Everyone's Overlooking The 800 Pound Obvious Gorilla

Sunday Music: I Hate Myself For Loving You

 

Arch-badass rocker Jett was in her prime and at the peak of her career when she released the single and video for this Top Ten song in 1988.

PSA

Shouldn't That Be Considered Cannibalism?

Not our wiring, but illustrative of the problem. Mice (the four-legged rodent variety)
 start more house fires this way every year than arsonists do.

We finally replaced our long-serving wired mouse with one of the wireless models, albeit reluctantly. Partly because we appreciated that with a wired model, no one else could intercept (or simply interfere, even inadvertently) with our input, but mainly because we didn't have to feed it a new battery every year or two, and we're cheap like that.

Imagine our surprise at the short life of the previous finalized technology, when we discovered it had become wonky because back before we eradicated the little bastards, actual mice had chewed partially through the hard wire cable. (Reason #27 on why we hate the little vermin m*****f****rs with a passion rivalled only by cats.) Now you know why Groundskeeper Carl Spackler referred to their cousins accurately as the Varmint Cong.

But it strikes us that mice killing our mouse by eating it has to qualify as behavior reminiscent of the Donner Party.

It also warms our heart to have wiped them out to the last with glue traps and peanut butter bait, and then smashed their little heads with a wooden dowel while they squealed in helpless immobility. If we'd ever thought about it at the time, we'd have strangled one instead, and made a taxidermist mount for the wall.

Now that the cause of the problem has been eradicated locally, we'll probably go back and get a new wired mouse. Maybe we can relegate the superfluous wireless mouse to occasional use on the TV monitor.

Colombia Learns A Harsh Lesson The Hard Way

Of Course An Old Dog Will Do New Tricks

h/t WRSA

Sunday Music: I Need A Lover

 

The '80s really started with this song, which was debuted by author John Mellencamp when he was still "Johnny Cougar" in 1978 with a 2½ minute intro, but it didn't really go anywhere until it was covered in hard rock style by Pat Benatar on her late 1979 debut album In The Heat Of The Night, with Benatar's future husband Neil Giraldo killing a guitar solo bridge on this version. It was the first single released on an album which hit #7 for the 1980 year, when the combination of Benatar's five-octave vocal range, and performing in leotards like the one on the album cover (above), helped pack auditoriums on her debut album tour.

Trump 47's Entire Policy In One Panel

24K Gold

Despite my sincere comments about what TPTB ought to have done to wipe out entire neighborhoods of stupid people building stupid houses in stupid places once and for all, there's one glittering spot of pure gold that shines out under these circumstances, one that compels musicians who have sold out stadiums to admit who the true rockstars are in this region.

A hat tip to the person who created these short clips, and the videographers who captured the footage. What you see below in these clips is vivid explanation for why firefighters in this area are justifiably treated as if they walk on water.

Paging Inspector Clousseau

Trump 47 Day Five: Some Global Warming We'd Support

PSA

h/t CW

Elections Have Consequences

Free At Last, Free At Last

 

Any careful reader of this blog might have noticed you would never, not even once, find the word "President" in a certain sentence. And that certain sentence was any one which also contained the name "Biden", where one word would precede the other.

"They'll have to burn this suit. They'll never get the shit stains out of it."

And if you notice even now, you still haven't. That was not a four-year coincidence.

We still lament that President Trump had to win three elections to get sworn in twice, but we console ourselves that in his case, late is better than never.

And one of the EOs yesterday eliminated the nearly century-old misinterpretation that allowed anchor babies to become a thing?!? We almost had a stroke from sheer, unrestrained elation at common sense breaking out, and someone finally noticing the words "and subject to the jurisdiction thereof" sitting there in plain sight in the 14th Amendment for 150 years, almost as if the authors of that bit of Constitutional law hadn't ever intended, not even accidentally, for the offspring of foreign nationals - who are by definition, not subject to U.S. jurisdiction, ever - to earn birthright citizenship for their issue just by the accident of geography when their non-U.S. citizen parents plopped out wombspawn on U.S. territory. That will be quite a blow to the taxi business in Tijuana and Nuevo Laredo.

It's almost like adult supervision and bog-common sense has finally been restored to the Oval Office, seconds after the oath of office was administered.

It's about damned time.

Sunday Music: Celebration

If there's a better musical pick to mark the end of a four-year national nightmare called Weekend At Bernies: Oval Office Edition than 1980's Kool and The Gang Number 1 hit, we cannot imagine what it would be. This has been the longest 1461-day slow motion disaster we can remember in our lifetime. But it ends at noon EST tomorrow. Huzzah.

The Difference Between "Homeless" and "Schizophrenic Junkies"

CNN Gets Defamation Lawsuit Enema; Navy Vet Wins Lotto Payday

CNN owes plaintiff $5M in actual damages.

They're still debating punitive damages against CNN, which may get him a major share of the network.

Time/Warner currently in full pants-shitting mode.

Lawfare is quite a bitch when it's headed the other way, isn't it, you lying media bastards?

Cinematic Immunity: Not Really A Thing

Bob Uecker, R.I.P.

Bob Uecker, MLB player, actor, and for only 50+ years, the Milwaukee Brewers' announcer, of lung cancer, aged 90 years.

Uecker had seven lackluster years in the majors, traded about every other year to a new club on the strength of a lifetime .200 batting average, and the misplaced suspicion he had greater  potential. He managed a scant 14 home runs in his ML career, averaging a bare two a year, including one apiece against future Hall Of Famers Sandy Koufax, Gaylord Perry, and Ferguson Jenkins, and being present to win a World Series ring with the 1964 Cardinals. As a catcher, he led the league in passed balls his final season as a player despite catching only 59 games, but in his defense, many of those were trying to stop Phil Niekro knuckleballs, and his technique for getting those was "Wait until it stops rolling, then pick it up". Once let go for good, he moved to the announcing booth for the Atlanta Braves for a couple of seasons, before moving to the Brewers for the beginning of his epic broadcasting stint starting in 1971.

Along the way, trumpeter Al Hirt convinced Johnny Carson to get him on the Tonight Show shortly after the end of his playing days. His anecdotes and self-deprecation killed ("Companies would pay me not to endorse their products." "I came up in the bottom of the ninth with the score tied, two outs, and the bases loaded, and when I looked in the dugout, my team was already in street clothes."), and when it was over, neither Carson nor Ed McMahon was entirely sure he'd ever been in the major leagues, but they definitely wanted him back again. Which they did, turning into over 100 always-watchable appearances on the show, earning him the title "Mr. Baseball".

That leveraged him into a string of Budweiser commercials (back when they marketed beer to heterosexuals), which got him the recurring role of Harry Doyle (he did that character from muscle memory) in the Major League franchise, and a sitcom (Mr. Belvedere), all the while announcing the Brewers' games season after season, during which time they only made the playoffs 10 times, and only won a single division pennant. Looking at Uecker, him announcing such a sad-sack club was a match made in heaven.

On the strength of all those seasons in the booth, and being one of the funniest guys ever in baseball, Uecker finally made it into the Hall Of Fame in Cooperstown. As an announcer.

One hopes, when he gets to the Pearly Gates, St. Peter will call "Safe."

But if Uecker hears "Juuuuuuuust a little outside..." he'll probably understand.

The world is poorer at the passing of such a funny and beloved man.

Beltway "Wisdom"

And they actually think this way.
For some value of the word "think".

Disaster Relief

 

We cannot and do not, in good conscience, recommend sending so much as a thin dime to either the Red Cross nor Satan's Army for use for any victims of the current fires in SoCal.

1) The American Red Cross has the official policy that they, and they alone, will set a secret limit of relief for any given disaster. Any funds contributed for a given disaster which exceed that amount, will be shunted without informing you to their general operating funds, for use howsoever they see fit, including for disasters that are less sexy and PR-positive.

Any way you slice that, it's underhanded, and we refuse to give them any money because of that sneaky shit. They should either publicize it forthrightly, and either return excess contributions, or ask your kind permission before repurposing them for their own pocket.

Any other course of action is quite simply fraud.

2) Satan's Army, AFAWK, never fired the two woketarded @$$holes from a couple of years back, who promulgated as an official policy, the idea that whypeepo were the root of all evil.

Fuck them sideways, with a rusty chainsaw, until they forthrightly renounce that, publicly fire those two sumbitches at a public press conference, and apologize profusely for ever giving them a platform for their vile anti-white hate speech.

If you choose to send them instead a pre-printed White Guilt apology slip in lieu of cash in any amount, good on you.

If you choose to look up either of the above grifters' addresses, and instead send them a bag of dildos from an adult store, and suggest that their leadership eat said bag of dicks until they get their collective heads out of their hindquarters and return to their apolitical missions of humanitarian aid, feel free to do so, with our profound and sincere compliments.

Otherwise, seek other venues for any aid you might wish to contribute to actual victims. And vet any agency to which you contribute very carefully, to include who else they take care of. Ideally, such victims not being millionaire dilletantes who wouldn't give two shits if your home burned down. Anyone of those celebutwats who didn't send contributions to the Western NC or Florida hurricane victims "because that's Trump country" should be considered de facto ineligible for anything but another bag of adult appliances as well.

Do as you see fit.

Damnable Libel

Seriously though, I had nothing to do with any recent fires.
But paraphrasing Mark Twain, I have sent a letter stating
 that I heartily approved of them.

I Told Ya So

Democrat voter turnout in Charcoal Hills, formerly known as Pacific Palisades,
 expected to decrease by 98.4% for next decade. Pisser, huh?

Homeless cause 14,000 Fires per year in L.A. County

Insurance companies dropped coverage because Califrutopia is a massive clusterfuck

authorities drained reservoirs in fire areas for a year despite two record wet seasons, which was why hydrants had no water

Billion$$ unspent: Gov. Moonbeam and Gabbin' Nuisance haven't built a new reservoir in CA in 50 years, as population doubled, and billions of gallons of rain and snowmelt flow out to sea year after year

UPDATE: And (h/t WRSA) all of the above in one Tucker Carlson podcast:

And all this nonsense was voted in and funded lavishly by the millionaire Leftard lunatics in West L.A., which runs about as Democrat as NYFC not counting Staten Island.

I repeat for emphasis:

Stop dropping water on those neighborhoods. Swap it out for napalm and aviation gasoline, and solve this problem for a century or more. Make Stupid Painful Again.

Sunday Music: A Few Hot Tracks

A few apropos cuts that sprung to mind lately. Something for everyone here. Talking Heads, Ohio Players, J.D. Souther, the Pointer Sisters, and Blue Oyster Cult. Riffs on a theme.

Say When

 h/t Divemedic

By all means, read DM's OP, but we've covered this ground times beyond counting, so we're cutting to the chase, and defer to visual aids.

Demographics Is Destiny. Which Works Both Ways.

 h/t WRSA

The bottom half is my helpful addendum to a pic CA posted today. Feel free to fact check my addition, but like Shit Trump Says™, even if it's off by a hair here and there, my addition is likelier far more accurate than most of you want to admit is the case.

Like the pooches in most situations, 49 other states and 85 other countries have f**ked Califrutopia so hard for so long it'll never walk straight again. Remember your own state's or country's role in that multi-decade bestiality caper the next time you want to gloat about how the pooch is getting on currently.

Bonus giggle for me: There were an estimated 500,000 anchor babies born in the U.S. to illegal aliens last year. The largest-growing group was in the 49 states not called "California".

And California is broke, so the welfare gravy train is coming to a slamming halt, which is going to drive both carpetbaggers and whackjobs back home like an electromagnet. So your turns are coming like a freight train. Lube optional. Bummer, man. BOHICA, baby.

Brushfires: It Isn't Just The Government, Stupid

 h/t Peter

If this is global warming, all I ask is a bag of marshmallows and a stout roasting spike.

As Bayou Renaissance Man noted, some other bloggers have offered explanations for the current fire situation hereabouts. Without questioning their bona fides on the topic, we have lived in the exact area in question our entire life (save for a few transitory changes of address required by Uncle Sam), and from time before Reagan was governor, let alone president. In our youth, we and some friends sat on our house roof and watched the hillsides gloriously aflame in all four cardinal directions at the same time, and watched 150' tall flames overtop those same hillsides. This is not a novel phenomenon, and we possess a wee bit more precise and firsthand handle on the situation, and a great deal more historical context than most.

While decades of flagrantly incompetent Democommunist government (but we repeat ourself) hereabouts has an undeniable share of the blame in the raging wildfires hereabouts, trying to portray the current fiasco solely, or even majorly, as government's fault is like trying to blame baseball bats for causing home runs.

Government's role in this is mainly as a symptom, not a root cause.

As we pointed out in comments to an earlier post on BRM, insurance companies abandoning coverage in Califrutopia was a net plus, not a terrible thing, because they were otherwise being forced to subsidize (on the backs of ordinary policyholders) rich, entitled idiots building mansions inches away from literal tons of fireload, in brush-choked wind-tunnel canyons that burn regularly for not years, not decades, not centuries, but for millennia, since Hammurabi himself was in diapers. 

Having seen this phenomenon first-hand for half a century myself, my argument was simple:

Let the insurance companies allow the entitled idiots' homes to burn, with no coverage possible.

Then we'll have fewer entitled jackholes (you guess the missing word there), overwhelmingly - but not entirely - the exact same dancing monkeys in music, film, and television, on either side of the cameras and microphones whose serial idiocy you all rightfully loudly decry and castigate on these same blogs 24/7/265, buying or building homes in those same brush-clogged wind-tunnel canyons, which burn every 5-10 years with the predictability of the seasons, who like having brush and oak trees inches from their multi-million-dollar estates "because it looks pretty", who won't let cities use eminent domain to widen the narrow streets enough to permit emergency vehicles to access those streets even during minor emergencies, let alone brush fires the size of some cities, who elect more government idiots to oppose brush-clearing and controlled burns, simultaneously funding dope-smoking tree-hugging eco-lunatard hippies who oppose brush clearing and controlled burns because they think humans are the parasites who must be eliminated, nor ever vote for any politicians or measures that would fund sufficient infrastructure to make sure there's even water flowing out of the hydrants at the top of those canyons, like for example fixing the 10,000 water main breaks in L.A. unrepaired since the Northridge Earthquake thirty years ago - which is why random sinkholes keep cropping up all over Los Angeles - to use when you need it (like for the semi-annual brushfires that have happened here since Fr. Junipero Serra and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the scene, and found out the local Indian name for the current San Fernando Valley was "The Valley that Smokes" because of perennial lightning-caused brushfires since time out of mind, thousands of years before Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola). Newsflash, Common-Core grads: there was smog over the Greater L.A. Basin and the adjoining valleys 200 years before the first car or gas station arrived here. You could look it up. History: still a thing.

These are the same entitled Leftard idiots who won't broom out the homeless, who camp in those same canyons smoking meth, and which drug-addicted losers are too tweaked out to notice that 50MPH gust during the regular Santa Ana winds just blew their hillside campfire into a raging inferno, causing five out of every ten fires, going back decades.

Hear me, God! Let those fires rage out of control and burn unrestricted, and weed out the surplus of morons (mostly deported or imported here from 49 other states and 85 other countries), and if possible, ship more morons into the fire zones while the flames rage out of control, to preclude having to deal with them after it's all over, with their upturned palms looking for government relief largely shaken down from the peons in this state and 49 others whom they moved to those canyon mansion to escape.

If we were governor for a day, the aerial tankers would be dropping napalm and aviation gasoline by the ton around the clock for the entire day, until the problem self-corrected, and the hillsides looked like Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945.

Oh, and the inevitable survivors of this disaster? No points for guessing who'll be back grifting next spring, when the scrubbed-bare hillsides turn into raging mudslides and flooding, crying to anyone who'll listen about how terrible is their lot in life, rather than having to attend mandatory public struggle sessions to own up to their stupid life choices and cranio-rectal impaction issues.

Never have so many delusional entitled morons so richly deserved to have been crapped upon from a great height by the Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and instantly make the entirety of government in Califrutopia go away, you wouldn't fix the problem. For the same reason you could kill all the horses in the world, and years later you'd still have hundreds of millions of horses' asses.

You want to fix California? Bite the bullet: this is going to hurt.

Leave the government alone.

Because as always, politics is downstream from culture.

Just take back all your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk who weren't born here but have come in and f**ked the state up royally for the last 40 years, and deport the 15M illegal aliens your congressweasels and senators have not only ignored, but even encouraged (Lindsay Grahamnesty, Marco ScrewYoubio, call your offices), until they started being bussed into your towns and cities, and the government hereabouts will take care of itself. Just like it did without any further input from you for 130 years. The rest of the country has used this state as a giant demographic and economic tampon to catch all the outflow from the other 49 for nearly 50 years, and now you're all aghast about the toxic shock.

Own your own goddam mess. Admitting that is the first step to solving the problem.

If you'd stop sh*tting and pissing in our gene pool hereabouts, you'd be amazed how fast it would resemble a swimming pool instead of the nation's septic tank. Oh, and those carpetbaggers you bitch about? They weren't Californians when they moved here, and they still aren't now that they've moved on to piss and sh*t in your pool. Best wishes dealing with your own states purpling up because of them. Tag, you're it.

And in the short-term, please, let the entitled @$$holes' mansions burn to the ground. Ideally with them locked inside. And not a penny of relief funds for those grifters that survive. Tough love, we beseech you.

At best, it'll build some character, and at worst, it might kill metric fucktons of them. Or at least, induce them to move back home where they came from, and where they belong.

Win-win.

Random Bushcraft Tip

h/t Commander Zero

The item in the header pic might look to you like a $2.99 roll of 18 gauge floral wire, available at any Hobby Lobby, with cousins for sale at Home Depot, WallyWorld, Michael's Crafts, etc.

It is, and it isn't.

What it really is, is twenty 5-foot long pieces* of snare wire suitable for all sorts of small game, helpfully all connected on one handy spool, with a nifty wire-cutting gadget on the bottom of the package.

If you're ever stuck and trying to survive, putting out a snare, i.e. ONE, is a joke, well-known to hundreds of SERE School instructors over the years who've seen or heard earnest students announce they put out their survival snare. Singular. Usually with absolutely nothing to show for the effort.

Putting out twenty snares on a trapline, or 3-5 squirrel poles in a target-rich woodland,

OTOH, is a much higher-percentage shot at getting something to go in the stew pot for supper.

Use the handy cutter on that package, once the need is urgent, to chop your entire 100' roll into handy 5' segments.

With each segment,

1. Pull a few inches around a small pencil-sized stick, twice around, creating a double loop, leaving about an inch or so beyond the loops created.

2. Slide that double loop off the stick carefully, keeping it open, and twisting an inch or so of the wire beyond the double loop tightly around the end before the loop.

3. Take the unfinished end, and pull it through the double loop, keeping the double loop open, until you've created a loop the appropriate size of the game you're trying to catch.

Repeat 1-3 another 19* times.

4. Find appropriate places on game runs, burrow holes, etc., to place your snares, and anchor them to driven or buried stakes or rocks, as appropriate, to secure anything you catch. Don't pull on the double loops, and minimize handling the snares. If you have anything to cover your scent, or to bait the set/run, do it after it's placed.

If you've done this right, anything passing through your snare will pull the noose tighter, causing the metal double loop to cinch down, preventing it from releasing anything you catch, and getting tighter the harder they pull against it.

Check all your snares at least once a day. Checking at dawn and dusk isn't a bad plan. Otherwise you're just feeding any local predators, instead of yourself.

There are myriad ways to set out snares like these for birds and small game, and all those approaches are beyond the scope of this post. Further study and real-world practice is highly recommended. Do it now, when your survival isn't at stake if you fail.

But now you have the knowledge of how to create the individual snares necessary. Sizing the wire you use and the noose size and height up or down gives you the opportunity to capture anything of almost any size, if you build the right noose with the right wire. (Snares for cougar, wolf, bear, and moose are not recommended. But you do you. Deer- or feral hog-sized snares, by contrast, could yield quite a bounty.)

Bear well in mind that whatever you catch may not be dead when you find it, and may not like being snared. Be prepared to turn it from a problem into a menu item by dispatching it without getting clawed or bitten in the process.

Boilerplate b.s.: Obey all game and hunting regs if you practice with these. Don't trap the neighbor's pets (or children) in testing these out. But remember that in a personal life-and-death survival situation, there are no game regs, and screw the bag limit.

You can buy purpose-made snares from several trapping suppliers, but generally for a lot more money. Unless you're trapping professionally, don't bother. But throwing a few spools of floral wire in your kit for survival purposes gives you snare options that might come in handy, with wire that won't rust, and is already a color found in nature.

*(Or thirty-three 3' pieces. Or fifty 2' pieces. And so on.)

Sunday Music: The Waiting

Seldom is a classic Tom Petty tune so able to capture the zeitgeist of the country forty years later. Top Twenty (#19) in 1981, and still as timeless now as then.

NEWSFLASH! COLD!!!

TDS Is Real. And They Really Are That Bat-Sh*t Crazy.

Also: I have a bridge for sale. Cash only.

Thought For The Day

This Is My Shocked Face

 

With more than 20M criminals deliberately imported into the U.S. since 2021 under the regime of Mr. Fraudulent, I'm not surprised the jihadi terror attacks have kicked off here.

I'm only surprised there was only one. So far.

But with the CIA and FBI on the case (the same geniuses who told us Hunter Biden's laptop was a fraud, and that grandmothers at J6 were our biggest terrorism threat) I'm sure we'll find out who was ultimately behind this. About the time O.J. finds the real killer, and Jimmy Hoffa's body turns up.

I still recommend that we quietly inform the Saudis that  if this keeps happening, all of Mecca and Medina will be bombed into rubble in immediate retaliation, and AC-130s will mop up stragglers. Make jihad Islam's problem, and see how long they want to play cowboys and fucktards.