And the Drumbeat Goes On

 

According to on-air statements today, Rep. Anna Luna will introduce - with the full support of House Speaker Johnson -- a motion to hold AG Merrit Garland in "inherent contempt", for refusing to turn over the video recordings of Biden's deposition that led to the DoJ declining to prosecute him on grounds of mental incapacity.

Garland's arrest is off the table, but a finding of "inherent contempt" would make Garland, himself, personally liable to a daily fine of $10,000 for every day he refuses to turn over those recordings, or force him to resign, before he's bankrupted.

And this @$$clown covering for Mr. Fraudulent is the guy Hopey Dopey wanted to put on SCOTUS.

Anyone conspiring with Garland, instructing him, or pressuring him, to continue in that contempt, including POTUS, would open themselves up to federal criminal conspiracy charges, and invoke articles of impeachment and/or referral for federal prosecution afterwards, and the statute of limitations on such prosecution is five years, and the clock doesn't start ticking until the last overt act, which could be all the way to next January 20th.

In the clip above from several weeks ago, Luna noted any such finding had to be carried out under the Congress during which the contempt finding was found. That means the timeline for passing this is the term of the current Congress.

Garland's looking at over a million dollars in personal fines if he holds out until the election.

And it's not even Monday yet.

Hakeem Jeffries is holding a virtual meeting today, and the presumptive topic is how many members of Congress are ready to throw Dopey Joe under the bus, and end the current debacle before things get any worse for every Democrat running for re-election, including every member of Congress, and a number of senators.

Historical Note for the Baby Ducks: Nixon hung around during Watergate even after they had him on audiotape agreeing to obstruct justice. The House had already voted two (of three) articles of impeachment against him, when a small group of Republican long-time loyalists in Congress, including Sen. Barry Goldwater, told Nixon point blank, he was going to be impeached on the third article, and the Senate would convict him and remove him from office.

He addressed the nation the next night, and announced his resignation from the presidency effective at noon the following day.

Garland keeps withholding those recordings, and this becomes Watergate 2.0. And this Congress isn't going to come at him with knives. They'll be packing machetes.

Even money the Cabinet removes Biden by the end of the month (even with the back and forth required by Article XXV, and the Congress needing to find the Cabinet's removal justified). The whole thing would play out in as little as three days, tops.

Hopeium Futures Take Another Hit

h/t to CDR Salamander

"May you live in interesting times."

Well, $#!^.

For those out there trying to draw some illusory level of comfort in the mythos that current reported US Kung Flu deaths are a byproduct of perverse incentives, and packing the numbers with non-Kung Flu casualties like snowmobile deaths and people juggling polar bears, there's some really bad news, apolitical in the extreme, from the number crunchers in London at the Financial Times.

They don't give a damn there whether your politics are Left or Right, or what political dog whistles you hear. They just, y'know, analyzed the data, and then compared it with historical death numbers from the same countries and cities from years past to show change over time this year. Almost like they were using mathematics and statistics, or something. (For anyone unacquainted, they're a handy tool, and you should try them from time to time.)

Suffice it to say, the numbers you think are padded may actually be drastically undercounting the actual Kung Flu death toll by as much as 50-60%.

 (LONDON) "The death toll from coronavirus may be almost 60 per cent higher than reported in official counts, according to an FT analysis of overall fatalities during the pandemic in 14 countries. Mortality statistics show 122,000 deaths in excess of normal levels across these locations, considerably higher than the 77,000 official Covid-19 deaths reported for the same places and time periods. 

If the same level of under-reporting observed in these countries was happening worldwide, the global Covid-19 death toll would rise from the current official total of 201,000 to as high as 318,000. 

To calculate excess deaths, the FT has compared deaths from all causes in the weeks of a location’s outbreak in March and April 2020 to the average for the same period between 2015 and 2019. The total of 122,000 amounts to a 50 per cent rise in overall mortality relative to the historical average for the locations studied."

Oh NOES!!!! The Flu Bros Hoaxer Myth just took another .44Mag silver bullet right to the heart.

Data graphic for countries (these embiggen):

Data for individual cities:

Those big red spikes, above? Those are what people who read graphs call "anomalous spikes", and they represent how badly and how far this thing has changed things versus historical death numbers, in exactly the same way you look at holes in ballistic gelatin to determine relative ballistic performance and effectiveness of firearm rounds. Look at the graphs again. Did we say .44Mag? Sorry. We meant to say .50BMG.

"The extra deaths are most pronounced in urban areas with the worst virus outbreaks, and have completely overwhelmed reporting mechanisms in some. This is especially worrying for many emerging economies, where total excess mortality is orders of magnitude higher than official coronavirus fatalities. 

In Ecuador’s Guayas province, just 245 official Covid-related deaths were reported between March 1 and April 15, but data on total deaths show that about 10,200 more people died during this period than in a typical year — an increase of 350 per cent.
{And an increase in COVID-19 deaths of 41,000%! "Just the flu, bro." - A.} 

Experts have warned of serious under-reporting of Covid-19 cases in residential facilities for the elderly, who are particularly vulnerable to the virus. “Very few countries appear to be testing people in care homes, staff and residents, systematically,” said Adelina Comas-Herrera, research fellow at the Care Policy and Evaluation Centre of the London School of Economics. 

Even the much higher numbers of deaths in the pandemic suggested by excess mortality statistics are likely to be conservative, as lockdowns mean that “mortality from numerous conditions such as traffic accidents and occupational injuries possibly went down”, said Markéta Pechholdová, assistant professor of demography at the University of Economics, Prague."

More rounds, center mass to the chest.
Kind of like this:

ED-209? No. COVID-19. You have 10 seconds to comply. 9,8,...
"You killed Kenny! You bastards!"
 

The only good news? Most of those spikes appear to have peaked. For now.

And just to really take a monstrous dump in your corn flakes:
That's in the First World, i.e. what we mean when we say "civilization", with robust medical care, and transparent reporting systems.

In the Turd World, i.e. Sh*tholia, Trashcanistan, et al , where neither of those things apply, the pandemic is liable to be far, far worse.

We have NO WILD IDEA what the outbreak is doing in places where they can't count beyond twenty, even though they're already barefoot.

IOW, you're so far beyond F**ked by this virus, you can't see F**ked from here.
F**ked was eight stops ago, and you slept right past that station, and the train's rolling way beyond where you thought it was. At full speed.

Cheers.

Now tell me about how prepared you are, and for how long?

BTW? For those who would discount the CDC projections of estimated deaths, here it is, helpfully posted over at Salamander's blog from back at the end of March this year:

Talk about calling your shot. Pisser for those who have to admit that the actual totals are right down the middle of the fairway so far (except that it doesn't yet seem to be leveling out like they thought, does it?).

Let's hope that it does indeed level off, as they projected weeks ago. Rather than, say, having wingnuts keen to ignore this charging out and spiking it even higher in the next few weeks.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One...

Democrats: F**king up a crowbar in a sandpile since...ever.

Stock up on popcorn and tasty beverages. It's a long way to November, and this comedy farce is just getting started.

Behold, The Clown Show Narrative Begins

Let's look at the Wayback Machine, Sherman. To, say, last week:

"And then, the cherry on the turdmuffin, they’ve invited any number of mouth breathing knuckleheads, helpfully pre-infiltrated by X*500 paid CI/agitators, not to mention actual and faux racists and other assorted idiots, whose entire purpose is to create the plausible rationale to
a) open fire
b) make mass arrests
c) turn this into Charlottesville Klan Rally v2.0 on national TV
d) make an airtight case in 50 states for gun owners being the exact non-existent lunatics the Brady Bunch and every other anti-gun lobby sees in their fever dreams, except now with actual video proof.
e) All of the above." - Aesop

Now let's visit last night's headlines:

BALTIMORE, Md. (WDBJ7/WWBT/AP) — Three men linked to a racially motivated violent extremist group have been arrested in Maryland and Delaware by FBI special agents. 

The suspected white supremacists were believed to be on their way to a gun rights rally planned in Richmond for Monday, according to several national media outlets.  

According to the Associated Press, a law enforcement official who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an active investigation said the group was arrested on their way south to Richmond, where a rally is planned to protest pending gun control bills in the General Assembly.
Governor Ralph Northam declared a temporary State of Emergency for Richmond on Wednesday, banning all weapons from Capitol Square during the time in which the rally is planned.
Northam said law enforcement intelligence analysts identified credible threats of violence, as well as white nationalist rhetoric and out-of-state militia plans that appeared similar to plans that led up to the deadly 'Unite the Right' rally in Charlottesville in 2017.
According to a press release from Northam's office, "credible intelligence gathered by Virginia’s law enforcement agencies indicates that tens of thousands of advocates plan to converge on Capitol Square for events culminating on January 20, 2020. Available information suggests that a substantial number of these demonstrators are expected to come from outside the Commonwealth, may be armed, and have as their purpose not peaceful assembly but violence, rioting, and insurrection."

Well played, fucktards.

I don't have to be a psychic medium to foretell this. I just have to know enough physics and history to predict how big the POOF! will be every time Wile E.'s  latest Acme Fucktard Plan takes him off the cliff, and calculate height and velocity before impact.

And now, Gov. Blackface Babykiller's entire emergency no-weapons declaration has been justified.

QED

I can hardly wait for Act Two.

Well played, Tard Army.

This is what it looks like when you play hopscotch in a minefield, and know more about sun tea than about Sun Tzu.

"All warfare is based on deception.
If you are weak, appear strong; if you are strong, appear weak.
The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.
Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.
Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win.
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
The greatest victory is that which requires no battle.”  - Sun Tzu

The feds and local authorities, four days before the first TardBus unloads in Richmond, have already made their case. They have pre-selected wingnut dipshits bringing FUCKING MACHINEGUNS to Richmond, FFS! Does Las Vegas ring any bells? Who wants to put $20 on the over-under before that link shows up in the news about this arrest? Beuller? Bueller...? Ferris Beuller...??? Anyone? Anyone...???

The media circus left the station and the Tards haven't even shown up yet. TPTB are picking the low-hanging fruit off before you even wake up, let alone tee up.

And yet, the true morons can't wait to get their chance at bat.

You're already lost the game before the first pitch.

Because you still don't get this:
They've had this narrative pre-crafted and road-tested for years, and you just woke up and smelled the coffee a month ago. The story is already written, and before you even get to tell your side, they've already got patsies and "crisis actors" all set to play the leading roles.

The assclowns showing up for this are just the extras in the background, to avoid having to CGI the mob into the photo ops.

Walk tall, fucktards.
Walk tall.

And I didn't even have to wait until Tuesday to say "I told you so."

Here's the forecast for next week:

Somehow, it's funnier when Wile E. does it.

Call Their Bluff, Yertle

Now, the slapdash half-assed and fullashit shampeachment will not be forwarded to the Senate, and the House has adjourned until next year.

Some folks are worried this could slide out from under us.

I'm not.

If they stage a successful coup, it will simply be time to shoot the bastards, and no more fucking around wondering about when it's time. (Claire Wolfe, call your office...)

At that point, it ain't about Trump, it's about not tolerating living in a banana republic dictatorship.
Open season, no bag limit, screw the regs.

Say "when".

They want to play for blood, they're going to find a lot of folks who'll be their Huckleberry.
Let's see if they really want to open that ball.

But it all becomes moot if Senate Majority Leader Yertle McTurtle simply states,

"Since the House refuses to send forward any notification of impeachment in a timely manner, we hereby consider the entire baseless process null and void, and serve notice that we consider the matter closed to further consideration. If the Speaker is so uncertain the House's action passes the basic fairness test, and meets normal standards of jurisprudence, we consider that no impeachment has been duly enacted by that body. If the House decides to do this all over again, from scratch, and this time they can find a shred of evidence for any of their charges that actually exist in U.S. Code, and an actual bona fide crime, and allows confrontation of witnesses and cross examination by the minority as well as the majority, and observes other basic and fundamental rules of American jurisprudence, the Senate may be inclined to take notice of an actual bill of impeachment that passes the standard set forth in the United States Constitution at that time, should the House return to the rule of law; but in an election year, we're liable to be awfully busy. All in favor, say 'Aye'. Motion passes. Senate adjourned."

If he did that, and called Nancy Alzheimers' bluff,
1) he'd win the argument
2) the Leftards' heads would explode
3) The House would shift right by 50 seats
4) rank and file Democrats would march on their leadership and set them on fire, alive
5) right after Pres. Trump carried 45 states next November
6) popcorn stocks would go through the roof

Bring it.

Fake News Clown Show

This morning, ABC News was cock-a-doodle-doing that two other minions with no firsthand knowledge of anything, had corroborated Amb. Sondland's assertion that the president had violated some imaginary law (which the Democrats cannot name or describe, but they're somehow nevertheless sure it must have happened).

The clip above, wherein Rep Mike Turner sticks a knife through the heart of the Dumocrats' star witness, and then twists it, hard, lays bare that corroboration of someone's fever-swamp imaginings does not leap into being "evidence" in any court not presided over by marsupials.

It is merely proof of a shared delusion, and a conspiracy to commit a coup.

That IS against the law.

"If two or more persons in any State or Territory, or in any place subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, conspire to overthrow, put down, or to destroy by force the Government of the United States, or to levy war against them, or to oppose by force the authority thereof, or by force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States, or by force to seize, take, or possess any property of the United States contrary to the authority thereof, they shall each be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than twenty years, or both." - 18 U.S. Code §2384

Note that happily, there's no ambiguity about this; that the mere act of conspiracy by any two persons anywhere meets the specification of guilt; and that there's no magical "except for members of Congress" clause hidden in there anywhere.

No where, whatsoever.

That makes Adam Schiff-for-brains, everyone who voted to open these hearings on the House Intelligence Committee, and all the witnesses called thus far co-conspirators, and the president is fully within his legal right to direct AG Barr to have those members of Congress and their flunkies, and all the witnesses doing this Seinfeld sham impeachment inquiry ("an inquiry about nothing") wholly without any of the basic Constitutional protections guaranteed to all Americans, arrested, indicted, and prosecuted for sedition.

We wish he would cut to the chase, and simply do so.
We would pay good money to see that on the boob tube day in and day out for the next 9 months.

I'd have to check the math, but rounding up a sufficient chunk of Congress and putting them under lock and key would flip the House, too, leaving Nancy Alzheimer's as the overnight new Minority Leader,  and Kevin McCarthy(R) the new Speaker of the House.

It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

Well, That Escalated Quickly...

h/t Small Dead Animals

Tesla: Our cars are safe.
Anyone who disagrees with us will be whacked.

A @tesla whistleblower discovered a "thermal runaway" risk

Tesla fired him, harassed him, and phoned in a fake shooting threat under his name. @elonmusk personally berated him by email.

And then several @tesla drivers were killed in vehicle fires.

So, your guy tells you your product could burst into flames and kill customers.
Instead of thanking him for looking out for your interests, and fixing it to save actual customers' lives, you fire him, malign him, SWAT him, and try to get the government's minions to whack him for you.

(Oh, and you still ignore your customers going up in flames like eggs cooking off in a microwave.)

Greedy corporate pothead lunatic.
Corrupt head office.
Lethally defective product.
Official corporate shenanigans.
Attempted murder.
Serial manslaughter.

This is movie-of-the-week film fare that just writes itself.
And in the spirit of the 37 (at last count) versions of Law and Order, I think it's time to phone the writers of Breaking Bad, and bring out the pilot of their new :Corporate Version.
(Art Buchwald Coming To America Warning: if they do, and it's a hit, all I want is 0.1% of the gross, in perpetuity. Have your lawyers call my lawyers, and we'll do lunch.)

Still no word on when the engineers who made Uber's self-driving cars, which also kill people, but never thought of telling them what to do when a pedestrian walked in front of the car will be perp-walked to jail in handcuffs for reckless endangerment and conspiracy to commit manslaugter.

Somebody, please, get Ralph Nader his walker, and get him into court.
Seriously.
This nonsense makes the Corvair kerfluffle look like small potatoes by comparison.

So I guess "too big to fail" includes killing people and setting them on fire, for modern-day robber-barons.

Perhaps quietly whispering "If this car fails because of your negligence, I'll come back and kill you, your entire dealership, and their combined families, slowly, painfully, and if possible, in front of them all" into the sales manager's ear, before you drive any newly purchased car off the lot, might be in order. It's kind of like the guy who grabbed his dentist by the family jewels before he'd drill, and promised him that any pain suffered would inevitably be a mutual experience.

TV Review: Yellowstone




Yellowstone, with the original cast.

I'd seen the trailers, and Costner generally manages to be likeable and interesting in just about anything he does, even if it sucks, so I figured I'd give this one a look.

He is, and this does.

The Good
This is better TV than 99% of what's out there now.

The Bad
How low that bar is cannot be measured with existing instrumentation.

The Ugly
I'd seen teasers for this last year, mainly in movie theaters (because no one who can help it watches TV anyways, apparently). So when it appeared in the store as a complete season, I figured it was worth checking out as a binge-watch, commercial free, because what's come out as movies lately has been every bit of dung-heap stinky for most of 2018 and 2019.

So, you get to see Kevin Costner as a cowboy (which, after Silverado and Open Range isn't a bad thing). And you think you're going to be getting an anti-PC take from a character who the whole world is coming after, in a turn worthy, or at least vaguely reminiscent, of John Wayne, back from the dead, however dimly.

Instead you get something you've undoubtedly seen before.
Allow me to explain.

Long about Episode 3 of the first season, you realize what you're watching.
It's not the saga of the patriarch of the Dutton clan bravely holding on to a piece of Montana "as big as Rhode Island".

What you're actually watching is Don Vito Corleone thuggishly protecting the Family business, in this case the Yellowstone Ranch, right next to the national park of the same name.

Except, no surprise, Marlon Brando, Al Pacino, Robert Duvall, James Caan, and Talia Shire did the whole thing so much better, with Francis Ford Coppola telling the story.

Don Vito starts out the wronged man, beset by the Tartaglias, who want to build a condo development in Corleone territory. Connie is out of control and alcoholic. Then the Solazzo mob rustles his cattle. Sonny gets whacked stealing them back, and war hero Michael avenges that, but it costs him the life and relationships he was cultivating outside the family business. Connie is out of control and evil, and Tom Hagen saves Sonny, only to become Fredo, because he's not a war-time consiglieri, leaving Don Vito with only Connie and Michael to stand with him against the cops, TPTB, and the rest of the Five Families.
That's all of season one in a paragraph.

Like I said, you've seen this before.
Except the original cast was far more compelling, much better actors, and the story was more interesting before they all put on cowboy hats. And it's beyond tough for Costner, surrounded by a cast of basically nobodies, to carry this whole thing by himself, try mightily though he does.

It's well-shot, and the scenery is nice for not being NYFC or anywhere within the Thirty Mile Zone centered at Beverly and Vine, with intermountain Utah doubling for Montana. (I leave it for actual Montanans to tell me how well they do with making Utah pull off Big Sky country. My guess is it's okay, but not quite the real deal.)

And they keep pulling off a few human interest moments to misdirect you into not noticing that Costner's character is just a criminal p.o.s. with a better legacy and better real estate location.

I'm telling you this to save you time, and possibly money.
I've worked on countless TV shows where the plot was a 42-minute version of Any Great Movie You've Ever Seen, and they always turn out exactly like you'd expect of lobster and champagne, time compressed, and shot on a beer and Cheese Whiz budget.

This is a teensy bit better than that in the looks department, but the drama suffers, and the plot literally comprises every point I outlined above, and that's 10 hours of TV, which means 10 weeks of production minimum, to get something Coppola did better in 6 hours over two movies.

The only reason I can figure for Hollywierd doing this series this way is to undermine decades of the Ponderosa, the Barclay Ranch, the High Chaparral, the Wilder farm, Paladin, Matt Dillon, Bret Maverick, and everything you might remember of that and countless other beloved Western shows, to the point that by the fourth or fifth season of this crap, you'll be rooting for the Indians and the EPA when they both swoop in and peck this miserable criminal enterprise to death, pick the carcass clean, and crap it out.

This is lazy storytelling rebranded and camouflaged, and mediocre TV at its most mediocre, and the only hero in this whole sad tale will be anyone with the sense to switch channels or turn the damned box off. Having done that a decade and more ago, experiences like this confirm the perpetual wisdom of that decision.

Unless the whole thing goes belly up before they can pull that off.
Which, judging by Season One, should probably happen about 3/4ths of the way into Season Two, if there's any Nielsen box office justice involved.

Never have I seen a show that more richly lives up to The Biz standard T-shirt punchline:
 

Theater is life.

Film is art.

Television is furniture.

More's the pity. They could have made a modern classic Western show.
Instead, they're just filling bags of rose fertilizer, straight from the steer's southern end.

Tip: If you want to see Costner in something far, far better, watch Tin Cup.
And then Draft Day.

Queen Alheimer's, Doing What She...Um...What Was I Saying...?

h/t 100% F'ed Up

Posted with only one comment:

Second (after the V.P.) on the list of Presidential succession.

Let that thought sink in, and remember who voted her into her leadership position.

A Good Rant Requires A Fact Or Three

Sorry, but just no.

Here’s a classic case of media slant:

Had They Bet On Nuclear, Not Renewables, Germany & California Would Already Have 100% Clean Power

This is what we non-journalists call “complete bullshit”.  In the first place, neither Germany or California “bet” on anything.  Germany closed all their nukes in a panicked reaction to the Fukishima disaster in Japan, and California deliberately closed their existing nukes and prevented new ones from being built because Californians are a bunch of fucking Green morons (as, by the way, are the Krauts).  There was no “gamble”, because everybody already knew that Green “technology” would be totally incapable of completely filling anybody’s power needs except maybe for the average sub-Saharan African country north of the Limpopo River.  For Germany and California?  Not even close.  And when even Al Gore is calling California foolish…

Natzsofast, Guido. While the origin of the headline slant may be exactly as described, this is what we sane people call it when kneejerk rant is faster than neurological processing speed. This is a classic case of letting your prejudices write your article before engaging your common sense, let alone 30 seconds of research.

Japan got into trouble with nukes (reactors, not the matching bookened gifts from Paul Tibbets, Curtis Lemay & Co.) because of...why, cupcakes?

Oh, right, that little 9.0 earthquake on a faultline right off the coast made a wee little tsunami thingie.

Maybe some of you read about it; I think it was in most of the papers.

Fortunately, there are no such seismic problems anywhere in California.
Oh wait, turns out there are.
Just a wee bit.

For the benefit of those who flunked or skipped basic geography and geology, California has a coastal mountain range running the entire length of the state, and the entire Sierra Nevada mountain range well inland of that, because the Pacific Ocean Plate is grinding against the North American Plate, to the point that the highest mountains in the Lower 48 of North America, i.e. not including Alaska, are not the piddly-ass Rockies, but Mt. Whitney and the Sierra Nevadas. (Sorry, Coloradoans, but facts and reality are harsh. If it makes you feel better, the Rockies are probably prettier.)

There are a bit fewer faultlines in NE California, because Mt. Shasta and surrounds are only fucking dormant volcanos!

"Dormant"? Here's how geologists define that term.
Mt. St. Helens ring any bells??



"Dormant" volcano, Oregonian version. Note the missing real estate.

Because when they speak of dormancy, they're expressing it in terms of geological time, which makes dog years shorter than the teenage years of fruit flies.

Now look, I know how tempting it is to bash our succession of Califrutopian moonbat leaders, and the Birkenstock-wearing tofu-slurping soyboi minions from West Hollyweird and San Franshitsco who elect them, even though 75% of them are actually the expat cousins of your own toothless, banjo-playing kinfolk in Bugfuck and Pigknuckle, transplanted here so they can pick a gender and save the whales. If you want to bash them, go ahead on. Take a number. The line just on this blog, is four miles in length, and 50 persons abreast.

Look, I've even got quite a sense of humor when it comes to bashing TPTB here in Califrutopia (as that name itself should suggest). But if you have an IQ higher than fungus, and two neurons to rub together, we should probably be able to agree without too much difficulty that the last goddam place to put more nuclear plants is next to an ocean, in a state with 100-something active faults (and that's just the ones we know about, now), all overdue for a huge seismic relocation event, and most in exactly the coastal zone such plants would be built upon, and half a dozen "dormant" volcanos in the vicinity of most larger rivers and water supplies. The best place to put California's nuclear plants would be in eastern Arizona, or Utah, or Texas, or maybe Kansas. Give a holler when they're interested in that. Last I looked, we can't even get Nevadans to agree that their desert mines are the best place for nuclear waste, even when they are.

And let's remember that the entire nuclear industry was touting the near impossibility of a nuclear plant malfunction ("a one in a BILLION likelihood"), and the safety of the industry,

President Peanut Brain's photo op did more for nuclear power in the Western
world than the Hindenburg crash did for airship travel.

right up until the evening news had shots of POTUS wading around in hazmat boot covers inside Three Mile Island, the same month that The China Syndrome opened. So you can thank Metropolitan Edison not just for a nuclear power debacle, but also for reviving middle-aged Hanoi Jane Fonda's flagging movie career. Thanks a pantload, guys.

Thus attempting to pin the anti-nuclear power urge purely on deranged Greenophilia is flatly silly, and descending into Fred Reed territory, and last I looked, you had to move to Mexico, sell your soul, and lose your mind to do that on a blog. Best not undertaken.

California does have solar energy in abundance. Not, nota bene, as a primary source, nor ever could be, but taken advantage of properly, it would make enough of a difference in total use to both cut demand on the deliberately antiquated grid, making mandatory brownouts unnecessary, and oh, BTW, make the average person with a wee bit of foresight and a few spare bucks completely independent of both random seismic events and the whims of the morons in Sacramento.

It's not good because it's cheaper (which it absolutely isn't) it's better because it's priceless when the grid falters or fails.  

We've also had morons in charge hereabouts who halted all offshore drilling since the series of spills in the late 1960s ruined miles of beaches. Goddamned tree-hugging hippies.

That can be fixed with a few penstrokes (and will, someday, when people get desperate enough). Because people aren't going to freeze, or sweat their jingly bits, or pass up literal billions of dollars just sitting there a couple of miles off the coast, especially if it mainly pisses off Barbra Streisand and her ilk.

And BTW, the San Onofre nuclear plant was shuttered, not because of "green" concerns, but rather because of critical parts failures, and the revelation that the whole thing was waiting for one jiggle to shatter miles of obsolescent and about-to-fracture piping, and the cost to replace/repair it would have bankrupted Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos. Just the thing you want, in a plant next to millions of people, and $M homes, right next to an ocean, and a key military base, is a nuke plant with pipes made of glass. Or just old, rusted, and ready to shatter, spewing nuclear contamination into the atmosphere and offshore.
As Casey Stengel used to say, "you could look it up".

So if we're going to stick to actual common sense energy policy, let's try it from that tack, and save the kneejerks for when the doctor is doing your annual physical.

Just a humble suggestion.

Weimar x Zimbabwe = Venezuela

h/t Daily Timewaster

Evidently from this photo, the easiest way to become a millionaire in Venezuela today is to pick up that many pesos with a wheelbarrow.
(Hot Venezuelan chicks wanting to become American brides for the price of a Big Mac combo!)

Apparently, those bills are worthless as anything but kindling or toilet paper.

Ponder how utterly valueless they'd have to be to just be sitting in the gutter like that, in such numbers.

A smart socialist government (oxymoron alert!) would be selling that crap on E-bay as souvenirs, for hard-currency $US.

A boxed set with Zimbabwean $1,000,000 notes and Weimar reichsmarks might even fetch a pretty penny as a collector's set. Maybe even a penny and a half.

Literally.

Evita Guervara-Castro's office could not be reached for comment.
To be fair, she may be in Caracas, trying to salt away a nest egg of Venezuelan pesos, as that hoard there has to be about what she made in tips the year before her fellow NYFC retards elected her, to dethrone both Speaker Alzheimers and Mad Maxine Waters as the Stupidest Women In Congress.

Unconfirmed rumors are she plans to give away those Venezuelan pesos to help pay for that green New Deal, after they outlaw cars and cows, and nobody has a job but the government gives away money to everyone, and just prints more money to pay for it.

Cuz that'll so work.

Or maybe she's going to use it to pay back her college loans for that international relations and economics degree from Boston U. At least then they'd be getting fair market value for what was delivered.

Four Strikes And Yer Out!

"(TWADDLE) Attorney for Leland Keyser, lifelong friend of Ford, who Dr. Ford says was at the party where the alleged incident with Kavanaugh occurred says “Ms. Keyser does not know Mr. Kavanaugh and she has no recollection of ever being at a party or gathering where he was present, with, or without, Dr. Ford.”

IOW,

"Crissy, you loon, what party?? There was never any such party. Take your meds, girlfriend, you're losing your freaking mind again." 

Two to one Ford never testifies.

 

 

Irish's Field Guide: The Democrats Pictorial Guide To Women Who Know Brett Kavanaugh...Kinda, Sorta, Maybe...

Primary Sources

h/t Irish

In history, secondary sources are people from a later time talking about persons, events, and so on. Infinitely preferable are primary sources, which are the people in question themselves, and their contemporaries talking about themselves, and their times and events,  and as they understand them at the time in question, and in their own words.

So in that light, courtesy of a tip in comments, someone - Cult Of The 1st Amendment's blog, in fact - has screen-grabbed the relevant pages from Kavanaugh accuser Christine ("Crissy") Blasey Ford's high school yearbooks, ("SCRIBE"), from 1982-1984, which would correspond to then-Blassey's sophomore through senior years of high school.

That they did so is both remarkable, and fortuitous, because they've been subsequently scrubbed from the Internet, once Ford's fairytales gained traction with the moonbats.
How...convenient. But too slow, progtards. You can't stop the signal, and the internet is forever.

UPDATE: They tried to scrub the above site.
But You Can't Stop The Signal. You Can Never Stop The Signal.
(And if the second site goes away, I grabbed 'em to post myself.)

I simply commend you go there and RTWT.

"On Monday Sept. 17^th, Christine Blasey Ford’s high school yearbooks suddenly disappeared from the web. I read them days before, knew they would be scrubbed, and saved them. Why did I know they would be scrubbed? Because if roles were reversed, and Christine Blasey Ford had been nominated for the Supreme Court by President Trump, the headline by the resistance would be this:

CHRISTINE BLASEY FORD AND THE DRUNKEN WHITE PRIVILEGED RACIST PLAYGIRLS OF HOLTON-ARMS.

And it would be an accurate headline. That’s why the yearbooks have been scrubbed. They are a testament to the incredible power these girls had over their teachers, parents and the boys of Georgetown Prep, Landon and other schools in the area. In the pages below, you will see multiple photos and references to binge drinking and the accompanying joy of not being able to remember any of it.

These yearbooks are, therefore, relevant to the national investigation now being conducted in the media, in homes, and in the halls of Congress. And they should not have been scrubbed. If Brett Kavanaugh’s yearbooks are fair game, so are these.

And you will wonder while reading them, why the hell did the faculty approve of these yearbooks? Why did the parents take out paid ads in these yearbooks? Animal House had nothing on the infamous “Holton party scene”.

The resistance media has been singularly focused on Brett Kavanaugh’s high school yearbooks, which imply that he got drunk and threw up. There’s no need to imply anything from the Holton-Arms yearbooks. It’s all there in focus, and the written word too. All of the sordid details as approved for publication by a “look the other way” faculty. And now it’s available for historical/evidentiary review."

I am roughly contemporary with both parties in the situation, and similarly, attended a small religious prep high school, though nowhere near the prep school prestige of the ones in question, ours being both co-ed, and actually religious, as well as over in the provincial left coast, rather than merely ivy-covered and self-importantly "formative" for the East Coast Ivy League universities that think they should run the world.

Suffice it to say that had we contemplated, let alone practiced, the open drunkenness and debauchery proudly proclaimed from the pages of Blassey(-Ford)'s high school days, there would have been a number of show trials, with students, parents, and teachers roasting in literal flames at a stake. It would have been a full-school assembly for the purpose.

The level of casual moral laxity, bigotry, lewdness, drunkenness, and general decadence in the weekly prep school party scene that was clearly the norm in Tidewater prep school culture was something I didn't even see at state university over here in the provincial left coast near the same time, until one dipped into the frat jugheads' sewers, which were mainly a homage to Animal House, except with half the wit and twice the alcohol.

So it becomes clear that when Blassey(-Ford) claims a hazy memory, there was clearly more than her alleged "one beer" involved, but when she says she was afraid of her parents finding out, one can only observe that they clearly never saw her yearbooks for her entire sojourn through high school at a time when them paying tens of thousands of dollars must have been a lot of money. Had mine proclaimed that sort of lifestyle as openly as her Scribe yearbook did, right on the pages in plain sight, the parents and faculty would have taken a flamethrower to the publication, and people would have been expelled, after an Inquisition that would have made Torquemada visibly pale. The faculty Yearbook advisor would have been subjected to thumbscrews, having the skin flayed off in layers, and drowning, screaming, while being subsequently dipped into a vat of bactine or rubbing alcohol, at a school assembly, and his charred remains would have been quartered, and still on a worldwide pilgrimage of known Christendom to this very day, pour encourager les autres. 

Then they'd have gotten pipes and blowtorches, as well as torches and pitchforks, and gone after the party-givers and their parents. The mass graves would be the stuff of legend, had such events ever happened in proximity to my contemporaries.

Conversely, we have Kavanaugh, the product of a Catholic prep school at the same time, regarded then and now as a model of propriety, by every witness (by the literal dozens) they can find, at a time when he was in his teen years, after passing through six proctological FBI background examinations before now, without so much as whiff of scandal or impropriety. That doesn't "just happen".

I've been through one such FBI Special Background Investigation, so let me tell you, the experience has to be seen to be believed.

I therefore have no problem, before even getting to the vague and suspect accusations of an avowed leftard SJW pleading alcohol and PTSD when I say, she's simply making shit up.
Seeing the atmosphere that spawned her during her formative years, it's pretty obvious how she got to be the damaged and defective fabulist she's become, and why she's such a psychological basket case. She wasn't sexually assaulted by a young Brett Kavanaugh, she's simply the product of a toxic upbringing and exposure to things grown adults should avoid, things that were in plain sight by all available evidence.

The unavoidable question isn't what Kavanaugh did or didn't do (which is overwhelmingly "nothing whatsoever that is alleged ever actually happened"); the question is:
"Crissy, where in hell were your parents all those years??"

Her high school years, in the words of her classmates, are exactly how you get such fucked-up and morally defective people, who grow up to become the lunatic fringe of the Democrat Party.

The brighter kids in the day figured that out in about a minute, freshman year.
The ones I still follow from my class have doctorates teaching at military academies, run aerospace multinationals, cable networks, and pastor mega-churches.

The slow learners became a generation of Crissy Fords.

And when someone never learned right from wrong, is it really that surprising that 36 years later, they're social and psychological basket cases, and they still can't tell truth from lies?

Welcome To My World

h/t IOTW

IOTW links to a story called "Why it’s so hard to get mentally ill Californians into treatment"
(besides the obvious answer, which is because my fellow Californians keep electing them to office):

(EXCREMENTO, CA) For years, Diane Shinstock watched her adult son deteriorate on the streets.  Suffering from severe schizophrenia, he slept under stairwells and bushes, screamed at passersby and was arrested for throwing rocks at cars.Sometimes he refused the housing options he was offered. Sometimes he got kicked out of places for bad behavior.  Shinstock, who lives in Roseville and works on disability issues for the state of California, begged mental health officials to place him under conservatorship—essentially, depriving him of his personal liberty because he was so sick that he couldn’t provide for his most basic personal needs of food, clothing and shelter.
But county officials told her, she said, that under state law, her son could not be conserved; because he chose to live on the streets, he did not fit the criteria for “gravely disabled.”

RTWT.

This is my life, every day for 20 years in the ER, and every other ER, nationwide, especially so if the community is larger than 50K people, and if it doesn't snow there in the winter, multiply that by a factor of 10.

We didn't have 500,000 visits a year at the Busiest ER On The Planet™; we had 1000 regulars who came in 500 times apiece.

I've now been to...fourteen ERs in three counties in nearly twenty years doing this, and it's no different anywhere you go.

Schizophrenia is like heroin addiction: it's a social death sentence, and it's almost never getting any better. The worst part, for family, is that Suzy or John (mostly John, victims are about 1 1/2 times more likely to be male than female) is perfectly normal until late high school or early college, even honors students, and then that last bit of wiring in their heads doesn't go in right. It short-circuits, and they stop being normal, brighter-than-average kids and become, frankly, batshit crazy. I can only imagine the never-ending horror for parents of raising a child, getting them safely past all the normal hurdles of growing up, sending them to college, thinking things are okay, and then watching them completely melt down before your eyes.

Meds help, but only if someone with schizophrenia takes them.
The meds make them feel "weird" (which is what we who aren't schizo call "everyday life" 24/7/365/forever), but they seem fine. So they decide they're not sick, and don't need the meds. And become actually weird, hearing voices who aren't there, seeing people and things that aren't real, and end up in my patch, barking, frothing mad. So we re-medicate them, they get put on a psych hold, they get better, go home, and the cycle repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats. And repeats.

Frequently, after burning all bridges with family, friends, and everyone else, and being thrown out of every care facility in an entire time zone, for cause, they end up on the streets. Where they "self-medicate". I.e., with pot, meth, heroin, benzodiazepines, alcohol, bath salts, paint, glue, or pretty much any substance they can get into their hands, and their bodies.

In a lucid moment, a juvenile patient once confided to me, straight-up, that he got wasted because when he got The Voices In His Head drunk or stoned enough, he couldn't understand them or hear them any more. Pure medical genius, right there.

Oh, and The Voices? They never tell you "You look great!" "Everybody loves you!" "You're a wonderful human being!"

That would be too easy, right?

The Voices always say "You suck. Kill yourself. Everyone hates you. Why don't you die?"

Go watch A Beautiful Mind. Or every scene with Gollum in the LOTR movies. (No points for guessing which sections of those latter movies I will completely skip over, wholesale, in that entire trilogy, because it's too much like pulling a shift at work, except without getting paid.) There was even a great TV MOTW with James Garner as the sane brother, and James Woods as the nut, that they showed in nursing school, because the writers and actors got it so right.

The article tries to pin this mess on Reagan (color me shocked), for signing Lanterman-Petris-Short in CA in 1967. But every other state was doing the exact same thing, and in fact LPS was in the legislative pipeline and conceived under Democrat CA governor Pat Brown, Moonbeam's father, before Reagan was even thinking about politics.

The state - in fact every damned one of them - wanted to get rid of psych hospitals long before One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest (which was outdated tripe from 30 years earlier when the film was made, but why let facts interfere with a good screed, right?), simply because crazy people don't pay their bills, you do. So warehousing them in Bedlam was nothing but a money hole the size of the Grand Canyon, nationwide.

And the do-gooders got together with the penny-pinchers, and decided collectively that since psych hospitals were so terrible, understaffed, under-funded, and yet still too expensive, because staff needs salary and crazy people need food and medicine, why not just turn everyone so "unjustly imprisoned for life" out onto the street?
What could possibly go wrong?
"The state budget will save millions!"

Whereas instead, as we all experience daily, they're free to run into traffic, attack people, burglarize and rob and steal to get money for drugs/alcohol/whatever, crap on the streets, and generally validate every reason that we have for why we used to throw a net over them and lock them up for life.

Which we can't do, because you have to be a "danger to self, danger to others, or gravely disabled", the definition for which last means that if you are mentally with it enough to scrounge garbage to eat out of a dumpster, drape yourself in trash bags when it rains, and construct a cardboard pallet and hovel to sleep on and in, you're not "gravely disabled."
Just...eccentric, and living an "alternative lifestyle choice".
Don't believe me, ask the district attorney, the state bar association, and the Do-Gooders League Of America. This ain't a California thing, it's a U.S. of A. thing, coast-to-coast.

So they're free, and now everyone else has to lock their doors, put up bars, keep their kids inside, and pack heat, so that these literal lunatics can run wild and free.

Brilliant.

And the article shows that TPTB haven't figured it out, even after 50 years' time.

The do-gooders just want them to be free (and to hell with their best interests, or anyone else's).
The rent-seekers want more money, and no rules for them.
The families want somebody else to solve (and most importantly, pay for, their batshit crazy uncles, cousins, brothers, and sons).
And the police, the hospitals, and the courts are simply tired of dealing with their bullshit, and that of the interest groups who want it to continue more than they want what we have now to stop.

My bent is a libertarian approach.
After three trips to hospital on a 5150 for being off your meds, we throw a net over you.
We put you in a helicopter, and we drop you off on one of the Channel Islands currently inhabited mainly by goats.
Once a week, the helicopter flies over, and they kick out food bundles.
There are no trees, and the islands are 30-40 miles away, in waters best described as sub-arctic even in July; those people aren't swimming or floating back, ever.
If the family is all broken up over this, they can pay for private care. They can visit them on Shutter Island whenever they like. They can bring them food, clothes, or anything else to make their stay more pleasant. They can even bring doctors and medicine there to address any other needs. The whackjobs are now free to chase butterflies, run around naked, or even try to fly off the cliffs; I don't care.
I don't want them euthanized, or harmed in any way. I want them free. Over there.

What they aren't free to do, is continue to run around in traffic, assault people and each other, crap on your porch, or walk around in society off their meds.
Three strikes, and you're out.
Now they're free, and so are we.

The do-gooders have tried it their way. So have the penny-pinchers.
Now it's time to solve the problem.