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.

FAFO: Slow Learner Edition

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

FAFO: Grandmaster Level

 

Oh, And Lest Anyone Thinks Cunard-White Star Gets A Pass...

 

Probably Not The Impact They Were Looking To Make

h/t WRSA

Natzsofast, Dipsh*t

h/t VFLL

Just because neither some drooling crayon merchant at the Hartford Courant, nor any of his woketard editors, know anything about how every tribe in the Americas got here from somewhere else, it doesn't change history. FTR, there's no one on either continent of the Americas who qualifies as "indigenous peoples", since ever. Everybody here, from the Arctic to Tierra del Fuego, came here from somewhere else, or descended from those who did. You could look it up. History here didn't start in 1492, nor 1620. Only idiots make that mistake. And they keep doing it, over and over. We're not a nation of immigrants. We're two continents of immigrants. Anyone who doesn't like it is welcome to go back where they came from, and nobody has first claim on anything here, except by current possession.

The Lumpenproletariat Explosion

 

Anyone who does this for more than two minutes per day
can rightly be regarded as a thoroughgoing moron.
Every single time. There, I said the obvious.

Amidst a breakroom discussion with co-workers the other day, I had occasion to pause at the blank looks from most of them regarding a cinematic moment in Scent Of A Woman. (For Common Core grads, as I'll illustrate, it's the movie - phenomenally good, btw - for which Al Pacino won the Best Actor Oscar in 1993). It's not exactly trench warfare at Verdun, Magna Carta, or even Stonehenge, let alone the late Pleistocene Era, but it may as well have been for the vacant stares going on.

Al Who...?

"Wait a minute, show of hands: For how many of you is waaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1993 "before your time"?"

Every single hand in the room but one.

Christ on a pogo stick. I grew up with average kids who knew the plots of TV shows from 10 years before they were born, because they were still re-running them every day. I'm even pretty sure SOAW might have been on TV a few million times since '93 too.

I'm conversant on both cultural phenomena like movies and music, and actual historical events that happened long before I was born, even long before my grandparents were born, and it's not a rare feat, I swear. FFS, they make kids take history for about 10 years, even in the idiot academies that pass for public schools.

Or so you might have thought. You have to wonder WTF they cover in those classrooms, but quite frankly I'm afraid to look. I'm pretty sure that the Kardashians are an AP Class for college credit.

Apparently, if it didn't happen on Netflix or Twitter, or since 2010, it never happened.

This is why Jay Leno could ask basic grade school questions at malls and on college campuses and never fail to find 99% dumbasses, from wall-to-wall, every other night for over twenty years on The Tonight Show. At this point, having been off it for 8 years, it's a wonder anyone under 40 even knew who he was when the story came out last week that he was injured in his garage. And if anyone did the same bit now, no one would get it, because they wouldn't know the answers either. Unless they asked their grandfathers. Which is as it should be for people who think Rosetta Stone is just a language app for their computer, because those are the Top Ten search results on Google. ("Wait; you mean there's an actual Rosetta Stone? Did they name it after the app?" Kill me now.)

That we have suffered to produce such utterly but proudly ignorant and wholly uncurious generations (plural!) of lackwits, and raise them past majority, completely unaware of anything that doesn't come up on their YouTube queue, is a national scandal.

But clearly, I've reached the awkward age: not as old as old people, and not as blisteringly dumb as young people. 

For the 95% of the Baby Duck Generations to whom it applies: Get off your goddamned phones, and crack a friggin' book, FFS! Life started before you were born, and some of that stuff is actually kind of important. Like, even more important than Taylor Swift's new album. For reals. Crazy, right?

Yes, I'm shooting Baby Ducks in a barrel. Because they're not going to shoot themselves, however much we might wish otherwise.

History For the Attention-Span Challenged

 

Fifty-four years ago, the US Navy nearly blew the USS Forrestal out of the water off the coast of Vietnam, at the height of the Vietnam War.

Heroic and genius-level accident investigation by Navy uncovered the fact that the entire incident started because of stray electrical energy, leaking into the weapons firing system, which caused an unintended discharge of a live rocket across the flight deck, and into fully armed A-4 Skyhawks prepped for a strike launch, carrying both full fuel tanks, and the last batch of rusted and obsolete WWII iron bombs, which resulting conflagration set off multiple rapid detonations, which decapitated the damage control crews responding, killed 134 sailors, injured and wounded 161 more, and very nearly cost the Navy its first supercarrier.

The pilot of the Phantom that launched the stray rocket, Lt. Cmdr. James Bangert, received no punishment whatsoever for the incident, despite $72 million dollars of damage to the ship, the compete loss of 21 aircraft, damage to 40 more, and the toll of dead and injured sailors, because it was manifestly obvious that it wasn't his fault, despite being the one person that flipped the switch that initiated the launch, and subsequent catastrophe. (Mirabile dictu!)

One of the Skyhawks was manned by a navy lieutenant commander named John S. McCain III, son of a full admiral (CINCUSNAVEUR), later a heroic POW, and after that, legendary massive fuck-up RINO saboteur while US senator from Arizona.

So disliked was he, that even decades after it was well-known and documented that he was nothing but a victim and unintended bystander caught right in the middle of the initial explosion and fire on Forrestal, and who barely escaped alive, people still, to this day, try to erroneously and deceitfully somehow pin the incident on McCain.

Pay no attention to how the behavior of such deranged anti-McCain moonbats exactly replicates the fervor to pin a tragic set shooting, not on the serial fuck-up incompetent weapons handler, who authored and caused the entire thing, but onto disliked and thoroughly dislikeable anti-gun fucktard Alec Baldwin.

Psychotic delusion doesn't repeat, but it sure as hell rhymes.

And to prove it, with an even deeper dive in distant history, pray let us continue.

People Who Should Know Better have thrown their brains out in order to get on the "Lynch Alec!" train.

Andrew Branca, who's been hurled at us in thread after thread like J. Noble Daggett from True Grit, assumes his case all the way to a conviction, after first handwaving away about 100 salient facts, based on a total ignorance of anything that goes on at a movie set during production, including some of the most critical facts in the whole story. If wishes were horses, he could assume himself atop a mighty steed indeed. He should know better, but as part and parcel of why we call him the jackass he is, he'd rather sell his legal soul to be the White Knight predicting criminal jeopardy for Baldwin than face any facts that show the error of his own diaper spackle theories. He truly puts the anal in analysis. Unfortunately, his jurisprudence was trumped twenty years ago, by the legal acumen of Felix Unger:

And Kurt Schlichter, with whom we frequently agree, and would love to point to this time, knows that letting Baldwin off is justice, but would rather burn down the law itself in this case, to give Baldwin the same roasting the Left regularly gives people in highly publicized show trials. Schlicter, too, should know better, but we leave it to the legal acumen of Paul Scofield, in the role of a lifetime, to explain far better than we, the utter folly of sacrificing the law just to get even:

Long time readers, whose opinions I respect, would rather not hear any more about this incident, thinking it too petty to trifle with any further. But aside from being the decider on this blog, we find that when something so petty induces people who should be of far higher character than back-and-forth on this topic has revealed them to be in fact, we're right on the money, and its exactly this sort of "trivial" incident that's highlighting how deep the rot in the culture goes, and how fragile is the civility upon our own side, that they would become so frothingly deranged over so small a thing.

We can scarce imagine what fresh hells await us one and all once things begin getting actually desperate.

Don't look to the horizon, dear friends. Your problems aren't going to come from there. Look instead to your own fences, because the biggest problems you'll face in the next decade are going to come from closer than a few miles from your own front doorstep.

All Baldwin's trials and tribulations have done is rip the scab off the problems you're going to have with so-called friends and allies, because it's never an enemy who does the damage. It's the one who calls you friend - and then stabs you in the back - who's going to sell you out for their 30 pieces of silver.

Watch your six, and don't give your trust away. Make people earn it.

History For The Short Attention Span Crowd

h/t tsk tsk should've known better

AKA "Don't pee on my head, and tell me it's raining."

A mere fraction of the Port Of Los Angeles

Once upon a time, there were four rich men. The were called nabobs. It was shortened to "nobs". They all decided to build lavish homes in the same neighborhood in San Franshitco (back when it was a bustling thriving nexus of commerce, rather than an open festering sore, open-air outhouse for the homeless, and running national joke), and all those homes on the same hill there. It is called Nob Hill to this day.

The four named themselves The Association, and were comprised of

Leland Stanford (former 8th governor of California, later U.S. senator from CA until his death, and Central Pacific and Southern Pacific RR president; you may have heard of a small private college he founded).

Collis P. Huntington (CPRR VP, director, and chief legal counsel, and whose nephew, who started the first inter-urban train transit  in SoCal himself, has a city in L.A., another city and beach in OC, and his lavish San Marino mansion and grounds all named after them).

Mark Hopkins (treasurer of the CPRR, the Trump of his day, and on the former site of whose mansion there's a landmark Frisco hotel that still bears his name).

Charles Crocker (railroad route chief engineer, and later financier, who once controlled Wells-Fargo and served as its president; he had a wee bank of his own once too; their commercials in my youth introduced the world to a struggling brother-sister singing act, before the bank was consolidated back into the Wells-Fargo financial empire).

Among the pasttimes of these rich kids, as noted above, was running a wee railroad, known as the Central Pacific Railroad.  The one that spanned the country by 1869. Later, it was consolidated with the Southern Pacific RR, at which point, in 1909, it connected the sleepy little nowhere cow-town of Los Angeles with the small wharves of San Pedro/Wilmington and Long Beach, the greatest natural harbors on the western coast of the continental U.S., after San Francisco Bay itself.

The sprawling openness thereabouts, however, with more open land all around than all of peninsulated San Franshitco County, allowed that by 1920, that Port (actually two adjacent ports) would surpass Frisco, and become the pre-eminent port of entry for the entire nation, remaining so unto the present day.

I provided copious links, because I'm a giver, and because You Could Look It Up.

We told you that story to tell you this one:

Railroad tracks run right to dockside in Los Angeles/Long Beach to the present day, a fact which makes fairytales about green truck mandates being responsible for the current goods bottleneck so recockulous as to cause open-mouthed gawping at the spectacle, and at the jackassery necessary to palm such a load of bullshit off as steak.

The fact that there are a finite number of berths, cranes, and longshoremen, with a commensurately predictable maximum number of containers that can be offloaded per hour, and thus a similarly predictable number of ships per day, expressable for one-, two-, and three-shift days, is rather tediously obvious to anyone who can do math with their shoes on.

You can't starve a python for nearly eighteen months, than suddenly try to feed it an entire herd of elephants, and expect that everything will proceed smoothly through from there.

This shouldn't have had to be said, yet here we are.

Just part of what's waiting to unload locally

There are, at latest reports, some multiple dozens (61 ships, per NYSlimes as of 9/21) of loaded container ships sitting offshore from just those twin SoCal ports.

The average container ship hauls between 500 and 7500 40' containers, or TEU equivalents (one TEU is a 20' conex, and container ships range from 1000 to 15000 TEUs of capacity).

The average freight train carries 200 and more 40- and 53-footers, apiece.

The average truck pulls one. A double trailer, with 53' boxes, could manage 2½.

Yet no one is squawking mountains of bullshit about how trains are backed up 97 deep trying to fit all the containers on them and pull them to points eastward, because that'd be patent horseshit.

And if picking up loads at the ports were really "the root cause", even a gifted dimwit would simply platoon the compliant trucks at the port, carry the containers from there a couple of miles from the port, to any one of hundreds of nearby SoCal truck yards, and transfer the loads to the millions of trucks that can't use the ports, but which nonetheless transport goods all over the rest of the Golden State 24/7/365, as anyone who's spent 5 seconds on the freeways hereabouts can attest; they would not haul the loads all the way to the motherfornicating Califrutopia state line, hundreds of miles away, FFS!

Conflating "port of" with "entire state" for the Fucktard Win!

The idea that there is any shortage of trailer trucks operating on California's highways, especially in the corridor from the Ports to every other interstate highway accessible from same is so recockulous as to fail the sniff test for 0.2 seconds with anyone who drives here for more than 5 minutes. But cleverly, they invented a heavy-duty workaround where truck traffic can be hauled entirely independent of the highways we drive on, at hundreds of times the capacity of a tractor-trailer rig, for 95% of every journey for every pound of cargo carried, and it's been around since the early 1800s. We called them railroads.

So please do some basic dumbshit math before trying to claim that lack of new compliant trucks is why nothing is moving through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, as if that could ever be true, and pretending like they couldn't just get the containers straight onto railroad cars and ship them directly to 47 other states by the literal trainload, taking the trucks out of the equation entirely.

The entire pipeline is overfull; it's no more complicated than that. Pythons can't digest elephants overnight.

When containers are stacking up at 500 freight yards by the railroad tracks, you can tell me there's a truck problem. Not before. Not even in Califrutopia.

The bullshit passed by the idiots here in Excremento is big, and unquestionably stupid and short-sighted, but it isn't omnipotent, and it isn't the reason that they can't unload cargo any faster or get it to your local Dollar Store, so pull the handle on that sort of nonsense, and send it to the sewer it crawled out of, rather than passing it off as gospel.

And try shaving people's arguments with Occam's Razor.

Fucktards gonna fucktard, but you don't have to listen to them if you can do basic thinking.

Posers discuss strategy. Amateurs discuss tactics. Professionals discuss logistics. Geniuses learn all of them from history.

But maybe that little historical wander is why we keep telling you to look at history like James Burke does. Wheels within wheels, all spinning and interconnecting. The guy should be the chairman emeritus of History for the world, for life.

UPDATE: FAR more likelier explanations:

1) New transport regs making it harder for truckers to make a living, so they've gradually bailed out. Nobody notices the dog that doesn't bark until after the burglar's been and gone.

2) Jab mandates at rail and truck companies (see Winston Smith in Comments), playing hell with staffing. Wait until this becomes a longshoreman issue as well, and grab your ass then. You can't replace them, and without them, just like truckers and rail workers, literally NOTHING moves. The Vaxxholes are about to pee on the third rail. Grab your popcorn.

3) Paying @$$holes too much welfare for far too long to sit on their asses playing X-box instead of going out and getting hard and relatively dangerous transportation jobs.

4) Leaned-out (times 30 years) jackassical "just-in-time" port infrastructure, with no elasticity to ramp up or down for higher capacity imports or exports, let alone both simultaneously. You can send more ships, or trucks and trains, but you can't whistle up more docks, cranes, and operators overnight.

5) Anyone can stop an economy, or a car engine, by shooting a big enough bullet into the engine block. What you can't do is restart it just as fast, simply by grabbing pliers, and just pulling the slug out afterwards.

We repeat for emphasis: Anyone of even average intelligence should have known this without being told.

Which is why none of it occurred to any government, from city to state to federal, nor likely will ever. They're simply not packing the gear to grasp that.

STILL TL;DR? Read the concise analysis by Noveske's Rock, below. It's tight, right, and flawlessly reasoned.

One definitionof insanity is trying the same thing, over and over, despite the fact it doesn't work.

PSA: Tap Codes

 h/t Matt Bracken, WRSA, and over two thousand Vietnam POWs

Many reports put the K with J, rather than C.
Either approach works.

This is the famous Tap Code, introduced by Col. Carlyle Harris, at such garden spots as the Hanoi Hilton, Alcatraz, the Briar Patch, and numerous other Vietnam luxury accommodations for American POWs, where they were treated to rotten pumpkin soup with bugs and worms, with a bit of spoiled rat meat on holidays, like Lenin's and Ho Chi Minh's Birthday, in between having their shoulders and hips dislocated with bamboo poles, while having the soles of their feet beaten with strips of old tires, for the sport and occasional intel gathering of the Soviet Union, Red China, and North Vietnam.

They were kept in solitary confinement for their entire stays, some for up to 9+ years, until the last couple of weeks before B-52s blowing hell out of Hanoi convinced NVN that giving them back, and laying off South Vietnam was in their best interest, unless they wanted a rubble pile for a country.

North Vietnam still got off too lightly, and we should have nuked them on general principles.

Their extra-curricular activities undoubtedly broke, maimed, and disfigured most of the POWs they held for life, which was why they only released the prettiest and least-disfigured fraction (596) of the men we knew (estimates up to 2500+) they were holding. (FTR, they released the last 13 French POWs from Dien Bien Phu, from 1954, sixteen years later, long after that debacle and the subsequent French withdrawal.) The US POWs they undoubtedly shipped onwards to the Soviet Union and China - senior SAC and B-52 guys with loads of valuable intel in their heads during the Cold War - or held themselves for further torture and amusement, either died in captivity, most after 1973, or they were simply executed at some point, to a metaphysical certainty - when the commie bastards running Vietnam to this day and still holding them prisoner got tired of feeding them and playing with them because they'd run out of things to do to them. Anyone alive now would be in their 70s or 80s, extremely unlikely given that sort of treatment. They're almost certainly dead at this point in time. They're not forgotten, and what they left us includes the Tap Code.

But I digress.

The key to using the Tap Code, is understanding how to use the box, above, info that was somewhat glossed over in the links above.

It is properly used by going down, and then right, for each letter.

As noted in the exemplar at WRSA and by MB, abbreviations can be, and were, used.

"Gob Bless You" became "GBU".

Most of you already know what BFYTW stands for.

Using tap code, that would become:

One tap, two taps

Two taps, one tap

Five taps, four taps

Four taps, four taps

Five taps, two taps

Numbers are simply numbers, 1-9. (Z or O can be substituted for zero.)

Here's a bit more explanation from the originator:

That, plus memory, allowed guys in a 5'x5' darkened cell to know the names of everyone in their cell block, everyone in their prison, every name of every POW captured, and trade Bible passages, song lyrics, personal stories and details, and anything else, and keep it in their heads indefinitely.

Pray to a merciful deity this remains wartime arcana from before you were born, and doesn't become day-to-day useful. Because commies do what commies do. Every. Single. Time.

Day Of Days

Seventy-six years and about two hours ago, men not much older than the idiots out rioting and looting last weekend, and better men than you or I, were crossing beaches carpeted with the dead and dying, and dodging bombs, bullets, mines, mortars, and artillery, to begin kicking the asses of the Nazis occupying France, and bringing about the end of WWII.

If you ever meet anyone who served during that conflict, especially anyone who landed in Normandy on D-Day (an eighteen year old that day would be 94 today, so they're getting pretty scarce), simply say "Thank you."

Humbly, and respectfully, as befits their service, and that of those who never left Normandy.

Celebrating Diversity

Commander Zero reminded us yesterday that this is Rooftop Korean Anniversary time.

His linked story, however, is large amounts of ahistoric twaddle.

Whoever wrote that tripe has no idea what went down, and clearly wasn’t alive nor living in L.A. at the time. I was.

During the interim between the Rodney King incident, and the Rodney King Verdict, a female Korean liquor store clerk in South Central was getting walloped for stopping a teenage black girl from shoplifting, so as the black girl (the 1991 exemplar of Trayvon Martin Syndrome: "Play Stupid games: Win Stupid Prizes") left the store with (or without) a stolen orange juice bottle, the store owner capped her with her gat – in the back. Deader than canned tuna, right there.
And then got a pass from the L.A. County court (probation, fine, community service. No prison time). C'est la guerre.

Koreans had taken over many of the markets in South Central L.A. over decades, after the previous owners (generally Jewish) had been burned out of the ‘hood in the Watts Riots of ’65. The lack of any supermarkets in that aftermath, for those long decades, made South Central (exactly as today) a “food desert”, where absent a long drive to less diverse regions of the city, only corner liquor stores had the handy necessities of life, like milk, eggs, bread, etc., and being the Diversity, the locals, either lacking the wherewithal and desire to run their own markets, or more likely, knowing that they’d be robbed and shoplifted blind by their own co-Diversity beans, resented the outsiders. Plus ça change...

The shooting above didn’t add anything to their fund of ill will.

So come the Rodney King Free Shoes and Televisions Festival, old scores got settled. Not least of which with Korean shopkeepers in the ‘hood.

In one memorable bit of local color, the Koreans, many former military veterans of South Korea’s National Service rules, took to the roofs of their stores.

LAPD, all aflutter, bypassed rioting Diversity beans of all colors in their haste to disarm the Koreans doing what LAPD would not do. (And no, LAPD wasn’t “stretched too thin”, they were deployed to the central bus yards, and there waited and watched the riots for three days, because Chief Knucklehead Wannabe Gates and Mayor Egging The Riots On Bradley weren’t on speaking terms. The rank and file was largely furious, but management’s plan was to do absolutely nothing, mainly to punish the citizenry at large for daring to indict police officers for beating the hell out of anyone they felt deserved it. Anybody above the rank of Sgt. in LAPD from then on was and is now, a complete gutless douchebadge.)

So when confronted by LAPD on the point, the Koreans handed over their rifles, and LAPD did what they did best in the riots: they beat feet and hid again.

Whereupon the Koreans, being no dummies, waited until the black-and-whites drove off leaving skidmarks, went to their trunks, pulled out their second set of arms, returned to their rooftops, and prevented many a mob from doing to their stores what happened to thousands of others.

On seeing one approaching group seeking cheap goods, the rooftop Koreans present scattered a number of rounds into the pavement ahead of the melee, and the crowd quickly decided to go loot and burn on another street, while still several hundred yards short of their objective.

That’s how it works in a riot: people tend not to go all in just for the fun of looting and arson, if it’s going to become a life-and-death proposition.

There were no complaints, and no arrests, AFAIK, of any rooftop Koreans for the duration. IDK whether they ever got the original set of confiscated rifles back, but knowing the LAPD and D.A., it’s doubtful.

And the whole kerfluffle could have been nipped in the bud, when videographer George Halliday showed up at the Foothill Division station with his homeshot video of the original incident the next day, suggesting that the LAPD might want to pass it along to their Internal Affairs folks for further investigation. Whereupon the desk sergeant in L.A.'s Finest "suggested" to Halliday that he ought to get the hell out of the station rapidly, before he got himself arrested, so he took it over to KTLA-TV  instead. The rest is history.

The moral of the story:

Since It Keeps Coming Up...

Some folks, on multiple threads,  apparently think I somehow missed Robert L. Gore's most recent essay.

Au contraire, mes amis.

RLG is a bright guy, and writes well and thoughtfully, better than me without question, and most days and times, but this example is none of those things. Sorry, but I said that out loud.
Tantrum and screed is not reasoned polemic, kids.

As if I didn't post a response to this two days ago, elsewhere.

"Objection: Assumes facts not in evidence, i.e. that a temporary quarantine will become a decades-long boondoggle.

Reductio ad absurdum Fallacy, 20 yard penalty and loss of possession.

And I observe FTR that people crying about something that’s not yet three weeks old as though it will go on endlessly are children who were never spanked, sent to bed without their supper, or told to wait for any form of gratification.

Most of us grew out of that phase of “right now is forever” tantruming somewhere around 1st grade, though the “this minute is forever” argument is sometimes heard as late as adolescence:

."

{FTR: "I'll never get off this planet" transitions to

lightspeed to Alderaan in about 30 minutes of

cinema time. QED

I don't pick examples randomly.}

RLG's personal response to that engendered a further response from me:

"You figure that stay-at-home declarations now for a current pandemic, which is knocking off upwards of 1K persons/day here, and more each day, will automagically become as open-ended and everlasting as the Patriot Act because…why, exactly?

Because that’s what we did in [2009], when Obozo had Swine Flu to pin this on?
Because Wilson did that with Spanish Flu in 1918?
Because of all the other presidents that declared perpetual martial law in every outbreak of bubonic plague in the U.S. before antibiotics?
And all those other times that happened too: smallpox, cholera, typhus, yellow fever, malaria, mumps, measles, polio?
Wait…none of that ever happened…??
Not even once???

So, what’s changed in the last 12 or 102 or 245 years to make you think we’d go for that now, since we didn’t then, ever?

I think one of these things is not like the other, not least of which because at a non-infinite point in time, probably within this calendar year (and perhaps much earlier), people would not and will not sit home and starve, or politely await handouts from the unquestioned benificence of Uncle Government, let alone do so in perpetuity, despite the current pandemic, and will express their further displeasure rather more kinetically than verbally.

You evidently disagree, or think that such response is a trifling thing.

I’m educable.
Please, show your work.

Particularly when 8 states are still under no such order, and some of them have been under one for less than 3 days.

I’ve been telling people since January this was going to be worse than “just the flu”, and the lunatards here are still in denial with people dropping in NYFC every 5 minutes, and I’m the Chicken Little; but you’ve got us giving up the republic hand over fist forever in less time than William Henry Harrison served as POTUS, on your say-so, and that’s revealed truth for the ages?

{Bonus for readers here:


Common Core grads: POTUS for precisely 31 days. You could look it up.™
Also one of my favorite presidents, for the same reason.

}
























You’ve written some good stuff, but I don’t think you could make that fly with a genie and a magic carpet."

-----

Have at it, in case my responses to RLG weren't clear enough.
Comments are open.
Anyone opening from the 5-year-old's complaint that "Now is forever" will be on the first course of the menu, labeled "appetizers".
The weapons of choice in this duel will be flammenwerfers, at 10 paces.
Asbestos underpants are cheerfully recommended.
No prisoners will be taken.
Zero fucks will be given.

If you cannot point to the time a U.S. president declared endless martial law in response to a disease outbreak in your opening salvo, best you stay home, and not saddle up for this Children's Crusade.

Never  ╪ Now.
Now ╪ Forever.

Cleverly, the English language solved these difficult logical concepts by having different words for each of them.
Consult a dictionary in case this wasn't made clear to you in the normal scope of your K-12 educational experiences.

Two Paths

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I --
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference. - Robert Frost

John Wilder (yes, THE John Wilder) has a great post today on adversity and perseverance.
As usual, RTWT.
We'll be here when you're done.

“Never give in. Never give in. Never, never, never, never – in nothing great or small, large or petty – never give in, except to convictions of honor and good sense."  

– Winston Churchill

Yeah, and Sylvester Stallone was on his second trip around the studios, who had all rejected his script for Rocky multiple times, and so broke he was about to be evicted from his crappy one-bedroom apartment, before he finally found someone who’d make the movie and let him play the lead.
Which only turned out to be the Best Picture of 1976.

But, natzsofast, Guido.

The illustrations we chose can make a big difference in the story we tell.
So let's give equal time to an opposing view.

Let us also remember another guy’s story of failure.

Bob was an executive, not a failure, per se. But he hadn’t really made his mark and hit the top tier.
So he spearheaded the drive to create a revolutionary new car, for one of the top auto makers in the world.
Anyone who knows cars knows it as the Edsel.
Yes, Bob was truly one of the best and brightest.

So best and bright that JFK made him Secretary of Defense, and then his failures kicked into high gear.
He thought a war in South Vietnam was not just necessary, but winnable.
He thought the F-111 would make a great airplane, for both the Air Farce and the Navy.
He made the Army buy the M-16.
And he thought drafting literal retards would be great for battlefield success.
Anyone reading this can google how those brilliant stunts turned out.

After such a lifetime of failure, you’d have thought Bob would have retired 0-for-Ever, but he was just hitting his stride.

Bob moved on to the World Bank, and came up with the genius idea to lend billions to Turd World countries like Mexico, and dozens of others, knowing they had no way to repay it, ever.

What could possibly go wrong?

There are thus three morals to this story:

1) Don’t be Bob.
2) Sometimes, your first failure is nature’s way of telling you to go home, stick a gun in your mouth, and do humanity a favor, by taking one for the team.
3) Know which thing Failure is telling you.

Because sometimes failure, like with Edison, is just teaching you 999 ways not to make a light bulb.
Other times, like with Bob, failure is telling you that your greatest service to humanity would be as a soil supplement.

The Past Is Another Country

The Golden Age in the Golden State, circa 1958.
Actual service, for 25¢/gallon.
If somebody did this now, even at current prices, they'd be sued for inducing heart attacks in customers, and they couldn't find nine people in 50 states with this kind of work ethic under the age of 40.

It was really like this in America once, kids, every single day.
I saw it with my own eyes.
Weep for what you've lost.


If you prefer, a lighter take from 1963's comedy classic It's A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World:

Hoist A Glass!

 

Che got nine bullets in his sorry @$$,
and all I got was this rockin' meme! Salud, bitch.

Forgive the lapse, but as Boat Guy reminded me in Comments, today is the anniversary of the date in 1967 when sociopath commie bastard mass murderer (but I repeat myself) Ernesto "Che" Guevara performed his highest duty to mankind, by volunteering as a target for a detachment of the glorious forces of freedom in Bolivia, where he was wounded, captured, and later executed summarily. Dulce et decorum est.

A toast, boys and girls, to the outstanding marksmanship of Las Fuerzas Armadas de Bolivia, and their virtuous achievement of making another Good Communist, in a hail of gunfire. Nice shooting, amigos. Viva Libertad!

And be of good cheer, fellow diehards: today means we're another year closer to Dead Hanoi Jane Day. Whenever that day comes, it cannot be too soon.

Idiot Savants

It's long past time the idiot savants proposing more freedom restrictions, that have never worked, recalled from the education they blithely ignored, that the biggest school massacre (45 dead) in U.S. history wasn't accomplished with any sort of firearms, but rather with dynamite, nearly a hundred years ago, in Michigan, and at a time when it was completely legal to go down to the hardware store and purchase machine guns, cash, and carry out, in about two minutes. So much for easy access to guns being the problem, then or ever.

(Proof, if you desired such, that historical facts to Leftards are like kryptonite to Superman, as Larry Elder frequently notes.)

You'll never stop deranged lunatics from killing scads of people, because they can.
Especially not by banning one object in their arsenal. They'll poison people, with things they can pick by the side of the road; they'll set the buildings on fire ( Wait, geniusii, you thought you were going to ban fire...?!?! ), they'll run them over with trucks. Or whatever is to hand.
It's just what they do. Like rabid dogs, kill them where found. Recidivism drops to 0%, and you dissuade a legion of would-be copycats.

The two most recent shootings, about which there's an unwarranted fuss on absolute grounds, pale into utter insignificance beside the weekly and annual combined toll of death and destruction that is Chicongo, every day for years. With hardly a peep from anyone, let alone the Party Organ Media jackholes. And then there's the Baltimorons. Detroitistan. The District of Corruption. Atlanta. And on and on.

Overwhelmingly, the problem areas are run by totalitarian Democrats, from coast to coast, (and invariably, with the most draconian anti-gun laws they can pass, yet the worst crime in the nation, and they can't figure out the exact correlation), and we're still shoveling trainloads of tax money into the furnace for the idiotic LBJ boondoggles called "The Great Society" and "The War On Poverty".

They didn't work. They never could.
They just made things orders of magnitude worse.
Exactly as designed.

This is why Communism is a non-starter with a pragmatic people. And why they keep trying to import enough ignorant illiterate jackasses from Shitholias and Trashcanistans to overwhelm the common sense population demographically, and vote it into being.
Hot Tip, Leftards: We see the bunny up your sleeve.

It didn't make society great, poverty is still winning (because it's caused by stupid life choices, not lack of means, and to fix stupid, you need a bigger hammer, not a hammock), and crime in this country is >gasp!< a function of race, culture, and stupidity, not poverty.

Crime went down in the Depression. The real criminals had their heyday in the boom times of the Roaring Twenties, under Prohibition and easy virtue. The celebutard criminals of the Thirties were, then exactly as now, mainly oddballs and media creations to sell papers at flagging yellow-sheet rags.

Crime in this country amongst strictly whites is lower than it is in Belgium, and among non-Hispanic whites, it's lower than crime in Lichtenstein. (Common Core grads, look it up.) Barrios and ghetto 'hoods produce most of the crime in this country, most of the criminals, and most of the victims. Mass shooters in general, and criminal white people overall, are both as rare as hen's teeth in relative and absolute terms, and always have been.

The only thing "Diversity for its own sake" strengthens is that class, the prison industry, and the metastasized police state we all decry, from cop to judge, and everyone in between, including the indispensable instruments, the perps.

Look no farther than Europe to see who's doing all the criminaling, including making Stockholm the rape capital of Europe. That's not being done by Abba fans, but rather, by hordes of unnamed Worthy Oriental Gentlemen. You could look it up.

Nota bene: That is not, racist fucktards, saying that all black or brown people are therefore criminals.

It's saying until you address root causes in those communities of why they think crime is a winning idea, you won't fix it.
Poverty is not a root cause.
A culture of stupidity, lawlessness, and learned helplessness is.

A great start would be honesty about who and where the criminals really are, and making crime not pay off, primarily by making its pursuit, apprehension, and draconian punishment a greater priority than is subsidizing welfare queens and single mothers, and driving fathers out of the picture, exactly as the entire government was warned would happen when the topic came up, by an earnest young 1964 Democrat bureaucrat (before that condition involved ritual cerebral mutilation and lobotomization by the party and its apparatchiks) in the Department of Heath, Education, and Welfare named Daniel Patrick Moynihan (back when it wasn't considered knee-jerk Raaaacissssssss! to refer to them, even in print by Democrat leadership, as "negroes").

So much for income redistribution as a solution.

There is also no law, or group of laws you can pass to end crazy people.
But you can end the ones you catch, with a rope or bullet (or, if you're squeamish, a needle).
And you could start putting the violent ones and violence-prone back into lifelong institutionalized care, rather than roaming free-range crazy, while decent folks are forced to live behind barred windows and vault doors instead. If only for the novelty of the idea in the last two generations.
Letting them run free and loose hasn't worked for one minute either, and it's another failed Liberal Stupidity Policy (but I repeat myself) that needs to be abandoned, and with vigor.

And you can stop giving them fame beyond Ludicrous Levels, and stop analyzing and glorifying their last public act of insanity, under the guise of pushing more socialist totalitarianism down our throats, for our own good.

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” - C.S. Lewis

And you could stop subsidizing fatherless welfare moms with seven children from six baby daddies tomorrow. Allow one set check amount for one child, and cut welfare to a fraction, where the amount is the same as number of out-of-wedlock births. I.e. someone with 2 fatherless bastards gets 1/2 that amount, someone with 3 gets 1/3rd, someone with 5 gets 1/5th, etc. In a generation, that number will be 2%, not 99%, of the target population.

Then, stop importing people here (legally and illegally) from Third World shitholes, and let Adam Smith's Invisible Hand of the capitalistic marketplace drive native employment and wages for actual, productive labor through the clouds. For those that will work, anyways; the rest are shiftless wastrels, for whom there should be a simple choice between unrelieved poverty, or chain gangs. But not so much as a dime of public largesse.

Income redistribution schemes are always corrosively idiotic, and lead to Somalia, Cuba, and Venezuela like gravity makes rocks fall off mountains. This is Econ 101 stuff.

Trying real Communism, Moar!, Harder!, Faster!, is going to get you gun violence like it's 1939. You don't want to open that ball, unless you have a death wish, on both a personal and a civilizational level.

And we have a Bill of Rights to warn the thoroughgoing morons in government (that would be ALL of them):

"You fucktards can't touch this!". Ever!

 

Democracy is a mob, always has been, and the Founders knew this in their bones.
We're a republic, not a democracy, and tinkering with the original blueprints has only fucked us harder and faster, and it gets worse every time they tinker with a successful original blueprint.

Persisting in the delusion that something needs monkeying with, by people 60-80 IQ points stupider than the original authors, gets you craptastic Hollywood movies, and the abomination that is our current Leviathan government.

But if you really want the guns, you're going to get them.


Bullets first.


Hand to God on that.

Call that toss in the air.
We'll be loading magazines.
MOLON LABE, bitchez.

See This Flick!

Whether you saw this in the theater and liked it, missed it and want to catch up, or never heard of it, but want to see a movie about war where all the details are correct, this documentary is out now on DVD/BD. $13 at Le Boutique Targét and Wally Mart.

As the box photo notes, written and directed by Peter Jackson ( Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit), WWI archival footage from 100 years ago was painstakingly restored, colorized flawlessly, and time-corrected (film cameras were hand-cranked in that era, and obviously, when shells and bullets were flying, some operators got a bit adrenaline-amped up) to make the people in it move at proper frame rates of real life. Then they employed a small army of lip readers, decoded every word spoken on silent films, and had the dialogue read by proper Englishmen from the appropriate shires and regions. They also used actual WWI veterans whose voice interview recordings were languishing in the cavernous archives at the UK's Imperial War Museum, and used them as narration for some of the appropriate footage. It's marvelously done, and the closest thing you'll ever get to sending out a crew to the trenches of 1916 for a live report, after time travelling back a century.

This is hauntingly beautiful and glorious documentary film work that was a labor of love for Jackson. (He did the whole thing for free, to honor his grandfather, Sgt. William Jackson, who served in the British Army in that war.) It's not a narrative of events, it's a detailed immersive look at what it was like to be  Tommy Squaddie in the trenches anytime from 1914-1918, for any army, but specifically British troops.

If you saw it in the theaters last year during its limited release, get a copy. If you missed it, Netflix it. And get a copy.

This is 5-star fantastic filmmaking that should have earned Jackson a special award just for doing it, on behalf of forty million ghosts on all sides of The Great War (before anyone knew enough to number them) who never lived to see 1919.

Heartily, enthusiastically, unequivocally recommended.

'60s Flashbacks

Older Brother (the crazy one of the family; no, really) knew from way out that he was not college material, long before the twilight of his senior year of high school, which I'm sure surprised mom and dad not a whit either.

So, long about January of his senior year, he and his Best Buddy got the bright idea that the thing to do was to both sign up for the Marine Corps (see kids, it's in the DNA) on the Buddy Program, an actual program they had in which they would put you and your friend together, guaranteed, in Boot Camp, and try to station you near each other afterwards.

For unskilled white kids in the late Happy Days/American Grafitti era, it was a brilliant idea: get a skill, see the world, get out of the house and away from your old man, blah blah blah.

Unless, as in this case, when you're in the Class of '65. That's 1965.

Then, it becomes pure genius.
Right about the time, long about March, after the contracts are signed, that the president announces "Ah am sending the Marines tuh Da Nang..."

Never in history have so many suffered for the delusions of one thorough-going fool.

(I mentioned the pair weren't college material, didn't I?)
"Where in the hell is Da Nang???"
"Don't worry kid, you'll find out soon enough."

But it worked out, mostly. Older Brother and his Buddy graduated MCRD in the same platoon, summer of '65. Buddy went to UH-1 Maintenance School, Older Brother sent to Generator Repairman School.

Followed by orders to Da Nang, RVN.

What's to worry? In the rear with the gear, fixing generators? Sweeeeet!

Except in Vietnam, the only place for generators was out faaaaaar in the boonies, where there wasn't any other power.
And the primary reason generators stopped working was because Charlie had shelled the sh*t out of them the night before.
Every. Single. Time.

So, for 13 months, Older Brother would get up, get assigned to fix broken equipment at places like Con Thien, Khe Sanh, Camp Carroll, the Rockpile, and 40 other little slices of hell in I Corps, up by the DMZ, and he'd hitch a ride thence with his buddy, crew chief on a UH-1 flying in support of said forward-deployed hellhole. (For grins and giggles, they'd kick the occasional sandbag out the side door en route and watch the people in the paddies all run off in all directions, thinking it was a bomb when it splashed into the rice paddy. 18 years old, 8000 miles from home, with minimal adult supervision, and getting shelled and shot at daily, y'know? "What were they gonna do to us? Shave our heads and ship us to 'Nam?")

So out they'd fly, Buddy's helo would drop Older Brother off in Fire Base Craptastic, and he'd go fix the broken gear all day in tropical sun, getting a great farmer's tan, and dodging snipers. Then, because he was a certified REMF, the folks at said base would happily assign him guard duty all night, so one of the grunts could rest, which meant him getting no sleep, while being shelled, or watching for "gooks in the wire", which happened on more than a few occasions.

Then go back to Da Nang the next day, for the same shelling and guard duty in the "rear".
Then back out the next day in the field to do it all over again.
While I and Baby Brother watched our parents get older and greyer watching the nightly news for 13 months at the dinner table, from '66-'67.

But he and his Buddy, thank a merciful deity, made it out of their tours in 'Nam alive, and mostly intact. He got out of the Marines in '69, so early that same summer, freshly back in the world, he decided it was time for myself and Baby Brother to go out shooting.

Early one morning, we proceeded out to the desert wastelands he was familiar with around Twentynine Palms, and when jackrabbits proved scarce there, and he got his van stuck in the sand, we returned closer to the pavement.

He got the great idea to go shooting much nearer home, up in the empty hills around the San Fernando Valley where we lived. In this case, up in the Santa Susanna Pass, between the SFV and Simi Valley, during our summer vacation from school.

You've seen the territory in the backgrounds of any number of westerns from the movies beginning in the 1930s to TV shows in the 1970s.

But we were there in mid-summer of 1969. June, or maybe even July.

We, pardon the phrase, "sure as shooting" were in unincorporated LA County, and not actually breaking any laws AFAIK, but even though it was unincorporated, and thus outside of city limits and LAPD territory, it wasn't that far from L.A. city limits, and civilization, so in short order, doubtless one or more of the nearby residents must have dutifully reported someone shooting some guns off up in the canyon.

We saw the LA Sheriff's car arrive on the road up above where we were beating the brush for jackrabbits, lizards, and such, and before he saw us. So we cheesed it, taking temporary refuge in some nearby rocky caves, because Older Brother had an inkling that no deputy was going to get his street shoes dirty chasing through the cactus and underbrush for kids shooting .22s off in the scrub and rocks thereabouts.

And while we were waiting and biding our time under cover, we were joined by some local hippie chicks who wandered by, asking what we were up to and such. They were friendly, and shared our momentary disdain of "The Man", and it wasn't very long in the summer sun before the local Barney Fife headed off to pursue more important wrongdoers, while we, particularly Older Brother, decided maybe it was time to call it a day as far as shooting, and head on home.

Which we did, without further incident.

So just a nothing story, until this year, while wormholing through the internet, when I came across this photo, eerily familiar, of some of the rocks we were sheltering under.

Let me help you out a little, with a period picture from LIFE magazine from '69, including some of the hippie chicks we hung out with briefly one afternoon right around the time period this pic was taken:

And here's where they all lived, just yards down the road from where we were shooting:

You know that shivering feeling, sometimes described as feeling someone walking over your grave?
Yeah, that, times ten, when the penny dropped for me.

For the really slow, allow me to bring it all the way home for you.

Can you feel me now?

Hand to God on this one.

Not all of my childhood memories are fond any more, after putting that memory together with the historical realities. The summer of '69 wasn't all moon landings.

But now, 50 years later, the later warning of "Don't tell Mom where we went shooting that day." makes a lot more sense.

Suffice it to say that seeing Quentin Tarantino's 9th film isn't high on my list of things to do this month. And no points for guessing what movie trailers started bringing this all back home to me this year.