Phew!
I was 13 when Roe v Wade was decided and I remember being very surprised that the court ruled the way they did. Abortion was only recently legal and in a very few states at that point, was wildly controversial, and a ruling from on high was only going to make matters worse. The Supremes weren’t usually that meddling.
Being only 13, my thoughts on the matter were probably a lot less coherent, but I got the emotional gist.
Abortion is not one of my biggest issues, though the Gosnell stuff got to me. But every law-talking-dude I’ve ever read says it was a complete mess of a decision. And goodness knows the Founders were unlikely to hide anything in the text that was pro-abortion. So, good riddance.
I wonder if they’ll burn DC to the ground tonight. Man, I’d miss the Smithsonian. Good weekend, everyone!
June 24, 2022 — 5:57 pm
Comments: 13
Gong hei fat choy, y’all!
‘Tis the Year of the Tiger again. This blog is so old, it’s cycling back through the Chinese Zodiac a second time. I hoped there was an old graphic I could steal, but Chinese New Year was on a Sunday in 2010. But hey, I found this neat screen shot from one of the Far Cry games. That’ll do.
Oddly enough, though we still have the godawfullest months February and March stretching out before us, it really does feel like Spring this week. The sun is shining, the birds are shouting insults at each other from the treetops, and Uncle B has his nose in a seed catalogue.
A big thanks to bds and technochitlin, respectively, for telling me a tweet of mine made both Ace and Instapundit. Woohoo!
Only, erm…mine was a stupid Boomer take and Mickey Kaus had the genuinely interesting (and terrifying) observation:
I’ve thought a lot about this since he tweeted it a couple of days ago. If he’s right – and it’s a take horribly congruent with Critical Race Theory – it’s yet another example of a mindset so alien and incomprehensible to me that we might as well be different species.
That legit scares me.
February 1, 2022 — 7:15 pm
Comments: 7
Graduating degrees of crazy
I’ve been on Twitter rather more than is good for me this past two years, and I’ve followed lots and lots of people I didn’t before. Oh, dear readers, I have followed some doozies. There’s a chemtrails lady and a flat-earther (I honestly haven’t worked out if this person is serious or blowing smoke up my bum). There’s even some nutballs who think the governments are working independently and honestly to do the right thing during a dangerous pandemic.
I haven’t posted much about it because it’s honestly a firehose of crazy and I didn’t want to get any on me. Just for funsies, though, let’s list the COVID-19 theories. I was going to say “in ascending order of lunacy” but couldn’t make up my mind how to rank them.
- Everything is as it seems. There’s a dangerous pandemic and the government is striving, however, imperfectly, to keep us all safe. (pff! madness!)
- There was no virus, it’s all just a power grab. (The staunchest proponent of this one in my circle actually caught the bug and had a rethink).
- Sure, there was a virus, but it turned out it wasn’t that bad politicians have exploited the situation in an unprecedented power grab.
- The virus was created in a lab in Wuhan (with funding from the US) and was accidentally released.
- The virus was created in a lab in Wuhan (with funding from the US) and was deliberately released, order to a) crash the economy or b) reduce surplus population.
- Actually, the vaccine was created to reduce surplus population. It will a) directly kill a significant number or b) wreck immune systems so significant numbers die over the next few years of cancers and other immunity-related illnesses or c) sterilize enough young people to significantly reduce future population.
- This is all just a big money-maker for the pharmaceutical companies and the politicians who love them.
- It’s a giant global conspiracy to smash everything and build back better – i.e. the way the greens (or the authoritarians pretending to be greens) want it. “You will own nothing” etcetera.
- It’s a giant global conspiracy to smash all the economies on earth and rebuild them with a digital currency and central bank in the control of a handful of Bond villains. This theory usually involves forgiving all our debt in return for relinquishing all our property. (See also “you will own nothing…”).
- It’s a conspiracy to smash the middle class and their small businesses and transfer their wealth to billionaires and their giant corporations. (Sadly, this actually happened, conspiracy or not).
- It’s the gateway to a social credit system and complete government control of every aspect of your life.
Did I miss any? I refuse to say which nutty theory, if any, I personally believe. Some of them naturally go together, in sets.
It’s coming to something when the least frightening and mind-blowing idea in the whole list is “greedy drug companies selling billions in unnecessary vaccines.”
The picture, by the way, is from here: a clever take on the old flat earth theory.
November 30, 2021 — 8:12 pm
Comments: 19
Get off my buttons, please
I’m getting a little weary of our friends in the media. No, seriously, our friends in the media. The ones on our side. I understand they have a product to sell and I’m here for that, but they’re leaning on my buttons now.
Various times I saw the above story tweeted, 100% of respondents believed Biden was forbidding people saying “Wuhan flu.” But muh First Amendment!
He’s forbidding it in government documents, and they wouldn’t have used “Wuhan flu” even under Trump. They’d use whatever CDC uses. Probably “covid-19”.
Because that’s all he can do with Executive Orders: give directions to his own cabinet and federal agencies. They’re incredibly narrow in scope. He can get up to a little mischief, but only a little. If you could do big things with EOs, every president would have.
It is a nothingburger. A nothing soufflé. Nothing on the rocks.
Man, I’d give a lot for a news source that tried to be absolutely straight and tell me when a provocative tweet was no biggie.
As an aside, this isn’t a very effective approach with conservatives, anyway. The left runs on rage. We like a pep talk. All of our most beloved communicators – Reagan, Limbaugh, Breitbart and, yes, Trump – were upbeat, happy warriors.
April 21, 2021 — 8:06 pm
Comments: 7
Happytalism
Happytalism. I think I just retched up a kidney. I guess that was Version 1.0 of “you will have nothing and you will be happy.”
I have a feeling that “having nothing” thing is just for the proles and the guys with private jets will get to keep them. Just a hunch.
Reminder that in 2008, “the crisis” was the financial crash. I guess they decided that horse wasn’t strong enough to pull this big a cart. Oh, the document is an archive.org backup of a UN document, specifically their New World Order project. It drifted across my feed this morning. The fact that it’s on archive.org link tells me it’s been scrubbed since.
They’re telling us to our faces. They have been for over a decade.
Anyhoo, Sarkozy was sentenced to three years (two suspended) this morning for corruption and influence peddling. For trying to bribe a judge. I thought it was for taking millions from Qaddafi, but maybe that’s what he was bribing the judge over.
I’m not interested enough to look it up. Sarkozy is what passes for a conservative in France.
Happytalism. If this whole miserable year was a put-up job, I’m going all Ahab on those fuckers, I swear. “To the last, I grapple with thee; From Hell’s heart, I stab at thee; For hate’s sake, I spit my last breath at thee.”
March 1, 2021 — 6:01 pm
Comments: 10
All too soon
Farewell to Rush Limbaugh, the man who taught me to put butter on steak. Gosh, he just turned 70 this month. How sad.
Social media will be completely unusable for a day, between righties being sad and lefties being inappropriate. I didn’t feel right posting the usual nonsense tonight, so have an open thread. Talk about anything you like.
Wonder if them poor Texans have thawed out yet.
February 17, 2021 — 7:03 pm
Comments: 13
Be-catted
Sorry for inattentive today (yes, we have a Dead Pool winner – congratulations Mrs Carl). I have been under a cat. Specifically, this one – Ol’ Kneewrecker.
Also, I’ve been on Twitter. It’s as awful as you can imagine at the moment. I’m going back to chickens, books and vidya games for a while. But I did want to mention two things I learned from this election.
There are more of us than there are of them. Like, a lot more. Like, so many more that we broke their ballot-cheating mechanisms and they had to get clumsy and stupid and obvious about the steal. Will see if that has repercussions.
It’s possible to do things differently. Trump made huge inroads into Middle East peace – for example – by ignoring the old wisdom about fixing perpetually dysfunctional Palestine first. He successfully brokered multiple individual deals between nations. He deserves a lot of credit for that, which he will never get. That, and bringing soldiers home from various permanently smoldering trash fires.
I guess, for me, that’s the definition of the “Trumpism” everyone’s talking about – approaching old problems in new ways.
Someone said on Twitter that people need to go back and start running for dog catcher and ward captain, with an eye to higher and higher office. But that’s like sending your nice kid away to college and getting back a blue-haired gender studies graduate with a nose ring. The years-long process of grinding through lower office changes people, makes them into politicians. We need to find other avenues.
Trump is a strange and, in many ways, unlikeable character, but he changed me from “anyone’s better than Hillary” to an enthusiastic supporter. I’m afraid he was lightning in a bottle: a well-known celebrity with go-to-hell money of his own. If we see the same combination in play again, it’ll probably be somebody like Cher.
I’m hoping he opens a giant media company, which zooms to #1 in no time (thanks to the collapse of Fox). Then he can be in their faces 24/7.
January 8, 2021 — 8:49 pm
Comments: 22
This smells
A spearhead of identifiable antifa/BLM types break windows and gain access to the capitol building while Trump is still speaking across town. Security non-existent, even though a huge political rally has been scheduled for days – just regular Capitol Police in their everyday uniforms. Some genuine Trump supporters join the mob.
They all take selfies in the offices. Somebody steals a podium. An unarmed MAGA woman is shot by a plainclothesman, for some reason. Then it gets shut down.
Nancy just called this an “armed insurrection” and is demanding Trump is removed over it.
This stinks to high heaven. This was supposed to blow up and didn’t, and everything the left has said and done since is an effort to inflame feelings further.
They’re dying to get an “armed insurrection” aren’t they?
January 7, 2021 — 7:57 pm
Comments: 18
Welp, drinking early tonight
The guys initially clashing with police looked like Antifa to me. Young men, dressed mostly in black.
Perhaps moot now.
January 6, 2021 — 7:44 pm
Comments: 16
A little light reading
The above excerpt is from the official report of an American soldier who died by accident in Korea, unclear what year. A sad story picked out of a mountain of Wikileaks documents.
Yes, Wikileaks has opened its archive. Interesting timing, with Assange hoping for a pardon.
So far, most of the documents I’ve looked at are boring, marked unclassified and/or redacted to uselessness. Hillary’s emails are mostly whiteout (and I think these are ones that had already been released anyway).
The most salacious tidbit is a blurry photo purporting to be Steve Jobs’ positive HIV test.
If you want to paddle around for yourself, some helpful observations. The dump is HUGE and topically all over the place, from military reports to the business operations of a transcendental meditation group. If you see a .pdf or .txt file extension, that’s probably small and manageable in your browser. If you see a .zip file, that’s going to unfold into MANY files, or a whole directory structure of .html files (which implies they were scraped off of web sites). A .7z file is a 7zip file, a kind of compressed file that Windows won’t handle natively, but there’s a good open source tool for opening them.
If you find anything good, I’d like to hear about it.
December 17, 2020 — 5:42 pm
Comments: 3