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.

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.

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.

'Where is all this leading?'

The following was originally posted over at Claire's place, as a comment to this post in which she comments on the ridiculous spectacle of the remaining field of Democratic presidential candidates trying without apology to out-Orwell each other in full view of everyone.  Included here are 1) my original comment, 2) a response from another commenter, and 3) my follow-up.

It seemed appropriate somehow to warehouse this exchange 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, first and foremost I hope you can find and keep your peace with the great Pandora’s Box that is the Internet. Heaven knows I still struggle as well…with the outrage fatigue, the “need” to know what stank the pernicious piddlewits are pimping today…against all the wonderful things that the same landscape still provides.

Playing with my kids helps–a lot–but the struggle remains. I do pretty well at the goal of living-free-being-the-best-revenge (and thank you once again and always, for your part in encouraging that), but boy, are there days…

Anyway, peace to you, Freedomista.

_________________________

I hate the fact that these tiresome, committed people are in any way living rent-free in my head, but I have to admit that the current ramp-up of Teh Stoopid does have me worried. It’s not that the depth of the ignorance, idiocy, or the unapologetic chutzpah is on its own shocking, although there are certainly days when I do have to marvel at what now passes for not just socially acceptable but even routine; rather, what I keep finding myself left with is the one overarching question which seems to have absolutely no good possible answer:

Where is all this leading?

Much ink has been spilled already, and rightly so, about the control zealotocracy increasingly demanding the unconditional surrender of every remaining vestige of individual sovereignty and freedom. Any honest assessment of the landscape makes it perfectly clear that it’s on, to these people: by any means necessary; only the result is acceptable; no law, ethics, or morality is any sort of impediment to the cause. The puppet masters set masses of people at each other’s throats–quite successfully–for increasingly trivial differences, and boy do the useful idiots know their narrative…if not so much how to defend or even really articulate it past the most sophomoric talking points. Rational discourse, even the most Pyrrhic forms of individual interposition, are becoming less and less possible by the day. And I’m sure it’s not me; the rate of acceleration of all this “let’s you and him fight” theater is well past tiresome, and into alarming.

Alarming because ultimately there’s got to be a reason for it. The real puppet masters may be evil in the purest sense of that word, but I cannot believe they are stupid. The comically hubristic antics we see each day, across the spectrum, must, at some level, serve a purpose. And with pretty much all the gloves coming off on every topic, by the day, the entirely reasonable question “what purpose is that?”…sits there, nagging.

As the saying goes, anybody who demands you give up the means of resistance, intends for you something he knows you would resist. Indeed. We’re seeing a fat lot of push for getting this thing (disarming the peasantry) done immediately. Why? What do these creeps know that we don’t?

Oh, sure, it could be something simple. Maybe it’s just covering for their sorry corrupt asses by misdirecting elsewhere. Insider knowledge of impending economic or social collapse. A hive-mind sense that their best opportunity for total domination is now, so strike with everything possible. Et cetera.

The thing is, the real puppet masters would seem to be above things like this. It reminds me of a comment I recall Claire making when talking about the increasing demands of the Total Surveillance State–the idea that you don’t go to the trouble to spy on everyone, everywhere, to catch mere criminals.

So what is it, then? Here we are, currently witnessing the most comically slipshod soft coup attempt I’ve ever even heard of, much less seen–this is stuff that would not be believable in fiction–and not only do the masses not seem to care about how embarrassingly bad it is and has been since even before Orange Man was elected, but more of the same is openly promised–and apparently cheered–going forward. The fainting-couch, Kabuki theater flavor of it all is so completely over the top, it would be tempting to think of it as freedom-lover agitprop…but frankly I don’t think any of us could have–would have–gone that far.

So again: what is it?

Eep. Apparently I needed to give vent to that. Like I said above, the struggle continues. 🙂



ANONYMOUS FROM FEB 10

---

@Kevin Wilmeth

Imagine drones bought from Hobby Lobby dropping firebombs on the roofs of government buildings. Dropping them every week. Dropping them until government falls apart because it can’t defend the bureaucrats who are funding it. Then government stays persistently fallen apart throughout the next phase, in which every militia general tries to set themselves up as a new king. For your own good, of course.

The technological singularity shifting power to the individual is the thing the current politicians are unsuccessfully trying to prevent with their too-little too-late attempts to LARP the Soviet Union.

Only the goofballs are playing the LARP Soviet game, because the competent who in times past would be nobility can actually do the military math about swarm attacks. Even the US Navy did the math correctly, in Millennium Challenge 2002.

What is coming next is a lot more freedom. The whining from the 99% who are not libertarians is going to be epic.



FOLLOW UP COMMENT

---

Anon 2/10, I hope you’re right. I hardly relish the idea of that sort of conflict, for several reasons (not least of which because I suspect you are right about strongmen stepping into any available gap), but good god, look at the state into which we have “progressed” thus far, at the insistence of these obnoxious people who seem so fully committed to forcing the issue no matter what. It’s not so much that they are making peaceful revolution impossible, as it is that they are increasingly making peaceful existence impossible.

I think that in the end I do share the faith that the peasantry, if it must, will find its ways of rising to the challenge, whether it’s riflemen “behind every blade of grass”, or the flash-mob drone swarm of the deplorables, or some other Hayduke-ian creativity none of us has thought of yet. Or all that, in combination…

It’s the days between here and there, that I’m dreading.

My pipe-dream hope is that someone, somewhere, figures out how to make a peaceful statement that makes the lunacy of the continued wolverine-poking so self-evidently obvious that even the most tone-deaf, chest-thumping wokester agitator can’t miss it, or ignore it. (In this regard, I miss Mike Vanderboegh, who had a real flair for pursuing this goal–this quest for peace via the dire warning.) This really doesn’t seem like it should be all that difficult–from the “live and let live, how fucking hard is that?” angle, through to “you really haven’t thought this through, have you, hipster brainiac?”…and yet here we are.

The only problem with improvising creativity, is that it is inherently reactive. (Maybe that’s where my faith comes from, that in a world gone sideways, free people will ultimately prove more creative than the planners of other people’s business.) We’re still living in a world of strategy, where these improvising, reactive traits haven’t been truly needed yet.

And maybe that’s why the “let’s you and him fight” crowd seems so incapable of grokking the stupidity of bringing their imposed reality to blows–they can only plan, not improvise. The strategy, on paper, may seem solid. Even the tactics–the planned tactics–may seem plausible. But at the point of action, the human tendency for creativity can, and usually does, intervene, and often in unintended ways. (“In any battle the first casualty is the battle plan.”) I dunno, it seems like most folks in Claire’s commentariat would have no problem seeing this result as obvious, but maybe the obnoxious polypragmatoi just…don’t. (After all, this crowd may have tried many different things to achieve their goals, over the nearly forty years I’ve been paying attention, but I can’t say that any of the methods I have seen truly qualify as creative.)

Hey, maybe we can glom on a bit to current trends, here. I’ve been enjoying some of the Babylon Bee’s satire titles lately, including this one, “Democrats Warn That American People May Tamper With Next Election”…in a similar way, maybe we can simply promise to interfere with their revolution. 🙂

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.

'Fifteen'll getcha twenty.'

"Fifteen'll getcha twenty."

This is a saying I remember hearing the entire time I lived in Texas, all throughout my teenage years and on into my early twenties.  At the time I treated it like all the other XY people did:  as a warning, a reminder, that on the subject of "statutory rape", the State absolutely does not in any way care about mutual consent, nor about mens rea, in determining guilt.  As a male, you either accepted the responsibility to know her age, for sure, or else you knew you were taking a huge risk.

I was still an unabashed statist back then, but even given that limitation, it still seemed...wrong, that a girl could simply lie about her age, wantonly screw you to the moon over a period of months, and then just decide she didn't like you and ruin your life by running to the law, without having to worry about proving anything beyond the fact of the act and a birth date.  At the time, things like that didn't happen all that much, but they did happen sometimes, and again, everybody just kinda knew all this.  It didn't matter that the law was completely, flagrantly against everything the legal system is supposed to stand for;  what mattered in a practical, everyday sense, was that it could and would be used enthusiastically against you.  Hence the quippy phrase.

Somehow, it would strike me as amazing that Cody Wilson wouldn't have known that, too, since he's no dunce, and that particular legal absurdity hasn't exactly improved in the intervening years.

So now, as we are supposed to believe that after some years of deftly managing being an Establishment irritant, he simply abandoned all his characteristic good judgment, and handed the people who most wanted his head on a platter--people he repeatedly embarrassed--the most astonishing softball, at a most astonishingly convenient time...

...well, anyone applying the Occam's Razor principle to the topic would quickly arrive at "honey trap", as something that could easily explain all the stink surrounding this case.

I think Bear Bussjaeger has done a fine job of covering the important bits here and here, and from a "legal" standpoint I suspect he's right that Team Cretin has Wilson over a barrel with everything that seems to have happened...

...But that's only because nobody* seems interested in acknowledging that entrapment and bearing false witness are crimes too.

I read the complaint.  What struck me most about it is that there is not one word of mention that the encounter was in any way against the girl's will.  That trivial detail just doesn't matter, and the accusers know it.  The complete omission just highlights how absurd the law is.  She falsifies her age to make herself available to an online service widely understood to provide sexual opportunities for the well-heeled (hello, it's in the very name), and after an alleged encounter which satisfies precisely that description (was this her only one, or are there other johns she's going after?), in which (per the wording of the complaint) she certainly seems a willing, premeditated, un-coerced participant, now she can just unilaterally choose to go play victim and (so coincidentally) bring down the big bad printy-gunny-guy, with no consequence to herself?

Even if Wilson did have a horrendous lapse in judgment, and the facts of the complaint are exactly what they claim to be, this is not okay.  Whoever would celebrate the State's "catch" here, would do well to review a bit of Solzhenitsyn:  you may think you want a world without due process and equal protection, but to the extent you retain any of your humanity at all, you are gravely mistaken.

______________________

* Just to be clear:  I ain't talking about Bear here.  That fella seems to get it just fine.

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.  :-)

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?



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* 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.