Trump Supporting Mike Johnson For Speaker

 

Name this political philosopher

Pay attention: Class is in session.

1) The first vote of the new House of Representatives is to elect a Speaker.

2) To get elected, one must win a simple majority of the members. That's 218.

3) That means whoever runs has to get every swinging Richard on the [R] side to win this time around. Having the most votes that is less than 218 won't get it done.

4) If the first ballot fails, there's a second. And a third. And so on, until they elect someone with a majority.

5) Historically, this can take from one ballot up to 133 ballots - which took two months.

6) Until there's a Speaker, the House cannot do anything else. 

N-O-T-H-I-N-G.

7) Like certify the 2024 election.

8) Which means no inauguration until there's a Speaker, and said certification, possibly weeks after January 20th.

9) Meaning neither Trump nor Vance could be sworn in. Maybe for weeks and weeks. Yes, really.

10) And with no Speaker Of The House elected, that also takes out the 3rd person in the line of presidential succession.

11) Number Four is not the Senate Majority Leader, it's the President pro tempore, i.e. the Senator elected by the majority to that post in the new Senate.

12) So unless there's a quick and bloodless selection of the next Speaker Of The House, the Acting President, who will be sworn in at noon on January 20th, 2025, if the 2024 election has not been certified, could be someone like current pro tem Peppermint Patty Murray [D-Lunatic Fringe], or former pro tem Chuck Grassley [R - RINO Extraordinaire].

13) Which Acting President would have full authority to do all official acts of the President until such time as the House gets its collective crap in one bag. Like appoint Cabinet members, nominate judges for life, conclude treaties, sign legislation, approve 1500-page budgets, and do all the things involving monkeying with the levers of power upon which you really want some Senatorial shitbag not to ever, ever get their grubby little not-elected-by-the-whole-country hands. Capice?

14) OR, the president-elect could try and curry a little less jackassery from a shitbag like Johnson, by helping him stay in the Speaker's chair without any fuss, so the House could speedily confirm the 2024 election results.

So...you go figure out why Trump might throw a bone to a confirmed pork-barreling shitbag like Mike Johnson, rather than read the newspaper in Mar-A-Lago for a couple of weeks until the House can get itself together, while some greasy jackass jerks the country around some more after Mr. Fraudulent gets carted off to the funny farm.

Swamp Gas Keeps Bubbling Up

 h/t JW

We thought we had thoroughly shat upon the notion of a national breakup into nifty sub-countries hard enough to highlight the perpetual unlikelihood of the prospect - at least beyond the initial 15 minutes.

But it seems there are always those who cling to the notion that they will get to keep their little patch intact, while the rest of the world burns, because someone shook Tinkerbell and sprinkled Magic Pixie Dust and therefore, it will be so, because they think happy thoughts, and God loves them best of all.

Not just "No", but "FUCK NO!"

JW threw this idea out as a trial balloon at the end of a post, but there's no shortage of earnest monkeys who will latch onto such a thing and begin humping it with all their might.

So for those Baby Ducks:

The idea of "balkanization" after a civil war/national divorce/banana is pure codswallop.

The why isn't difficult to suss out.

Let's start this small, and go bigger.

Everyone knows it takes two people to go to the courthouse to get married. But it only takes one to get divorced.

(This is why, with all due respect to JW and the Mrs., marriage is exactly like a hand grenade: anything that requires a ring to keep it together is not your friend.)

War and peace have exactly the same calculus:

It takes two nations to maintain the peace.

It only takes one of them  to say "F**k that!", and suddenly you have a war on your hands.

So, you're going to balkanize into separate territories.

How has that idea worked out with the two-state Israel/Palestine plan?

How about with the two Koreas?

North and South Vietnam?

East and West Pakistan?

Two Irelands?

How's the "two Chinas" policy looking these days?

So, knowing that track record, you're going to split America That Is into separate Leftard and Liberty pieces, and you figure the Leftards, who can't help finger-banging anything they see because they think they know better than you, are going to merrily leave other people in peace, rather than jam their fingers into other guys' pies up to the armpits?

Srsly? Anybody thinks that??

Riiiiiiiight. that'll totally happen. When monkeys fly outta my butt.

You may have no desire for D.C. 

Rest assured D.C. has designs upon you, along with the cheerful support of vast hordes of dependent minions in every metropolis in America - you know, the urban locii where 82% of Americans currently live - who will cheerfully and gleefully come to get you and what you think is yours, simply because they can.

People have lived so long under the protection of a republic that safeguards the minority, and the smallest minority, the individual, they've completely forgotten what happens when might becomes right.

People in Alsace, the Czech Republic, Austria, and Poland should be consulted before anyone proposes to build castles in the air based on the allure of "balkanization". What looked like a great plan in 1919 didn't work out so well by 1939.

Suggestions to the contrary are merely normalcy bias writ large.

And you don't even notice that any hope - including your own - for any piece of the puzzle living happy and peaceful afterwards depends on the good wishes and honest intentions of the exact folks you despise the most right now. If you're going to gamble like that, the Powerball grand prize has better odds. Just saying.

The same thing happened in Korea. And Vietnam. And the Middle East. And on and on.

In the rest of the world, that time is known as the Overture.

Idiots claiming balkanization as the permanent end state, rather than the prep phase, are going to have one helluva shocked face when the curtain goes up on Act One.

Pray, don't be one of them. 

So, inevitably, even a semi-peaceful "divorce" quickly becomes an existential hot shooting war. 

(Side note: How did Ukraine trusting Russian promises to guarantee their original borders work out?)

So this, as always, becomes a cage match, where two sides enter, and only one leaves.

There will be one America with one people when it's done.

Not 2, or 4, or 9, or eleventy.

And anyone who thinks the Canuckistanis or the Mexican'ts, or any other country is going to take advantage of the situation should best look to the response when the cops show up to a domestic violence call: both parties attack the cops more often than not.

Now imagine the US with Blue Helmets or any other silliness. Everyone living here would exterminate the interlopers before we returned to knocking off the native-born enemies.

This will be rivers of blood, mountains of skulls, and oceans of tears before it's over.

One side is going to be smaller when it's over.

One side is going to be extinct.

Which is which will be determined by who wants it more. Period. Full stop.

You think the two (three/four/seven/eleventy) sides will live and let live?

Show your work.

Change my mind.

Start by sharing with the class how the same excremental fucktards who made anyone want a divorce, are going to respect it afterwards, and let you live in peace.

Even if you never wanted a communist paradise, and never voted one in, you're going to have to shoot your way out of one, and back to the republic you miss. And I've yet to see anyone, anywhere come up with a better template than the one instituted in 1776, but there have been dozens and dozens before and since that example all done far, far worse. You will garner enthusiasm for those lesser attempts in the single digits, on your best day. Wrap your head around that reality good and tight before you think to throw out the baby with the bathwater.

Which is why I'm also far beyond sick of the asinine city/country wrangling. The people who can add without taking off their shoes already know the vast majority of the country are city folks. (That would be 82% urban, for Common Core grads.) Some of you Baby Ducks new to that bit of intel had best step up your efforts to befriend your ideological allies in Cities you Don't Like (which, word to your mother, they don't like either), instead of shit-talking them for not living in Bumfuck, Bugtussle, or Hooterville. They will be the exact people who'll monkey-wrench Leviathan when the time comes, from inside the citadel walls.

Or, not.

Your job, and as exactly what all insurgencies require to succeed, is to be the place they can recruit, relax, re-arm, refit, recover, and recuperate. America is the one nation that can be its own "foreign power". No one else is coming.

But if you keep pissing off and pissing on your city cousins to where they sit things out, like far too many of the dim-witted seem to pine for fondly, there a bare 18% of you sit, out there in flyover country.

Your move, bumpkins. But don't take my word for it. Call a seance, and discuss with the spirits of Bobby Lee and Stonewall Jackson what a martial contest looks like at 82:18 odds, when you're the 18. The brighter lights out there should be (and are) already looking for ways to make friends, not enemies. You can get to a peer war if you learn to make friends, or simply content yourselves with being the baby Harp seals in the upcoming hunt.

I imagine the hardest thing to do was to teach the caterpillar that in order to become a butterfly, he just had to die first.

Slaughter your delusions, instead of yourselves. Stop hanging your hopes, dreams, and plans on fairytales and fond wishes, and start doing some hard work. Starting with some hard thinking, and hard thoughts. We're running out of time to make enough like-minded friends. 3AM friends. And FFS, quit taking leadership lessons from a herd of cats. Learn to work and play well with others. If only from an enlightened sense of self-preservation.

In closing, I cannot help but observe the number of witch doctors out there, and the dearth of medical common sense. Anyone with a lick of medical acumen knows that amputation is the last option, not the first choice. And that when there's a cancer, you don't give it a sacrificial piece of the body in hopes that will satiate it. You kill it, all of it, down to the last molecule. With fire.

And Now, For Something Completely Different

Michael? Back so soon?

Now, rid of the latest attention-whore idiot illustrative of the mouth-breathing class of internet troll, we can assemble the two or three pearls we promised to dig out of the metric buttload of diaper spackle from the previous exercise, and string them together to make some use of them.

Learn the difference between strong sentiment, and Incitement

Thomas Jefferson mused that the Tree of Liberty needs watering from time to time with the blood of tyrants and patriots. No one batted an eye, even with early 1800's sensibilities. That, friends, is "Just saying...".

Spewing that "I'd really like to strangle Federal Judge Shitforbrains!", OTOH, is liable to get you an earnest chat with federal marshals, at the very least.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball.

The J6 protesters will not be participating in anything going forward, owing to a prior engagement.

Don't be those guys, for at least two reasons.

1) Incitement is illegal. And you've seen, in only the last week, how far the law will be stretched to go after perceived enemies of the state.

2) Nobody is telling anybody to start shooting anybody else. When it is time, you'll be able to figure it out for yourself with little outside input.

Until #1 becomes #2, you ought to heed some wise advice from a seasoned Doctor of Law. Ignoring the magnificence of the cinematic effort, you really should watch that clip, and take it to heart, until you could recite it from memory, and bear it well in mind - until this clip ascends to pre-eminence.

A Civil War Would Be A Disaster - But not the worst disaster, the last disaster, nor the only disaster

Bumbling around in the recesses of poor Michael's mind, along with incoherent psychosis, was the genesis of an actual coherent thought or three, had he the wit to nurture and tend them until they were ripe enough to pluck.

To wit: he confused and conflated Civil War with TEOTWAWKI. If you think they're the same thing, share with the rest of us how, in April of 1861, everyone fled to the countryside, and abandoned all the cities. Go ahead; I'll wait over here at the bar while you work that out.

Then tell us how the same thing happened in England during their Glorious Revolution. How about Paris, circa the Reign Of Terror? Or anywhere else, ever. Spain, 1930s? Cuba, 1950s? Vietnam, 1946-1975? Indonesia? Yemen? Congo? Rhodesia? SAfrica? Korea? Japan? China? Look in vain, because that's not what happens. Life goes on. One or both sides may experience tough times. Some places or all places may see such. But nobody says, "Holy shit! Civil War! Run for the woods, quick!"

I outlined the difference between city and rural in a civil war.

The problem, when (not if, to about 4 decimal places) we have another one, it isn't going to be state versus state, nor city versus country. It's going to be street to street, house to house, and in some people's homes, room to room.

And some people will get careless, or stupid, and a civil war will become the second- or third-most dangerous problem.

The currency could collapse. In fact, probably will. Could happen even if we don't get to a civil war in time. If this is news to you, yet another cinematic benediction comes to mind.

In fact, worst of all, we could have a civil war, and our side could even win that war, and we could still become Weimar/Zimbabwe/Venezuela. 

But wait! There's more!

Someone in any Unpleasantness could get careless with matches, and next thing you know, the power grid goes POOF! Like fog on a July morning. In Death Valley. The cheeriest predictions for a grid-down "problem" are 90% casualties. But what's a paltry 300M dead, between friends, right?

A civil war, in either case, would become the lesser problem in about one pantry. So even if you have both, war isn't the biggest threat to you and yours, and even giving Uncle Government a snappy raised arm salute, and a daily tongue bath, is no guarantee things will be rosy even for the sycophantic Useful Idiots.

Planning For Almost Any Disaster Looks Pretty Much Like Planning For Only One Disaster- Get your Priorities in Order

In all foreseeable problems, some things will be more important than others, but most things will be important Every. Single. Time.

Water. Food. Shelter. Warmth. Medicine. Weapons. Power. Communications. Intelligence. Allies. Trade Goods.

Without them, you can't do anything. In fact, without most of them, you will not be able to do anything, including survive.

With them, you can likely do as much as your means will allow.

Which leads to another brilliant bit of cinematic exposition. (Clever readers may detect a trend here.)

Planning Is Useless; But The Planning Process is Invaluable

That is a direct quote from General of the Armies and former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, but all he ever pulled off was D-Day, ending two wars, and the greatest peacetime boom in history, so what does he know?

Because as we noted earlier, plans go to $#!^. And the more elaborate the plan, the greater the number of points of failure, and the higher the odds that it will fail.

But failure to plan is planning to fail. Because the planning process shows you where all those places are where things could suddenly go pear-shaped.

So the important thing isn't to have any plan, let alone a perfect one, it's to have a perfect planning process, so you exhaustively expose ever single point of failure, and come up with - at the least minimum - Primary, Alternate, Contingency, and Emergency Courses Of Action.

Peace Is A Nice State To Live In - But It's Rarer Than Hen's Teeth

Si vis pacem, para bellum.

You need People.

You need Priorities.

You need Preparations.

You need a Planning Process.

Do those things, and you have a fighting chance with whatever comes.

Do them not, and other people will be splitting your gear after you're gone.

With 10 or 20 more IQ points, and better social skills, Michael might have dug all that out on his own, instead of wanting someone to hold his hand for him, lead him to it, and then cut it up into chewable bite-sized baby food so he could swallow it.

But some people would rather dig in their diapers than break a sweat, and do hard things.

Either way, you get the rewards you deserve.

You have to do the work to get the prize.

You Might Want To Take Notes

Everybody who's ever had to take a fire safety class knows about the Fire Triangle:

Air, Heat, and Fuel. Any attack on one or more items puts out a fire.

People in the .Mil and civilian occupations have seen "Break The Chain" posters and lectures, noting that it is rarely one thing, but usually an unbroken string of bad or stupid things, that lead to a total disaster. Breaking one link "breaks the chain", and the disaster doesn't happen.

At its simplest, there's the template to every episode of Rescue 9-1-1 back in the day.

Implacable forces of nature + Human stupidity = drama and pathos.

Get rid of either one, and your stupidity wasn't featured on one of their episodes.

The root lesson, and the one I was hinting at in this previous post, is that folks should stop worrying about the current shenanigans on college campuses (or any future sort of Leftard tomfoolery and jackassery) like a serious problem, and start looking at them from a military perspective.

Meaning every event like that runs on several non-negotiable things:

Personnel

Intelligence

Training and Operations

Logistics

Communications

Attack one or more of those things, in any field of endeavor, and the enemy's plan fails, along a spectrum from tactical to strategic.

People: those are already there, but that's a blessing and a curse. People need water, food, rest, and sanitation.

Intelligence: They need to know what's going on beyond their personal horizon.

Training: If they haven't been trained for everything, there are weaknesses to exploit.

Operations: Thwart their mission, disrupt their activities, and their failure is assured.

Logistics: Anything they don't have in their pockets, needs to be prevented from reaching them, or prevented from working as designed.

Communications: Internal, and external. Jam it, cut it, delay it, or any combination, which all degrade their chances of accomplishing anything useful.

The more of those things you do, the more you degrade morale.

Which makes people question or ignore their leaders.

Which saps commitment.

Which undermines everything they attempt.

So all the things I whimsically suggested, and many more, could all be used (should all be used!) by whomever, to let these bumpkins and Useful Idiots know they're playing checkers in a world full of chess grand masters.

Block food and water, and that crowd will dwindle to nothing in about 2 days. Jesus will not be multiplying loaves and fishes, and if they didn't bring it, and can't get it, they won't be eating it.

Deny them rest, and they'll lose their minds in a couple of days. Literally.

Deny sanitary facilities, and it'll turn into a mass health crisis in the same amount of time.

Those sites are running on cell phones. Which run from helpfully obvious towers. Be a real bummer if someone dropped a soda can full of iron oxide and magnesium shavings on top of the control boxes, which somehow caught fire, and took those towers relays out for a few days, wouldn't it?

They lose contact, media access, communications, cohesion, everything.

Legacy media have satellite uplinks from their trucks, but the schmucks in the tent cities? They're deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid.

People could also get their hands on portable all-band cell phone jammers, stuff a few into backpacks, and wander nearby, creating the same effect. Someone might even plop a few into fake A/C units, with solar panels, on rooftops, and just let them run, for the same benefit. No cell, wifi, or any other nonsense. By the time they could be pinpointed and ID'ed, the event would be over. You could even set them to run at different times, in rotation, making DFing them more problematic. Serious HAMs could do it, but the yokels running that show? They'd be bumfuzzled.

Beavis and Butthead are using VHF, UHF, FRS, or CB? Selectively jam them. Let other communiques out. Gather intel. Spoof them with bogus messages. Pretend to be them, and issue retarded and embarrassing manifestos and messages, which will most assuredly be heard and disseminated, and now they're on the defensive having to deny things they never said, which go viral on all media outside their enclaves.

Anyone nearby could gin up totally bogus "protestor" videos too, and dump them onto YouTube and X. Comedy gold is where you mine it. Remember Churchill's line: "A lie will get halfway around the world, before the Truth has gotten its boots on." Use that reality to your advantage.

Simply suss out all the things underpinning those activities they're undertaking, and seek to take them apart one by one, until their whole effort is one giant clusterfuck.

Nobody has to do all of them. Pick one, and go wild on it. Be the chaos and friction Von Clausewitz warned military leaders about.

The other side aren't all that well-organized, so it isn't going to be that hard.

BONUS RESULT: Some day, when you're the G, operating operationally, you'll know all the ways your plans can be monkeywrenched, so you'll be fore-armed at thinking of alternate, contingency, and emergency methods to unscrew any attempts to screw with your efforts, come the day.

Both of which make your enemies look ridiculous, and lead to them being ridiculed.

"And then, kick them in the balls!"

 - Captain William Fairbairn's concluding remarks, after each and every dirty move he taught commandos in hand-to-hand combat during WWII.

Memeography 101

We note today on the latest WRSA edition of memes that CA shared that he'd created a meme in about 5 minutes on imgflip.

We didn't think this knowledge was arcane enough that it needed to be shared, but for those who need it, we offer a brief tutorial.

Memes started here when we dedicated ourselves to the task of flinging as much sh*t as humanly possible against the douchebadges who arrested an ER nurse in Salt Lake City for refusing to violate the U.S. Constitution, state law, police and hospital policy, medical ethics, and sheer common sense, by refusing a completely illegal demand by Officer @$$hole to collect illegal evidence as a job-jacked medical minion of the state, from an unconscious person, not suspected of any crime, for said Officer Asshole, and his overbearing supervisor, Lt. Shitforbrains.

We are rather pleased that whatever small contributions we made contributed to Lt. Shitforbrains' eventual demotion, and Officer @$$hole becoming an ex-police officer for life, and hope he's enjoying the winos as an unarmed night shift security guard duty outside the local Circle K, or greeting the hoi polloi at WalMart.

He still deserves a daily kick in the balls for being one of the biggest dicks ever inflicted on the planet, but there are limits to what we can accomplish in a day.

But as a happy serendipity, we now get to create many of the pictures that accompany our posts, which breaks up the monotony of a wall of text, underlines and emphasizes our efforts, and most importantly, when we nail it, travels far and wide, flinging sh*t at idiocy far beyond the pages of one humble blog.

We may have put some words in Mr. Churchill's mouth,
and/or removed a digit from his hand. Sic transit mundum.

When (if) it's good, we might cost some folks a keyboard due to spit-takes. 

When it's better, other bloggers we enjoy pick it up and distribute it to an even wider audience.

When we're very lucky, it exceeds our wildest hopes, travels around the world over and over, and keeps coming back to us from other sources.

Which effort, incidentally, was when we started tagging them. It pisses us off when people use our creations without attribution. We still make $0 per meme; it's the principle of the thing. Some people are douchey enough to scrub it out, but fucktards gonna fucktard.

But in the grand scheme, we are not the World's Foremost Memester. Nor even in the Top Ten. We're probably in the top 1% of the anglosphere, in our niche, but even that's an enormous club. But we're definitely doing our part, and pulling our weight.

And there's a simple fact: None of us is smarter, or funnier, than all of us. And we see your comments, here and elsewhere. Some of you truly are some funny m*****f*****s. It was a commenter here that, AFAWK, dubbed the China Syndrome "Kung Flu". We were the first one to start memeing that, and in less than six weeks, it went all the way to POTUS, during a televised White House Press Briefing. We're particularly happy with that.

And if we can do it, so can you. And many of you ought to. We read somebody say something really good, and the wheels turn over, and it becomes a meme. Or we see a pic, and a caption or three spring immediately to mind. So for those of you who still haven't bothered to learn this arcana, we humbly offer the following brief treatment of how to do it yourself, so that you and your efforts can take their rightful place amidst internet lore, and add another hundredweight tub of flung sh*t to the edifices of Libtardia we'd all like to bring down.

First Iron Law Of Comedy:

Comedy requires Truth + Humor.

This rule cannot be broken without abject failure. Go back and read that again. Anybody can say funny things, or make funny memes. But if it's factually bullsh*t, you've faceplanted in front of the entire internet. That's generally behavior you're supposed to be lampooning, not aspiring to. Write that one on your hand, lest ye forget.

There's no law that says your meme has to be funny. (Thank a merciful deity.) But funny or not, it has to tell the truth. If you're not a Libtard, that shouldn't be hard.

But when you ignore this principle, you deserve all the scorn thrown at you. Which you're going to get, believe me. And you're an idiot. Which, like being dead, is something everyone knows, except you.

Outside of that, the sky's the limit.

You can simply tell the truth. In a time of lies, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.

You can meme a famous (or obscure) quote. From life, media, culture, iconic movie lines, whatever.

You can find a great picture and put your line(s) over it.

You can put words in the mouths of great men. (Try to make the satire obvious from space, please. See the second meme below the header.)

You can add your own captions to totally separate and unrelated events. Just like the lamestream news does 24/7/365.

If there's already a classic meme, you can re-invent it in your own style. Maybe yours is funnier, better, or more original.

Knock yourself out.

How To:

You have multiple options.

First off, you can use the Paint program that comes with about every computer sold. I do.

Generally, that will let you cut-and-paste and crop images as well, .bmps, jpegs, pngs, etc. (I have to translate the new WEBPs into jpeg or pngs with mine first to play with them, because it's old.) Use whatever works. The Paint programs usually allow you to add text too, in colors, with a choice of fonts. But there are some text limitations, which we'll discuss presently.

Learn it, love it, live it.

If you want to go Grand Master Class, you can rent Photoshop, and there's no end of what you can do with the pixels you create.

So go forth, find, and make your baseline masterpiece.

But you probably don't have (nor want) the bandwidth to host people clicking on that image 24/7/365. Like you hope they will.

But image-hosting sites do, generally for free. You may have to sign up, and provide some breadcrumbs to who you really are. Get over it.

As CA noted, you can do it through imgflip. I use IMGUR. There are many others. And you can also flip through Know Your Meme's catalog of what's already out there.

Most sites let you load a raw picture, and include that as or in a post.

I use that a lot for finished product, or bare pics I haven't futzed with at all. More on the former in a minute.

But, if you want to add their version of text, usually in just one font, you have to select the "make a meme" option, or something similar.

Which means before you upload that pic to add your text, look at your picture.

If the text can go on the pic and still get the point across, great. Type it in, and you can make it bigger or smaller to suit the space. Less is more, and bigger is better. Some people are looking at this stuff on their phones, FFS.

But if the text is going to kill the pic, you might be better off adding some black or similar-color text bars, top, bottom, or both, to contain your verbal efforts.

Do that in your paint or photo editor software.

A safe way is to make them way too big, then crop the excess away after the text is in place.

Again, more on that momentarily.

If you didn't need to crop anything, once your text is where you want it, CHECK FOR TYPOS. Looking like an illiterate f**k doesn't help anyone, and there's nothing more frustrating than making a killer meme, and finding out you mis-typed a word in your creative rush to the presses, and now have to start all over again. (Ask us how we know.)

Once you do that, and save it, your meme is done enough for prime time. Whichever site you're using provides a link you should cut and paste, to save it, display it, or share it around.

But, if you need to crop it, open that link, re-save the picture (imgur compresses everything down at this step), and put it back in your paint or editing software.

Blow it up to the original (or larger) size. I recommend 1000 pixels wide, minimum.

A good default for landscape is 1280 wide and 700-900 pixels tall. Your pic editing or paint software will generally let you specify one parameter, either height or width, and then enlarge the other one to scale, so you don't get a funhouse mirror distortion.

Crop any excess of your image out, especially any overslop text bars.

You can also cut pieces out and move them at this stage to center them visually, and make a better presentation. Do that, as necessary.

Signing Your Work

Once our product starting getting legs, we began cropping out "made in imgur", which always popped up at the right lower corner, and replacing it with a suitably small but readable "made by Aesop" tag, usually by adding a sacrificial neon green bar on the bottom edge big enough to contain Imgur's tag, knowing we'd whack it out at the final stage. then re-sign it with our own tag.

1) Because we want credit for our best works, and

2) because we own what we write, good or bad.

We figure we're already on twenty lists of Undesirables anyways. Get over that, too. That ship sailed the minute you logged online. And we also know some douchebags will try to crop our signature/watermark out, but that can't be helped. Sign it anyways, and make them work to be douchebags.

Sometimes (see above) we'll move our sig up, or flop the pic sideways, to make it harder to crop out. Some people/software let you put it anywhere, make it a semi-clear watermark, and/or slant it to match pic contours, or whatnot. Up to you.

It's also a couple of extra steps. but we feel it's worth it in the long run.

When it's literally picture-perfect, re-save it, and upload it as a simple image to the same image site, and save that link. (We'll usually kill the earlier working copy, both to save our time and host bandwidth when searching through old ones, and avoid the existence of dueling images. We may save the raw image to re-use for other memes*. Dealer's choice.)

Imgur, for example, has a library of about 50 certain pics that lend themselves to a million uses.

Sean Bean's "Brace Yourself", Gene Wilder's "Tell Me More", Office Space's "That'd Be Great", John Krasinski's whiteboard from "The Office", Steven Crowder's "Change My Mind", Picard and Riker's double facepalm, etc. etc. The list is endless, limited only by your imagination.

Throw in some bare facility to jerk around the right pixels, and you have a world of endless possibilities, limited solely by your own talent and imagination.

Now you have the bare tools to make your own memes in Shop Class, with any one of 500 billion images on the internet.

And with the endless clowncarnucopia of AI sites that will whip any picture from the ether at your whim, there's no limit to what Wrongthink mischief you can wreak on civilization, from pictures not yet even created.

If you can type, and work a mouse, you have the skills. If you're not on the Left, you have the requisite brains and sense of humor they lack by the metric f**kton.

Go forth and become the sh*t-posting memelord you have inside you, and help us tear the Libtardian behemoth down, and burn it to ashes. Or just crack up a few of your friends and neighbors. Civilization is in desperate need of both just now, and you may be the David that fells Goliath.

Soy Boi Problems

 h/t John Wilder

Wilder meme-piles on the above NYTimes nonsense (but we repeat ourself) at his place.

We drop a frag on anything still twitching after he's done:

Male what?

The words you strung together have some meaning individually, but collectively we don't know what you're talking about. In a "Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are having an intellectual argument, and it sounds like some millenial's Furby collection speaking in a gibberish word salad while stray cats are giving birth" kind of way.

I suspect the best cure for male loneliness among the soy bois reporting it and who read the NYTimes is to knock that sh*t off, put that fishwrap back under the bird cage where it belongs, have a urologist re-attach your balls, and stop crying like a girl.

Chicks hate whiny crybabies who sit at women's feet looking for an answer to life's questions, they have no respect for them, and they replace them with actual men every chance they get. And when we say "every chance", well, we hate to be the one to break it to you if you thought they were really out with their friends five days a week, but it's time someone clued you in to why they aren't interested in you anymore except as a life support system for their credit card and a dog walker for their yappy little purse-mutt.

GTFO of the house, go shoot something, kill something, or build something (ideally, a solid brick BBQ for the animal you shot and dressed or the fish you caught and drove home from out in the wilds in your gas-guzzling 4WD pickup), and whichever you choose, generate enough carbon from your efforts to give Greta Thunberg a fit of apoplexy. When you get back, tell that whiny advice columnist you're staying with to turn off The Spew and make you a sammich.

And if she leaves you over that, be sure and tell her "Thank you!"

By the time she hits the wall, and realizes she's living in a middle-aged prison of box wine and cat hair long after her freshness date is a distant memory in life's rear-view mirror, and comes crawling back to you begging for a do-over, you'll be dating three Scandinavian stewardesses, and you won't be able to hear you ex's pitiful whinging over the sizzle from the BBQ, the scream of your power tools working on projects in your garage, the tune-up you're doing on the 4WD, or the screams of passion in your ear from Astrid, Helena, or Ingrid.

You're welcome.

"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

"Welcome To My Masterclass"

h/t daily timewaster

 

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.

You Should Read This

 

Lawdog thinks the Russians deliberately blew up their pipelines too. 

But inadvertently and negligently, not purposeful sabotage.

Which is still going to cause volcanic butthurt to those who knee-jerked straight to " 'merica did it."

RTWT.

I'd link him over yonder --->, but for his twice-annual posting.

For The Slow Learners

 

If this is what you see every morning in your bathroom mirror,
this post is for you. Anyone else, go ahead on with
whatever you were doing.

Literally out of sheer pity, and so as to not be seen kicking retarded kids, is today's tutorial on maritime search.

We bring this up because of the globally stupid (and largely anonymous) commentary regarding recockulous assertions that the US was fingering Russia's Moskva cruiser for the Ukrainians, who then shot gaping holes in it with a couple of their Neptune AS missiles, which would be their second or third time being used ever operationally, AFAIK.

For those with military, engineering, or DoD expertise, who already realize how unlikely and improbable that scenario sounds, my sincere condolences. I feel your pain.

So, by the numbers:

I. The Pigeon

Russian Federation Cruiser Moskva. Originally the lead ship and namesake of the Soviet Slava class of cruisers. Launched in 1979, 611 ft long, about 10,000 tons, with a top speed of 32 knots. Recommissioned as the Moskva (121) under the re-organized Russian Federation in 2000, after sitting idle at dockside for 10 years, and the flagship of their Black Sea Fleet. Originally designed as something to go after Americanski aircraft carriers, it's armed with air, surface, and subsurface search and attack capabilities, which included 6 Russian CIWS anti-missile gatling gun-style defensive systems, and manned by about 475 officers and crew.

II. The (likely) Hunter

The Ukrainian-developed R-360 Neptune missile is a rocket-assisted subsonic anti-ship cruise missile, derived from the Soviet-era Kh-35 (which was nicknamed the "Harpoonski", being a pretty close copy of the USN Harpoon, in size, weight, configuration, etc.). 

The Uke design added a rocket booster to get increased range, in this case, out to about 190 miles, but the basic missile still hums along at about 30' above the waves. At a programmed point, the active radar-seeker head turns on, locking onto the target at about 20 miles range (at the horizon), whereupon it drops to about 12' over the water, and bores straight in until it hits the target with a 300# penetrating high-explosive fragmentation warhead. (The American Harpoon pops up, and does a terminal dive down into the ship it hits, by contrast.) It's only designed to kill ships up to 5,000 tons, (about half of Moskva's size), which would explain why two of them would have been fired, to ensure sufficient damage for sinking the target.

The Ukes first deployed it only in March of 2021, and it's designed to be fired from heavy truck launchers from up to 15 miles inshore, and out to 175 miles out to sea.

III. The Unlikely Bird Dog (?)

As introduced yesterday, the P-8 Poseidon, USN's land-based ASW/maritime patrol plane, since 2020.

Based on Boeing 1994 upgrade of their 1969 design 737 jetliner, flies to a service ceiling of 41,000', with a working range of about 1300 miles.

It took off from Italy, proceeded to the Romanian Black Sea coast, and could be presumed to be doing long slow racetracks of that 100 miles length, safely within NATO airspace, observing the Show to the east and northeast.

It can spot a sub periscope with its surface search radar at 29 miles, and see targets the size of a full container cargo ship (radar cross section of 10,000² meters), or the supercarrier USS Nimitz, at 220 miles. The Moskva, with an RCS about 1/3rd that size, would have to be commensurately much closer in to be identifiable, probably something more like 65 miles, under best conditions (i.e. search a/c at max altitude, and Moskva broadside). Degrade either or both those conditions, and the detection and tracking range to the target gets shorter still.

If radar abilities were a simple line graph (and they're not) the graph for the P-8's abilities would look like this:

But they're not, and that line is a curve. not a flat plot, meaning it's even worse than that, even with the new high-speed low-drag whizbang radars now deployed by Poseidons.

The actual plot of that curve, i.e. how deep the fall-off is and what ranges, I leave to practical physicists: Raytheon is looking for you.

If you can and do name the actual plot for the Poseidon's AN/APY-10 radar, the FBI, DIA, and CIA would like to have a chat with you.

The other problem is those ranges are based on max altitude; the lower the flight, the worse the capabilities of the radar to see anything. And the P-8 operates anywhere from 1000' to 41,000', and everywhere in between. Lacking a MAD boom, it doesn't need to get down in the surf spray like the P-3 Orion did, but at some point, like certain weapons or sonobouy deployments, lower than 41K' is going to be their go-to choice.

Which degrades the radar's visibility. Which also pushes the detection zone on the earlier graph down as well.

Flying a racetrack surveillance pattern from well back inside Romanian airspace, so as not to be misidentifed by either side as a hostile aircraft adjoining an active war zone, the Poseidon's radar acquisition and tracking range would be further degraded, and spotting Moskva would have been iffy in the best case, and simply beyond its capabilities for much of that track.

Open sources pinpointed her (him to Russian ship conventions) on satellite imagery after the explosion, at 45°10'43.49" N, 30°55'30.54" E.

That location is miles away from where the WSJ reported the ship was when it exploded.

And the WSJ report also fits the suggested operating area available to anyone on the internet after April 7th, at the same prior source. (Which would rather obviously include the entire Ukrainian military and intelligence establishments.)

This information is provided so that people who read one sales brochure and stay at a Holiday Inn Express once, and then think that a P-8 can detect troops in the open and sub periscopes at 250 mile ranges, can helpfully pop their heads out of their asses, and unfuck themselves. Surface search radar doesn't work like that.

This is the difference between IRL, and your XBox and PlayStation games.

To date, Russia maintains that the Moskva had an unexplained fire and explosion in a ship's magazine space, and sank while being towed back to port in a storm, which all worldwide weather reports have failed to identify as ever existing. (Two Neptune AS missiles up your ass will bring about a similar result, btw.)

And the Neptunes could have been aimed out to sea "to whom it may concern", or using drones to relay targeting information, or even just nothing more timely than that Naval News open-source report, and simply locked onto the biggest target out there, sailing around fat, dumb, and happy, and totally oblivious that they were meat on the table.

Apparently, the chaff decoy launchers and 6 CIWS mounts on Moskva performed just about as well in actual combat as any other component of the Russian forces have done since this war began. Sux to be Vlad. Or worse yet, one of his military minions. "Russian Warship, go f**k yourself!" turned out to be rather prophetic, in the event.

Thus obviating any need for the US Navy to see things beyond its ability, explaining why they had no explanation for a sea-skimming missile attack, or what happened to make Moskva explode, and therefore absolving the entire US chain-of-command from the command-and-control and liaison nightmares inherent in trying to get real-time maritime surveillance intel captured, verified, downlinked, translated, and funneled to the guy in the truck pushing the red button on those missiles, which task is one helluva lot harder than it sounds. Ask anyone who's ever done anything in the actual .Mil that's even 1/10th that complicated, or anyone who's ever worked with the government at pretty much any operational level.