I’m busy pre-gaming, hope you’re the same. The rains are tailing off, Da Bears are enjoying the welcoming atmosphere of a city that’s even more fucked up than Chicago, and I have multiple beers lined up, with rum as a standby in case the Ravens decide to be the team they were against Jacksonville.
In the infamous Libertarian Paradise, someone named Mohammed demonstrated that there’s ways of killing lots of people without having a bump stock.
Maybe Tesla can’t make a profit and relies on taxpayer props, but they can jettison workers with the best of them. At least they had Bob and Bob interview all the workers first.
OK, he’s not Earl Weaver, but Joe Madden is still lots of fun. And he dropped a few lines hinting of a libertarian streak.
What amazes me is that anyone is still interested in what this senile has-been has to say. But that’s nothing compared to this bit of amazing irony. Team Blue is apparently determined to see that our current buffoon remains in place for eight years.
Damn, this is all depressing. Let’s have some music. Old people’s music, the kind we used to listen to when we were shooting up marijuana. My band used to cover this and my fingers itched while I was listening.
I am up at 4 every morning.
Me too. Your 4 am, not mine.
The question is where you wake up. Important detail.
And who’s next to you when you wake up.
How I imagine Suthen’s morning view
Now that made me laugh.
I would have suggested this.
And if you’re somewhere out there , passed out on the floor
Oh Joey, I’m not angry anymore
Don’t wanna know what it is,
Don’t wanna see no more
Man, you’re woke for real!
But are you woke ?
I wish I was waking and baking. Alas, I’m at work, putting out other people’s fire.
Also, I can’t count how many times in college I was told to go to Somolia, like it was some killing word for libertarians. My opponents didn’t appreciate to much when I pointed out how much of Somalia’s dire situation was related to international interference and Cold War politics and not related to being ancapistan.
Somalia is just another in a long list of failed socialist states. Point that out and they stfu.
The douchebags that are constantly rewriting history to push progtopia will call you a damned liar for pointing out that Somalia is what it is today because of what the Russians did to Africa while encouraging the dumb fucks that fell for that evil shit they were peddling to fight their old imperialist masters…
I don’t see how Somalia is libertarian either.
Obvs, it full of chaos and violence! There are no roads and no central government! It cats marrying dogs and exactly what libertarians want!
” I’m at work, putting out other people’s fire.”
You’re Mike Ehrmentraut?
Not nearly that cool. But similar, without the gunplay and deadfish eyes.
His eyes are all dead because he hasn’t outlived the shame of getting p0wned by Eddie Murphy
He just had to tell Victor about his herpes simplex 10, right?
It was in the script!
Somalia began improving a fair amount once it stopped being a communist dictatorship.
If you could keep foreign backed militaries out of the country, it would approach typical African coast basketcase status.
That’s something you are not allowed to point out either these days: that Africa is a giant shithole for its people.
I know that OMWC posted the link on Herself, but take another, more enlightened perspective.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/oct/14/hillary-clinton-trump-nuclear-arms-race-north-korea
“We will now have an arms race – a nuclear arms race in East Asia,” Clinton said in an interview with CNN due to be broadcast on Sunday, in which she also criticised Trump’s threat to pull out of the international nuclear deal with Iran. “We will have the Japanese, who understandably are worried with missiles flying over them as the North Koreans have done, that they can’t count on America.”
What?
The shit that falls out of that woman’s mouth….
She isnt president. She isnt going to be president. She holds no elected office whatsoever. Why is she talking?
Who has been running things for the last 8 years?
She was also a terrible Secretary of State.
She was also
a terriblehistory’s most qualified Secretary of State.FIFY
That’s what I always try to remind people when they start harping on about her “lifetime of public service”.
She isnt president. She isnt going to be president. She holds no elected office whatsoever.
I’ll drink to that.
That’s what she said.
I think they learned from the Libya nuke deal that you can’t count on America.
You can count on America. Just to do what you don’t want it to do.
I’ll bet Little Kim plays this clip twice a day, just to remind him about dealing with the USA:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FmIRYvJQeHM&feature=youtu.be
It is amazing to me that after all of their spectacular failures they have the nerve to keep flapping their gums and keep endorsing disastrous policies. Clinton is afraid that now there will be a nuclear arms race in Asia? Would someone please ask her how that got started?
If we hadn’t killed Col. Q. like a dog in the street after he voluntarily gave up his WMD program, with our assurances of course, maybe we could get Kim to give up his program in exchange for economic incentives. Unfortunately that will never happen again and it was Clinton herself who’s to blame for that.
He was killed because he had opened 1, and was opening another, bank that facilitated the sale of oil in comodies other than the US dollar.
If that were allowed to happen it would implode the Western economy.
That and the bitcoin farm.
“We will have the Japanese, who understandably are worried with missiles flying over them as the North Koreans have done, that they can’t count on America.”
Pretty sure she’s talking about what would have happened under a Clinton presidency.
““That is bad not just on the merits for this particular situation, but it sends a message across the globe that America’s word is not good,” she said. “We have different presidents, and this particular president is, I think, upending the kind of trust and credibility of the United States’ position and negotiation that is imperative to maintain.”
Oh I get it now, you’re an idiot.
When Obama did it to the promises that other idiot Bush made, it was the height of international politics. Now Trump does it to the stupid shit Obama did, and suddenly America is unreliable. If one was inclined to see people like this hag as profiteering jealous scum with an agenda that enriches them at the expense of all of us and no standards, one would be in the right.
Promises, treaties, agreements, and gentlemanly bets are of equal legacy when the bombardment cannons light off.
I know the last election was like a choice between food poisoning and AIDS, but god damn do I wake up every morning glad the country didn’t choose the AIDS. The taste of vomit in my mouth is preferable by far.
“”There’s no winners in that, it’s just very, very sad and tragic for those poor women that had to go through that.”
Allen said he hoped the revelations, which emerged after an investigation by the New York Times, would lead to “some amelioration”, but said: “You also don’t want it to lead to a witch hunt atmosphere, a Salem atmosphere, where every guy in an office who winks at a woman is suddenly having to call a lawyer to defend himself. That’s not right either.
“But sure, you hope that something like this could be transformed into a benefit for people rather than just a sad or tragic situation.”
That sounds fair.
“who else gets up early on Sunday?”
People who work in the entertainment industry. By the way, I heard that some of the injuries in the Vegas incident were caused by the drivers getting the artists away from the stage* being told to run over anyone who gets in their way, including stagehands and concertgoers. Seems like that would get someone criminal charges if true, no?
*They are present at every event, usually to rush the artist away in a black SUV, often with police escort. Which makes me wonder why people crowd the back of the venue for hours after the concert, trying to glimpse the artist leaving. Most of the time, they’re already long gone.
Truckers. Truckers always get up early.
See; full grocery stores and gas stations.
You’re welcome.
Church goin’ folk too.
My backyard is my Church, and welcomes me every weekend when I’m home to enjoy it. Praise Be.
Amen brother
That big W900 in your avatar leads me to agree with you.
‘Street musicians in animal masks have also been given official warnings.’
A dark, perverse side of me kinda wants to see an Islamic terrorist wearing a Winnie the Poo mask blow himself up near a group of mimes.
Street artists are irritating.
Winnie the Poo is a really shitty name for a bear.
Well, he IS from Winnipeg.
Mimes are the white people of street artists.
…
!
Wearing WhiteFace is problematic.
Has anyone ever complained he wears nothing but a read tank top?
To be fair, Tigger wears nothing and he’s bouncing all over the place.
First I am going to focus on Donald Duck. He too only wears a shirt, but he is also always hanging around with three of his “nephews”.
Walt Disney… Know what I am saying?
I credit lazy cartoonists. Jeez, I gotta animated frame-by-frame pants TOO!????
Don’t get us started on Scooby and Shaggy.
STEVE SMITH WEAR TRUE FACE. WELCOME UNIFORMED DELIVERY RAPE
“I think it’s important that we stay focused, and shine a bright spotlight, and try to get people to understand how damaging this is,” she continued.
By all means, continue to do so. If your sanctimonious hectoring won’t make the world a better place, nothing will.
I still wonder if she actually believes that the only people qualified to run the world are credentialed elites like herself and Obama, whose only real world accomplishment and qualifications were based on either their internal plumbing or melanin content, regardless of how much they keep fucking shit up. And doing so while demanding that anyone not part of her high school clique be perfect on a grading scale that is constantly changing.
You can’t parody these people better than they do themselves. And you have to wonder about the people that actually take them seriously’s mental conditions..
Dude, I had a prog tell me Obama was ‘brilliant’ and possibly one of the all-time great Presidents.
They’re out of their minds. I’m not sure what they saw.
When your rating system is totally subjective and based on fantasy, this shit is easy to do.
I had an old time prog trying to tell me that Bill Clinton was “just too damned smart for his own good.” According to this theory the reason that he never got anything done was because he over thought everything.
Right…
People like this is why I despise our society trying to prevent Darwinism from taking it s course.
The same person had to take 3 days off work to grieve when Paul Wellstone died. If that gives you an idea of the type of person he was.
Looking at the age of the democrat leadership, he’s at risk of being out of the office for a whole year pretty soon.
When all the state funerals, rending and wailing and gnashing of mandibles are complete, his only heroes left standing will be Keith Ellison, Kamala Harris, Debbie Wasserman-Schultz and Chelsea Clinton.
In honor of #WomenboycottTwitter
https://thegrapevine.theroot.com/top-10-things-white-women-should-boycott-besides-twitt-1819448421
Not racist at all
And they keep asking me to “whitelist”.
I got on Facebook (I use it to keep track of friends, I’ve made maybe one or two posts this year) and saw something someone shared something that made my jaw drop.
There is so much wrong with that I don’t even know where to begin. First most players didn’t kneel until Trump tweeted something. That made it about protesting Trump. Secondly, if I don’t understand what you are saying, in most cases it is not my fault, it is your fault for not explaining it properly. And not understanding something someone is saying is not racism.
It took all my willpower not to respond.
He’s not wrong about those child leashes.
But he is wrong about the frying temperature for chicken. 490°F? It’s 380 tops, and often less, as it’s almost impossible to find a chicken under 4 lbs. nowadays.
Oh, I didn’t even notice that. That’s just a stupid temperature, most oil’s smoke point is lower than that. I think peanut oil is around 440-450.
He’s mocking the TV cooking shows, not giving actual instructions.
I watch a lot of cooking shows and guess what? He’s full of shit about seasoning. Imagine that.
I’m not defending the overall asininity of the piece. It seems he’s going for the half joking thing, ala PJ O’Rourke, I don’t think he succeeds but that’s why the obvious hyperbole and such don’t bug me.
It needs to have even a tiny basis in reality to be effective at what it’s trying to do. This is just wypipo can’t jump bullshit.
“The HGTV recipe for fried chicken…”
See, this is how you know it’s comedy. HGTV doesn’t do cooking shows. Food Network is the cooking show channel. There is no “HGTV recipe”, any recipe presented on Food Network would be developed by the chef hosting the show.
So the guy is being funny because white people watch cable tv and all white people watch hgtv/food network/travel channel. It’s pretty funny when you think about it that way.
And brothers be like, “Imma’ watch some BET.”
Those shows are literally packed with folks – white and black – sharing their grandma’s fried chicken recipe and such.
If he’s riffing on “stuff white people like”, it’s a complete failure.
It’s a complete failure.
My deep fryer only goes 375.
“Nothing makes you not racist.”
No point in trying then.
That dude makes a living as a writer?
I think this is one of the most evil, racist things I’ve read. Fuck that asshole. I actively wish ill upon him.
A similar music selection
I don’t see how Somalia is libertarian either.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who think “libertarianism” is synonymous with “chaos”. The sort of people who read the New York Times opinion page as if it were Holy Writ. You know… morons.
Don’t you know that when the individual and his rights are more important than the collective, even when said collective believes in murdering those that won’t play along, there can only be chaos?
TW MotherJones
http://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/08/40-percent-californias-fires-are-fought-prison-inmates/
Not TW, not full on derp.
MoJo, as lefty as it is, isn’t really “shitty-leftist-partisan-hackery-all-the-time”
they’re basically baby-boomer lefties. they don’t go full-salon/slate retarded. the latter aren’t capable of writing about any topic without fucking it up and trying to turn it into some kind of bullshit SJW narrative. MoJo *can* do that sometimes, but they actually have to make an effort. most of the time their basic reporting is pretty good, and they only editorialize on it in certain opportunistic moments.
I was honestly surprised, it’s not bad journalism at all and something I was unaware of.
Trump has crippled the swamp, crippled I tell you!
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/atf-association-bump-stocks_us_59e11925e4b04d1d5181c61f?section=us_us-news
“These accessories DO NOT cause the firearm to shoot more than one shot by the single function of a trigger pull,” he wrote. “The notion that ATF chose not to regulate an item it had the authority to regulate is false. The law is very clear and it does not allow ATF to regulate such accessories.”
That sounds right to me.
You can’t type that without linking to this…
This or that.
Has anybody linked to the
storyrumor about Clinton becoming a professor at Columbia University? Because that’s not what I really meant when I side she should be placed in an institution.Yes.
I linked it yesterday.
The best ways to help, gentlemen, ignore at your own risk!
https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/07/combat-entitlement-in-pukennehoublic/
“Page Not Found.” Exec summary, plz?
I get a “page not found” error. Must be sexism.
https://everydayfeminism.com/2014/07/combat-entitlement-in-public/
I patently refuse to use the pronoun ‘they’ when referring to a singular person in the way I would use ‘he’ or ‘she’. English has a gender neutral singular pronoun: deal with ‘it’.
This is nothing more than authoritarianism. They’re just trying to see if they can bully you into doing something. Doesn’t really matter what it is. Once they’ve succeeded in that, they’ll try to push it a little further.
Wow. She sounds like a lovely person to be around.
Fixed it, derp away!
I’m more interested in what on earth “pukennehoublic” is.
Fair point. I’m not entirely sure actually.
It’s a developing country near Somalia, best known for is exports of possibly the world’s finest cofeve.
Waking: my kid has been having consistent night terrors around 12am-4am for the last solid month despite a perfect sleep record for the rest of her life. Brutal. At least I have Illy Dark and my Rancilio.
Baking: using the rest of some canned pumpkin puree to make some small ramekins of punkin’ pie sans crust. Bird’s custard powder stars, because why not?
Both my sons had night terrors. I wake the kid up, took them to the living room and let them scurry about a bit. They normally asked to go back to bed. The idea was to get them to realize what was real and what was not.
I had them throughout my twenties and thirties. It got so bad I was in contact with a sleep researcher about “WTF is wrong with me?” and considering testing. Went away about ten years ago, knock on wood.
Yeah it’s good advice. It’s a little brutal here since our home is completely open concept until our home addition project concludes in December. Everyone hears everything until everyone goes back to sleep.
Night terrors are weird as hell.
I own a gun. Here’s why I’m not getting a concealed-carry license.
This guy is gonna have to go full self-flagellation if his state flips to constitutional carry. Also, give a guy like this a WIDE BERTH. Future Stephen Paddock material, this guy.
I am guessing it is another parody of a gun owner written by a rabid gun grabber. It’s the WaPo and they wont let me read without paying them and I sure as hell aint paying them.
Really? It’s not behind a pay wall for me and I sure as hell didn’t pay them.
Tried again. Huh. The page whites-out for me and they tell me I have to pay a dollar to keep reading.
Same here.
That happens after you go over their allotted 5 free articles for the month or something..
ScriptBlocker for Chrome shuts that down. IME, going incognito or not doesn’t seem to make a difference.
That stopped for me when I switched to Safari.
In Chrome, just copy the link and hit ctrl+shift+N, paste the link back in. You’re in.
incognito window.
He could be a legit gun owner. I know a couple of Fudds whose interest in firearms as a defensive tool is zero, and if the guy lives in DC, hey, it’s possible. These are the guys who I’ve heard even today, 4 years on from the updated gun laws around here, who go in my local gun store, and want to buy a couple of boxes of hunting ammo, and are then outraged they need am Ammo permit, because – well – those laws they had the opportunity to oppose in 2013 – they couldn’t possibly be intended to limit them, could they?
The issue is, I just don’t care what his credentials are. I’m not the one proposing policies that would force him to carry or some other nonsense.
This guy sounds legit dangerous. No responsible gun owner is ‘itching’ to show off, this is a case where the thing is an actual dick replacement, christ.
It is bullshit. That is who exists in the fevered imaginations of gun grabbers.
I am going to say you called it right Suthen..
This sounds like a gun grabbers fantasy of why some people want to own guns.
This statement,
is how you know he’s completely full of shit. Nobody notices. Nobody cares.
You think everyone does when you first start carrying, and then after awhile, you realize that most people are incredibly unobservant. Also, most people have bulges and folds, so the little bump from the end of whatever you’re carrying looks just like everyone else.
IIRC, there’s a youtube or two of a guy OC’ing something large, but not flashy on his hip and most people walk by completely oblivious. By comparison, your IWB G19 isn’t going to even move the needle.
Well, it depends somewhat on where you are – although for the most part you’re right.
OC in CT is really not recommended. Some towns have very poorly educated
citizenssubjects who do notice, and certainly do care, combined with police officers who “have to investigate because a member of the public complained”.But in non-pants-shittingville, yep, you’re right.
Having been stopped a few times because of idiot busy bodies I second that in CT you are just setting yourself up for a hassle if you ever carry in such a way that it can be seen.
Yes
This is a common aspect of gun grabbers, A while back one of them admitted that if she owned a gun she would kill people who angered her, and because she’s an unstable loon everyone else must be punished.
Yes, a lot of their opposition to the 2A is based on projection.
Some other gems by this fella include “The guns that don’t make the news — one by deadly one” and “Rubio wants to let guns onto D.C. streets. Why not let them into the Capitol?” Call me crazy but I get the feeling this article wasn’t really written in good faith.
Have you ever been at work talking to another gun owner about guns, and someone butts in and says, “Why would you ever want to own a gun? I mean, what if you just got mad at somebody and shot them? Hell, you’re probably the kind of person who would come in here with a machine gun and shoot everybody! … Hey, when you do, make sure to shoot Jane in HR; she fucked up my paycheck last week! And don’t forget to kill that guy Frank who works next to me! LOL!!!!”
Projection ain’t just something that happens in movie theaters.
Utter horseshit. The “journalist” here has probably never handled a firearm.
Remember a couple years ago, the NYT columnist who described firing an AR-15? The report “loud like a bomb,” the recoil bruising his shoulder, the “temporary PTSD” that he got from the experience? He never did that. They guy never put hands on an AR-15 in his life.
This is another such case of “I’ll take Shit That Never Happened for $500, Alex.”
Indeed. An AR-15 has a buffer tube and usually a muzzle break as well, making it a very light-recoil weapon. My .357 lever-action kicks harder than my brother’s AR-15, yet the former is considered a “sensible gun that could be used for hunting” while the latter is seen as some kind of “military-grade assault weapon that nobody needs to own”.
The muzzle break is exactly the reason why shooting it makes it “sound like a jack hammer”. It’s designed to intimidate and scare the people standing next to you.
Oh, god, the comments…
He declares that anyone who carries a gun is “scared”, but there’s an unexplained carve-out for government officials. Also, isn’t there a difference between being “scared” and just taking a precaution against something that is known to happen? Are you “scared” of a fire if you install a smoke detector? If you wear a seatbelt, are you just a big pussy who is afraid of being launched through the windshield?
Those are different. Those are government-permitted fears,
Well, you see, law enforcement are highly trained and qualified professionals – except when they are jackbooted thugs enforcing white supremacy and patriarchy.
Speaking of fat feminists…
In the end, which is where we live now, it turns out that America was brought low not by war or economic collapse or environmental catastrophe (though none of those are off the table) but by plausible deniability.
This month, BuzzFeed News published a truly astonishing exposé on the so-called alt-right, the youth-driven, arch-conservative online movement that is at least partly responsible for Donald Trump’s rise to power and has been an indispensable siege engine in his war on truth. An unnamed entity sent BuzzFeed a cache of emails from the former Breitbart editor and alt-right figurehead Milo Yiannopoulos — Steve Bannon’s protégé — revealing that Yiannopoulos has been working intimately with white nationalist leaders to normalize radical far-right ideology, particularly among disaffected white youth.
In a bizarre personal twist, one of the leaked emails exposed a connection between Yiannopoulos and an ostensibly feminist writer named Mitchell Sunderland, then employed at Broadly, Vice Media’s women’s section. “Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos, with a link to one of my articles. That email corroborated two things that feminist writers have been insisting, fruitlessly, for years: One, that the abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a byproduct of the internet but a politically motivated silencing campaign. And two, that even left-wing media failed to take us seriously when we insisted that Yiannopoulos was more than just a clown.
The alt-right has always thrived on obfuscation and disinformation. A few of its founding factions include a misogynist hate movement that insists it’s a good-faith crusade for journalistic ethics and free speech, multiple white supremacist hate movements that insist they’re simply passionate about “Western culture,” and the disfigured (or perhaps unmasked) remains of the Republican Party, which has long hidden its ruthless determination to enrich the richest at the expense of the poorest behind lies about “small government” and “personal responsibility.”
Word salad; it’s what’s for breakfast.
“How many boogeymen can I shoehorn into this literary diarreah?”
BuzzFeed…are there any revelations about hookers and golden showers in these leaked emails from an unnamed source?
This alt-right guy looks more and more like Sasquatch every day.
“Please mock this fat feminist,” Sunderland wrote to Yiannopoulos, with a link to one of my articles. That email corroborated two things that feminist writers have been insisting, fruitlessly, for years: One, that the abuse we endure daily on social media isn’t just a byproduct of the internet but a politically motivated silencing campaign. And two, that even left-wing media failed to take us seriously when we insisted that Yiannopoulos was more than just a clown.”
No, that means you write clickbait — crap that is so outrageously stupid in generates page views.
For example:
“Of course, to anyone with even the remotest grasp of nuance, context, American history or good faith, Trump’s racism has always been glaring, as has Yiannopoulos’s.”
If it were “glaring” it wouldn’t require a grasp of nuance, context, or anything else.
I want to know Trump’s secret. The man is a rabid, screaming racist yet he managed to keep that secret despite being in the public spotlight for 4 decades. How did he keep anyone from noticing until after he was elected president?
I wouldn’t be surprised they will claim it was because he was buddies with Harvey, and Harvey helped cover it up for Trump-Hitler.
“radical far-right ideology”
Which translates to anyone right of Mao. That explains most of it. Like free speech? You’re a Nazi.
Sunday Times is extra-retarded-SJW-Times.
they let their C-team run wild on Sunday.
“Speaking of fat feminists…”
But you repeat yourself.
That is horrible! I’ll have you know that not all fat people are feminists!
“”Look, we just elected someone who admitted sexual assault to the presidency. So there’s a lot of other issues that are swirling around these kinds of behaviors that need to be addressed,” Clinton said when asked if she had heard rumors of Weinstein’s behavior before the bombshell reports.”
So you opposed your husband’s re-election in 1996?
She opposed the movement that might have cost her a chance to run at the WH. Hillary stayed with Bill because she knew that was the only way she would get a shot at the WH. You have never seen a more conniving and self serving person than this Clinton woman.
As I recently told an ex-girlfriend that pointed out that she wanted a relationship that was so strong that she would, like Hillary did, even choose to stay with a man when he cheated on her and dragged her through the mud, all because, like Hillary had answered when asked why she stayed with Bill despite his ways, that cheating man was able to make her laugh and understood her: well then, you are certainly not mature or sane enough for a serious relationship if you can’t see through this blatantly obvious pile of shit.
How deluded does one have to be to be envious of the Clinton marriage not because of the power or anything like that…but because you think they just love and understand one another too much?
That’s why she now is my ex. When I met her she sure as hell looked like she had her shit together. Fast forward to when the sex got old, and you suddenly start noticing that the deck might be short a few cards, and then you hear crap like this and the curtains come down after that discussion and you get ti see she is missing half the tool box’s tools.
I am giving up on finding semi-sane women that are not suffering from one or more manias anymore at my age. Like Santa and the tooth fairy, they don’t exist.
Look abroad then.
She was from China, living here in the US for some 17 years now, owned her own house, worked a good job, and seemed that she had her shit together. In a lot of respects she did, but when she finally let the curtain down, I should have known that living in CT she would be subjected to a ton of derp, but I was saddened to find that she was a woman first and the usual mental issues you end up dealing with when you find a decent woman of my age range not married, were there.
She must be a dangerous person to be around. The only reason that I can think of for the reporter not to burst out into laughter and ask that exact question is that they know she might physically abuse them.
Someone I knew who was a reporter way back when for a while was completely disillusioned by the amount of covering up the press would do to keep “access” to the pols. He said Ted Kennedy was a knee walking drunk, but no one would say anything about it because if you did then no one else would ever answer any of your calls.
Ross Douthat gets out his pearls, and clutches them
But let us not congratulate ourselves too quickly. There are ways in which we have passed from eros to thanatos — from the chaos of unrestrained desire to the stability of senescence. Our era is less overtly sexually destructive in part because we are giving up on sex itself, retreating into pornography and other virtual consolations. In the 1970s people left their marriages because they believed some higher fulfillment awaited; in the 2010s they marry less, have less sex once married and have fewer children, opting out of promiscuity and procreation both. Abortion rates are down, but suicide rates are up. Hefnerism seems to have led us through orgiastic excess to depressing onanism.
Oh, woe, the end of civilization is upon us. Again. Still.
We’re gonna need a bigger fainting couch.
Glib BIF’ers, I’ve sent out the preliminary e-mail. The current list of participants is:
MikeS
Tundra
DEG
Trials and Trippelations
egould310
Gray Ghost
Gordilocks
If your name is on that list and you didn’t get an e-mail, let me know. If your name is on that list and you didn’t want to participate, also let me know.
Now to subject my liver to day 3 of Cleveland Beer Week, and the girlfriends favorite event. A beer and donut pairing, 5 mini donuts with 5 samples of beer to pair with them. Then a full pint and a glass to take home.
This is gonna be fun. Thanks for organizing it.
I sent you an email this morning with my info.
mexican sharpshooter:
I haven’t received any e-mails from you. Nephilium at google’s mail service dot com. If you were raised Catholic, notice that it is not Nephilim, it is Nephilium. As it’s late, I’ll post another message on the evening/afternoon thread, as well as Monday’s morning thread to try to get in touch.
With this fine establishment as my home beer merchant, I’m going to have a lot of fun filling out a variety box for some lucky Glib.
No responsible gun owner is ‘itching’ to show off, this is a case where the thing is an actual dick replacement, christ.
I read that the other day. He’s no responsible gun owner, he was a government goon.
“The notion that ATF chose not to regulate an item it had the authority to regulate is false. The law is very clear and it does not allow ATF to regulate such accessories.”
LOOPHOOOOOOOOOOOLE!
You know things are bad when Courtney Love seems like the sane and sensible person.
I seem to remember about that time she fell out of favor and lots of people started taking jabs at her then she kinda disappeared for a while. I thought it was because she was too trashy even for hollywood standards. Turns out it was the other way about.
Her daughter hates her guts because she is a legit toxic nutjob.
Why not both? There are plenty of people out there including stagehands and roadies who have spoken out about big a PITA Love is to work with for years before that. I doubt that people who consider beer a method of payment were talking trash about Love in order to get ahead in Hollywood.
NEEDZ MOAR MUNNY
A larger problem with both bills is that they would do nothing to increase the size of the budget or staff of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, which is responsible for overseeing the industry and will have to write new rules for self-driving cars.
The agency has been underfunded for years and has struggled to investigate auto defects and improve safety standards. Worse still, President Trump has proposed cutting the agency’s operations and research budget by $24 million, or 7.5 percent, in the 2018 fiscal year.
Today, the agency is woefully unprepared to regulate self-driving cars, particularly at the scale proponents hope to see down the line. More electrical engineers, programmers and cybersecurity specialists who can evaluate such cars have to be hired.
Among other challenges, the agency has to come up with standards for what happens when a highly automated car has to hand control back to a human driver. The results could be devastating if drivers are distracted because they place too much trust in their cars.
We must have a bigger budget, and more government oversight; there is literally nothing which cannot benefit from that. Money is magic, that way
Look, everyone knows that if the government didn’t regulate driverless cars the manufacturers would have them go all Skynet on America at the earliest opportunity. If that means some fatcat CEO has to crack open the door to one of his money bins a millimeter wider, so be it.
derp
“Lisa Bloom: I was warned ‘The left can be vicious’”
https://hotair.com/archives/2017/10/10/lisa-bloom-warned-left-can-vicious/
Watching the left eat each other is like watching Cookie Monster eat cookies….Mummm, mummm, mummmm.
Blue on blue fighting, especially when it is about one of these idiot proggie booga-boos, is awesome.
Is that Canadian for “Nom nom nom”?
It is a kind of insanity. Beleiving that those who think individuals are not important are going to treat you as special and important and not put you up against the wall for their own aggrandizement is nuts. Of course the left eats its own. For the greater good.
Her support couldn’t have anything to do with that picture deal she had with Harvey?
“But it’s different when I consort with grubby people for money!”
It’s not like they have a First Amendment – just target Muslims already.
You’re welcome.
“FBI Finds 30 Pages of Clinton-Lynch Tarmac Meeting Documents – Wants Six Weeks to Turn Over Docs
The FBI originally informed Judicial Watch they did not locate any records related to the tarmac meeting. However, in a related case, the Justice Department located emails in which Justice Department officials communicated with the FBI and wrote that they had communicated with the FBI. As a result, by letter dated August 10, 2017, from the FBI stated, “Upon further review, we subsequently determined potentially responsive documents may exist. As a result, your [FOIA] request has been reopened…””
https://www.judicialwatch.org/press-room/press-releases/fbi-finds-30-pages-clinton-lynch-tarmac-meeting-documents-wants-six-weeks-turn-docs/
This country now seems to be run by an oligarchy more concerned with conserving its power than serving the people..
Seems to be? Now?
It’s the same as it ever was Alex.
In the past at least they were concerned with not making it look like there was a different system for them vs. us, or maybe I am just biased that way Suthen, but now they don’t even try anymore and want you to know they think you are beneath them..
I have to admit I was a bit shocked when Clinton just came right out and called half of the citizenry deplorable. Of course looking at the other things she has said it shouldn’t have surprised me at all. She is a straight up sociopath that has no idea what to say to get a desired reaction. She has to experiment every time she opens her mouth.
It goes in cycles. Those kinds of people get too comfortable and the mask starts slipping. They get punished and start the ‘man of the people’ act all over again.
It goes beyond just Mrs. Clinton. You don’t come up with a phrase like ‘basket of deplorables’ off the cuff. That was a planned statement (and probably focus-group tested among Democrat donor-types). The entire Blue establishment thinks that about us (or more correctly, anyone who’s not them).
This was a rare moment where the language these people use when they discuss the public in general amongst themselves made it out to the general public, surprising even a lot of the usual proggies, not because this was what it was obvious they thought of the serfs, but that it had been said out loud.
That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying that the phrase ‘basket of deplorables’ was put into the speech purposefully. It wasn’t a mistake, it was a calculated deliberate act.
Since the Clinton machine won’t decide what to eat for breakfast without testing it with focus groups, that tells you the entire Dem establishment endorsed the statement to be made IN PUBLIC. It wasn’t a slip, it was a deliberate attack.
It may not have been specifically focus-grouped, but it was certainly a deliberate hunk of red meat thrown to her partisans.
“The FBI is out of control. It is stunning that the FBI ‘found’ these Clinton-Lynch tarmac records only after we caught the agency hiding them in another lawsuit,” stated Judicial Watch Tom Fitton. “Judicial Watch will continue to press for answers about the FBI’s document games in court. In the meantime, the FBI should stop the stonewall and release these new records immediately.”
Not that I expect anyone to get even a slap on the wrist over this, but this seems stunningly brazen and a bit of a vindication for all the Trump vs deep state conspiracy theories.
This was from earlier in the week, and since then, Shiny Pony has backpedaled, but it serves as a good insight to the depravity of the statist mind.
Someone in the Canadian Government thought it would be a good idea to tax employee discounts, be they on clothing, dog food, or meals.
My buddy’s wife in BC manages a clothing retail business and a pet food store, and this would have put her in the uncomfortable position of taking even more money out of the mouths of her low-wage employees on behalf of FedGov.
These people are relentless, man.
I pray every night for a non-confidence vote against this moron.
I dunno. The CONS really shot themselves in the foot by nominating this Andrew Scheer cat. He’s a milquetoast standard conservative corporate welfare/supply management fan. I bought a membership to vote for Bernier and I kinda want my 15 bucks back.
And on the other side, this new guy with the NDP.
They vote, we lose. Wash, rinse, repeat.
Get this. As we know, Trudeau (a trust fund millionaire) and Morneau (the son of a millionaire who married into a billionaire family with shell corporations) causes a major upheaval with their mental tax plan to rape SMEs. And just like scumbag left-wing Democrats like Sanders and Warren, they don’t practice what they preach:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/morneau-company-france-ethics-1.4351933
The Liberals are pure incompetent assholes.
Rich leftists never think they are part of the 1% they so hate..
The price of ink and paper use to have a limiting effect.
http://www.dailyvaper.com/2017/10/13/omg-kat-timpf-shocked-shes-the-big-new-hit-at-the-daily-vaper/
“Hi Bob, Bob”.
I’m off to work, where I don’t check the site. So I just wanted to say, have a good Sunday and Go Pack Go vs the Queens.
Look you don’t have to root for the Queens, but you can’t root for the Pack.
The only thing that keeps the Packer Backers from being reviled coast to coast is that they are in flyover country and they don’t get the same exposure the Raider fans get.
I’m sitting here with Meet the Press on in the background. The assembled nodders were just talking about how that mean old Trump is making Congress work too hard. He’s basically returning to them responsibilities which they have, over the course of many years and multiple Presidencies, abdicated to the Executive branch. I harbor no delusions as to Trump’s qualifications as a Constitutional scholar, but that is without doubt a good thing.
My 3 year old grandson tricked me into a wet Willy. “grandpa, what is that over there?” pointing over my shoulder. Like a doofus, I look. “what? ”
MMMMLlmlmlmlmmmmmmm.
Little rascal.
Does your grandson know what an eagle-bird kiss is? If not, it’s about time you gave him one.
No. Ummmmmm…. This isn’t something OMWC would do is it?
Not to boys. I’m not gay, just perverted.
Had to do some googling. My grandpa, Jack Kelly, called them eagle-bird kisses. They are also known as zerberts, or perhaps raspberries. https://youtu.be/58c90bEguvs
Oh heck yeah. All the time.
Oh, goody. Kasich is on. Trump is a big meanie who wants hardworking Americans to die in the streets.
Who’s Kasich?
Sounds like some kind of template for your standard tool, and I don’t mean tool here as a useful implement, but as a douchebag.
He’s that pathetic guy from the 2016 primary season that cries when the lowest 10% of earners can’t get premium health care under Medicaid when the middle class is getting fucked with shittier private plans that they pay for.
He’s 100% responsible for all the shakeup action in 1994 too , dontcha know? I got a mailer about it last year.
I know who he is. I find it funny anyone cares what he thinks.
Trump didn’t even bother to make a name for him like he did for Low Energy Jeb and Lyin Ted. Shows just how irrelevant he is.
If it wasn’t for Kasich, Cruz may have had a chance of toppling Trump.
I don’t think anyone really cares anymore.
OMFG we’re ceding the battlefield to the commies!
The wrong authoritarians are winning.
I’M A SUIN!
Do Democrats really believe they can just sue over anything? The law now means you can’t hurts muh feelz!
Yes, drag them along in limbo for years longer. At least Welch was honest enough call for amnesty.
Don’t you understand? Obama’s executive orders have the legal permanence and effect of a law. Trump can’t just overturn them! That would be unconstitutional!
At some point Trump is going to have to start ignoring these nuisance suits.
When my ex-wife #1 divorced me, she seemed a proggie through and through. A few days ago, we had a conversation that blew my mind. She hates liberals, CNN, and wants the wall built.
But she really hates these DACA kids. Everytime she sends off a student loan payment, it pisses her off. “I didn’t get state subsidized tuition, why should they?”
Oh. Janet Nepalatano is a stupid, mendacious, lying cunt.
Obama really loves him some fugly butch dykes.
“Oh. Janet Nepalatano is a stupid, mendacious, lying cunt.
Oh crap, I though you said Janet Reno.. She was just Chelsea Clinton’s dad.
you were married to Janet Napolitano? That’s fucked up dude. Even for you
But she really hates these DACA kids. Everytime she sends off a student loan payment, it pisses her off. “I didn’t get state subsidized tuition, why should they?”
Creating two classes of people in a country where one, the citizen, pays to subsidize the non citizen is how you turn formerly left leaning normal people into rabid Breitbart reading MAGA hat wearing national populists. I have heard the same sort of comments from friends of mine who are parents of college age kids. How is it fair? It isn’t. Equal protection dontcha know.
“Sweden prides itself on being a beacon of feminism. It has the most generous parental leave in the developed world, providing for 18 months off work, 15 of which can be used by fathers as paternity leave. A quarter of the paid parental leave is indeed used by men, and this is too little according to the Swedish government, which has made it a political priority to get fathers to stay at home longer with their children.
Sweden has never ranked lower than four in The Global Gender Gap Report, which has measured equality in economics, politics, education, and health for the World Economic Forum since 2006. Of all members of Parliament, 44 percent are women, compared to 19 percent of the United States Congress. Nearly two-thirds of all university degrees are awarded to women. Its government boasts that it is the “first feminist government” in the world, averring that gender equality is central to its priorities in decision-making and resource allocation.
But while Swedish women rank among the most equal in the world, they increasingly fear for their physical safety on the streets. Reported sex crimes increased by 61 percent between 2007 and 2016. Meanwhile a rise in gang violence among men–the number of victims injured by gunshots increased by 50 percent between 2004 and 2016–indirectly affects the safety of women. Police admit that rape cases are piling up without being investigated because resources are being drained by gang violence and shootings.”
http://quillette.com/2017/10/10/swedens-sexual-assault-crisis-presents-feminist-paradox/
Not sure how that’s paradoxical.
It is a paradox if you completely ignore the factor that contributes to the rising crime. It is going to continue rising as long as they pretend it’s not there.
This cant be repeated enough: “The demoralized person cannot draw a sensible conclusion no matter how much information you give them.”
If naming the root cause of the problem is forbidden then good luck fixing it.
“Hate speech isnt free speech!”
Truth is the first casualty of the war on freedom of speech.
But while Swedish women rank among the most equal in the world,
/facepalm.
So some women are more equal than others? I don’t have any sympathy for Swedish feminist. They deserve thier raping Good and hard. But being woke, I’m guessing that is kind of what they want since thier men are utter fucking pussies.
Do I even need to link the Thatcher quote?
“beacon of feminism”
This is just a fancy term for ‘cultural suicide’.
While certain types of crime, such as manslaughter and car theft, have declined over time, recent studies show that Sweden has four to five times as many fatal gun crimes as Norway and Germany. Between 2014 and 2016, police authorities handled more than 100 cases involving hand grenades, an astonishing figure that makes Sweden stand out among countries not at war.
Those Norwegians and Danes with their lax grenade control laws! /progderp
Wait, is that piece including hand grenades in its “gun crimes” statistic? WTH?
Wait, wuh? Chortle.
If you can get far enough the article does mention that imigrants are “over represented” in the crime statistics. No more is made of that curious fact.
Geezus H Christ. What in the holy hell happened to public manners? An idiot family is blasting their videos on their smartphones at full volume in the breakfast area of the hotel, oblivious to everyone around here. Grandma’s one of them. Three generations of imbeciles and all that.
Nancy Pelosi: “They (the Republikkkinz) have the power to accede to our demands.”
That’s how I heard it, anyway.
Also- Nancy missed her pre-interview botox appointment.
Nancy: I’m an excellent legislator.”
Now Susan Collins is on. Has she admitted to suffering from Parkinsons?
***
The death toll has risen to 231, with more than 275 people injured, after a truck bomb in Somalia that the U.S. government condemned Sunday as a “cowardly” attack.
***
It is officially the deadliest attack in Somalia’s history.
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2017/10/15/somalia-explosion-kills-at-least-53-people.html
Religion of Piece(s)
????
Are there any good guys over there at all? Seriously, I know very little about Somalia. My impression is that it is nothing but different savage tribes all trying to kill each other and that they have essentially reduced their country to rubble.
well, there’s Abdi
The northern part is doing its own thing and is in decent shape.
The rest of the country is a mess because of civil war and socialist mismanagement.
That’s the impression I get about Somalia as well as the entire Middle East. A bunch of guys bickering over who gets to be the next Saddam Hussein while idiot American politicians like Obama try to find the “good rebels” and give them free machine guns.
Guess who held the previous record
Had that happened under Trump the calls for impeachment would bring the heavens down.
Man, that headline is morbid.
When I was still on DerpBook, where the overwhelming majority of my associates tended leftward, I spent much of the Obama Administration posting articles about the merciless murder and mayhem wrought by the drone war.
And of course, all I got in return when it came to election season was bad vibes and accusations of torpedoing the Democrats by pointing out the facts about how they roll.
Why if they outlawed the bomb making materials, they wouldn’t be in this pickle would they? Jus’ sayin’…..
Earlier this week, Nicolle Wallace offered a novel characterization about the original intent behind the Second Amendment and gun ownership in America.
Where would the intellectual discourse be without input from one of the chicks that showed her tits in Boogie Nights and played the poor woman’s version of Clarice in Hannibal?
You mean Ms. Moore isn’t your go to authority for constitutional jurisprudence? Sexist!
Of all of the gun grabbers arguments this one is the most mendacious. The authors and signers were very clear about the meaning and intent of the second amendment. It is a simple matter of record. The entire ‘not for individuals, only for militias’ canard is fabricated out of thin air. A complete lie.
Yet, think about how often such obviously dishonest interpretations of the Constitution and even more mundane laws have been accepted in court. Some didn’t even require going back in history more than a few years.
There is also a more generic explanation for the purpose of the 2nd amendment: the entire Bill of Rights was amended to the constitution for the express purpose of limiting the power of the central government. So, however you want to interpret the 2nd amendment, the central point was to arm the people in case they needed to confront their own government. This was why Madison was so perplexed about the anti-federalist demands for a BoR – although, of course, he later came around on the question.
Pomp, I have pumpkin pancakes, sausage, hash browns and eggs in the works for some brunch. Thanks for the tip.
Don’t thank me until the pancakes work for you. Pork fat
“I have to admit I was a bit shocked when Clinton just came right out and called half of the citizenry deplorable”
HRC’s loss is a never ending supply schadenfreude. It is obvious that she is a sociopath. But I underestimated how awesomely stupid she is. She is married to another sociopath/predator who won the white house twice. You’d think this dumb cunt would take his advice. Whether said advice about her spending more time in the rust belt or changing the title of her book. But Noooooo.
Dear Left:
Please keep Hillary on the national stage. In fact, run her again in 2020. Report every utterance that comes out of her pinhole as something from the Oracle of Delphi.
I give it about 100% chance she runs again in 2020. Once you’ve come to the conclusion she’s a sociopath, it’s sort of a given.
Her 2020 run is why she’s trying to stay in the spotlight. It’ll be hilarious if the Democratic machine manages to force her nomination down everyone’s throat again.
I’m just looking forward to the part where Hillary debates White Squaw and they wind up in a cat fight on stage pulling each other’s hair out.
I’d pay good money to see that.
The least titillating catfight ever.
What’s the over and under on Hillary having an epileptic fit? And what’s the one on Fauxahauntes pulling out a tomahawk and then scalping Queen Big Bullshitter?
I can see Bernie jumping up and down in the audience with that wild tuft of white hair and yelling ‘Scalp her, Lizzy, scalp her, she’s a capitalist!’.
Lizzie Warren gave Hill forty whacks. When she was done, she gave Bill forty one.
I can’t wait to see how much more they can twist the English language to try to make her palatable. Ever expanding definitions of racism, misogyny, and patriarchy I assume. Oh and Michelle Obama denigrating deplorable women for having the temerity of voting in their family’s interest instead of just their gender.
Cass Sunstein struggles to understand those strange creatures called humans.
***
By contrast, a lot of people object to mandates and bans, apparently on the ground that they limit freedom.
…
At the same time, most people reject nudges that are taken to have illegitimate goals. Nudges that favor a particular religion or political party will meet with widespread disapproval, even among people of that very religion or party.
…
If public officials nudge people to give money to a cause they dislike, citizens will disapprove. More surprisingly, they will also dislike it if officials adopt a default rule by which citizens automatically give their money to a good charity. Apparently people think that if they are going to give to charity or lose some of their money, it had better be a result of a conscious choice.
***
https://www.alternet.org/personal-health/do-people-government-nudges-apparently-yes
Leftists completely deny that human nature even exists as a powerful force. They have to build the new Soviet Man.
People don’t like being forced to do things? Who would have thought?
-eHe and Sam Power (his wife) are possibly the 2 worst people in America.
Both have spent their entire careers trying to convince people that social-engineering at the point of a gun will *work* (this time!) Because they’re so smart and well-intentioned.
His version is about using the power of Govt to force people to behave better and exercise more and stop being so stupid.
Her version is about using the US Military as the muscle for UNICEF. That its core role should be ‘helping starving/oppressed people’, and ‘preventing’ genocides by murdering dictators.
Both were given powerful Govt jobs. He was Obama’s ‘regulatory Czar’. She was ambassador to the UN. this is how we got Obamacare and Libya/Yemen/Syria etc..
That is one creepy guy right there. He is the epitome of a control freak who always knows better than everyone else what’s good for them. Of course Obama pals around with the likes of Cass.
The left really is populated by the worst kinds of people.
Based on the over 120 million killed and the billions enslaved by collectivism in the past century, I would say nobody could argue that last statement you made, brah.
“By contrast, most people favor automatic voter registration and automatic enrollment in pension plans and green energy, apparently because citizens think that those nudges are in most people’s interests.”
Automatic does not equal choice so how are these “nudges” as defined in article?
Well thanks for that. Now I know of a public figure I despise more than Bill Kristol.
I had an instructor who had personal, professional experience with Sunstein as an academic, and was severely under-impressed with his craft as a scholar.
Even his name screams douchebag.
I read one of his pieces of ‘scholarship’ not long ago, and its basically a loosely-slapped-together theory that throws some evidence like spaghetti at a wall and hopes some of it actually supports his argument.
He published it at a time when “wild speculation about the effects of the internet on society” was a thing (around 2000), and you could pretty much spitball anything and people would praise you for ‘visionary’ thinking.
i started writing an article for this site which included a long bit about Cass’s theory above (the piece was a response to the Weekly Standard article “the Joy of Destruction” which cited Cass).. but it just got way too long. 6 pages in and i felt like i was somwhere in the middle.
TRUMP NOW MORE SCARIER THAN EVER!
Oh noes, as if Trump wasn’t already scary enough, now he’s been spotted hanging out with scary libertarian! We’re doomed I tell you!
The two whackiest heads of hair in DC playing a round together. Screw it, as long as Rand manages to influence Trump rather than the other way around I’m all for it.
Well, that’s the desired outcome anyway.
Sweet shit.
Fuckit, this guy knows what’s up. Let’s restructure the economy around Bernie Sanders’ master plan.
That was the plan that includes bread lines, right?
If you limit the amount of fiber you get, you don’t have to worry so much about the toilet paper supply.
Progress!
Bernie Sanders: “It’s funny, sometimes American journalists talk about how bad a country is, that people are lining up for food. That is a good thing! In other countries people don’t line up for food: the rich get the food and the poor starve to death.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJBjjP8WSbc
Sanders is a Goddamned idiot.
Gibbering too, with extra gibber.
If you made up a cartoon caricature of a commie, it would be Bernie Sanders.
Bernie is exactly right! Why, I was at the supermarket just last night, and there were very, very short lines!
QED
“Suffering and death for the poor.”
My 2020 campaign slogan
It might work. I mean Trump just signed an EO to kill 10 million poor children and his approval rating went up!
Suffering and Death!
FTFY
Succinct. I like it!
Andy Dalton sucks in more ways than one.
The comments are schadenlicious.
Trump’s golfing is killing poor brown children in Puerto Rico as we speak. Every time he swings his evil one percenter club, 10 Puerto Rican children fall over dead!
Well, that could certainly solve their economic troubles.
I dont think it is an accident that Trump’s EOs on Obamacare accomplished much of what was in Paul’s bill that couldn’t get off of the ground. We have a market in healthcare now that is closer to a free market than anything in my lifetime.
Despite all of the complaints and insults from many self-declared lovers of liberty Trump is the closest thing to a libertarian president that we could ever hope for. Hell, I never thought half of the things he has done were possible. I dont understand all of the Trump-hate except from authoritarian types.
“. I dont understand all of the Trump-hate except from authoritarian types.”
I think it is the USA hats. The left despises the idea that this man genuinely loves his country.
And Trump has the hat with him this morning while golfing with evil libertarian. CNN and NYT must have all their people in overdrive mode.
And what does everyone think the two of them are chatting about? I bet they’re debating on a way to kill the most poor children with an EO.
Where was this? Wannsee, VA?
Somewhere in VA I guess.
Cristal-nacht to follow.
Nah. Golf is time to talk about the personal. Like the proper way to prevent their orphan laborers from mutinying.
Horse trading some orphans of course
‘The Taliban Can’t Win,’ Says Commander Of U.S. Forces In Afghanistan
http://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/10/13/557195911/the-taliban-cant-win-says-commander-of-u-s-forces-in-afghanistan
***
That is because the White House has given him more authority to attack the Taliban, more warplanes and drones to mount punishing airstrikes — and a few thousand more American troops to advise the Afghans.
Just eight months ago, Nicholson told Congress that the Afghan fight was at a stalemate.
Now, he tells NPR, “With the policy decision announced by President Trump, the Taliban can’t win. It sets the conditions to get to a peaceful resolution of this conflict.”
Nicholson says, “It’s still a stalemate right now. I mean the authority, the troops, the air [power] are newly arrived. I’ve literally gotten these in the last six weeks. But with these, we can move now in the right direction.”
…
In his interview with NPR earlier this month, Nicholson laid out some details.
The general says key parts of the strategy include, over the next several years, doubling the size of the Afghan commando force — the Army’s best fighters, currently numbering about 17,000 — and doubling the size of the Afghan Air Force, providing its pilots with modern American Black Hawk helicopters to replace its aging Russian ones.
Maybe more importantly, the troop drawdowns and deadlines set by the Obama administration are no more. Conditions on the ground, success against the Taliban, will be the new metric as the U.S. enters the 17th year of its war in Afghanistan.
Doing away with deadlines, says Nicholson, “is absolutely critical” because the Taliban can no longer just wait until the Americans leave.
…
“As a military commander, we drew down too far, too fast,” Nicholson says. “And that led to many challenges we faced the last couple of years. We pulled off the Afghan units too soon. And now we’re fixing that.”
Nicholson says the goal is to get Afghanistan to “a manageable level of violence.”
The key, he says, is not to eliminate all violence, but to bring it to a level at which it can be finally controlled by Afghan government forces.
When will that level be achieved? Nicholson says it will take about five years.
***
“With pressure on their sanctuaries outside the country, with military pressure inside the country, we believe that significant portions of the Taliban will then choose to rejoin society.”
Uh…yeah.
Yeah, that’s not even wishful thinking, it’s just pure delusion. As soon as they’ve killed the last of them, France and Britain will just send in the backups. Last I heard, there’s at least 8000 Islamic fighters living in the UK.
Also, as soon as you leave Iraq alone for just a little time, it will go back to being warring tribes killing each other, just like always.
Lessee…we win the engagements, the Taliban shelters in Pakistan and signs off on a settlement, in five years or less the government we leave in place is either toppled by them or we have to go back in. It doesn’t take a genius to know that this is exactly what’s going to happen if we “win.”
What I have never gotten is an explanation of what we would even get out of winning. Back in George Bush days there was some delusion of an oil pipeline from the Caspian sea through afghanistan but even that is never talked about anymore. What will winning get us?
Noted elsewhere, a skeptical man might say that having a large contingent of your own military embedded in a politically disunited location, right in the middle of an unstable area you want to wield influence over, might be worth the costs and pain associated with the project.
Motives need not be directly material, although if you can cover some of the expense by exploiting local resources, it softens the criticism from some directions.
I saw that and it does make sense but only if you have something to win in the larger area. There just isnt. The entire ME is one giant clusterfuck with precious little to be had resource-wise and no single group of peaceful people large enough to make anything resembling a civilized, developed nation.
Even if we ‘won’ in the entirety of the ME, North Africa and central Asia it would be an endless nightmare and money sink. We would end up playing a larger version of Israel against a thousand tribes playing the Palestinians.
Well, sure, depends what the politicians see as being “victory”.
In 1990’s terms, “victory” might have meant ensuring that your country had an adequate supply of crude oil.
In 2000’s terms, “victory” might have looked like ensuring the US’ only reliable democratically run nation state survived.
In 2030 terms, it might mean being in a ground war with a certain very large Eastern Asian nation in an alliance with a very large Southern Asian nation.
The US has been “in” Europe for decades since the USSR ceased being a regional threat. A case could be made that it’s as pointless as it is having an “FOB Afghanistan”. There may well be an equally “long game” being played here, based on a set of expectations that are geopolitically obsolete.
Nations (like my original one) can stay geopolitically irrational far longer than you might expect.
.. “ensuring the US’ only reliable regional ally survived”
Even better-
define winning.
I have no idea what a win would look like.
Winning will mean that we need to pump even more tax payer money into the military industrial complex. Hey. we’re producing results, we’re winning, needs moar funding!
Dead terrorists
It really has been a Fool’s Errand.
“With the policy decision announced by President Trump, the Taliban can’t win. It sets the conditions to get to a peaceful resolution of this conflict.”
Bullshit.
The only way to a peaceful resolution in Afghanistan is for Trump to marry a Roxana and have all his officers take afghan brides from all the competing factions in the country.
Well, that’s the problem of course. This “system” has so many degrees of freedom, that in order to be able to claim you’re on a path to success relies on blind faith to lock some of them down.
I was somewhat supportive of the initial commitment to Afghanistan, likewise to Iraq, but the US has had so many opportunities to exit the theater that it’s hard to refute that having troops in Afghanistan is part of some broader, regional strategy that ensures that the US has troops in-theater for when the Middle East finally goes to shit. There’s obviously some strategic value in this, if you believe that the US has an interest in creating a locus of irritation that will stop ME and Central Asian states from unifying effectively, which is another sticking point with me for a couple of huge reasons.
I’m starting to view the whole theater as a bit like my now-ex Audi A4. We bought it having kicked the tires and done everything we thought was reasonable to ensure a satisfactory outcome. Discovered that we really had bought a pig in a poke and that the Audi of today is not the same as it was 50 years ago, and found that despite warranties, all we’d experience is lurching from one Check Engine Light to the next with no expectation of a carefree driving experience. So you act like my wife, who sighs and thinks about the sunk costs and suggests paying this one further bill, or you act like me, who has solid stop/loss criteria. We stabilized the Audi’s condition, and traded it in to a dealer who is better positioned to deal with the ensuing costs.
That’s what we need to do. Triage to the point where each point in the theater is somewhat stable, and prepare (in *genuine* secrecy) for a theater wide withdrawal. Let the US take (another) hit to its credibility, bolstering the lack of confidence in US loyalty to (some) of its allies, and get the fuck out of there.
Let the Afghans grow opium if they want. Let the Pakistanis build their Madrassas. Get the fuck out of Incirlik, ask a real ally in the area (if we can find one) whether they’d like the same deal as Poland for missile defense, and (sigh) ask them if we could have an airbase there.
There is nothing here talking about how to change the 3rd world culture that is Afghanistan. You want to bring piece? Starrt talking about bridging the Sunni/Shia schism.
Hahah. You’re a funny guy!
We’ll shoot you last.
Goddammit Troy. I just ironed this shirt.
*stomps off to bedroom for a new shirt*
this is no different than arbitrary timelines.
All the taliban need to do to undermine your perception of victory is stage some huge attack once a year, and remind the world that you’re not really in control of shit.
Double? Why so conservative, sir? Why not triple? Hell, why don’t we just make every member of the Afghan military and police force a commando? Surely, that would be the surest path to victory. I mean, we should at least be aiming for a 100,000 number like the Norks have here.
Because everyone can be the best fighters!
Fight for 15! million!
/Why not?
Police in the Afghan capital Kabul say they have arrested a would-be suicide truck bomber, averting a major attack on the city.
http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-41626854
Excellent.
Afghanistan is like real world Serious Sam sometimes.
Growing up on the east coast, I remember what it was like when the games started at 1:00 pm.
They’d get rid of a minister that wouldn’t cut the sermon short enough to get you home by then.
The heathen would hurry and mow the lawn before game time.
The west coast may be more laid back because there isn’t enough time on Sundays before the games start at 10:00 am to get much done.
That’s also a reason to skip church.
I’m just sayin’.
This is from last year, maybe this was shared at TOS or here after the Great Exodus, and apologies if so; regardless, it’s worth a read.
The Left’s War on Science
The danger from the Left does not arise from stupidity or dishonesty; those failings are bipartisan. Some surveys show that Republicans, particularly libertarians, are more scientifically literate than Democrats, but there’s plenty of ignorance all around. Both sides cherry-pick research and misrepresent evidence to support their agendas. Whoever’s in power, the White House plays politics in appointing advisory commissions and editing the executive summaries of their reports. Scientists of all ideologies exaggerate the importance of their own research and seek results that will bring them more attention and funding.
But two huge threats to science are peculiar to the Left—and they’re getting worse.
This is very true. The left’s problem with science is that they’ve let ideology trump science. It’s never the correct result unless it confirms their political bias. Each conclusion needs to uphold their views on social justice and leftist ideology.
And the GMO thing is really just over the top nuttery.
Eventually, a collectivist ideology pretty much has to embrace Lysenkoism.
Yeah, that makes sense.
You beat me to it Number.6
I was replying above and then scrolled back here to write exactly that.
a similarly good article on why the politicization of science destroys both politics and science
her focus was on why the Clean Air Act was being misused. but her points apply to pretty much any govt policy
this is the nut of it:
The bolded part is what i think is important.
Science is used as a way of pretending that a) the posture being taken really isn’t motivated by political interests – when it always is… and b) that because the question is ‘scientific’, that mundane issues like ‘cost/benefit’ or practical reality are shoved aside as irrelevant.
When partisans use science as a political tool, they use it in a way to pretend that it *isn’t really politics* going on; its ‘science’! Hence: “why do you hate science?” they say in response to any criticisms of their economic-redistribution proposals. When you try and point out the economic flaws, they simply fall back on the idea that this policy has been already validated by men in white-coats and test-tubes, and is therefore beyond such petty concerns.
I really don’t think most CAGW-cheerleaders realize that’s what’s happened… that they’ve basically just applied a veneer of ‘science’ to what were actually pre-existing progressive policies, and re-sold them to the public.
Do legislatures really claim their hands are tied, though? It seems more like the left proclaims anything and everything they do is backed by the science. The right shrugs and denies responsibility for what the bureaucracy they helped empower does. It’s more about avoiding responsibility for decisions. These are politicians. They’d prefer to talk and pass bills that named after dead children but create good feels than actually have to make tough calls that may be unpopular and cost them their jobs.
“I really don’t think most CAGW-cheerleaders realize that’s what’s happened…”
In 1975 Margaret Mead and her Malthusian buddies announced that that was exactly their plan. Yeah, the realize it. It was deliberate and calculated.
Another thing they do is pretend that science is a group of human beings, and if you disagree with them, you’re branded as “anti-science”. But science is a mode of thought; a discipline. It’s the method of gathering evidence, drawing conclusions from it, then questioning those conclusions from every possible angle to see if they hold up. What the CAGW crowd promotes is not science but dogma.
– Yes, but i think its still missing the point she makes which is that policy is always a matter of Trade offs – policies have cost consequences which ‘science’ ignores. and that all of those trade offs are political decisions. People who stand atop “Science” and claim their data shows X aren’t really saying anything at all about *policy*.
The rhetorical-judo-move (*which i said i think many don’t even realize they’re doing) is when you disagree with the policy, and they claim you’re disagreeing with “science”. As tho Science is interchangeable with “policy”
Drawing on research into genetics and animal breeding from scientists at Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins, and other leading universities, the eugenics movement of the 1920s made plans for improving the human population. Professors taught eugenics to their students and worked with Croly and other progressives eager to breed a smarter society, including Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Margaret Sanger. Eventually, other scientists—notably, in England—exposed the shoddy research and assumptions of the eugenicists, but not before the involuntary sterilization or castration of more than 35,000 Americans. Even after Hitler used eugenics to justify killing millions, the Left didn’t lose its interest in controlling human breeding.
Eugenicist thinking was revived by scientists convinced that the human species had exceeded the “carrying capacity” of its ecosystem. The most prominent was Paul Ehrlich, whose scientific specialty was the study of butterflies. Undeterred by his ignorance of agriculture and economics, he published confident predictions of imminent global famine in The Population Bomb (1968). Agricultural economists dismissed his ideas, but the press reverently quoted Ehrlich and other academics who claimed to have scientifically determined that the Earth was “overpopulated.” In the journal Science, ecologist Garrett Hardin argued that “freedom to breed will bring ruin to all.” Ehrlich, who, at one point, advocated supplying American helicopters and doctors to a proposed program of compulsory sterilization in India, joined with physicist John Holdren in arguing that the U.S. Constitution would permit population control, including limits on family size and forced abortions. Ehrlich and Holdren calmly analyzed the merits of various technologies, such as adding sterilants to public drinking water, and called for a “planetary regime” to control population and natural resources around the world.
Environmental science has become so politicized that its myths endure even after they’ve been disproved.
Their ideas went nowhere in the United States, but they inspired one of the worst human rights violations of the twentieth century, in China: the one-child policy, resulting in coerced abortion and female infanticide. China struggles today with a dangerously small number of workers to support its aging population. The intellectual godfathers of this atrocity, had they been conservatives, surely would have been ostracized. But even after his predictions turned out to be wildly wrong, Ehrlich went on collecting honors.
I’ve been called a conspiracy theorist and a Nazi by some people for pointing out the progressive history with Eugenics.
The left always has to disassociate itself from its own prior behavior before they can try one more time to get it right.
Let’s not forget that some states, notably North Carolina, undertook eugenic practices until 2003.
The Eugenic Board of North Carolina was instituted some years after the state’s first eugenic policies were enacted in 1919. One might say in that respect that this, among other US states was more progressive than Nazi Germany, who had to wait another 25 years before they got their chance to improve the working man.
Spot the Not: Bernie Sanders
1. We have to re-invent socialism. It can’t be the kind of socialism that we saw in the Soviet Union, but it will emerge as we develop new systems that are built on cooperation, not competition.
2. I will tell the billionaire class: you can’t have it all while kids in this country go hungry.
3. I will…ban semi-automatic assault weapons which are designed strictly for killing human beings…
4. You don’t need a PhD in economics to understand that American workers should not be forced to compete against people in Mexico making 25 cents an hour.
5. When I talk about democratic socialism, I’m talking about Social Security.
6. We need to reverse the massive transfer of wealth from working families to the top 1 percent and put millions of Americans back to work.
7. Social Security has nothing to do with the deficit.
8. Finland is no utopia.
9. The Postal Service is a vitally important institution for the American people. It must be saved.
10. You’ve got the top 400 Americans owning more wealth than the bottom 150 million Americans. Most folks do not think that is right.
1. Bernie would never criticize the USSR.
8. When Bernie talks Scandanavia, he really means Sweden.
8. The others feel far too likely.
It’s a gamble, but I’m gonna guess #3 just because I remember an article on The Old Site detailing how Bernie Sanders is not actually waving around a rock-hard ban-boner on the subject of guns.
From the link in comment 50:
***
In a 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, the climatologist Stephen Schneider advocated a new fourth branch of the federal government (with experts like himself serving 20-year terms) to deal with the imminent crisis of global cooling. He later switched to become a leader in the global-warming debate.
***
Heh.
9?
Oops, wrong theard, that was for 51.
Warmer…cooler….meh, it’s all the same. Climate change!
The only eyebrow-raising part of that quote is that he was proposing term limits.
That, and he didn’t write it under his real name, Floyd Ferris
Everybody remember Preet Bharara? He of The Great Woodchipper Crisis? THAT GUY?
He’s got a new podcast!
Is it about arboriculture?
I think arboriculture doesn’t quite encapsulate the scale; more like ‘Pulp and Paper Production Inputs’.
So since he now only a former US attorney, does that mean I can only call him a former sheepfucker?
Once a sheepfucker, always a sheepfucker.
“But you fuck one sheep…”
We should call in and troll about woodchippers and woodchipper accessories.
Austrian ‘whizz-kid’ projected to triumph in election
You know who else was a nationalistic Austrian whiz kid?
Franz Klammer?
This guy?
How long have you been saving that one? Simply too perfect…
i googled “austrian” and “urine” and voila. The magic of the internet
So, I take it this whizz kid is one of them right wing extremists? Which in Murica would make him a little right of Zoolander?
And the far-left Greens may not make it into parliament.
Now they can clarify the “head-covering” ban.
So I was watching a crappy movie on a crappy local channel and this came on. It’s a real thing I guess? I think I might actually want one.
Have y’all seen this (Trumpy Bear)?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i9qv8RSreIM
The commerce site looks highly plausible,
For $40, if it’s real, you get a bear. If it’s not real, you get a chance to find a lawyer to initiate a class-action lawsuit.
Win-Win.
Actually, if you don’t live in TX, you get the chance to report wire fraud.
I saw that while watching Rick and Morty, I just assumed it was one of those weird ass Adult Swim things.
Should be featured in the next episode of Hat and Hair.
When I was watching this the only thing running through my head was why, WHY, didn’t think of this? It’s so damn simple and it’s going to make somebody a mountain of money.
That’s why you’re here, commenting on a blog, and the guys behind that product are signing up for the next Fyre Festival.
My wife is going to want this crazy thing, lol.
I had to scroll up to work out what “this crazy thing” was.
You were about 15 seconds away from me giving Tony your home address.
The left can’t meme with a fuck. I can see thousands of these showing up in Nebraska
This thing is going to drive the left crazy. I mean it’s a short trip and they’re just too easy to troll.
Gordilocks, yes. The Cons naming Scheer was surprising.
My disillusioned bleeding heart liberal sister who has had it with progressivism and its feminist/SJW bull shit liked Bernier.
If she’s a barometer for annoyed liberals looking for something different, they may have made an error.