'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

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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

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@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

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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. 🙂

When hip waders just aren't enough...

...to keep the muck away.

Rather than puke, I'll just vent a little about the recent fainting-couch theatrics in Oregon over some predictably sweeping and authoritarian climate change bill. This sort of horror-show bill, and these sorts of political gameplay shenanigans, are so depressingly common (and ironic) that they hardly even rate outrage any more. So, maybe my bile today is more a result of the gorge finally spilling over, than of anything unique about this particular episode. Whatever.

Stipulated: that the walkout by Republican state senators was pure gameplay, intended to deny a quorum and thus kill off a bill they did not have the power to defeat by conventional means. I'll leave the arguments for and against the legitimacy of such procedural stunts to those who give a shit about such things, but it is historically undeniable that organized walkouts such as this are not uncommon for either blue or red wings of the Boot On Your Neck Party.

So, are we ready to play the spin game?

Here's the [Oregon governor] Kate Brown version of events:

• Oregon Democrats offer a common-sense Save The Planet bill, sure to pass with Democrat supermajorities in both houses. The squee! 
• Oregon Republican senators throw a tizzy and leave the state, clearly being unwilling to Save The Planet, instead being more interested in actively impeding your own Brighter Future, and probably eating kittens. The droogs! 
• Kate the Great orders the Oregon State Police to go and fetch the criminal miscreants with all due Authority. The justice! 
• Republican senator Brian Boquist brazenly threatens OSP, the government of Oregon and thus all living things by extension, by indicating he will not submit to Kate's common-sense extradition order. The handlebar mustache! 
• Totally documentably (trust me!) violent antigovernment militia extremist inbred fascistic ammosexual teabagging gunhugger misogynist racists of white male privilege and self-evidently low intelligence (why won't you ever come to the table with us?), and their inexplicable race- and gender-traitor hangers-on, threaten to appear at the state house in protest. The orc army! 
• OSP quite sensibly closes the Capitol due to the obvious and documented militia threat. The white knight! 
• Friendly media outlets help us out by pointing out that some of these threatening groups supported...the Malheur Refuge protest (gasp). The moral authority! 
• Politically reliable Esquire magazine contributes a wonderful hitpiece for the cause, which properly and sensibly calls out the seditious rabble for its instantaneous, unprovoked resort to violence. The outrage!

And certainly, if you read "The Insanity in Oregon Is a Glimpse of Our Very Dark Future" and don't ask a lot of questions, you might well see Courageous Kate & Co. in a positive light, and the walkout and its backers as mustache-twirling villains. It was designed and written that way.  If you're already a card-carrying Woke Progressive--well hell, you could probably have written the story even better, eh, and even added an Orange Man Bad flourish for good measure. Your sky is clearly the same color as ol' Kate's.

What color that may actually be, though, is open to speculation. Clearly it ain't blue.

The thing that sticks out the most, here, is the brazen chutzpah of painting the protestors as aggressors. Apparently Courageous Kate & Co. don't believe that sending the Oregon State Police, on an extradition sortie to other states, constitutes aggression. Those guns they wear are just decorations, you see, and if those who have gone elsewhere in protest politely refuse to go quietly with the nice large men with the rippling muscles, "weapons of war", legal impunity, and Mustaches of Understanding, they'll just say, "Oh, I see. Tut tut, guess we've wasted our time then, very well, have a nice day," and leave peaceably.

Uh-huh. Pull the other one. Even the most dimly honest observer of history can see that on such a mission, law enforcement absolutely will continue to escalate until the victim either complies unconditionally, or needs a body bag. No matter how long it may take. If this does not constitute aggression, then the word has no fucking meaning at all. It's bad enough that people usually just ignore the always-present official threat of "comply or die" as though it somehow doesn't exist, just because most people exercise--under obvious duress--the first option. "We" don't like stating it how it really is--that even the collection of a parking ticket carries with it the ultimate threat of death--but that doesn't make it untrue. But then, for officialdom to step up on the moral soapbox and paint someone who actually removes himself from a brewing fight, as an aggressor...

...with or without a response that declares, "No. Your move."...

"Hypocrite". "Chutzpah." "Cognitive dissonance." "Hubris." "Tyrant." Mere words are insufficient to fully convey the complete absence of moral authority here. This isn't a public discussion, it's a show trial, a pile-on, and if you look at it that way, a whole lot of things make more sense.

(I seriously miss the late Will Grigg at moments like this. He'd find the perfect historical parallel in some forgotten story of fugitive slave recovery, weave it into an anthology-ready narrative--and be able to do it all without swearing. He'd also observe that, whether or not he'd agree with Brian Boquist's politics in any way, the latter's response to the threat of forcible kidnapping over a disagreement in politics is not so much a quintessentially American attitude, as it is nearly a human duty.)


That may be, for me, the worst smear--painting a "no" response to a clear threat of political violence, as aggression--but it's far from the only one in this sordid story. For those who cannot--or will not--see the difference between aggression and response, the smears come easy, and the Hive Mind's juvenile attempts to portray gun-rights activists of any sort--here, it's Threepers, Oath Keepers, and local private militia, plus their supporters--as imminently aggressive and violent, would be dismissable as "file photo" retread, if it didn't still work so depressingly well on the credulous. Look, I've got my own objections to some of the things I've seen these groups do, but one thing they are not, is preemptively violent, or even impolite, in the face of a pretty much never-ending onslaught of bigotry and dehumanization from the victim-disarmament (VD) crowd. And that latter's open contempt inadvertently reveals that they damn well do understand that gunnies are not fight-pickers; as Joel has put it before, if these people actually thought we [gunnies] were as dangerous as they say they think we are, well, they'd treat us a lot more politely. Given the spin-production machine the VD types have metastasized into over the last few decades, squatting on every opportunity they can imagine or invent, one can't help but get the impression they're quite deliberately poking the wolverine until they get a bite back.

There are other, more garden-variety contributions to the spin, too, but again, these have been so common for so long now, they hardly even register on the reader's radar anymore. There's the simple political hypocrisy:  it seems that ol' Indignant Kate apparently thought that partisans going AWOL for the purpose of denying a quorum was just fine some years back, when Team Blue was doing it for (I'm sure) some purpose of noble embiggenment. There's the partisan partial-truth-telling:  thinly veiled media hitpieces conveniently forget to mention that walkouts are and have been common;  why do that when cheap PR points can be scored against the opposition that they insist they don't have, because they're so unbiased and professional and all. And of course there's all the other usual shenanigans of business-as-usual partisan politics--on both "sides" of the aisle--usually delivered with great sanctimony along the lines of "if you don't drink all my Kool-Aid then you clearly want to spit-roast your own children".

There's an interesting article here, about that notion of weaponizing everything and radicalizing everyone in the process, and that goes along with a pretty well-done statement here which simply further generalizes the same idea.  (Sometimes, with so much stoopid in the world, it helps simply to recognize that not everyone is so credulous.)

At this writing, there are still two days left before Oregon's legislative session expires, and at this point the fugitive slaves will probably stay away for the duration.  Of course, nobody should be surprised if the home team manages some sort of ace-in-the-hole surprise when people do come back--these are politicians, after all.  That group of people whose approval ratings may, some day, with a sincere and dedicated effort, make it up to their hat size.

And yet, millions of people put these same oxygen thieves into, and back into, "legitimate" positions of power, every year.  Afterward, those same people wax betrayed and indignant at the ensuing shenanigans.  (And call me the crazy one, since I want nothing to do with any of it.  The world is baffling sometimes.)

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.

Rest well from a job well done, MamaLiberty.

An American hero has passed.

Oh, she wouldn't rate that accolade with a lot of the modern popular set, but she's a hero to me, and frankly I seem to care less and less what the popular set thinks anyway.

She said her goodbyes in advance, and I managed to say it best over there:

When I saw this news, I had to explain to my girls why Daddy suddenly had uncontrollable tears.

Mama, I’ve never made a secret of my admiration for you. Years ago now you challenged me just exactly the way I needed to be challenged, in order to fully (as the saying goes) “run out of excuses” and actually embrace people as they are, not as what they think they are or (worse) what they think they should be. I am so much happier now, for doing that, and of course how could anyone manage to repay that kindness?

Well, I do know one thing I can do, and that is to pass it on–pay it forward, if you will–to my children, in the hopes that they will be able to remain at peace and calm in the turbulent world they will outlive me in. They already know who you are, and they came to comfort me when I told them the news.

Love you, Mama. You will be missed, but what you did for me, and doubtless for others too, will live on with gratitude and enthusiasm.

Thank you, for the attitude, and for your example.

Peace.

Susan Calloway, aka MamaLiberty, rest in peace.

Sigh.  There's another hole in the freedomverse now, and although what she did for me she did long ago now, it still makes me sad.

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.

Well hello there, Diana Stormrider.

Somewhat by accident, I recently noticed the Diana Stormrider precharged pneumatic air rifle.  Actually noticed it.  I've been a bit dormant on the bangy stuff lately, and hadn't even remembered that Tom Gaylord did a series on it, just last year.

You know, that there's an interesting gun, for my contemplation of a suitable platform to come up with an airgun Scout.

Things to like:

• Sights!  Out of the box this thing has real iron sights, and the platform looks promising both for  ghost-ring irons and even for a scout scope.  One could mount a proper ghost-ring aperture at the back of the receiver on the dovetail with little fuss, and by discarding the "open" rear sight, adding a second barrel band, and adjusting the position of the two bands, have a perfect mount for a real Leupold Scout Scope.
• The manual safety switch is not perfect, but it is not insane like the Marauder's, and because it's in front of the trigger guard rather than at the back, it's more ergonomic than the Discovery.  It's something one could train with.
• The interchangeable magazine and single-shot tray is good design--I would argue it is in fact the right design for a beginner and trainer rifle.  Any "airScout" really should be a manual repeater.
• Stock is old-fashioned wood, and would be very amenable both to shortening LOP and rounding toe and heel, and also to mounting a proper Ching Sling.
• The bolt system certainly looks pretty robust, and with a longer throw than on the Disco or M-Rod, although it's still going to be shorter than a .22 rimfire.
• It's light and svelte, from reports, and actually looks like a traditional rifle, instead of the aggravatingly ubiquitous pistol grip pattern of most of the newer offerings.  IOW, it would rate reasonably well on Jeff Cooper's "handiness index", which is the total height of the rifle from bottom of pistol grip to top of sight system.
• It's reasonably (reasonably) hand-pump friendly, and sounds like it may get over 20 usable and accurate shots per fill--with enough available oomph to hunt with.  

A couple of mostly minor drawbacks:

• It uses a 3000psi fill, rather than the Disco's 2000psi fill.  That's going to be significant if using a hand pump.  The Disco's ability to deliver many shots on a lower fill pressure, albeit not necessarily at a hunting power level, does still set it apart from others in its class.
• It's not sound suppressed--but then neither is the Disco.  This is reasonably minor, in light of the advantages.

Promising, in toto.  I find it interesting that it's offered (by Pyramyd Air at least) as a kit, along with its own hand pump.  Someone is paying attention to the success of the Benjamin Discovery!

Anyway, bookmarked for future reference and contemplation.  Interesting indeed!