag between friends, right Ms. Jacobsen?

Maybe try the same thing for the lunatics in Pakistan and Iran. If you can find anyone there who can read.

Otherwise, absent that effort, Jacobsen is just beating the nuclear disarmament drum again, 50 years after it failed in America and Europe the first time, and beloved mainly of the continued Useful Idiots of the Stalinism that died in Moscow circa Yeltsin, but thrives in American academia and media among the halfwit class.

Save yourself the twenty bucks and multiple hours it would take you to read Jacobsen's drivel. Get a copy of When War Comes, and John Hersey's Hiroshima, and watch some historical newsreels on YouTube instead, and you'll be $20 richer and forty IQ points smarter than you'd get by wasting the time or money on Nuclear War.

If you own a goat, wait for the book to show up in the $2 rack at a bargain bookstore. Then get it, and feed it to the goat. It's cheaper than goat chow at that point, and whatever Billy or Nanny shits out afterwards will be much smarter than what Jacobsen did.

We can't stop you from wasting your time and money, but afterwards, kindly remember that we tried.

TL;DR: When a half-bright second lieutenant, or even a midwit cadet at Colorado Springs could come up with a decent "Why this scenario would be galactically stupid" position paper on their lunch hour recess, you have not found wisdom, nor anything close to it.

Our rating: Were still trying to figure out how to give this sort of codswallop negative stars. We kind of like the idea of giving it five Black Holes:

 ○ ○ ○ ○ ○ . 

Stupidity so concentrated no illumination or information escapes. 

Or maybe just Five Piles: 

💩💩💩💩

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Forget What I Said Two Weeks Ago...

Would you buy a used campaign from this slore?