Of course the Fibbies knew about the Colorado shooter.

Documenting, here as a post, what was originally intended as a comment to an entry by Wirecutter. Another contemporaneous post at The Federalist is also appropriate backdrop.

The topic, in general, might be summarized as "Why is it that the FBI seems to have known about most of these mass-shooter cretins in advance of their moment of infamy?"  Because--spoiler alert--they have.

Oh, now that was a swell thought...

So, y'all been enjoying this ongoing game of "What Fresh New Swill Will We Be Expected To Swallow Today?"  

There's little point of my recounting or even summarizing all the electoral fraud shenanigans;  many others have already done a really good job of this, including dismissing the nothingburgers among the legitimate gotchas. For some context, just to give the first nod to "best titles", I'll give the link love to Larry Correia:

• The 2020 election:  fuckery is afoot
• Election 2020:  the more fuckery update
• [Added 11/12] I asked one simple question to people who work with fraud

Indeed.

Other resources are worth the time as well, including this from the redoubtable Glenn Greenwald, and this interview (this link starts at about 7:10 on the timeline, where the best bits begin, and continue until about the 20-minute mark) in which one Robert Barnes very clearly lays out several of the most glaring "indicia of fraud" concepts.  There are others.  

Actually...there are a lot of others.  

Some of the usual suspects, of course, like Project Veritas, Breitbart, American Thinker, etc.;  and of course many sources come with varying degrees of obvious Team Red partisanship.  Caveat lector as always.

But again--there are a lot, and with a significant number not easily dismissible without the assistance of partisan beer goggles.  And there's a different vibe about the group of them, as a whole.  This isn't like what you're used to with the Hive Mind wokester crowd rallying behind an idea, where everyone refers primarily to each other, leading eventually back to a singular and highly partisan source, using the same talking points, same strategy, same rebuttals, etc.  No, from what I've seen here, there are simply a lot of reports (of evidence of shenanigans), from different people, stressing different evidence from different sources, appearing in different places...what's the same isn't the who, nor the evidentiary details, nor the style, nor the source, but only the obvious conclusions to be drawn from taking the body of reporting as a whole.  Even when multiple accounts do point to the same observation (e.g., the statistical impossibility of huge tranches of Biden-only-with-no-downticket-votes happening only in critical swing state locations), they often seem to do it from different angles, or the same observation gets made in both a statistical and a historical context by different people in different states...things like that.  To me at least, the signature of this landscape says grassroots, and self-motivated involvement, as opposed to water-carriers carrying water.

Woodward and Bernstein introduced the world to the modern term "follow the money", and this has the feel of a whole bunch of crowdsourced citizen-analysts, with various degrees of standing to analyze (e.g., I've seen things from data analysts, auditors, poll workers, historians, lawyers, and of course pundits, researchers, and activists as well), independently "following the money" with a fat lot of differentiated observations that all point to the same conclusions...

And boy, do these differ in presentation from the stank all the Cool Kids are so busy pimping:  I see a noticeable amount of "here are my sources;  by all means check my work";  as opposed to all the shouting, shaming, and Most Glorious Censorship of our modern MiniTru.  ("Joe Biden loves me / this I know / 'cause Twit-Face-Google / told me so.")

Really,  taken as a whole, it seems like the sort of broad evidential saturation that you'd absolutely dream of having on your side in a court case.  (Or, presently, quite possibly a lot of court cases.)  And as of this writing it keeps coming, with increasing reports and claims of actual intentional malfeasance, to go on top of the initial "this is just not possible" statistical and historical observations which merely imply malfeasance.

So, shenanigans then.  (Duh.)  And so we have Team Blue partisans looking away from the evidence so hard they risk snapping their own necks, and Big Tech and the urinealist media have their "nothing to see here" support schtick in full swing.  But a lot of people still seem to have noticed that what we're being asked to believe simply wouldn't pass as credible fiction, it's so over the top.  And now we have the great Hive Mind push to legitimize the shenanigans before they can be questioned.

Which reminds me:  I've found a pretty good analogy for trying to find some way to explain this shitshow to my girls, currently eleven and nine.  "Imagine you're watching a football game and the visiting team, heavy underdogs in the betting, are driving down the field for the go-ahead score at a critical point late in the game.  Suddenly there are multiple, inexplicable calls, all favoring the home team and shifting the momentum of the game.  The announcers and commentators can't figure this out, looking repeatedly at replays and scratching their heads, but the fans clearly love it, and play continues.  Then the home team commits a horrible roughing penalty, stripping the ball and returning it to within an inch of the goal line (but still clearly short).  Flags fly everywhere, but then the officials confer privately amongst themselves...with the clock running...and then rule that there was no flag on the play and the result is a home team touchdown.  The crowd goes wild.  At this point the home team literally races to get off the PAT play before the ridiculous spectacle can be reviewed.  (Oh, and it can't be challenged, see, because now they're now inside the two minute warning, even though the game clock hasn't been reset, and remember, the call on the field favors the home team...and how about that, now there's also been a glitch in the video footage for replay.)  And everyone knows that once that point-after kick is away, it's all a done deal, because you know, no backsies.  That's basically what's happening now."

And so now we have Biden already acting like he's official, with the mendacious partisanship level cranked up to eleven in support, all while more and more evidence piles up illustrating just how far and wide the Team Blue shenanigans went.  I've now seen some opinions coming forth that this is QED desperation;  that they know they've been made, and simply have to go all in or get completely destroyed from being hoist on their own petard.  It's a plausible idea, and maybe it's even true.  Under any amount of scrutiny, it just looks really bad for Team Blue here.

And then the thought hit me.  Oh shit.

Oh, shit.  No, no, no, no...

We've been here before.  

Remember the absolutely massive amount of evidence, and even public demand, to go after the Clinton cabal in 1998, for actual abuse of power crimes?  Waco.  Filegate.  Ron Brown.  Vince Foster.  (I'll stop there, but do you remember?  It was a lot, and the evidence was good.)  

All we needed, for a "within the system" remedy, was an opposition committed and competent enough to hit a barn from the inside.  It should have been the easiest layup of all time.

I may have written this here before, but it bears repeating now:  I can remember the exact instant when I finally gave up completely on "working within the system".  Why, it was in 1998, when I heard that Team Red was actually going to go after Slick Willy...for getting some unauthorized nooky in the White House, and for nothing else.  

They did it!  They missed the barn!  

And JFC, it's the same crowd that needs to come into play as a viable opposition now, to make any of this current cluster-coitus into something constructive.  

Shit.  We're screwed, aren't we?

____________________________

Why does this matter?  It's a question I've asked myself as well, and it's a reasonable one.  Claire recently touched on the idea too:  for those of us who have lost faith in the system to even show an interest in correcting itself, why sweat over these latest shenanigans, which for all their impressive magnitude, are hardly new in principle?

I'm not going to claim any sort of intellectual purity here, but I think there's a part of me that still wants to believe that a correction can happen;  that the grassroots of Greater Leavemethefuckaloneistan actually can rise up above the Establishment and bloody its nose just a little bit.  No delusions here that any such would somehow produce a true long-term solution, and maybe it's just sheer misplaced spite at decades, now, of having pretty much all the things I hold dear under continual attack by a mendacious, sanctimonious Establishment that now wants so bad--so very bad--to rid itself of an aberration in its hegemony (an embarrassing one that makes it look bad just like it really is).  But I don't think all this would bug me so much if that weren't at least a little bit true.

And so the realization that effectively exposing the obvious fraud here, and at least delegitimizing the transparently engineered election result, is going to depend on the cooperation of the same people that can and did turn a gigantic abuse of power case into a flaccid burlesque theater, leaves me a bit more despondent than usual, during the week after a presidential election.  

(What's most bizarre to me is that Trump himself, preening peacock and general toad though he may be, has actually proven himself unexpectedly capable of the sort of fortitude needed to lead such an effort.  I may have no confidence in the Team Red party apparatus to do anything substantial--hello, history--but DJT himself, now, he just might start swinging, and to the extent he appeals to people not on his own merits but simply as a functional stickfinger salute to the more couth, polished forms of authoritarian statism...well, he just might bring enough to the yard to land some hits.  (Personally, I like the idea that if he does wind up losing the war here, he could really stir things up with simple outgoing pardons of Julian Assange and Ed Snowden.))

In the end, philosophically, I remain where I have been for a while--over a generation now--but I think I have to admit I got caught hoping for better, here.

Damn buffoon sure has been entertaining, hasn't he?  The ability to give that much apoplexy to the pretentious mob...is actually pretty impressive.

Updated thinking on air rifles for training.

(Okay, so all this week I have been just giddy with the success of last weekend's introductory gunhandling sessions with Feral Daughters One and Two, which culminated not only in reliable hits with the Airsoft 1911 from about five yards, and also not only with exemplary attention to safety and basic handling, including load and reload...but also with conspicuous smiles.  More on this effort later;  for now, that's the context of my starting to think again about the broader context of airgunnery for training.)

I wanted to set down a couple more thoughts about the use of precision pellet guns for training, as the landscape has evolved a bit since I last did that.  I've now been freshly reminded of the viability of using appropriate Airsoft replicas for true gunhandling, and really for any training in which the gunhandling is more important than great precision in marksmanship...but in the end, there will also remain a need for low-cost, high-volume training using something more precise.

Previously, I've written on the Scout-Rod concept, and I'm still keen on making this happen.  The problem of course is that even aside from the ridiculous "safety" on the otherwise-excellent Benjamin Marauder base gun, there would still appear to be much custom work to do to get it up and running in full form, and of course along with the base gun, that's expensive.  But then I noticed the Diana Stormrider, which seems more promising in several ways, especially with the ability to add an additional barrelband for the possibility of a true Scout Scope setup without extensive gunsmithing.

And then today, I happened to notice both the Diana Trail Scout, and also the Diana Mauser K98 repeater.  Both of these are at the very least, interesting options!

The Trail Scout is clearly a derivative of the Stormrider, with the same bolt and breechblock, magazine, trigger and safety group, sight setup, and presumably it would accept the same second barrelband, if possibly requiring some stock inletting.  The Trail Scout seems to be about half the cost of the Stormrider, runs on CO2 instead of HPA, and currently only comes in synthetic stock garb.  Would CO2 be the way to go?  It sure might.  The Stormrider produces velocities, in .177" caliber, high enough that you can (maybe) start to lose some precision, and it seems to get about 20 good shots on a fill, with attendant blast for the not-strictly-necessary oomph.  The CO2 gun advertises much more sedate velocities, and 100 shots on a fill, using three standard powerlets.  Presuming the CO2 powerplant is as accurate a platform as HPA, this lower cost option might be a great training tool!  (Hell, might need to have both...)

The K98 Mauser replica was also a pleasant surprise.  I'd seen Tom Gaylord cover the single-shot version of this rifle before, and hadn't paid it much attention because I've already got a wonderful trainer for single shots in the Air Venturi Bronco.  But this one is a repeater...and hmm, look at that bolt!

I'm pretty sure that is the closest I've seen to a full-size rifle bolt on a non-Airsoft airgun.  No, it's not going to duplicate a real Mauser bolt in travel or even in feel, but it is so much closer than anything else I've seen, at least in a precision, rifled pellet gun, that it immediately becomes a serious contender for a precision trainer.  It's not cheap, by comparison to other HPA alternatives like the Stormrider, and it will have some of its own flaws--for starters, a true scout scope is going to require true custom work, the "safety" is a...let's call it comically primitive crossbolt in the trigger itself (good gawd, people!), and it probably will fit the same 20-shots-per-fill, 200-bar fill pressure, 20-foot-pound envelope as the Stormrider.  But hmm...that bolt, plus the onboard sights, the friendly stock (for shortening and mounting a Ching Sling), and what appears to be an overall excellent base platform...well, I now need to meet one, and am glad that the option exists!

Finally, I'm also curious to dig a little more into what SIG has been doing with EBR-pattern, semiauto rifled pellet guns.  This seems a distinct "third", in terms of training importance (where "first" would imply Airsoft blowback replicas capable of precision gunhandling and gross marksmanship, and "second" would imply rifled pellet guns capable of gross gunhandling and precision marksmanship), but those lines are of course at least a little blurry.  But still, to have the ability for some real rifled-pellet precision, in a semiauto*, AR(-ish) pattern carbine, would seem to be quite useful, and certainly worth the initial investment for inexpensive trigger time.

Anyway, SIG seems to have some options in their MCX and MPX rifles, and boy, I'd love to meet those too, to get an idea of what they're like.  (Tom has covered both an MCX variant and an MPX variant, and I'll cogitate further on the idea.)


______________________
* In the pistol realm, I already went through this thinking a bit ago, though I don't seem to have written about it specifically yet;  the core idea is to come up with a faithful replica of a "semiauto" design that can shoot rifled pellets rather than Airsoft or steel BBs--to be able to work on precision, across multiple shots.  Pistols are difficult for this, at least for 1911 lovers like me:  no pistol design I've yet seen seems to have been able to combine both rifled-pellet feeding, and a single-action trigger.  However, what is available--and what I would argue is viable enough for the concept--are a few designs employing a small internal rotary magazine, against a "double-action" style trigger (technically, this is really a CO2-powerplant revolver, in the guise of an auto pistol), and no blowback.  It's by no means perfect--I'd want the blowback and reciprocating slide if I could get it, and of course I'd want the option of a 1911 design as well--but then I stopped and considered the S&W M&P 45 variant simply on its own terms...and I think it's worth pursuing.  Whether or not the 1911 might be a preferred platform, this still captures a good base gun to train on (the M&P is well-established) and the long trigger is a good exemplar of striker-fired pistols like my own beloved Kahr.  I figure:  use it for precision singles and doubles;  the long trigger roll is the focus of the exercise here, and requires the same sort of sight-settling focus that blowback provides, without needing the actual blowback.  No, it won't combine with authentic reloads or clearance drills, but it is pretty clearly the best option for precision work in a pistol that is anywhere close to ergonomically authentic to a design you'd want to train for.

Hive mind? What hive mind?

You know that sense you get sometimes, when it seems like you are suddenly seeing all the usual suspects use exactly the same talking point verbiage to push whatever stank they've been told to pimp today?

Must be your imagination.

No no, loyal comrade.  You do not understand.  We said, it must be your imagination.

That actually made me laugh, to see that.  Blanket pre-approval from The Hive, to simply dismiss whatever content might appear above, probably just because someone used a hashtag for "QAnon"*, whatever that is.  (It hardly matters, as this content speaks for itself just fine.)

Anyway, whatever y'say there, MiniTru (or WikiPravda, if you insist on a modern name).  You said it, all right-thinking people believe it, that settles it.

For those who insist on having a 'leader': this is what a real leader sounds like.

Today I became aware, for the first time, of South Dakota governor Kristi Noem.  I got referred to this video clip in particular:



Other news clips picking up on this statement were available as well, but the clip really speaks for itself.

I'm impressed.

I may have nothing good to say about anyone who wants to engage in politics, on general principles, and I may have no further contextual knowledge about Kristi Noem or anything else she may have done, but on the strength of this clip alone, she distinguishes herself significantly, above nearly everyone else in her field, standing out as a (pretty lonely) example of what an actual leader sounds like.  Here, she appears to be:

• Someone who understands that the people she leads are worthy of respect.
• Someone who acknowledges that there are limits to her power--and who considers herself bound by them.  
• Someone who neither panders nor condescends to her audience.

My god, it's like she appears to be a human being, or something.

I happen to think that it's a tragic flaw, in much of humanity, to insist--despite the evidence of all of human history--on having "leaders" in the first place.  It makes me a heretic, I know;  insert here whatever joke you may think passes for a witty and clever rejoinder.  (I've heard 'em all.)  But hey, let's get real;  on a practical level, I'm quite aware that I won't likely live a single minute of my entire life without at least one "leader", at some level, laying some sort of claim on me.  (Because enough people believe this to be inevitable, so it becomes inevitable.  A sort of psychosomatic slavery.)

In such an absurd world, I may still bristle at the idea of having "leaders" out there, on principle, but that does not mean that I can't recognize better from worse.  Which means I can say, unequivocally, that if our "leaders" were more like Kristi Noem as she is in this clip, the world would be the better for it.  

Nearly incomprehensibly better.

Hello there, Robert Gore.

Posting has been pretty dark here for a while--not really my intention even given the deliberate attempt to pull back from all Teh Stoopid for a good bit--but this deserves a bookmark.  "The Last Gasp", by one Robert Gore.

I came across it via the Zelman Partisans blog (hat tip to Sheila Stokes for this post), which linked to Gore's "Basic Math", which then identified itself as a companion piece for "The Last Gasp".  So, arguably, I found it nearly by accident.

It does sorta get your attention right away:

When you can’t love, you hate. When you can’t build, you destroy. When you’re ignored, you scream. When you can’t tell the truth, you lie. When you can’t reason, you panic. When no one will follow you out of admiration or respect, you compel. When you can’t live, you kill.

This is it, the last gasp of the psychopaths who express their contempt and hatred for humanity by trying to rule it. Compulsion, not voluntary and natural cooperation. Power, pull, and politics, not incentives, competition, honest production, and value-for-value trade. From each according to his virtue to each according to his depravity.

Nicely said.

It goes on from there, with a refreshing excellence.  Gore's style strikes me as a mashup of Rothbardian ideas, laid out and presented in a Butler Shaffer artistic style, using a tone that reminds me of Robert Higgs, with some polite nods to Will Grigg.  (Meaning, of course, that in me it would naturally find a friendly audience.  :-)

Boy, I hope he's right--with the "last gasp" idea.  It makes perfect sense in a go-to-the-logical-conclusion kind of way, but of course I'm also reminded of an El Neil backstory (I think it was in Forge of the Elders) which talked about a similar tyranny inexplicably snatching an unexpected total victory from the jaws of similar defeat, right at the point everyone thought it was over and could finally move the hell on to better things.  "No one is more dangerous than the suicidal," indeed.

Anyway, hello there, Robert Gore.

A ranging shot from Leviathan?

The following was originally posted over at Claire's place, as a comment to this post in which she comments on (among other things) both the sudden Democratic Party wagon-circling around the barely-still-functional Joe Biden, and also on the emergent COVID-19 hysteria which has since illustrated, with full-spectrum clarity, just how willing and even eager so many otherwise intelligent people are to be led around by the nose, by the world's oldest protection racket.

It seemed appropriate somehow to warehouse this extended comment here as well. (As a housekeeping choice, I've backdated it to the date of the comment, but otherwise it's as it appears there.)



ORIGINAL COMMENT

---

Claire, I’ll echo the “blog when you’re inspired to do so” sentiment. I see blogging at least a bit as a true art, and authentic art is, at heart, the channeling of a muse. Whenever you hear yours, by all means bring her beautiful voice to life again. (The hard part, sometimes, is just knowing when that voice is authentic, and not a manifestation imposed by the noisier parts of an active mind.)

_____________

In re the sudden wagon-circling around Biden, it seems clear enough that all the handlers are scrambling for a viable plan in this fainting-couch chaos of their own making. Bernie’s crime is simply that he’s had enough unexpected success on his own, now, that he’s forgotten his place, which of course is nothing more than to appear on cue for the purpose of making the party’s anointed one look more palatable to the credulous; he’s become big enough that he has to be put down–publicly. It’s amusing not because he’s actually “too far left” for the party (ha!), but that he’s too bluntly honest about the direction it’s all supposed to go, and since the Hive appears to have concluded there aren’t yet enough rubes ready for The Long Game to wind down, well, he’s got to go. The audacity of the shenanigans needed to accomplish this simply shows us the magnitude of the internal problem. (That is, if it really is a problem. After all, it could yet be another part of the show; it’s not like we’re dealing with honest people, here, in the first place…)

I can’t imagine anybody’s actually thinking of putting Biden into the general election on purpose. My guess (conjecture, of course, but hey, the popcorn’s already on the table, so have at it, eh wot?) is that he’s just being propped up temporarily to limp the party into the convention, where he can be publicly judged to be (suddenly and tragically) medically unfit for office, suitably lionized as a faithful soldier ready for retirement with honors, and then replaced by the pre-circled-wagon crowd with a True Anointed One. Everyone makes out, right? Bernie gets effectively sidestepped, Joe turns his humiliation into a Great American Hero story, and the party rallies around…

…well, at that point, as I seem to remember some professional cretin arrogantly saying, “What difference does it make?” (shudder)

I can’t quite make out Gabbard in all this, either. Sure, her politics are repulsive, but there does seem to be a certain honor and consistency there, and maybe the party really does simply fear that on her own she’d run away with the public and put their investments at risk. She’s an interesting X factor–or at least, at this point, she should be. (He says with full understanding that we’re so far beyond “should be”s, now, as to be firmly into the realm of the “absurd” of Voltaire’s famous quote.)

_____________

And in re Coronavirus…well, yes, it scares me, but not principally for any reason of epidemiology. Sure, it seems obvious enough that it’s a nasty little beast, a serious threat to people with certain vulnerabilities, and quite possibly comically under-reported…but…

If I take a step back, and take a sober look at what appears to be a worldwide…uniformity of both the under-reporting and the hysteria…first focused on establishing a public belief in lethality far past what even the most generous numbers seem to indicate (nicely said, Bear)…then shifting to focus on the inevitable impact on world markets…then shifting further to discussions of mandated quarantine, loss of resource and manufacturing supply, and most recently the potential for unrest due to resource scarcity…

…well, what are we always told is the solution to problems of this magnitude? Hm.

And then there are the outré, ridiculed, but persistent claims that [this Coronavirus] is a runaway bioweapon…and all the shifting stories and claims from governments worldwide…well, initially shifting; now, instead, coalescing around the “under-reported” leitmotif and moving toward increased discussions of mandatory quarantine…

Hell yes, I’m scared of Coronavirus, the worldwide phenomenon…because somehow, it has the feel of a goddamn ranging shot.