"Roger Shuttle Columbia, You Are Cleared In Hot..."

h/t WRSA

"Spread Far And Wide"??
Well, I don't think they meant "like the Space Shuttle Columbia, coming in to land with a big chunk of heat tile missing on the wing", 'cuz that's about how this is going to go, so let's get started on that re-entry.

The "Cunning Plan" .

So, how's that going to go?

"Have fun storming the castle..."

It's also a little late (like by an effing year, minimum) to try and pull something like this out of your ass on D-Day.

If you're trying to fail publicly and demoralize your base (that is, the 5% who'll still be around by the time they get to the end of that .chan thread), it's a great way to shoot off several toes in one go. Maybe even a whole foot. Winning!!!!!

Double Bonus Points for deploying the Stormfront sourcing as the BLUF, because nothing succeeds against Hollywood like throwing on your NSDAP armband and holding a torchlight rally with a bunch of guys with toothbrush moustaches who missed the news in 1946.

"Gee, I wonder how everyone from the Lamestream Media to Norm the Normie will react to guys in swastikas attacking Jooooooooooooooos!!!!! What could possibly go wrong there??

But hell, I've only worked in that town and that biz for twenty years or so, so WTF do I know?

The worst part is, Hollywood IS yuuuuuuuuuuuuugely over-ripe for such a takedown.

But when you let autistic twelve-year-olds and the Henry Gibsons from The Blues Brothers come up with the "strategy",

and it doesn't even give Haxo a chubby, anyone marching in that parade is pretty well fucked before you get started.

{Strategic Tip To Anyone Concerned: Probably not the best idea to get the World's Worst People At Media Savvy to do anti-media campaign. Like hiring termites to guard your woodpile-bad. Like putting Rosie O-Donnell on guard at the Twinkie Factory bad. Like handing Rep. Evita Guevara-Castro a microphone and putting her on CNN bad. Like asking DiFi about AR-15s bad. Times a  million. Let me know when the penny drops; I can go on if I haven't quite jack-hammered that particular point home with a 20MT hammer..}

In fact, they're probably so far from Fucked, they couldn't see it with a telescope orbiting in space.
Just saying.

Find some people like Sabo, who know how to craft a message, and get the fucktard minions to keep their Nazi-dicks in their lederhosen for a week or two hundred, and then try this for real. With an actual strategy (besides resolving to smell bad), a fuckton of actual planning, and a way to appeal to flyover America with less swastikas. Like maybe none. Think of swastikas like camo at a press conference: it's pretty much the equivalent of wearing a beanie with a propeller for your presidential debate. Not even the faintest whiff of swastikas that only a bloodhound could detect, ever, with 5 weeks of sniffing. Please. I'm begging you with tears in my eyes, because if you fuck with this, you'll kill everything, and people will talk about what happened for a hundred years. While Sy Snoodles and the Tatooine Cantina Band plays marimba riffs on your whitened skulls.

This is like a landing craft dropping the ramp at Normandy, and having 100 retards with Airsoft gear try to take the beach. After tying all their shoelaces together, wearing their underpants outside their trousers, and putting their shoes and socks on in that order.

Funny as hell to watch, but only on newsreel footage.
In person, not so much.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the play?

Oh, wait, you were serious?

Okay.
Start with when you want this to hit.
Say, the Oscars in 2020, and the summer after that, eight months to two months out from Election in November. (Which event, I'm reliably informed, could be of some importance to the future immediately afterwards.) Which means you've got this month to plan taking them out starting next month, and building that snowman for all of 2019.

Not posting it on Fucktard-Chan on Monday for a Thursday roll-out.

Start there, and work your way forward.
Finding someone over twelve, and with an IQ over 12, to mastermind your Cunning Plan would also be a healthier prospect of actual effectiveness, unless the plan all along was to drop the lit road flare you're juggling into that wading pool of racing gasoline.

And BTW? Gibson made Passion Of The Christ, with his own wallet of money, for $30M. I dunno what his distribution deal was, but to date, worldwide, it's only grossed $611,899,420.
So I'm just spitballing, but I'm pretty sure Mel's over Hollywood's snubs, by a paltry half a billion dollars or so.


And this, boys and girls, is how we get a post. Those fish in the barrel aren't going to shoot themselves.

Calm Down, Get Ahold Of Yourself!

Somebody somewhere, I'm not saying who or where out of politeness, seems to be having a hissy about the President "wanting" civil war.

If you stumble over it, I didn't send you there.

Team Lunatard, right there.


Option B: There is no “Blue Wave”. GOP keeps House and Senate this November, actually picks off a Senate seat or two, and the next day, Trump decides enough is enough, fires Meuller, Rosenstein, and tells Sessions to either start indicting people, or resign as AG as well.

In the ensuing 237 trials, including Obama, Shrillary, two former AGs, and all their minions, and after the House and Senate allocate the first $20B for the border wall,Trump then rides to re-election in 2020 with ease, and the GOP picks up 20 more seats in the House and 5 in the Senate. Ruth Bader-Communist has a heart attack, and Andrew Napolitano is confirmed to SCOTUS 69-30 in a week and a half.

Pres. Trump follows that by cutting all federal loan guarantees for college except for STEM programs, based strictly on merit and grades, and the college tuition bubble bursts nationwide overnight; millions of unemployed liberal professors suddenly have to get paying jobs as barristas and McDonald’s order takers. The military hits enlistment records. The downward pressure on wages compels Congress to drop the minimum wage to $6/hr. The Dow goes to 30,000.Threatened with nuclear annihilation, Iran agrees to stop screwing around, increases oil production for hard cash, and the Saudis respond by upping production to keep market share. Gas hits $2/gallon nationwide. GM and Chevy re-open three plants, and the top-selling car in America is the Chevy Gas-Guzzler, a 12-cyl. 6WD MRAP half-track with a front-end metal crusher that inhales Priuses (Priusii?) and shits them out the back end as little 2’x2’x2′ blocks.

The CDC drops opioid abuse, and starts investigating the sudden explosion of liberals’ heads in 50 states, as their entire empire starts to melt down.

Since we’re talking Fantasyland.

Go big, or go home.

There Are Only Two Genders: Men, And Not-Men

                 Stick to pin-up calendars, not combat, ladies.

Washington Examiner link : warning : auto ad-spam

Surprising...no one, exactly, another attempt to infiltrate the SEALs by the estrogen-burdened gender commandos has failed:

A woman aiming to become the first female Navy SEAL officer quit about a week into the initial training, Task and Purpose reported Thursday.
The unidentified female candidate dropped out in early August during a three-week course in San Diego that began July 24. It was the first assessment of potential SEAL officers before they can be sent on to more grueling courses, according to the website, which cited "multiple Naval Special Warfare Command sources."

Two women, whose names were not released to protect their privacy, entered the famously difficult SEAL training program this summer more than a year and a half after the military allowed female troops to serve in combat roles.
The candidate who dropped out was enrolled in the Navy SEAL Officer Assessment and Selection program. If she had completed the program, she would have faced an officer selection panel and the Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL program, or BUD/S, a six-month training course for the elite special operators.

Ensign Noload Couldnthackit couldn't even make it through a week - a farking WEEK! - of pre-BUD/S, which is merely a warm-up and conditioning program to get SEAL candidates barely prepared for the actual horrors of First Phase BUD/S training, which is actual SEAL school. So the chicklets are still 0/0, lifetime, and can't even reach the front door. How apt.
My compliments to the BUD/S Officer Selection and Assessment folks, officer and enlisted, for not greasing the standards to slip in Ensign Wannabee.

So, as only 30 years of military physiological studies, all human experience, and the testimony of hundreds of male and female military members have predicted, G.I. Jane was nothing but the pre-literate fap-dreams of Hollywood scriptwriters with a fetish for dominant women. In real-life, G.I. Jane turned out to be Private Benjamin. Thank heavens she figured it out before she got herself and her teammates killed.

Turns out the bell was mightier than the vagina.

So after how many attempts can we stop feeding the imaginary beast that women can cut this gig?

If women in the services want equality, there's a simple way to get it: eliminate the female PFT/PRT readiness standards, and have them pass the service-wide male tests. We can discuss what to do with the softball-team sized contingent we get each annum at that point, but combat won't even be on the table.

Until they're ready to walk in the door and stay in on a level playing field, they're nothing but Special Snowflakes who've been molly-coddled for half a century of social experimentation, and it's time to end the joke, and quit playing SJW games.

The boss isn't amused.

 

The Way Sideways

References today are this essay by Jesse James at Virginia Freeman's Society, and the discussion of same over at WRSA.

The essay is mostly excellent, with a pretty good summation of things as they are and have been, until it suddenly and inexplicably takes a turn off a cliff.

Which I noted.

Key graf from Jesse:

 The way forward for our movement is much the same. Show up to rallies, get active with the younger people in the movement and if you’re too crippled to do that then fund those who can. Yeah you might get uncomfortable around some of the people, you might get hurt, you might even get shot by some psychotic Bernie supporter. What kind of men have we become if that is a sufficient reason to hoard a few more insipid days of mediocrity at the cost of your character and your country? Show up and influence things at a local and state level, there are no enemies to the right in this fight.

Which nonsense I called out for codswallop in commentary at WRSA:

WTBlisteringF???
Total number of times anythingimportantinrecordedhistory was changed by a rally, from the anti-Neanderthal rally in Thag’s cave to yesterday: lemme see, carry the one…times…got it! That would be exactly zero.

... 

You want to show up and influence things at a local and state level?
Don’t go to a rally.
 ...
Rallies?
Those are for people who couldn’t get an office appointment with their reps.
It’s hand-holding for the powerless.
You can sing kumbaya and beat on garbage can lids, and all you’ll do is piss off people with jobs for screwing up traffic.
FFS, stop copycatting the never-did-squat tactics of the hippie generation.
They never changed anything.

I can rely on, and nearly predict with precision, that whenever I post something like that, here or elsewhere, so self-evidently obvious and demonstrably factual beyond any rational response, the kneejerk response of the Internet commentariat worldwide will be to respond to it with shock, scornful derision, ad hominems, and factless rants devoid of intellectual content. Pavlov's dogs have nothing on the great unwashed when it comes to denying the obvious because their feeeeeewings are hurt.

Or, in this case, because it pricked the bubble of their conclusions. Jesse responded:

Cute. The hippies changed nothing. Maybe not in CA but I’d say they had a demonstrable impact on law, society and the role of government. I’m not sure whether it’s ignorance or mens rea but you’re throwing false information out there. It’s ok if you don’t like me or my ideas, just use better arguments. These things are the equivalent of a recruitment pool and whether you want to or not If prefer to have a measure of influence in pointing the younger and less informed in the right direction. It also shows people they aren’t alone and strengthens the counter-culture I want established. We should not be thinking one dimensionally. The abortion activists would argue that rally’s and incessant political pressure does nothing.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Liberty
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre
Thomas Hutchinson (read about him)
Nonimportation Movement
Committees of Correspondence

Truncated comment response there dictates this be done here, at leisure and at length, with my thoughts in bold.

 Cute. Sorry Jesse, the word you're looking for is "factual".

 The hippies changed nothing. Like I said.

Maybe not in CA but I'd say they had a demonstrable impact on law, society, and the role of government. Yes, they got arrested by the law, they provoked society into electing Ronald Reagan four times, overwhelmingly, twice in CA and then twice more nationally, and it was he who properly identified the role of government as the problem, not the solution, to anything. Some of us were alive at the time, and speak from experience, not thirdhand from textbooks. 

I'm not sure whether it's ignorance or mens rea but you're throwing false information out there. Well played, Captain Butthurt. Whenever someone disagrees with your silly ideas, accuse them of stupidity or criminal intent, because THAT is how you argue your conclusions best and most forcefully. Reasonable people can never disagree with you on the merits, or lack thereof, of your ideas. It couldn't possibly be because you've stepped on your own dick, and become seduced by street theatre as if it ever did anything substantive, other than identify any group doing it as another bunch of loons needing a good PR-24 shampoo, to most people you're trying to reach, let alone to TPTB. The information I "threw out" was that rallies never accomplished anything. The way to refute that authoritatively is to list the rallies that have made a difference in anything important. (Say, how's that Tea Party agenda doing in a totally GOP Congress these days? Taxes any lower? ObamaCare repealed? Wall with Mexico built? Call Bitch McConjob and Quisling Ryan, then get back to me.) We could start with so much as one such. (Say, how'd that ranchers' rally go in Malheur? Any luck getting the feds to back down?) Or just concede the point to me, and get over it.

It's okay if you don't like me or my ideas, just use better arguments. Thanks for the permission; it's mighty white of you. I don't know you, so I really have no opinion either way. In point of fact, in the recent past, any number of times, I've praised your thoughts without hesitation, on your own site and at WRSA. My problem with the idea under discussion isn't one of subjective personal dislike, as if we were merely discussing the best flavor of ice cream, but rather of its utter impotence to achieve anything helpful, while simultaneously associating any group that uses it as another bunch of butthurt whiny children who see a public tantrum as a suitable response to their own diapers being wet. And I have no better argument on my side than facts, and the entirety of recorded history. As Casey Stengel used to tell folks, "You could look it up." Nota bene please that pointing that reality out neither calls you ignorant nor criminal, just wrong-headed, with small mountains of actual evidentiary weight behind my point.

These things are the equivalent of a recruitment pool and whether you want to or not I prefer to have a measure of influence in pointing the younger and less informed in the right direction. Fair enough: If you're using street theatre and public tantrums to recruit young people, you'll get people who are clueless, low-information, emotional, feelings-driven crybabies with poor impulse control. And soggy diapers. Let me know how that works out for whatever you think you're trying to accomplish. If you want a mob with a happy face (which is all that a rally is, on its best day) that's what you're going to get. And you won't point anyone in the right direction, but you will get people who are rather simplistic, unthinking, and prone to emotional outbursts, rather than anyone capable of rational thought and contemplative action, i.e exactly the opposite type from those recruited, e.g., by our own military, for things like officer candidates, senior non-commissioned leadership, or every elite group in any of the military services. You will appeal to the lowest common denominator a la Madison Avenue, rather than considered selection and recruitment of intelligent, adaptive, disciplined, and creative thinkers. Call me when you bring LZ Hindenburg into the docking mast, and I'll bring my camera to record the moment.

 It also shows people they aren't alone and strengthens the counter-culture I want established. The mystery of how alone the counter-culture you want established is, was pretty conclusively solved for most people with IQs above plant life last November the 9th. If the fact that the highest-rated programs and sites are Limbaugh, Drudge, Fox News, O'Reilly, Hannity, Glenn Beck, and so on, by orders of magnitude over CNN, the NYTimes and WaPo, MSNBC, and most of lamestream media, going back for the last thirty years, didn't drive the point home with a golden spike of reality. Anybody who didn't know that is thus not very bright nor culturally aware, and anyone who needs a mob around them to feel loved and accepted probably isn't worth going after unless your intent is to loot the Food King and burn some cars. The Free Shit Army already has a pretty good lock on those types, and even if you could poach them,  why in hell would you even want to??

 We should not be thinking one dimensionally. Agreed. I'd really be happy if any thinking at all would take place, if only out of enlightened self-interest.

The abortion activists would argue that rally's and incessant political pressure does nothing. I couldn't give two shits what abortionists would argue, but their rallies, like those of the anti-abortion faction, have largely accomplished nothing but annoyance to most people, and for the other side especially, because they don't approach the issue intellectually nor morally, but rather from a desire to ratify their own choices, and find an easy excuse for their conduct. You can't argue someone into a position they didn't get to rationally, and you won't get them out of one that way either. Someone for or against justifying abortion gets there alone, not by the attitudes (or arguments, philosophical, moral, and rational) of anyone, and especially not of any mob. If someone views a fetus as a human life with its own DNA and its own claim on affecting your moral compass, they will decide one way. If they view it as mere tissue, entirely secondary to their desire to copulate without consequences or personal inconvenience, they will decide another way. The presence or absence of either mob in the public square will be of little effect to which way they come down. 

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sons_of_Liberty
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Massacre
Thomas Hutchinson (read about him)
Nonimportation Movement
Committees of Correspondence

The Sons of Liberty were Sam Adams' IRA to the Founders' Sinn Fein. Sam's cousin John famously defended the British redcoats over the actions of the very mob you would recruit and emulate, and his arguments against them and their behavior thunder down through the ages. It is, in fact, from John Adams' defense of the British soldiers in the Boston Massacre that we derive verbatim his argument that "Facts are stubborn things," while the indictments and false accusations of the mob's mouthpieces have been relegated to history's dustbin . Plus ca change, Jesse. And the Committees of Correspondence were just the opposite of what you want: they were private, even clandestine, bodies of thoughtful men, intensely interested in changing things, and who argued by pamphlet and essay, not mob action, in order to sway people's minds and gain support. They were not the people throwing tea in Boston Harbor, nor egging soldiers into committing manslaughter in self-defense to provoke passionate revulsion. They were largely, in fact, the people who became the delegates to Philadelphia, who signed the Declaration of Independence, a document of such singular logic and mental appeal that the like had never been composed before in all of recorded history. Mobs, on the other hand, go back unendingly to the dawn of recorded history. The first one I can recollect was outside Lot's house in Sodom. So...how did that mob work out?

 So, did you want to talk about the weather, or were you just making chit-chat?

Most of Jesse's essay was thoughtfully done and worthy of a careful read.
What was most jarring and frankly ridiculous was the sudden, wheel-jerkingly bad default to trying street theatre as if it was ever a good idea, and why my mind screeched to a halt at the scene of the wreck when I came to that point in the piece.

Pardon me all to hell for noticing the obvious.

 

Retail Sophistry

 

Link: The (Stoopid) Case For Evil


The author of the piece, witty or insightful on any number of issues at times, is entirely right: one should rationally choose to be evil.

Provided one accepts two tiny but disastrously stupid premises:
1. That you'll get away with it here and now.
2. That here and now is all there is, infallibly, and human existence ends at death.

Because if, and only if, those are both infallibly certain, being evil is a no-brainer.

BUT.
Maybe - just maybe - life isn't like that, neither here, nor hereafter.
Maybe, by not being the World's Greatest Asshole, you'll avoid untold numbers of fat lips and black eyes.
Maybe, by not f**king someone else's cheating wife, you won't get blown in two by a pissed off husband with a shotgun. Even if you pass up the pussy someone else will get.
And hey, maybe she has gonosyphiherpaloids, because she's already f***ed twenty other guys, and by passing on the offering, your dick doesn't fall off.
Maybe by not f**king over everyone you can, you won't get tied to a cinder block and dropped in a lake, or have your house set on fire by a mob, or get dragged off to prison forever for breaking every law writ by God and man.
Just for starters.

Secondly, let's bear well in mind that raw capitalism is just as fallaciously stupid as raw communism: both assume that material wealth and well-being on earth is all that matters in life.
As expressed in "He who dies with the most toys, wins  dies. (There, FIFY.)

So if such materialism were true, why are so many rich people so neurotically unhappy?
Why are so many people of lower to middling wealth vastly more satisfied with their lives?
Are you really stupid if you're the latter?
Are you smart if you choose a lifetime of attempted wealth, with the associated level of misery?
And how does any system of economics value a horde of intangibles: doing something worthwhile, helping others, raising your children safe, free, and better off than you, or hundreds of other things which are beyond any  valuation in economic terms?
We have a name for people who don't feel any of those pulls of intangible virtue: sociopath.

And speaking of sociopaths, if man and life here and now is the only thing there is, how can anyone stand in judgment of anyone, e.g., Charles Manson? How can anyone who thinks evil is rational call anyone evil or wrong, except from self-serving tautology?
The nihilism of such an outlook ends, as always, on the rocks of reality.

And lastly, who can tell you - authoritatively - that this life is all there's ever going to be, and it ends at your death?
(Except, of course, someone choosing evil "rationally".)
Who's ever been there and come back to tell us convincingly that there's nothing there?

What of Pascal's Wager:
If God doesn't exist, and I don't serve him, I lose nothing.
If God doesn't exist, and I do serve him, I lose little.
If God does exist, and I don't serve him I lose everything.
If God does exist, and I do serve him, I gain everything.
?
The rational bet is not to choose evil, but rather the opposite.

The very existence of evil argues for a deity.
Everyone knows what is evil, particularly when it is done to them, with or without any teaching of same. Even a dog - lacking any moral instruction whatsoever - knows instinctively the difference between someone accidentally stepping on its tail, and being maliciously kicked.
Everyone understands a standard of good exists. And they all know they don't meet it (however much one may attempt to rationalize that reality).

And only taking that rationalization beyond sanity could allow someone to argue the existence of both good and evil, and suggest with the slightest whit of seriousness to aspire to the latter.

It's sheer madness and idiocy.
The sophistry referenced in the link is philosophy for the mentally and morally retarded.

The prior practitioners are to be found in cemeteries and prisons throughout the land, or the local skid row: go, please, and ask of them what riches their lifestyle and choices have provided them.

There is far more in heaven and earth than is dreamt of in the referenced petty silly philosophy.

Gun "Gurus" and Self-Styled Loudmouth Tacticool Geniuses

Combat is not a gunfight, any more than working in surgery or a doctor's office qualifies you to help when someone is bleeding at the side of the road outside a bloody wreck.

Plenty of well-intentioned podiatrists and dermatologists, and even cardiac surgeons, proud med school graduates to a man, are daily cheerfully invited by mere firefighter paramedics to go sit down and call 9-1-1 if they'd like to help, unless they can show some mad pre-hospital trauma skillz. It's a different ballgame when it's just you, without all that help and a cozy hospital helpfully wrapped around you.

It's long since time when someone applied the same sensibilities to the self-styled "tacticool gurus".
Show me a guy (or a woman) who's been through one or two or three shootings, come out on top, and studied the whys and wherefores, then made a deeper study of outside incidents, and draws rational conclusions, and I'm all ears.

But surviving any number of battles, with air support, indirect fire, comms, and 500,000 of your closest friends all shooting alongside you, is not gunfighting experience.  I'd sooner take advice from Call Of Duty champions who played on full realism, and no regeneration - ever.
It'd be a smaller club, and probably equally skilled.

That's why for the most part, even the military elites are sometimes living on second-hand knowledge; and why the sniper cadre in all the services generally differentiates between PIGs (Professionally Instructed Gunmen) and HOGs (Hunters Of Gunmen). The former is a badge or a qual passed, the latter has BTDT downrange.

I had the privilege of listening to a guy who bested 4:1 or 5:1 odds, off-duty, with a backup piece and one spare mag, recount the incident that earned him a medal of valor in depth and detail. Over a decade later, it was clear he'd re-worked the problem in his head a few thousand times (like you do), and critiqued what he'd done right, and wrong. He got shot, but it was relatively a minor injury, and he sent two guys to the morgue, and three to prison for life, and probably saved half a dozen bystanders from taking bullets to the back of the head. He was well-trained before it happened, and he got a couple of lucky breaks on the day. He was damned sure a lot better prepared every day afterwards.

Had the story not been dragged out of him by another officer, I doubt he'd even have mentioned it at all to me or anyone else, given the context of the day's activities, and he was a pretty humble and self-effacing guy about the incident. As are, I suspect, most of the people to whom it's worth listening.

I'm a much bigger fan of people like that, or the guys who made the Mag-Pul videos, who said out front: "Look, we don't know everything, but here's what we do, and this is the reasons why we do it that way; try it and see if it works for you to make you quicker/more accurate. But if you can get from A to B a different way, go on ahead and do it, because there's a lot of different ways to skin that cat."

The guys belittling everyone, because "Fuck you, I'm a martial prowess LEGEND!" strike me as simply pompous assholes, defensive lest someone discover what their volume and braggadoccio conveys: that they don't know what they're talking about, and afraid everyone else will catch on.
Wiser shootists know there ain't a horse that can't be rode, and there ain't a rider who ain't been throwed, and it's true with shooting and being shot at too.

There are also two other tales I lean on:
When some smartass in Hollywood kept egging Audie Murphy into a face-off quickdraw contest to settle who was fastest gun, Murphy finally told him succinctly "Okay. But with real bullets." That was the end of that challenge.
And Pappy Boyington said it best: "Show me a "hero", and I'll show you a bum."

I've had guns pointed at me, and I've pointed guns at other people, but fortunately never had to shoot them, or trade lead close up. So if you have, experientially, you're ahead of me. But unless you've done it a lot, vice getting lucky once, and dedicated a lot of time and study to the problem, and can articulate the details, don't wave your plethora of imaginary ninja qualifications at me, or get all butthurt when other people call you out.

Stay on the internet, and stroke your own ego, and leave other folks alone who aren't buying any of it.

West Point Ranger Studs - STILL not faster than a speeding locomotive

Today's Lesson: Watch Your Step

Fitness model, actor and reality TV star Greg Plitt was fatally struck by a Metrolink train in Burbank Saturday afternoon. Police say Plitt was filming on the train tracks.

People who knew Plitt and fans who wished to honor the fitness guru stopped by the train tracks Sunday to pay their respects. A bouquet of roses was left at the scene.

Plitt, 37, was a top fitness model and actor. He appeared on TV shows and movies, and was on the cover of more than 250 fitness magazines just in the last eight years.

Burbank police say Plitt was filming with two other people on the train tracks, just north of the Burbank Metrolink Station, when he was struck and killed by a Metrolink train.

Witnesses say Plitt was holding a video camera when the accident happened.

"He had on all black. The train went by. I saw him stumble over the tracks. He had a camcorder in his hand," said Metrolink passenger Victor Crowell.

Y'see, train yards are generally gravel and hardscrabble, with not just tracks, but large ties ("sleepers") sticking out, along with the anchor spikes, and all matter of other detritus afoot.
So when you stumble right in front of a moving train, that's it for you.

This is why on real productions (as opposed to someone half-assing it with a couple of buddies "on-the-cheap" with a handicam) there are whole departments of people who make sure that the person with the camera is safe from such things. Now you know what a grip does.

Tragic for Plitt and his family, and no doubt rather inconvenient for the train crew and passengers. But I daresay his DayPlanner has opened up quite a bit, and 200 other would-be fitness cover boys are shedding crocodile tears.

But even if you're rough, tough, and buff, with an Academy ring, a black-and-gold tab, a five years with the Regiment, your chances against a moving Metroliner in your gym shorts and tennis shoes are about the same as if you wore a meat suit to swim with Great White Sharks.

For Mr. Plitt, lesson learned, albeit about 5 seconds too late to deliver any helpful behavioral changes. Some stuff may look easy, and making videos is: right up until you find out the parts where it's not so much the case. Like from the undercarriage of the train.

Oh well. 

Survival - How Not To Do It - UPDATED

Moron Thwarts Darwin

For one California man, what began as a day fishing trip quickly turned into a five-day fight for survival.

Mike Vilhauer, 58, went fishing Aug. 6 at Lower Sunset Lake in Alpine County when he noticed he wasn’t catching any fish. Deciding he needed more bait, Vilhauer, butterfly net in hand, left on what he thought would be a short trip to find some grasshoppers.

“I was just zigzagging up and down the mountain,” Vilhauer told ABC News. “I didn’t see anyone for quite a while.”

After a few hours, Vilhauer said it began to get late, and he decided he should probably head back to the fishing site. “That’s when the fun began,” he said.

Vilhauer began to make his way towards what he thought was the fishing site. But with darkness upon him at about 8 p.m., he decided to make shelter under a pine tree, covering himself with pine needles and willow branches in an attempt to stay warm. Vilhauer attempted to call 911, but a weak signal thwarted his efforts.

Vilhauer continued his search for the help on Thursday. Weak from his lack of food and water, he adapted what he called his “survivor man routine,” drinking water out of puddles, regardless of what else was in the puddle.

Unaccountably, the CHP, using helicopters, and local SAR groups on the ground found him after five days in the NorCal/Tahoe area Mokelumne Wilderness, at the 7800' level in the alpine forests about 25 miles south of Lake Tahoe.

Let's score his efforts:

The 2003 version of The Mountaineers Ten essentials:

1.Navigation (map and compass) -Doofus had a raggedy old topo map, allegedly of the actual area in question, but NO idea how to use it, and no compass
2.Sun protection (sunglasses and sunscreen)- Nope
3.Insulation (extra clothing) - Nope
4.Illumination (headlamp/flashlight) - Another fail
5.First-aid supplies - Fail
6.Fire (waterproof matches/lighter/candles) - Fail
7.Repair kit and tools (incl. a knife or multitool) - No
8.Nutrition (extra food) - Total fail
9.Hydration (extra water)- Total fail
10.Emergency shelter - Absolute fail

Final score: 5% (I'm being generous) out of 100 -- Too Stupid To Live, Too Lucky To Die.
This is the military equivalent of TARFU.

Seriously, it is a true wilderness genius who can leave a lake, by definition and physical necessity the lowest terrain feature in a place, wander off, and be utterly unable to follow gravity back to it a few hours later, and then lose himself completely wandering around for four additional days.

The fee for rescue in such situations should include 10 days in the public ankle stocks, with a dunce cap, a billboard detailing your exploit, all while local scouts and such are allowed to come by and throw fruit at you and put their chewed gum in your hair.

It's hard to say the planet wouldn't have been better served had this guy ended up as mountain lion scat, but evidently his family still wants him, for reasons passing understanding.
He should also have his driver's license amended to read "not allowed more than 500' from pavement".

UPDATE:
This gets better still, per CBS-13 in Sacramento:

He was rescued Sunday afternoon after a helicopter spotted Vilhauer’s ‘Help’ sign. He was uninjured, but exhausted. He said he was only four miles from the lake when he was rescued, but he travelled in circles during his ordeal.

“That’s when they told me, by-the-way, there's no fish in that lake,” said Vilhauer.

                                                                {emphasis mine. -A.}

He needs to sue his grammar school for malpractice, and give his 6th grade diploma back. What a total oxygen thief.

Low Information Jackholes

Media pundits have lovingly trotted out the evidence that the lunatic Left is populated by room-temperature IQ retards who spout party-line rhetoric with knee-jerk predictability like good little brainwashed communists.

Okay, of course they do, well-played.

Now comes the tale of a lying thieving insaniac multi-millionaire, and the mirror is pointed the other way.

I refer to one Cliven Bundy.

For those who haven't paid much attention (and that would be 85-95%, based purely on direct interactions) Cliven Bundy is not Robin Hood, he's a robbing hood.

To set the scene, Bundy's family has owned a ranch in Bumfuck, Nevada, since the 1870s .
UPDATE: Since 1948. As Casey Stengel said, you could look it up.
Note that approximate date, you'll see this information again. They also paid the federal government for cattle grazing leases on adjoining federal land they never owned outright. This will become important too.

The farm passed from Bundy's father, to Cliven Bundy, somewhere about the 1970s. Who continued to pay the federal government for those adjoining annual leases, until 1993. Because at that point, the feds, via the BLM and EPA, had determined that in order to protect a tortoise, they needed to limit the number of cows that could be grazed on the federal lands in the area, to include the specific lease that had been renewed with the federal government every year for about twenty years before that point by rancher Bundy.

Ignoring the fact that he didn't own the land, he was just a tenant, he claims that the feds' decision to set terms of use on their land violated his rights to do whatever in hell he wanted, because evidently the tinfoil under his cowboy hat was too tight.

After several years of non-payment of his traditional lease, by 1998 the feds noticed his cows were grazing on federal lands, without their owner having any right to be there whatsoever. Doubtless after several lesser enforcement actions, like a visit, then a letter or twelve, they did what federal agencies do: filed suit in federal court seeking judgement to tell him to GTFO. Surprising no one with a brain, Bundy lost.

His entire argument was that the feds didn't own the land, but the court noted the finding of fact that the land in question had been ceded from Mexico to the United States (nota bene, not to the Territory of Utah, nor to the later Territory of Nevada eventually carved out from amongst the lands of the Territory of Utah, since in 1848, neither such Territory existed), and that therefore Bundy's whackdoodle contentions that the feds didn't own the land, didn't even pass cursory common sense and rules of settled law going back to about Hammurabi.

The feds set a trespass fine of $200/head/day, going back to 1998. Come some years ago, after dickering, arguing, cajoling, and such with Bundy, during which time he admitted and stipulated that the cows were his, they were on federal lands, and he would round them up, he did no such thing. The feds even offered to round them up for him, and hand him the money for the sale. (FYI, a head of cow goes for in the neighborhood of $5K@).

When all this failed, the feds once again went to court, obtaining in July of 2013, another federal summary judgment, affirming that Bundy and his herd of over 600 cows were in fact trespassing on the lease he hadn't paid for the use of since 1993, as well as now spilling over to new lands he'd never leased, at any point in time, in perpetuity.

The court found his claims that the land wasn't the feds' were prima facie nonsensical, granted the feds the right to seize the offending herd on federal land anytime after 45 days from the July 9th 2013 federal district court judgment (that would be August 25th, 2013 and following on my calendar), and the right to seize any future trespassing strays in perpetuity.

The feds waited another nine months, and finally, having had enough of Bundy's 20 year theft of government resources, acted to seize his cows, in obedience to federal law and the order issued by the federal court.

Whereupon Bundy wet himself, vowed to oppose the feds with force of arms, vowing not to be taken alive, and whilst fondling firearms. Ignoring the latter-day domestic terrorism violations, that right there is about 5 specific federal felonies on the federal books since the 1800s. Put there by such evil over-reaching oppressors as John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. (That would presidents Number 2, 3, and 4 if you didn't buy a program at the front gate.)

Then Bundy called upon the Whacktard Legions to join his jihad of stealing from the feds, because Mom, Apple Pie, and the Flag.
And they came.

Bundy has racked up, by a rough count, a potential fine of over $650,000,000 in trespass fines, besides the price of the unrenewed leases, if we look at 600 cattle x $200 fine per head per day x 365 days x 15 years. That's from 1998-2013.

His cattle herd, at market price, is worth perhaps $3,000,000 dollars.

So:
1) He is a multimillionaire, not some oppressed pauper, and
2) He's going to come up a little short on paying his fine.

There's nothing wrong with being wealthy per se, provided you come by it honestly. But when you pretend to be some poor working man put upon by Evil Uncle Sugar, when in fact you've enjoyed three or more generations of government handouts in the form of grazing leases from the same hand you're now biting, and secondly by stiffing the government for even that pittance for the last two decades, you aren't a working man, you're beyond morally challenged, you're a straight-up working thief. And crying for help when the cops have you by the scruff of the neck for that thievery is chutzpah the size of Texas.

Enter "our" side's fucking retarded legions.
Bundy cries "Big Government! Help!" (That would be the same Big Government who three generations of his family paid for those leases without a peep until 1993, and the same Big Government whose teat he was content to suck on as recently as the Clinton administration) and the dog whistle of insanity draws them like moths to a bonfire.
The Headless Chicken Posse ignores that the feds are simply enforcing, ever so gently and slowly, federal law on federal lands in compliance with the permission of the federal court, which has found against Bundy every time they've offered an opinion, and which even the lunatic 9th Circus Court refuses to overturn. (Of course, this will offend the strident lunatics and anarchists among us, who think the federal government should be non-existant. But usually they're too busy fapping to Ayn Rand's picture to bother anyone.) 
They ignore that they're violating about 27 federal laws, felonies all, in furtherance of the criminal enterprise of a multimillionaire who's flouted federal law with the impunity normally reserved for indicted Democrat congressman and Columbian drug lords. 

IMHO, at this point, the feds would be entitled to strafe Bundy's herd with attack aircraft, and napalm him inside his own house for threatening criminal violence towards agents attempting to end his twenty year and $650M thieving run.

I wish they would, and would happily cheer them on if they did, despite the fact that I think the federal government is bloated beyond metastasis, stupid beyond imagining, and on its best day, merely vile and loathsome.

Because Bundy is that wrong, that criminal, and that overdue for a good dose of comeuppance.
And all of this information is readily and easily available about 2000 places on the internet, for those with any modicum of wits and a yellow belt in Google Fu.

But instead, "our" pundits continue to whip the rabble into a froth against the federal government enforcing the laws against thieves stealing a national resource from every taxpayer in the country, because Barack Obama is evil.

This is the same shit we decry when black juries acquit black defendants who murder and rape black people because The Man Done Been Keepin' Us Down.

And of course, we can depend upon this administration to enforce the law as written, because that's what they've always d...wait, never mind.
Because we know that having found the Poster Child for crazy right wing gun-toting anti-government criminality, they want those visuals and the multiple news stories to go away, because midterm elections are coming and they don't want to see more stories like...wait, never mind.
Because Interior Secretary Sally Jewell, AG Holder, and His Nibs, Emperor BHO the First, aren't hardcore acolytes of Saul Alinsky, and would never read his Rules for Radicals, follow them in lockstep, or keep pushing situations that favor them over and over, because that's not how they roll since...wait, never mind.


"Ridicule is man's most potent weapon.

A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it."
                                          - Saul Alinsky, Rules For Radicals

That's about half of them, right there.

And now comes Bundy, spouting racist nonsense that would warm the hearts of the KKK, and the quickest way to get trampled would be to stand between any one of his public supporters, and the nearest exit. People haven't moved this fast since the LZ Hindenburg tried to land in New Jersey, on their heads. And clearly, Bundy's fifteen minutes are about up.

The last time there was someone on TV this stupid named Bundy, it was on Married With Children. Which, unlike this round of silliness, was at least occasionally funny.

So if you're one of those idiots who's been chanting "Bundy good, government bad" shame on you.
If you're one of the fucktard legions standing in the desert with him, please attempt to suck-start your pistol or shotgun, and up the overall IQ of the planet, let alone our side.
And if you're one of the dipshit pundits who's been cheering this silly horseshit on, please stand next to one of the fucktard legion members when they're doing that.

You're the problem, not the solution to it, and you'll figure it out about ten minutes after you piss away any chance of winning a landslide in the upcoming midterms, and the rejuvenated Democrats in Congress announce a sweeping pushback of firearms laws because of all the terrorists in the desert, you stupid mouthbreathing morons. And doubtless you'll be the loudest whiners at that turn of events, with a suitably silly look on your face.

There are any number of actual cases and causes to oppose oppressive over-reaching dictatorial government actions.

Pay attention now:

THIS IS NOT ONE OF THOSE CASES.
GOVERNMENT EXISTS TO SECURE RIGHTS, NOT CEDE THEM TO CRIMINALS.
YOU'VE BEEN A VERY NAUGHTY BOY.
STFU, AND GO HOME.
AND STOP PLAYING WITH YOURSELF, KENT.



All this is, is a senile sumbitch caught robbing the bank, and bitching that there's a fed trying to put handcuffs on him and haul him away.
Gravity works. Boo frickin' hoo.
 

Update:
Equal time for the easily bamboozled...

Evidently it's "wealth envy" to note that someone is prospering from theft, and has been doing so for at least twenty years. My apologies that in this case, the perpetrator's first name isn't Congressman.
Nonetheless, a crook is a crook is a crook.
Sane people get this.
If you have a rational counterpoint to make, feel free.

For the rest, let us know when you'll be storming the Bastille to free all the income tax cheats. But if your only mission venturing here is to hurl your feces, be sure and dig around the corners of your cage. That way when you're done, you'll have a clean place for the other monkeys to sleep; no sense wasting a trip.

Things Not To Do

Okay, I admit, I could give you easy ones.

Things like:
Don't buttrape the Bill of Rights.

But we've had two probably at least fourteen presidents who say otherwise, so I'm taking a different tack.
Sailing across the wind, rather than into it, is exactly what tacking is, after all.

Let's note, for the record, that the NSA isn't collecting telephone cell records under a court order.

They're collecting them under a large farm of antennae in Maryland, connected to enough raw computing power to crush diamonds, and use Chinese calculus as your log on password. Which they've done since pretty much the day after Marconi invented their stuff.

So rather than get all unpatriotically down on their activities, or throw some hysterical histrionic fit, I'd rather make a few carefully chosen observations.

I note, purely for informational purposes, that you can log on to Google Translate, type in any words, for instance, either a meaningless string of terrorism "alert" words or actual fully-formed sentences laden with those little DHS/NSA sphincter-puckering Easter Eggs. You can also use Translate's player to read the results back to you out loud, record the Siri-like voice(s) as an mp3 that wouldn't match your own voiceprint, get a couple of "burner" phones bought and maintained with cash, and send the resulting canned conversations back and forth at will from, say, Phone A live to Phone B voicemail, and vice versa.
If you're an even sneakier little $#!^, you can use the power of Google translate to convert your English (or whatever) words into Arabic, Pashto, and any number of other high-interest dialects, play those live conversations around, and for nothing invested beyond boredom and keystrokes, invent an entire fictional terror cell, complete with dialog.

Of course, purely for research into your unpublished Clancy-esque novel.

You'd want to take the batteries out of the phones except when you were actually sending yourself a message, and drive somewhere far away from your house or office when you send. *I* can't help it if you drove over to the cell tower nearest the local federal building, or international airport, and I'm certainly not responsible if you sent such a conversation to, for example, a US Embassy where the odds it's being tape-recorded in real time are about 100%.

But I will remind you that making discernible terrorist threats is a crime, and that security cameras record facial features and license plates, which a halloween wig and sunglasses, public transportation, and half an hour reading spy-biz tradecraft from a Barnes and Noble book generally thwarts.

And don't, under any circumstances, send Arabic conversations containing key phrases to voicemail accounts at places like the Southern Poverty Propaganda Center, See B.S. Nudes, Handgun Disarmament International, or the American Criminal Liberties Union, on the weekends, or at 3AM, when no one's going to be there to answer their phones in person. Because sending the dung beetles to investigate terror cells among those groups would be...baaaaaaaad.

Don't do it! Never ever ever.

And while we're on the subject, don't Google half a dozen truly awesome German Enigma emulation websites, translate similar alert-word laden conversations from English into actual Enigma alphanumeric cipher groups in spy-approved blocks of 5 letters/numbers, and then text those coded messages back and forth between the burner phones either. Because you wouldn't want the NSA and DHS goons to waste their precious time cracking obsolete WWII-era encryption, and find a bunch of coded tweets revealing a massive imaginary conspiracy to do nothing but waste their time. So please, I'm begging you, don't do that.

The Reichsicherheitshauptamt told me, if I see something, say something.
But they didn't tell me what to say, so this is what I chose.

April Fools is too precious to only celebrate once a year. So don't do that.

Chaos, panic, disorder. Don't do that either. My work here is done.

They can't stop the signal. So let's absolutely not do that.

Celebrity Math

I've never seen Angelina Jolie's boobs in the wild, and unless you're Brad Pitt, neither of us has any personal interest in them either. Those facts aside, today's announcement about how "brave" she was for undergoing unnecessary double mastectomies only points out how people who can't count can still have a lot of impact.

(For instance, Google Al Gore's impact on the global warming debate, despite decades of cooked statistics.)

But the widely quoted witchdoctory quote du jour is that the gene she had gave her "an 87% chance of developing breast cancer". 9 out of 10 is scary, but 87 out of 100, or the 25,000,000 women who won't get breast CA out of 150M women in this country even if they all had this gene is far less so.

To be fair, I haven't seen the literature the quote is drawn from, and hopefully based on. One hopes it's some amount better than the math they used to count attendees at the Million Man March some years back.

But let's consider a few things. The overwhelming number of women tested for the gene have probably been women who already have breast CA. Which kind of screws your sample pool. I'd like to hear how many women out of the entire population have the special gene involved, and then I'd like to know how many of them, untreated, and controlling for all other risk factors (obesity, smoking, use of contraceptives, etc.) got breast CA. And I'd also like to know what risk factors Ms. Jolie's mother had, since her death from ovarian cancer (which supposedly this gene makes a 50/50 split also) was a lot of what Jolie cited for having two perfectly healthy breasts mutilated.

If, for example, 87% of women at large have the gene, and they all get breast CA at exactly normal rates, then there's your "87% chance" turned to nonsense. So without further citations, until I hear of multiple high-sample-number double-blind peer-reveiwed studies, I'm calling shenanigans.

Then there are the risks of surgery, which in this case are tripled, because her situation required multiple procedures.

And finally, while she (or more correctly, her publicists) are cock-a-doodle-dooing about her courage, and try to make her Everywoman by advocating that everyone else consider following her lead, her surgeries, rough guess, are $50-100K worth of medical procedures (which, let's recall, were to remove perfectly healthy tissue from a healthy woman) that would have paid for her to get not annual, but monthly mammograms for 21 years. And a nearly 100% shot at early cancer detection. Granted, the increased radiation dose adds to her risk, but detecting the cancer she assumed was coming is virtually guaranteed, so that's a wash. And factor in that the amount of time she spends in private jets at altitude probably gives her the same increase in radiation (and subsequent cancer risk) as a pack-a-day smoker. So she could have saved her breasts, her wallet, and the planet by taking a limo more often, or just staying home.

In short, what you've got is an under-educated hypochondriac multi-millionaire, who's personal press corps has found a way to spin her middle-aged boob job into a crusade for humanity. And she still gets to keep the teenage-looking boobs.

The only possible good I see coming out of this, is if it leads to similar tests for men, and people like Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, Michael Moore, and the feministas on The Spew to all have their gonads hacked out before any of them breed.

The only other actual good is to the AMA, particularly to the plastic surgery industry, which is either paying Ms. Jolie for her current publicity blitz, or ought to be.