The Mob That Cried Wolfanaugh.

Now that the Kavanaugh circus has moved past the hearing stage, and the social mob's Operation Fecal Flingery has failed to produce the smoking-gun moment its architects and footsoldiers insisted was the only "reasonable" outcome...stop, and listen:  one can almost hear the sound of the Never Trump Army mob suddenly remembering other reasons to deny Kavanaugh his application to the Nazgul Nine Society.

But after all this crap, will anyone care?

Boy, it kinda takes you back to the last time that a shamelessly partisan mob decided to hitch its attack wagon exclusively to a salacious sex charge, doesn't it? 

If I recall correctly, after that failure to produce the mob's desired outcome, the public suddenly just didn't have any stomach left to talk about other--better--reasons for going after the cretin any more.  "Enough," they effectively said, and not without at least some reason.

And the band played on, didn't it?

Huh.

Boy, it's a good thing that a social mob is not easily...manipulable, by Establishment players who know just how to exploit the statist impulse of the credulous.  Otherwise, it might be tempting to observe that the "woke" crowd* just got utterly hoist-on-its-own-petard-punk'd by Le Coif du Orange...who simply applied the history lesson he learned just about twenty years ago now. 

_____________________________

* And Hell's bells, but I wish these tiresome people would stop showing me reasons to give Trump credit where credit is due.  He's still a tyrant, in a tyrant's chair, continuing the work of the tyrants before him, with no sign of actually reversing course--but he is at least amusing to watch**, not least because he incites nearly pluperfect apoplexy in people who, by their unconcealed and purely partisan hatred, richly deserve to reap what they have sown. 

** I remain convinced that at least most of the buffoonery is fully intentional, which is at once refreshing and amusing, but also--observing its performance--deeply frightening.  We should not forget that for all the noise, the Establishment / Deep State is just fine with Mein Trumpf.  After all, he is still here, isn't he?  And that means that, regardless of whether anyone likes him or not, he is at least proving...useful.

Yo, Kroger. Is the craven coward thing paying off for you yet?

The following is addressed to the decision makers at Kroger / Fred Meyer, whoever you are and wherever you may be, who have now simply removed entirely gun and ammo counters, even from a store in Alaska, in response to partisan political pressure.  Let me be really clear here:  if you had a hand in promoting or making this happen--then "you" in what follows means you, personally.

Listening?  Good.  This part is important:

You are invertebrate, 

craven cowards.  

Get that?

Do you even know what the word craven means?  It really is not possible to use the word more literally.  Or more sincerely.

Harsh, you say?  Hell yes, what you've done is harsh.  Oh, me, you say?  Ha!  I'm just being honest.  It's not even comparable to say that I am responding in kind;  I am being far more polite than that.

Let's be clear about one other thing, too:

You chose this path.  

You did not have to, but you did anyway.

Oh, don't get me wrong.  I'm not saying the choice shouldn't have been yours to make.  It's your business, and I'll defend your right to make your own business decisions until my dying breath.  Even if those actions are spineless, contemptible, and misanthropic.  (Liberty does not require decency, or even mutual respect.)

But the flip side of the freedom to make your own choices, is that then you own them--at least in the eyes of decent people, who do not presume to mind the business of others.

And you do own this misanthropic abomination you now call policy.  You have chosen to hock a giant greenie at untold thousands of customers, quietly loyal to you for untold years, to the tune of untold millions of revenue dollars, across product lines going far beyond guns and ammo.  And you did it in despicably craven deference to a simple loud-mouthed mob, self-arrogated minders of other people's business, crusading with nearly comic religious fervor to forcibly impose prior restraint upon millions of people who have harmed no one.  (You are aware, I presume, that the public face of this lynch mob, prior to the transparent co-opting of its tragic celebrity by veteran partisan zealots, and its subsequent miraculous conversion into instant national gun policy experts, was best known for being unable to resist eating Tide Pods on a dare?)

You do understand, I presume, that their coercion tactics have been wildly successful on you thus far?  I mean, let's not mince words:  they told you what to do, and you could hardly heel-snap into line fast enough.

So, here are some questions for you, now that you've made this bed and have to lay in it.  Even if you're not real happy with me at the moment for being so honest and all, you really should consider what the answers are.  (Truth, and reality, do not require your agreement, nor even your consent.)

• Do you really believe that, having caved without any real effort at all on this demand, that they will leave you alone now?  Do you?  Because either you do, or you don't.  If you don't believe it, then what's the payoff supposed to be?  If you do believe they'll go away now that you've caved, then you're as stupid as you are spineless--and QED that's saying something.
• Do you actually buy the stank these meddlesome piddlewits are pimping?  I mean seriously:  this crowd talks as if they are selling their ideas on the basis of some sort of calculable performance, but try this experiment if you want to learn something:  ask any of these people, if they truly believe in this notion of performance, what their "tipping point" is--that point at which their chosen statistic or metric goes the other way and will cause them to agitate against forcible prior restraint, and for actual liberty.  Just watch what happens.
• Do you think we--both the actual "gunnies", and other liberty-loving types for whom guns may be unimportant but principle still is--will simply not notice what you've done?  The complete removal of the entire gun-and-ammo counter is actually an up-the-ante move from the more well-publicized decision to ignore state law and further restrict sales based on arbitrary age.  (In my local store, the age-restriction sign still hangs above the now-simply-not-there gun counter, mockingly.)  I suppose this idea shouldn't be that surprising, since you've so clearly chosen to throw us under the bus in preference to your new policy-shouting besties, but will your gamble pay off?
• Did you trade up, in spitting on people like me to welcome the hipster polypragmatoi?  Or did you maybe miscalculate and trade down?  If I were you, I'd pay attention to that.
• Do you even know how many of your customers you've pissed off, by pissing on?

You could have told the meddlesome nitwits to pound sand in a hundred ways, and you could have simply ignored them into the irrelevancy they so richly deserve in a hundred more.  You didn't.  You capitulated immediately, with not even an obvious objection, much less any meaningful resistance.

The right to make that choice was, and is, yours.  The right to call it out as contemptible, craven cowardice, and pure antipathy to your customers, is mine.  

And here's the final rub:

It was pointless.

Yes, pointless.  No good will come of it.  If you don't understand that yet, don't worry, you will some day.  (I suspect there is a lot you haven't yet figured out about political crusaders;  if you think I'm a pain to deal with here, just you wait.)  

In the meantime, ponder this last question:

What will you do, 

when you figure out 

you've been played 

for nothing?

The late Mike Vanderboegh--a much missed voice in this tiresome age--used to love to quote Frank Zappa at moments like this, and it is with Mike in mind that I (as an unabashed Zappa fan of my own) offer this Frank-ism in parting:

Do you love it?

Do you hate it?

There it is,

The way you made it.

Achieving what is possible, free of the shackles of shame.

Hat tip to Gun Free Zone, via Joel.

Hey Mom!  Look, I haz a dumb.

(Things like this make me miss Will Grigg terribly.  I'd have loved to hear him roast this one.)

Okay, kid, I'll go out on a limb and venture a guess that you don't know Thermopylae from a fever tester.

That level of irony is almost worthy of someone trolling it.  Somehow, though, I don't think I'll hold my breath on the hopes that this person is either trolling directly, or making a more obscure comment about NRA being skippered by pre-emptive surrender monkeys.  Possible, I suppose, in a quantum sort of way (and it would actually be pretty awesome if it was), but not...exactly...likely.

Actually, though, when I saw the picture, the very first thing that went through my mind was this:




Actually, the whole scene is worth a bookmark.  I do remember enjoying that film.




Almost spooky, isn't it?

Maybe the real question, since we know that so much of this (current) feeding frenzy is pure Astroturf, is whether the idea for the kid's unintentionally hilarious sweatshirt originally came from Team Tide Pod*, or from the handlers.  (Frankly, I'm not sure who I'd root for, there, either.  The handlers more richly deserve the egg on the face, but they're just plain not going to heed the lesson no matter what:  ironically the kids stand a much better chance of actually learning something from it all.)


Give the bag to Bozo, kid;  you've taken being played for a fool to a whole new level of achievement.  And in that vein, here's a piece of free advice for the future:  never enter a battle of wits unarmed.


__________________
* Probably, of course, it's just a school mascot sweatshirt, and we're just witnessing a truly amusing karmic coincidence.  But I'd not be surprised, if word of this double-facepalm-fail actually gets around the way it should, to see schools across the nation drop Spartan mascots like the proverbial ton of bricks, for being too inconvenient to the narrative.  (Because the narrative, after all, just wants to go home at the end of its shift.  :-)

A thought struck me...

...you know, in and among this latest top-down push shove from the Hive Mind to impose forcible prior restraint upon tens of millions of people who (s'prise!) didn't harm anyone this time either.  The ongoing Trump Derangement Syndrome spectacle* is tiresome enough (the Manic Progressive crowd having utterly destroyed any remaining humor value left in their transparently aggressive adventures in open misanthropy--do you appreciate how hard that is to do?), without having to add on this next-level muckraking Astroturfery from the professional victim-disarmament set.

But these are crusaders, here, and they do (le sigh) persist.

And actually, that's what prompted the observation:  their commitment to doing whatever it takes, to achieve their social engineering goals, no matter what the inconvenient little people may actually want.

Think about this for a moment:

• They're going to get what they want (in this case, gun control), and that's all there is to it.  They are smart and you are stupid, and they're more than willing to bet your life on the outcome, so they absolutely will not stop coming, will not be turned away, for any reason:  they will get what they want--what they want, they take, and they deserve to take, because they're smart and they just want it to be this way so bad.  Nootch.
• We already know from long history that the Force!Defenselessness!Now! crowd is willing to resort to procedural shenanigans, deception, outright fabrication and lying, and agitprop to dominate their moral and intellectual lessers.  (Actually, that's an interesting question:  has any gun control ever passed without procedural chicanery to end-run around the inconvenient lack of popular support?)
• They habitually (and loudly) claim the moral high ground, not because they actually hold it, but because in a victimization society that is a known safe haven for concealing one's own moral turpitude.
• They habitually slut-shame the targets of their domination attempts to make and keep them subservient, or at least ineffectual.  (What else would you call repeatedly suggesting that any sort of dissent from the Hive's currently-proffered snake oil product, is prima facie evidence that nutjob redneck ammosexual overcompensators would obviously cook and eat their own children rather than give up what is obviously nothing more than a prurient hobby?) 
• They habitually enlist both institutional and freelance wingmen to enable their depredations and schemes.  (Outcome-predetermined "research" from transparently ideological think tanks, Establishment media for both unlimited free marketing and hitpieces on demand, talking heads and policy wonks, "under the radar" propaganda manufactury, and ambulance-chasing litigation and soapboxery, just for starters) 
• And now we can see that they will openly exploit traumatized schoolkids to make their hard-sell for them, where they have failed themselves to snow over enough people enough of the time, in a manner for which you or I would be utterly and rightly destroyed for "abuse of power by a person in a position of authority".  The kids may drink various amounts of the Kool-Aid Flavor-Aid on their own, or they may believe they can go along to get along, or they may not understand their position as pawns in the opportunists' game, but what they do not really have in the matter is a real choice:  they will serve the purpose assigned to them and that is that.
• Finally, the Hive Mind crusaders threaten any who stand in their way.  They do it in advance, to ensure compliance;  they do it in arrears, to keep inconvenient accounts and reports under control.  They do it openly, and behind the scenes.   But above all they do it constantly, so that everyone is clear that what the Hive wants, the Hive will have, and dissent is simply not tolerated.

So...hm...domination under the cruel illusion of choice, cynical and deliberate abuse of power, political strongarmery and wingmen, conveniently cloaked in whatever facile sanctimony is currently popular with the all-hat-no-cattle set?

See, it's not like old Harvey is somehow back.  

No.  With these people, he never actually left in the first place.

_____________________
* It should go without saying that calling out TDS for what it is, in no way constitutes any sort of support for that pathetic impostor of a human being.

I know I can't be the only one thinking this...

...and also it's not like I spend much time these days combing the Interteubz to be sure, but still, I don't recall seeing the thought anywhere else thus far:

Bumpfire stocks as a key component of the recent Vegas disaster?  Really?

Notwithstanding the fact that certain key details of this sordid story seem to be slipperier than the finals heat at a greezed-pig contest, and changing and shapeshifting about like you'd expect within that metaphor:  this guy was supposed to be rich, a bit of a showoff, and not really afraid of jumping through hoops to get what he wanted.

So...instead of simply using that wealth and personality to amass a braggable NFA collection of "real" automatic weapons, he instead resorts to what has been described as the poor man's full-auto*?

And watching how the whole bumpfire thing has landed so squarely into the exact right spot to be exploited by all the usual blood-dancing suspects?

Something stinks doesn't even begin to cover it.  But then again, for anyone who's been paying attention, that's basically a given for any of these events, isn't it?



_____________________
* Personally I'm among those who disparage bumpfire stocks as a range toy for those who want to more efficiently waste ammunition, but I'm also among those who acknowledge that the most valuable characteristic any product could possibly have is the ability to cause instant apoplexy among the insufferable polypragmatoi.  Which is to say that if I had money, I'd immediately acquire two, whether I like them or not, which is hardly the point.


 

Please, stop. I need taller boots for this.

So by complete accident, I recently failed to avoid noticing this:

I try, you see, but sometimes it's just inevitable.

Gaaag.

Sometimes I'm tempted to wonder if it is even theoretically possible for this crowd to be more sanctimoniously self-absorbed and haughtily tone-deaf than they already are.  But the very minute I consider even entertaining the thought, the Weaponize Arrogance Now! crowd comes through once again, like the finely honed machine that it is.

"Can Satire Save the Republic?"  Oh, you mean from the hive mind's metastasizing singularity of abdicated intelligence masquerading as wit and self-arrogated moral superiority over an undifferentiated mass of people they utterly and totally refuse to understand on any level beyond that of a toddler at meltdown?  Well, you know, as an art form, actual satire just might be able to accomplish that--if, you know, it were done well, and pointed at the right target.

And so here they are, this professionally smarter-than-thou crowd, as usual presuming that they've got it all figured out.  Just a little more ridicule and those stupid hicks and cousin-humping rednecks will surely see the light.  It's so self-evidently obvious!  And then we'll be able to avoid all this electoral ugliness next time.

I know I shouldn't let it get to me, but JFC, so many of these people are committed to their onanistic displays of wanton superiority and intrasquad virtue-signaling.  It's bad enough that we've been burdened with the Deep State in the first place, and then with this latest buffoon to figurehead it, without having also to deal with this worse buffoonery of the overeducated useful idiot whose understanding of utopian ideology and elevated sense of self-importance vastly outpaces his understanding of real people in meatspace.

Hell, they don't even understand that the Current Occupant is an intentional buffoon, and yet from what I can tell, they crow with stunningly pathetic pride at all their oh-so-very-clever takedowns of what may be the ultimate straw man.


And man, is it annoying when I then sound (to myself at least) like I'm somehow defending that smarmy buffoon, or his "supporters", or even "the Republic" itself.  I'm not, of course.  But this hive-mind gambit--to somehow manage to be worse than all that, with new levels of sanctimonious smuggery backed up by childishly facile tone-deafness in practice--is, at least arguably, working.

Just putting this benchmark out there. Eyes, ears.

All of a sudden, the TwitFace is starting to ramp up a noticeable number of those hive-sourced, meme-driven, professionally hoplophobic nuggets of just exactly the sort that seem to happen right before something big and stupid goes down somewhere in the American soyuz, becoming suspiciously convenient fodder for just whatever the victim-disarmament crowd has recently been working on pimping.  You know, that shit that always seems so uncanny when it happens, and never seems to happen at any other time?

Of course, maybe it's nothing:  these tiresome people are always digging away at human independence;  they are nothing if not committed to their war on everyone.

Still.  The level of tone-deaf stoopid right now is beyond breathtaking, and we know for a damn fact that recent administrations are not above working "under the radar" to manufacture whatever opinion that the peasant rabble refuse to accept on their own.

So:  eyes, ears.  

Actually, George...

(As seen on the TwitFace.)

I’m sure you were great on TV and all (I confess I have never been a proper Trekkie), and I’ve no reason to doubt that you have also been a personal inspiration to more than a few perfectly decent people trapped in the closet by shameful and needless sexual bigotry. Even more importantly, you have done much to shine needed light on one of American history’s darkest moments, in openly talking about your own family’s internment in WWII. (As things happened for me, I learned about that horrible exercise in genocide enablement from others, but I will always respect you specifically for swimming against the shameful tide to willfully ignore or forget it.)

But seriously, George, your snowflake comment here pretty much writes its own rejoinders. 

Since you brought it up, then, here’s a few other “the thing”s about snowflakes:

• Snowflakes evaporate (or sublimate) and vanish completely with the simple application of hot air. (That is: they are utterly dependent upon utopian environmental conditions.)
• Snowflakes have no minds of their own; they simply drift and fall wherever the winds may blow them. (Note that it does not matter who may supply the wind.)
• Snowflakes are also completely unlike any living thing, in that they have no individual defenses of their own. (Not only are they not organic—they’re inorganic!)
• Snowflakes’ entire capacity for creativity and uniqueness is expended at the point of their creation. Yes, they are formed beautiful and unique, and truly the process of crystalline self-organization is remarkable—but once the process completes, the magic is gone; there is no life. (Nor the sentience for self-awareness, much less the sapience for self-direction.)
• Snowflakes can be artificially manufactured by machine, or deliberate cloud-seeding. (Note that whosoever does this, does so with inherent intent to create an exploitable mob.)

Look, I understand that your intention in coming to the defense of the noble snowflake, was probably to call out the notion of unintended consequences. In itself, that is a reasonably noble instinct, which I would generally applaud. But—aside from a rather juvenile delivery—do you really not recognize the fractal irony in defending the accretion of mindless, non-adaptable, easily manufacturable participants in a societal contest over “legitimate” power?

And I not only mean the overall irony, George, I mean the personal irony. It somehow seems very odd that you would make a reference such as “in large numbers become an unstoppable avalanche that will bury you”, given your own personal and family histories. I would think that you would understand, implicitly, “the thing” about “in large numbers” as it relates to human society, which is this: the relationship between empathy and “large numbers” is strongly inverse. Are you really suggesting that the only thing that matters in a societal discussion is “large numbers”? That the little guy should just suck it up lest he be bur[ied] in an avalanche? Really?

The late Aaron Zelman had a name for that sort of cognitive disconnect: bagel brain.

There's a reason they call it the TwitFace.

Behold:

Well there, Massuh Superior Being suh, that's quite a statement there.  (Personally, I'd say the worst insult anyone could throw at me is to call me a v*ter in the first place, but then I'm a known heretic.)  It deserves a far more thorough fisking than I have any time to assemble here.  Nonetheless, presumably you, paragon of civic virtue and All That Is Good, Healthful, and Nonfattening, "supported" a different candidate, and very likely "supported" the current administration through both of its terms, as well.  (I suppose it's possible you didn't, but somehow that seems vanishingly unlikely from the evidence here.)

It would be childishly simple to ask you, in light of your strong declarative statement, why you would prefer a candidate (and a sitting president) who believes that dead Mexicans (that's brains-blown-out dead--we're not talking about a bigotry of words here) are an acceptable political cost of manufacturing the public impression that American gun dealers are arming narcotraficantes on the sly.  (Oh, you never heard about Operation Fast And Furious, reported on almost daily for what, a year?  In which the ATF deliberately armed the cartels so that their crime guns could be traced back to US gun dealers, supporting the FedGov's claim that 90% of Mexican crime guns trace back to the US?  Yeah, both Hill and Barry were all over that one.)

It would be similarly easy to ask you, again in light of your morally upstanding and good-for-the-climate statement, why you would support candidates and presidents that not only argue openly for extrajudicial killing and indefinite detention, but practice it regularly.  As but one example, assassinating not only an American citizen without trial, but shortly thereafter his teenage son, offering the functional equivalent of "sucks to be him, he should have had a better dad" by way of explanation.  How many hundreds have been killed with drones, or more traditional methods of extrajudicial war?  

You're okay with all that, right?  Seeing as how "there is no middle ground", and all.

One could go on.  It's not difficult.

But you're smart, and enlightened--so much moreso than half the American public, which you keep telling me has simply lost its mind because it doesn't move in lockstep with your beliefs.  (Oh, you don't put it that way, but that's always what it comes down to.)

Obviously they must have been conned.

I'll bet you think you appreciate irony and wit, too.

It takes a special snowflake...

...to be that committed to not learning the takeaway lesson in the "shocking" Trump victory.

"Shocking"?  Please.  The American public has been begging for this farce for years, even generations.

It's been pretty ridiculous thus far, among the channels I follow.  People who I know are otherwise intelligent, and even reasonably perceptive, are nonetheless shamelessly shouting out their best entries for Fainting Couch Theater, and looking like utter and complete fools doing it.

The fractal ironies seem to be lost on this legion of hyperventilating, Holier-Than-Thou thespianics, who with great sanctimony and without irony ascribe to the vast, undifferentiated mass of people who outv*ted them, every single talking point attack that Team Blue managed to come up with.  And so I  am repeatedly informed that there are well over fifty million racist, misogynist, homophobic fascists out there, QED, simply because the Team Red buffoon won, so there.

Keep in mind these are the same people who are so (loudly) frightened of the mindless mob-mentality they see in Trump's authoritarianism.  The irony is simply lost on them, and you will not make any friends suggesting that they should just maybe look in the damn mirror.

And it's just childishly amusing to hear all this doomsday talk from the very selfsame who just about eight years ago went to such pains to..."reassure" critics that all our obviously racist thoughts about BHO were unfounded, and that we really needed to relax and take a nap.  Because this, of course, is different.  (While on that point, betcha we also see the return of the term "war criminal", which has been conspicuously missing in action since January of 2009.  Dissent will no longer be considered racist and antigovernment, but once again "the highest form of patriotism".)

The tone-deafness is really stunning to consider.  As just one example, I've seen multiple calls to abolish the Electoral College, because they are just sure that plain old mob democracy will produce their preferred result, and not this insult to their progressively superior way of thinking.  Did they somehow miss the fact that, for all Hillary's institutional advantages (e.g., "I want a love who looks at me the way the press looks at Hillary"), and against all the predictions and punditry, that very mob just matched them?  (Arguing minutiae is pointless--the popular v*te was supposed to favor Hillary heavily, and instead it was essentially a dead heat.)

This is a crowd who believe themselves to be self-evidently superior beings, and are quite uninterested in the existence and influence of their lessers--so much so that they appear unable to believe that an actual revolt against their rainbow-shitting-unicornverse is possible, even after it occurred!  "How did this happen?" is the exact, precise equivalent of what Jeff Cooper would have called "getting caught in White":  they never really believed that their nightmare could happen in the first place, and now that it has, the excuse-making and condescending rationalization will have its out--"those people" are simply subhumanly stupid*, or they got hoodwinked by all that massive right-wing propaganda, or they cheated...anything at all to avoid the realization that "Never Hillary" is just as valid and rational a position as "Never Trump".

Which doesn't say that much anyway, because neither of those awful cretins should ever be entrusted with the life of a single housecat, much less the lives of hundreds of millions of human beings.  And  there's the biggest punchline of all:  the one thing both Team Red and Team Blue agree on wholeheartedly, is that only by supporting the system that would actually elect a de facto king, from choices representing some of the very worst examples of all humanity, can the system be improved.

And they got their legitimacy loud and clear.  Just about one hundred twenty million people, most of whom probably believed they were protesting by selecting the lesser evil, cast their vote for the other evil.  And once again the system is renewed, staffed comfortably with evil, and in absolutely no danger of actually having to change.  (Why?  Sixty million wanted Clinton, sixty million wanted Trump.  What's the problem here, folks?  It's not like you said "NO" or anything...)

For all the sound and fury, Americans once again, as they always do, elected the Establishment once again.  (Yes, Donald Trump is perfectly acceptable to the Establishment.  How do we know this?  Because he was allowed to remain on the stage.  We know from long experience that actual threats to the established order are removed long before they become a problem.)

See how this works?  Here's a handy review, as it will be precisely the same next time:
Step 1:  Complain loudly about how inevitably awful the Establishment choices are.
Step 2:  Hone your complaints to focus on the jingoistic mob mentality of your chosen opponent.
Step 3:  Go cast your v*te, because not v*ting is insane, fattening, and un-'Murickan.
Step 4:  Wear your "I Voted" sticker with no irony whatsoever.
Step 5:  Act surprised at the outcome you produced.  Tell everyone.

"This time for sure!"

______________________
* You think I'm kidding.  Actually, I have lost count of the number of article links on the TwitFace that go to a title of roughly this construction:  "Half of all Americans simply do not have the mental capacity to understand [insert progressive unicorn here:  climate science, economics, healthcare, voting, etc.]"  The dehumanizing condescension that inheres in this mentality really is breathtaking to behold.

Greenwald on 'nobody is coming to take your guns'.

Well, actually, no, that's not what he's writing about here:

The reality is that there is ample evidence uncovered by journalists suggesting that regimes donating money to the Clinton Foundation received special access to and even highly favorable treatment from the Clinton State Department. But it’s also true that nobody can dispositively prove the quid pro quo. Put another way, one cannot prove what was going on inside Hillary Clinton’s head at the time that she gave access to or otherwise acted in the interests of these donor regimes: Was she doing it as a favor in return for those donations, or simply because she has a proven affinity for Gulf State and Arab dictators, or because she was merely continuing decades of U.S. policy of propping up pro-U.S. tyrants in the region?

It's a great article (worth a RTWT), and should, if there were actually any sort of popular interest in restraining the ruling class, be more than enough to prevent HRC from ever again holding actual power over so much as a single cat, much less hundreds of millions of human lives.

But it's not about the guns at all.  And yet somehow, the "nobody is coming to take your guns" canard simply keeps popping into my head:

So if you want to defend the millions of dollars that went from tyrannical regimes to the Clinton Foundation as some sort of wily, pragmatic means of doing good work, go right ahead. But stop insulting everyone’s intelligence by pretending that these donations were motivated by noble ends. Beyond that, don’t dare exploit LGBT rights, AIDS, and other causes to smear those who question the propriety of receiving millions of dollars from the world’s most repressive, misogynistic, gay-hating regimes.

I know, I know, it's one thing to say all this about campaign finance, but it's like totally different when it comes to plebes with guns.  You can just sense a politician's scruples come roaring back into line, when it comes to plebes with guns.

Which nobody wants to take.  The guns, I mean.  Not the plebes.  Of course not the plebes.  Well, unless they want guns.  Then, maybe the plebes too.  Wait, is this thing on?

Just stop acting surprised. It's bad for your complexion.

And so we record another step along the pathway to what is shaping up to be Decision 2016:  Mein Trumpf vs. Hitlery (achtung!).  To wit:  Bernie Sanders endorses Hillary.

Some people are even gnashing their teeth about it all, as though it's some sort of surprise.  The TwitFace is no stranger to that peculiar flavor of ire-of-the-betrayed, so often performed histrionically in front of a gen-u-whine Pious(TM) brand fainting couch.

Thing is, it seems to me that someone said this was a foregone conclusion:

Anyway, so here we have the "self-described democratic socialist" Sanders, who is going to wind up doing nothing more than making Hillary look more palatable to the credulous. That is the point.

I know, crazy SOB in serious need of re-education, right?

Sweet Metor O' Death, indeed.  It'd serve "us" right.

Made me think of you, Mama.

Seen on the TwitFace today.

An old woman walked up and tied her old mule to the hitching post. As she stood there, brushing some of the dust from her face and clothes, a young gunslinger stepped out of the saloon with a gun in one hand and a bottle of whiskey in the other. The young gunslinger looked at the old woman and laughed, "Hey old woman, have you ever danced?"

The old woman looked up at the gunslinger and said, "No... I never did dance... never really wanted to."

A crowd had gathered as the gunslinger grinned and said "Well, you old bag, you're gonna dance now," and started shooting at the old woman's feet.

The old woman prospector -- not wanting to get her toe blown off -- started hopping around. Everybody was laughing. When his last bullet had been fired, the young gunslinger, still laughing, holstered his gun and turned around to go back into the saloon.

The old woman turned to her pack mule, pulled out a double-barreled shotgun, and cocked both hammers. The loud clicks carried clearly through the desert air, and the crowd stopped laughing immediately.

The young gunslinger heard the sounds, too, and he turned around very slowly. The silence was almost deafening. The crowd watched as the young gunman stared at the old woman and the large gaping holes of those twin barrels.

The barrels of the shotgun never wavered in the old woman's hands, as she quietly said, "Son, have you ever kissed a mule's ass?"

The gunslinger swallowed hard and said, "No ma'am... but I've always wanted to.

There are five lessons here for all of us:

1 - Never be arrogant.
2 - Don't waste ammunition.
3 - Whiskey makes you think you're smarter than you are.
4 - Always make sure you know who has the power.
5 - Don't mess with old people; they didn't get old by being stupid.

And, of course, "Never enter a battle of wits unarmed."

Anyway, it made me think of MamaLiberty right away.  Sure, the old woman in the story was (giggle) CCing that shotgun--made for a nice story element with the surprise--but as ML likes to say, CC or OC, just carry!   :-D

Clairespective.

Another capital-R resource from Claire.  This one covers--well--the idea that sometimes the path to better things does indeed go through the technically unacceptable.

Are we likely to see constitutional carry in Massachusetts, New York, or California any time soon? Ha! But I can tell you that a lot of us who were around in the dark old days of 1993 and 1994 never thought we’d see even this much, ever, in so many places.

And “this much” is a lot. A hell of a lot. Better yet, we’re going to see more.

Do I now approve of the “shall issue” permits that laid the groundwork for this? Nope. No way. But even I have to admit that the grassroots “shall issue” ccw movement gave birth to the constitutional carry movement. And constitutional carry is an unreservedly good thing.

I do indeed remember those darker days;  in fact it was right around then that I stumbled across Claire in the first place.  Worth, seriously worth, a RTWT.

The only downside I can see, honestly, is that celebrating a good thing for what it is, isn't going to help the sort of prag mindset that still can't distinguish between long-term strategy and true pre-emptive surrender.  Yes, there is a lesson in all this for those of us who can't bring ourselves to actively support ideas that might turn out later to be valuable incremental milestones.   (Duly noted and appreciated, and to borrow from Joel, the crow tastes pretty fine!)  But we, too, should recognize our important place in restraining the surrender impulse--and keep at it.  The real visionaries, as Claire's post suggests, will recognize us for what we are and work with us.

Here's to more such free-people assertions.  Many more!

Okay, is it just me...

...or has it gotten way past the eye-rolling stage, even by the usual election standards, the way many people are acting at the very idea of a Trump presidency?  

You know, as if he would somehow be materially different from any other "leader" in the same position?

Wait...you mean he might be a bigot against The Little People?

He might curtail basic human rights at home, and ignore them abroad?

He might go dick-swinging around the globe, in a way that might engender blowback?

He might shove societally suicidal policy down the national gullet?

He might do all the above by lying, deceiving, and conspiring with not-nice people to get what he wants, all at our expense?

You mean, in general, that he just might act with the impunity of a dictator, rather than with the accountability of an executive custodian?

ZOMG, your powers of perception are simply off the charts, man.  With informed, enlightened attitudes like that, you have me, like totally convinced that we can totally prevent even the slightest bit of all that by simply electing someone else.  Hill!  Bernie!  Cruz!  Rubio!  Kang!

Ferchrissakes, people:  yes, Trump is frightfully unfit to win The One Ring Sweepstakes.  But all this "leave the country!" "the sky is falling!" melodrama really does little more than out you as either a weapons-grade hypocrite, or as unconscionably, nearly unbelievably naive.  They're all unfit to wield power...over a cat, much less 330+ million people.  And they all have been since before any of us were born.

On the other hand, maybe you should leave, if you can't (or refuse to) see that the the real problem with The One Ring Sweepstakes isn't the competitors, but the prize.  If the office disposes of so much power that just putting a slightly-less-sophisticated buffoon in it can cause the whole thing to come apart, then maybe--just maybe--the office has too much damn power.

Seen today on the TwitFace.

Weapons-grade irony right here:

"If it's too big to fail, it's too big to exist."

Well, perhaps there is something we can agree on after all.  Personally, I'd fully approve if all you authoritarian dickheads--you know, the entire control structure of that One Institution To Rule Them All--simply oozed on home and never again tried to force yourself on others.

That'd be...great.

Mockingjay, Part 2.

I do love my better half.  She basically engineered yesterday to allow me time to make it into town and see the second Mockingjay film.  (This is not nearly the trivial matter it may sound.)

Blowback.

Man, is it a tiresome time.  We seem to be in one of those periods in which the perfectly inevitable disasters of the disarmament mindset are in crescendo, and the professional crisis exploitation crowd is in a feeding frenzy to match any in history.  Allusions to Solzhenitsyn and the Milton Mayer chorus just seem to write themselves out of daily events.  The level of dehumanization is reaching the point of inspiring genuine alarm among the historically literate.

What is it with people named Bob?

And so over at Mike's place there has been a bit of back-and-forth between MBV and this Bob Nicholson character, who originally penned this anti-NRA hitpiece.  Mike gave him one of his nearly-patented responses, and somewhat unusually, this time he got a reply back.  To which Mike volleyed, bringing us to today, with Nicholson attempting what might be called a "who, me?" tactic to dismiss and avoid.

Ol' Bob offers us all the smarmy confidences of the professional Astroturfer, with the added narcissism that comes from thinking you're the smartest guy in the room because you have a professional license.  He goes to lengths to make sure we know he's one of us--in just exactly the sort of loudly self-outing way that only the completely tone-deaf can manage--even as he repeatedly condescends to the simplistic projections of himself that he has somehow convinced himself that we are.

Sadly, you know the type.  They're coming out of the woodwork again.

Anyway, he must have been a little flustered as he concluded his most recent facile attempt to dismiss Mike, as his ability to spell started to crack a bit there at the end.  No matter.  He'd have to work a lot harder at bad mechanics to get me to look past the inherent chutzpah of his content here:

"I beleive that thothing I supported infringes on rights. You disagree. Fine we will leave it there."

Oh Bob, please do piss up a rope, willya?  We both know perfectly well that you won't "leave it there".  You toss that phrase out there like you expect others to believe you mean it, but you don't.  See, the one thing--the one, single, solitary, only thing that free people require, in the absence of having actually harmed someone, is to be left in peace, unmolested.  And that is the one thing that you absolutely will not do, no matter what sort of sophist drivel you may spout to the contrary.  You will continue to agitate for the forcible prior-restraint violation of untold masses of people who have not harmed anyone.  Violation that, whether you choose to admit it or not, will be carried out with all the fervor, sanctimony, abuse, and blowback of the functionally identical War On (Some) Drugs.  At the point of the government's guns.

The government's guns, Bob.  You know how you thought you were being so smart in trying to chide Mike for calling you a "collectivist"?  Well, it's hard to get more functionally collective than forcibly imposing your political will--in the form of total State control over the exchange of private property between individuals engaged in peaceful commerce--with government "gun cops" running naughty-and-nice list operations.

Yes, Bob, you're a collectivist.  (Sadly, most people are, so don't let it get you down too much--but you do need to own that.)

You also need--seriously--to let go of these delusions you have, that you understand either the people you claim yourself to be among, or the people whose stank you are pimping.  You don't.  You think you do, but you don't.  The former can see right through what David Codrea calls your "big but", and the latter, giving you benefit of the doubt by presuming you are earnest-and-merely-stupid rather than a willfully contributing Astroturfer for them, ...well, they are playing you and your desire to make nice like a cheap accordion.  Seriously, if you actually think that the NRA represents gunnies, or that resistance to gun control is somehow about the prurience of protecting a hobby, or that MBV is somehow agitating for conflict rather than trying to prevent it, or that anything that the disarmament crowd wants is in any way about protecting life, liberty, and property:  your ignorance is weapons-grade.

You may think you want to live in the world you ask for, Bob.  But you don't.  Maybe you think that you can violate people just a little bit, no harm done, and that's the end of the matter.  Especially if some of those people are vulgar and unwashed, or (even worse) uppity.  And it's something that you're okay with, so forcing it on others must be okay too--even if they've not harmed anyone.  (Yet.)

It's not like they'll ever come for you, after all.  You're a model citizen.  (No, seriously, you're exactly what the Establishment wants.)  You think all the right things.  You haven't harmed anyone (ahem), or even broken any laws.  You're safe.

Right?

Oh, okay, I get it now.

Had a "duh" moment, among all this discouraging mouth-frothery since the latest perfectly inevitable disaster in Paris.  Some well-meaning gunnie (I forget where, actually) was waxing agog about the disarmament crowd's latest attempts to hold up another "gun free zone" mass murder, as somehow evidence that what we need to correct the failure is to impose the same failed policy everywhere.  Pretty standard stuff, really, and of course a valid point.  Not arguing that.

But then it hit me.  Sure, governments always tend to want to disarm their populaces, on the general principle of monopolizing power.  But within the context of this newest Menckenian hobgoblin--the deliberate planting of action-not-words Jihadis in refugee populations (and the larger Rube Goldberg plan that ISXX may or may not have, to drive all Muslims worldwide "back" into their loving, caring arms by deliberately causing their worldwide persecution with all the butchery in their name)--there is actually a very specific risk that a protection racket needs to button up, to avoid being outed.

The risk of being shown up by the victims population served.

Of course we can't have the peasantry armed.  If they are,  then common plebes might just take it upon themselves to Indiana Jones the Jihadis on the spot.  On its own, this is old hat for gunnies, who have long noted how often the concept works for individuals on mean streets.  But that's small potatoes, just showing up the cops.  Regular people taking out policy-blowback Jihadis when they actually attack, though?  That's showing up militaries, and governments.  

Think of all the denied exploitation opportunities--the wasted crises!  Hell, if that happens regularly enough, their wars may (gasp!) never happen.  

And, even worse:  if people learn that they don't need their governments to put down an "international threat" that really, actually did come to their very doors--well, then the little people might just start asking dangerous questions that really matter.  

The State can tolerate much, among "its people", but it can never tolerate that.  People will die first.  As good old Maddie Albright said, "We think the price is worth it."