If You Live South Of Canada, Best Pay Attention

Sunday, Mexican Army units cornered the head of the Jalisco Cartel. Electing to take his chances with shooting his way out of the trap, the cartel head received the full Bonnie & Clyde treatment. Within hours, the Jalisco Cartel responded by setting much of Mexico on fire: burning busses across roads, arson to houses, hotels, and anything else they could, and shooting anything moving on legs. Think Rodney King riots x Beirut.

That's all fun and games in the dumpster fire/failed state that is Cartelistan, or Shitholia/Mexico.

But now the cartel is vowing to go after tourists, and the U.S. State Dept. Has issued run/hide advice to all gringos in Cartelistan, and thousands of international flights have been diverted from Mexican airspace, because the drug armies are shooting at the airports, the planes, and anyone exiting them.

So, picture this. The cartel minions grab a handful of Americans, because it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Trump, being Trump, jumps on them and stomps the living sh*t out of them, courtesy of Delta Force, Navy Seals, the 82nd Airborne, and two thirds of the Marine Corps.

The cartels say "Fuck me? No, fuck you!" and order any fifty cartel members (out of the thousands that already reside in the U.S.), to travel to the local malls in Dallas, Houston, El Paso, Phoenix, San Diego, and Los Angeles, and just shoot up everyone they can. And then a couple of NBA games. Disneyland. A few schools full of kids. Take your pick, and there's fuck-all that can be done about that short of putting the factories that makes Mk 82 bombs and all the B-52 bomber wings on a three-shifts-a-day schedule, and just like that, Mexico's cluster-fuck meltdown is now America's war, on American soil, for the first time since Pancho Villa raided New Mexico in 1916. And we aren't going to fix this with Pershing and Patton galloping around northern Mexico, but sending the 1st Armored Division and the 1st MarDiv to occupy a twenty-mile wide buffer zone south of the international border would be the likely result by next Friday.

You want a war where your meat suit is your uniform, where being brown in America is the new n-word, and where 60 million Mexicans caught in the crossfire decide to move into California, Arizona, and Texas, and this is a swell way to get there.

Pay close attention, kids. This might simmer down. Or it could all go Shit Mardi Gras in hours to days, and demonstrate in an international way, the truth of the statement: Good fences make good neighbors.

And own this, in your bones: we got here because too fucking many people who should have known better thought doing drugs was no big deal, and going soft on them was a bright idea. You were down with a Slap Fight On Drugs, With Collateral Damage. If we'd ever had an actual War On Drugs, Mexico and Columbia would look like the surface of the moon.

As If Troy Was In Wakanda...or Minneapolis

Hey, John Wilder (and "Unusual Whales", by extension):

(Graph as found. Reality is quite a bit harsher. And Gen Z would
be far better off if they hadn't learned math from 60's hippies.
They're about to learn it from their dead grandparents from 1934.)

(Dear JW:

I'd have posted this as a comment to your previous CW 2.0 post, but it keeps getting cock-blocked there, due to wonkiness. This is one way to drag me back here, kicking and screaming. Well-played.)

FTR, whoever "Unusual Whales" is, the graph line that suggests "Real wages" have increased 30% in the last 40 years is far beyond mentally retarded. And merits them an internet dick punch of Godzilla-ish proportions.

Wages since 1985 have cratered. Case in point, my parents' combined household income in 1985 was at the 50th percentile at the time, i.e the mid-point, nationally. Or notionally. Mine is currently at the 90th percentile nationwide, all by my ownself, IOW, better than 90% of US households. But for me to have the purchasing power they enjoyed near the household median in 1985, my paycheck would need to be larger than it is by seven- to ten-fold. IOW, I make 500% of what mom and pop did, yet the purchasing power of my income is only about 40% of what theirs was then. That's how much nothing my fiatbux "Real wages" command currently, and how badly "Real wages" have dropped.

Gold is gold, which is why the spot price is USD$4500/oz as I write this, compared to +/- USD$300 in 1985. That means a dollar in 2026 is worth less than 7% in real terms what it was 40 years ago. (You could look it up.) Let me turn that up:

A 2026 dollar is worth <7% of what a 1985 dollar was worth.

(And BTW, a dollar in 1985 is worth less than <7% of what a 1932 dollar was worth.)

For Common Core grads, that means your dollar now is worth less than 5/1000ths - 0.005% - of what a dollar was worth in 1932. ($1 x 0.065 x 0.07 = 0.00455. QED) A dollar currently is worth less, in real terms, than the cost for the ink and paper to print it. Maybe write that down on your hand in Sharpie, lest ye forget. We don't need zinc pennies anymore, because $1 bills are the new 1/2¢ coin. And the only people who've figured that out are EVERYONE who's selling you anything, worldwide, and why all your sh*t, from cars to houses to Happy Meals,  has zoomed in price. Gold hasn't zoomed. Your dollars are simply worth Jack, and Shit. That's how inflation works, with the Treasury printing fiatbux three shifts a day, and inflating the unbacked money supply by trillions, year after year. Fun times, dead ahead. 

Oh, and that wasn't Boomers who f**ked you, Boomer-haters. You kneejerk know-nothings know who you are. It was every generation prior to Boomers, those born from 1850-1944 who own that. As anyone with an IQ about room temperature knows, when Nixon was elected in 1968, only the pitifully few Boomers born 1945-1947 - three years out of twenty one for that generational 1945-1965 demographic slice - could even vote for Nixon. But you dipshits "learned" - I use that term loosely - Common Core history from the same aging commie fucktards that taught you economics, which is why reality from both math and history is kicking the shit out of you in both ends at the same time. Stand up, and maybe let a cluebat smack you in the forehead, rather than the foreskin, and you might actually learn something, instead of spending your entire lives getting butt-f**ked by Reality. You public-schooled shithead simpletons. /rant

(This is also why comments from the people who chided me for saying "buy gold as a hedge against inflation, not stocks" from a year or five back haven't aged well. Suck it, chuckleheads.)

This reality is why Fiatbux - dollars, francs, yen, renminbi, whatever - are all finely engraved toilet paper. Don't make  me do a retard crayon talk here. The only things that have cratered harder than "real wages" since 1985 are Russian armored regiment performance, or possibly Minnesota fraud investigations. Even Catholic church child abuse investigations have improved more than real wages since 1985. To suggest otherwise makes CNN economic reporters and hosts on The View sound wise. 

The "Real wages" line on that graph should actually look like Rosie O'Donnell's future media prospects, with the endpoint somewhere below my third paragraph in this response; to suggest otherwise - as that dickheaded graph does - deserves to have the creator of that graph punched in the throat with brass knuckles, then set on fire alive, dropped in a vat of av gas, and have the dwindling pyre shot at by hunters with buckshot. It's so far beyond cretinous, that actual cretins couldn't see the creator from here, even looking from the Webb telescope in space. If somebody can't get something that simple correct, maybe graphing things isn't their game.

Sometime between tomorrow and death, most of the world is going to discover firsthand what the inhabitants of Weimar, Zimbabwe, and Venezuela all learned about financial reality. It isn't going to be pretty. In a Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff kind of way. Mind the drop.

Just saying.

- Aesop

Just Noticing

First, to piss off the haters: No, we are not dead. Second, neither is the blog. It's merely paused. Third, no, we're not back yet either.

Additionally, we've made a lot of progress on alternative arrangements. And some other fronts. Huzzah.

But in flicking by here and doing a quick peruse, the lowest numbers sit around 2K visits/day. The average is several times more than that, most days, equaling what Gulag reported when we were contributing 1-4 posts/day, for a decade-plus. The peak interest was Christmas Week this past year, with multiple days at 50k+ visits/day(!), when a lot of folks were doom-scrolling the net, and the exact kind of daily numbers the Gulag's monkeys NEVER allowed to show up on our view count when we were contributing regularly.

Our conclusion is that, surprising us not a whit, Gulag continues to fornicate our daily view/visit count, only letting their efforts lapse when we're not showing up on some shit-minion's daily Black-Pilled Blogs To Fuck With List.

Which means we can probably take their reported views, and at minimum, assume that post-Trump, there should be a zero behind them, if the actual views were removed from the official Gulag Fuck With This Guy's Blog list. We're sure any number of folks, especially those on our right column Blog List, fall under a similar situation. IOW, we see you're still f**king with things, Gulag, but you're not fooling anyone. (We have literally been online and watched the count cycle backwards, in real time, like on Election Night 2024. They're that ham-fisted. For another touch point, the view count of this post shows 6 views in the seven minutes since it dropped. The blog's view count shows 2400 additional visits in the same time frame. IOW, people are visiting the blog, but not, y'know, reading the posts. Kind of like getting Playboy, but not opening it, like people did. Riiiiight. Said No One Ever. How To Tell Me Gulag Is F**king With Your Blog, Without Telling Me Gulag Is F**king With Your Blog.)

Which means we're winning, and it's still giving them a huge dose of redass, even when we're too busy to add anything.

This warms the cockles of our cold, green amphibious heart no end. Keep sticking it to the bastards. We shall return to the fray anon. And we humbly thank what is obviously an interested reader base in our current prolonged absence. You're not alone out there, people, even on shitty days in challenging times. 

It's just that certain of TPTB want you to think you're alone. Take heart. You are not any such thing.

See you soon, we hope.

Best Wishes,

-A.

Bigger Fish To Fry

We've been far less concerned with the internetz the last couple of months, because we've been working on Castle Anthrax. IOW, our personal arrangements for when the threat of spicy times becomes an actuality, as well as being our retirement fortress of MYOB when we've had enough of indentured servitude for our final employer.

Where is it, you may ask?

NDBBM.

It is far from our front porch, well away from the 10% of America that lives in the surrounding area, and conveniently far from the beaten path to make us happy with the arrangement.

The last few weeks have been spent securing things to a reasonable degree, and working on plumbing and other infrastructure.

So as much fun as we have here, it doesn't hold a candle to weightier things at the moment. We do not expect a horrific turn of events tomorrow, or this year, but want to be in a better position for whatever comes, whenever it happens, with a view towards when we wish to put out the following unwelcome mats, bolted to the step,

then chain-locking the front gate, and set about minding our own business to a far greater degree.

Posting will continue to be therefore rather light. We have frequently advised people to make the most of the good times to prepare for bad times. That's exactly what we're doing the most of at the moment. We hope you are too, or have already done so. Anyone who doesn't realize Trump and Vance are a seredipitous but temporary respite hasn't been paying close attention.

And FTR, this is probably just about all we're going to specify on this particular activity until a friend or relative comes on here, and tells you we won't be posting anything at all, since there's no internet in the afterlife. We earnestly hope that day is looong in the future, but for the time being, we quite literally have much better things to do than deal with the minutiae in the wider world. We expect to still log on and visit our own favorite stops and drop comments, but overall, this place has been moved temporarily to about twenty-seventh on our list of daily Top Ten Things To Get Done.

While we're otherwise occupied, feel free to frequent the other bloggers on the Blog List, or cruise through our greatest hits from the last seventeen years we've been at this. When Castle Anthrax provides some object lessons, we shall be only too happy to share those, consistent with our personal privacy. When things are a lot farther along than now, we expect to return to more regular posting.

In our absence, you have our sincere best wishes for your efforts to make similar arrangements.

Sunday Music: Too Late For Goodbyes

 

1984 saw this cut from Julian Lennon's debut album reach #5 on the Billboard Hot 100, teasing hopes of a belated Beatles' reformation, with son Julian sitting in for his recently assassinated father John. But it was all tease, and nothing ever materialized, except this track showing everyone what might have been.

Sunday Music: Just My Imagination

Classic Motown soft soul, this platinum single was the third time the Temptations hit #1, this time in 1971, recalling their signature 1960s glory.

No, By All Means, Move

h/t WRSA

Suck It, Bitchez

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

I've never said Ukraine could win. I have said Russia, Ukraine, or even both could lose.

But DJT? What does he think, 1309 days into Putin's idiotic and blood-soaked quest to reassemble the former Soviet Union?

I'ma just leave this right here.

There was a mix of astonishment and reservation in Kyiv on Wednesday — contrasted with bitter dismissal and some mocking defiance in Moscow — after President Donald Trump said Ukraine could reclaim all of its territory, a dramatic change in rhetoric on the war. 

Trump had long maintained that an end to the war would require Ukraine ceding territory, but months of failed diplomacy have seemingly fueled frustrations with Russian leader Vladimir Putin.

We earnestly commend the Rootin' For Putin crowd still waving their "Any Day Now™" banners to flood the White House website, and explain to 47 how he's got it all wrong now that he's finally grown tired of the taste of Putin's ass. Let the UDS flow through you.

Can Ukraine "win"? Define winning.

Can either side, or both sides, lose? Absolutely.

But at least Trump's stopped trying to outdo Dementia Joe in throwing a country whom we promised to support under the bus for naked political expediency, thereby imperiling every treaty and alliance we've signed since 1787.

Personally, we only have one thing to say to DJT, finally pulling up in his Secret Service limo:

Cue a caravan of poo-flinging monkeys and ass-slapping baboons in 3, 2, ...

Second Encore: Tomorrow

This was first posted in February of 2017. And then encored in 2020. Both times, it was one of the most-read posts I put up in either year. And it still strikes a chord with a lot of people. Which makes me wonder: is it the Ghost Of Christmas Past, or Christmas Future? Only time will tell. - A.

 

"Seven".
The earpiece crackled in Jake's ear from one of the handheld radios they were each tuned to. They'd picked up a couple of dozen surplused Motorola LE-only encrypted radios on eBay, and after a lot of work, Gene had programmed them all to use a normally unused simplex channel reserved for the authorities for tonight. All anyone else would hear was a brief bit of static with the factory encryption, but they still stuck to brevity codes.
Jake calmed himself. He knew the signs of buck fever, and he took a few moments to stretch his whole body, starting with his toes, and ending with his fingers. It wouldn't be long now, and he didn't want to be fighting adrenaline when the moment came.
The van he was in was non-descript. It was the twin of one belonging to a local business the next city over, and the plates on it would be back in the morning, with any luck at all. Inside was dark and quiet, but he could already hear the noise of the protesters as they moved down the main street, closing at the speed of a 6000-footed caterpillar, fueled by youthful exuberance, and a healthy amount of stupidity. Well, they were about to get a lot more education than what they'd gotten at U Cal, and he was happy to be a teaching assistant tonight.
He focused on the intersection, and checked over his gear one last time inside the darkened vehicle, as the sounds of yet another leftist temper tantrum grew louder by the moment.

"Six."
Jim, hunkered down behind a load of cardboard boxes in a van much like Jake's, sat at right angles to the intersection.
His weapon too was identical to Jake's: the ubiquitous Ruger 10/22, modified for tonight.
It had a frame optimized for grown-ups, with one of those evil pistol grips that gave the state legislature hissy fits, going back to the late 1980s. Also a high-cap magazine, which torqued them out even worse. In this case, picked up out of state on a visit to relatives, and driven back across state lines into what Jim referred generally to as "Occupied Territory". He had several more loaded and waiting next to the stock. Also present was a heavy barrel, making the thing a tack-driver out to the limits of the relatively weak cartridge. And under the heading of "in for a penny, in for a pound", both rifles had custom home-made suppressors screwed on at the business end. They wouldn't be truly silent, but inside a can, inside a van, a couple of hundred yards away from a herd of screaming protesters, would be as near as. Just to be on the safe side, Jim screwed an earplug into the other ear, the one without the earbud.
Jim hadn't been in the military, and he wasn't the shooter Jake, who'd been a designated marksman when he served, was. But a lot of patient practice and range time had made him plenty good enough. And using the little pop-guns tonight wouldn't tax anyone's abilities at all. He checked the bipod legs to make sure they were securely locked. If they had failed, he had a beanbag rest for backup.
And when they returned, the barrels used tonight would come off, replaced by factory barrels again, and the heavys would go on a fishing trip, after being reamed out with a hardened bit. No evidence, no traces.

"Five".
Gene spoke in a monotone voice familiar to anyone with long hours in a ham shack. He was the geek in the bunch. He'd found and programmed their radios, made sure everyone understood how to use them, and how to communicate.
There wasn't a leader as such, but he was older than the others by a decade or so, and after raising three teenagers to adulthood, there wasn't much that fazed him or ruffled his feathers, so he made, if not a Daddy to the group, a good Friar Tuck: a bit more mature, thoughtful, and worldly-wise, when it was needed.
He focused on his screen, and his fingers moved the controls to guide the drone slowly and deliberately. It was unregistered (of course), blacked out, and over the din of the demonstration, almost as silent as Jim and Jake would be, on the moment.
He followed the mob's progress as they moved towards the intersection where all their flyers and internet blather had helpfully pinpointed they would end their rally.
The police scanners indicated that, exactly as before, the town cops would be studiously ignoring the protest except for a token presence, and the campus cops were half a mile behind, doing about the same thing.
No roadblocks, so he and the others, in separate vehicles, would take separate, easy, and rehearsed routes out of Moscow-Near-The-Bay, and back to the quiet semi-rural small community they lived in an hour or so back up California's lush Central Valley.
Not so lush now, with dumping the agricultural water formerly set aside to feeding the world now going to a Sacto Delta baitfish to appease the whims of the idiots Gene was watching, and their elected Foole, long known as Governor Moonbeam.
Gene focused his attention on the drone's power supply. He had four of them, and had alternated them in series, swapping  hot batteries for the depleted ones, so he wouldn't lose visual on the herd. Other than a minute or two between coverage, it had worked flawlessly, until one of his drones had a hiccup, and had to be retired from the relay. The others picked up the slack, but he was glad he was able to recover it without losing one of his numerous toys. The mob was now crossing the fourth street from the target intersection.

"Four."
Pete could barely hear his earpiece, turned up all the way, but he had the most dangerous job. He'd infiltrated one of the local bunches of miscreants some weeks prior, after the first riot. He wasn't one of their anarchists per se, just one of the multitudinous black-clad folks giving them cover.
He had several jobs.
First, on his way to the rally, he'd carefully dumped a couple of hundred pieces of wiped .22LR brass around the intersection; some in each direction, where later investigators would find it, for all the good it would do them. It had been collected off the ground and floor at half a dozen shooting ranges, separated by brand, and location. The consensus was it would look like between 4 and 8 close-in shooters, rather than just the two.
Second, he was the one with an interest in historical sabotage. Careful research on real manuals (not the tripe in The Anarchist's Cookbook, which he was sure had been written by BATFE to get amateur bomb makers to blow themselves up) and practice with real materials had taught him several time-honored ways of getting something to go up in flames or explosion, reliably timed, and without him being there to get the full effect in the face. Most, but not all of the materials would be consumed, making things that much harder for anyone looking into it afterwards, as he was sure they would. That's why after tonight, he wouldn't use that particular set-up again for some time, so as not to create a signature. And just for fun, the night before, he'd left enough parts and exemplars inside the garage of the witch organizing this event to see her off to a long odyssey through the federal courts and prison system, after one anonymous phone call. Life's a bitch, especially when you are one, he chuckled to himself as he salted the items among her possessions the night before.
Third, as the mob moved along, he would place his devices underneath several likely cars about a block behind the festivities, on both sides of the street. That mainly entailed tying his shoes a lot at the bumpers, and surreptitiously sliding his items under their gas tanks. Time and physics would do the rest, in about three minutes, once he set them in place.
Lastly, once he'd done that job, he was artillery.
He had a water balloon cannon ready to attach to poles on the sides of his pickup truck. Practice had taught him that he could hurl small-bottle Molotov cocktails a couple of city blocks with minimal effort, and hit minute of mob, in about thirty seconds. Three shots in 10 seconds, break it down, and then be gone in half a minute.
He was wearing the mob uniform black, head-to-toe: black combat boots, black baggy military-style cargo trousers, black long-sleeved t-shirt and black hoodie, with a black balaclava over his face, and black leather gloves with hard knuckles. On his back, a generic but sturdy nylon black backpack.
Underneath, hard soccer shin guards, knee pads, a cup, hard elbow pads, soft body armor, and lightweight HDPE Level III plates in a plate carrier. A homemade hard helmet shell under the balaclava. He would not be playing victim in the knockout game if he got confronted.
He also had OC spray, a stun gun, a cheap but sturdy full-tang knife, and a Glock 19 with several extra mags, as well as the CCW permit (from a more enlightened sheriff in the nearby county where he lived, but good statewide), to make him almost 100% legal. Well, except for the incendiaries in the backpack.
Like the others, he also had a generic camelback, a small IFAK, and a personal E&E kit, including colorful regular shirt and pants, maps and routes on a removable cell phone thumb drive that led to an alternate and contingency rendezvous, a burner cell phone with the battery removed, paper cash and change, energy bar, and a good plausible and backstopped cover story.
He was young enough to pass for a grad student, and a bit of an adrenaline junkie, hence his choice of assignment, but he was nobody's fool, and they all planned to get home quietly and safely, and had taken every precaution to make it so.

"Three."
Gene noted everything on the scanners normal, mob moving into position.

"Two."
Jake and Jim chambered the first rounds in their rifles, and stayed on their scopes.

"One."
Now it got hairiest for Pete, and as he entered the last block, he started dropping off his packages, pushing them well under gas tanks, and making sure to trip the chemical chain to start the ball.
The first two were easy, then he had to work his way quickly through the mob as it congealed, to get to the other side of the packed street, and his alley exit. The front end was in the target zone already.
"Target 1. Target 1."
"Target 2. Target 2."
"Confirm Target 1. Confirm target 2."
Jake and Jim both had eyes on the front of the herd in their crosshairs.
Pete pulled out his last timer, and shoved his package delicately along the asphalt under an SUV.
As he hit the alley and made his way along it, he gave the all clear.
"Thunder. Thunder."
"Confirm Thunder."
"Waiting for ignition."
As Pete jogged towards his truck, the chemical chain ignited his first package. A fire blossomed underneath a sedan on the far side of the intersection.
The drone confirmed it as the orange blossom grew.
"Ignition."
"Weapons close. Weapons close."
Two safeties were snapped off, and two pairs of eyes searched for targets.
A second package ignited, as flames from the first began to engulf the first car.
Pete got to his truck, jumped into the bed, and limbered the poles into place.
"Drone's off. Drone's off."
Gene guided his drone back towards his vehicle. When it was well away from the zone of interest, he dropped it to 100 feet, set it on homing, and turned on his burner phone.
He punched in a number, and a previously selected landline rang.
It was connected to a timer, and the timer to an Israeli-made cell phone jammer sitting in a phony generic utility box as camouflage, on the roof of a building on the near side of the intersection.
For the next 10 minutes, no one would be connecting any calls within 100 yards of the site. All streaming video from the riot stopped. Texts bounced to nowhere. No 911 calls would be going out.

The crowd pushed into the intersection, some of them cheering the fires they thought their own thugs had started.
"Shot out. Shot out."
Pete called the first of three launches of lit molotovs now arcing towards their target, labeled "to whom it may concern."
The first bottle bloomed into fire amidst the mob. There were screams; they weren't expecting this.
"Splash. Splash."
"Splash. Splash."
Both shooters confirmed the impacts.

Gene was recovering his drone; he closed the sliding side door as he made the call.
"Weapons free. Weapons free."
Inside the two vans, the shooters began plinking through their 25-round magazines. The rounds might kill, maim, or just leave a painful but survivable wound, but in less than half a minute, they were all on their way. Inside the vans, the rounds tick-tick-ticked off, and the brass went into catch-pouches.

The mob was careening around the intersection now. Panic set in with a vengeance as people started to go down. The herd started to stampede back the way they'd come when the first vehicle's gas tank went up with a "Whoompph!", and sent them in new directions. The third package ignited across the street, just as the last of three molotovs landed in the confusion and screaming terror, amplifying it.

"Rounds complete. Rounds complete."
Both shooters changed magazines, and began to send the second batch of 25 shots into the fleeing mob. They both aimed low; a lot of knees and legs were hit.
"Three, Tally Ho."
Gene was already on the road and outbound.
"Four, Tally ho."
Pete had dropped his poles, and was on his way out too.

"Winchester 1."
"Winchester 2."
Jake and Jim had gone through their second magazine apiece. They each dropped the hinged windows back into place and secured them there. The rifles were dropped into hide boxes, then covered with a couple of heavy crates.
"Two, Tally Ho."
Everyone waited breathlessly for Jake to announce he was rolling as well.
"One, Tally Ho."
Three other hearts started to slow down to normal.

NOW the idiots would know what a "WAR" was. None of the men driving away thought they'd like it very much in reality. And the authorities were still trying to figure out WTF had already happened. They wouldn't learn anything useful, though the anonymous call the next day that snitched out the organizer of the violence for cooking her own people "for the greater good" would come as a great PR boost, rather than their usual "we're investigating all leads" B.S.

The cards on their steering wheels led them to separate freeway entrances. After that, the routes were in their heads. Cruise control kept them driving at the speed limit. Radios were switched off. Each drove silently into the night. Behind, the screaming continued, and the nightmare for the protesters, and TPTB, was just beginning.

One hour later, the radios came back on.
They each checked in by number, and verified from different directions their primary rendezvous site was clear and uncompromised.
There, the rifle barrels would come off, the brass would be policed, and they'd switch to the cold license plates. 
The rifles were put back to original configuration. Jake took the weapons. Jim took the silencers, and the custom stocks.
Gene got the hot barrels. Pete got the brass.
Everyone changed clothes. Gene took these to an all-night laundromat.
The other three, in sweat clothes, hit the 24-hour gym next door, and took long showers, scrubbing every trace of residue from their bodies. Then they changed into their normal attire.
Pete took the hot plates back to the lot where the delivery vans they'd borrowed them from were parked, and put them back on without incident.

They drove home individually, at intervals, and by separate routes. Gene drilled out the barrels; next deep sea trip, they'd fall off the boat at night on the ride out. Jim cleaned and stashed the other parts, and Jake cleaned the weapons thoroughly. Pete took the brass home, where he pounded it into lumps of scrap with a sledgehammer, then shot off a bridge into the tule marshes with a slingshot.

And they all slept like babies.




This is entirely a piece of fiction. And a cautionary tale. Hopefully it stays that way, but I wouldn't put chips on that square. If it gets your panties all twisted, too fucking bad. Get over it.
It took about twenty minutes to type out, and I haven't even been thinking about this much.
If I can come up with this off the cuff, so can five hundred thousand other people. Some already have.
Bet your ass on that.
And if you're one of the erstwhile protesters, many of them wouldn't be as merciful towards you and yours as I was in this little tale. You ARE betting your ass on that, every time you show up for another piece of street theatre. And when it actually happens, 100:1 they'll see that YOU get the blame for it. Win-win.

So, contrary to all experience thus far, you all could grow the fuck up, knock your silly shit off, and just suck it.
Or keep pushing your luck.
Call the toss in the air, kids.
-A.

Sunday Music: Mas Que Nada

 

The only way you get more 1960s than this instrumental classic is if you're listening to it on your 500-pound combination AM/FM/turntable/stereo speaker cabinet. Don Draper, Matt Helm, and Sean Connery's 007 would all approve. The band for this track included session musicians like Doc Severinsen, before he became Johnny Carson's paisley-coated music maestro. This cover by Warren Kime and Brass Impact followed Sergio Mendes' version featuring Herb Alpert, which version hit #47 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1966, and was done yet again with Sergio and the Black Eyed Peas, and included on the soundtrack for the animated feature Rio in 2011.

A Reminder To Communist Pigs

Ask the Viet Cong how Tet worked out for them.

Since They Keep Losing The National Debate...

Leftards shot up Republican congressmen. They targeted Supreme Court justices. That wasn't enough, so they tried to assassinate Trump. At least twice. That we know of.

Now they've killed someone who did nothing but clean the floor with them, rhetorically. As civil a civilian as there could ever be. So now, the Left is killing ordinary citizens. Or in this case, extraordinary ones.

Evidently, they got tired of losing the arguments, and decided the time for talking is done.

They have sown the wind, and they shall now reap the whirlwind.

Be still, my beating heart. This ends the debate on having a debate. Shooting people for their politics is now, beyond any argument, on the table. The range is now hot in both directions. Best wishes with that plan, Leftards. When one of yours goes down from here on out (and believe me, a ten-fold or hundred-fold recompense for this assassination is well within reasonable speculation), the only response forthcoming will be "Good riddance. Moar, please." You will not hear "Enough!" unless it was your last guy. And that last guy will be the only one that hears it, as his lifeblood drains out. Sympathy for you will only be found in the dictionary, somewhere between "shit" and "syphilis". You are now the dog who caught a car, and is about to find out how that works out for the dog in real life. As Matt Bracken once warned, the people who don't know what "minute of angle" is shouldn't pick a fight with the side that does. That ship has now sailed.

Open season, and screw the bag limits.

This isn't the beginning of the end. But it's the end of the beginning. May God have mercy on the Left's souls. Because no one I can think of on this planet will.

Sunday Music: Heart Of Glass

Blondie's breakout #1 hit took them out of cult status at the end of 1978 and took them and new wave into mainstream, fronted by Debby Harry's breathtaking classic bombshell blonde looks and unmistakable vocals. This song is as timeless now as it was then, and it never gets old.

Barriers To Entry

This is your world with no barriers to entry.

 

Angus and I are still going back and forth on professional licensure, barriers to entry, etc. His points are worth noting, and merit proper consideration.

As my latest reply is really too long for a comment there (or anywhere else), I post it here:

I absolutely understand barriers to entry, including both intended and unintended consequences to same.

In the original example you've cited, that's exactly what was in play. It was also gross stupidity to no intelligent purpose whatsoever. It demonstrably encouraged fraud, by creating an attractive nuisance in letting someone completely untrained, unlicensed, and uncertified demonstrate excellence in a position where obviously no professionalism (nor basic morality) was in any way needful to meet and surpass the employer's needs or expectations. 

In 90% or more (if not 99+%) of registered nursing jobs, that barrier to entry is both necessary and prudent.

You've cited an outlier where it was neither. I can generally count those on my thumbs.

The tip-off to that is anyone doing a job so well despite a total lack of training or education, they were being considered for a "charge nurse" position after mere months. (That's granting that the media report(s) we're relying on for the example was anything close to accurate and correct. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect says that's pure hopeium in play, but that's another issue.)

I wasn't citing the shortage of nurses as refutation that a barrier exists, I cited it to point out that erecting that barrier over positions that don't need it is immensely stupid and clearly makes no sense. It's like requiring an electrical engineering degree for a job changing common 60W light bulbs - asinine and pointless, to no discernible benefit to anyone: not the end user, the employer, the employee, nor to any person or reason articulable or imagined.

It's quite simply stupidity in action.

IOW, most of what bad HR does pretty much every day of the week.

There's barriers to entry for brain surgery too, and we generally don't consider them a drawback.

When someone requires the same level of barriers to entry for the person who cuts and combs your hair as they do for neurosurgery, however, it's obviously become asinine.

Your example was the latter, by a country mile.

That example is so narrow in the field specified as to require measurement with an electron microscope.

What it's not, is proof that that's either the trend, nor even common practice.

There was once a time when anyone could claim the title "nurse". It was generally either nuns, or hookers too old to pull clients.

This was back when "doctors" had less medical expertise than that currently possessed by a reasonably intelligent paramedic, and the death rate from "medical practice" of all types was commensurately horrible.

Current barriers to entry in the entire medical field, be it licensure, education, etc. is a net plus, otherwise the hue and cry to get rid of them would be deafening.

While there are endless examples of times and places where barriers to entry to any field may be flat-out idiotic (as the original one you cited), in the medical field in general, including nursing, it's a positive boon to all concerned.

The alternative is hiring African witch doctors off the street, and according them co-equal status, which is like  letting retards who can't grasp grade-school math hang out a CPA shingle.

Was there a barrier to entry for a position in the original example? Yes.

Was it needless, pointless, and egregiously stupid? Also yes.

Does it therefore prove that barriers to entry are therefore always pointless and stupid? Absolutely anything but. I don't think you were or are arguing that.

And that example is so breathtakingly stupid and rare anywhere in the medical arts that calling it "remarkable" is where using that word falls far short of accuracy.

The only thing I can see is that it also beggars the word "moronic" when describing the employment entity and management of same precisely for requiring licensure for a position far in excess of requirements, as well as in violation of basic common sense and napkin-math economics.

But that's really about all it does.

FTR in anything medical, the rule is generally the exact opposite, to wit letting people far less than competent do things far beyond their abilities or preparation, whether it's letting techs perform procedures without anything but a brief OJT, or state medical boards letting anyone practice plastic surgery with nothing more than having graduated medical school, both of which examples are the exact opposite of barriers to entry. And with predictable outcomes.

For another example of the problem with lack of barriers to entry, currently, the only barrier to entry to riding an e-bike hereabouts is someone (or someone's parents) having the means to purchase one. No age limits, no license required, no training regimen prescribed, nothing. Consequently, anyone who can reach the handlebars can ride one, and in a year or two, e-bikes have moved into the Top Five causes for trauma visits to local ERs, and we see 1-5 cases a day, nearly every day, since e-bikes first hit the stores.

They're like handing out live hand grenades to toddlers, and wondering what will happen.

In both cases, carnage.

It's a situation absolutely begging for barriers to entry, where the item in question should require no less training, licensure, and safety equipment (i.e. a helmet) than that required to legally ride a motorcycle on city streets. Just to keep the accident toll down to single digit percentages.

Until that happens, letting anyone ride e-bikes is simply the unwritten Orthopedic And Trauma Surgeon's Full Employment Act of 2005.

In a fair world, they'd also require that anyone injured by riding one recklessly be cared for only by "doctors" and "nurses" with no licensure or certification to practice as such.

Sauce for the gander, and turnabout is fair play.

FTR, I'm also fine with only caring for drug overdoses and drunks with specific specialty hospitals staffed solely by personnel absolutely working while high as f**k, and/or with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit.

It would be hilarious on pay-per-view, and give us something to do with all the doctors and nurses with revoked licenses for substance use, while having Darwin's acolytes rolling on the floor in fits of laughter.

Just like comedian Gallagher's plan for giving all those houses under the airport's flight path to deaf people.

(Safety Tip: No flying monkeys need respond at Angus' site, nor are they invited by either of us. Like most blogs, he has posting guidelines. Ignore them at your own peril, and on your own head be it.)

Sunday Music: Rock & Roll Fantasy

 

If ever a rock song should have been brought to life word for word and then immortalized in animated form, it's Bad Company's Top 13 hit from 1979, but when Heavy Metal came out in 1981, they totally missed the bus on that. (Pro Tip: Anyone looking to make a name as an animated director, the song is still right there, waiting and ripe for this to happen.)

Gone Fishing

Dupont spinners. 100% success rate.

Multiple out-of-town trips last week and this one. Posting sporadic. Making up for using less than 3 weeks of PTO in the last quarter century. Starting with a number of new toys, and the time to play with them. (Pro tip: thermal sights are awesome.) And I may do it again next week too. Visit the blogs and sites on the right-->.

Sunday Music: Lovergirl

Today's choice is from the funkiest white girl singing R&B in the '80s, at 28 years old here, and already on her sixth studio album. She wrote this, played it, danced it, and sang it, taking it all the way to #4 in 1984.

Choices Have Consequences

h/t OddJob

Nota bene Warsaw is not on that list.

Demographics is destiny.

Either Europe throws them out en masse, and without pity.

Or they become the Turd World.

There's no middle.

(No points for guessing how that works out for the 50M overbreeding invaders, from all points of the compass, already here in the U.S. DHS reports that over 2M have self-deported since January 2025. So only 48M to go...)

Sunday Music: A Little More Love

Between her movie success coming from Grease, and the blockbuster album Physical, ONJ put out Totally Hot, and this sultry single from it, which peaked at #3 in 1978, hinted at the shift from soft pop to a harder rocking image, and the volcanic explosion that was to come on her next solo album, which kicked the doors open on the 1980s. She wasn't accidentally one of the best-selling artists of all time.