ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. ZARDOZ UNDERSTANDS TODAY IS A DAY OF BRUTALITY. AND OF RETAIL SALES OF GOODS TO BRUTALS. ZARDOZ HAS THE ANSWER FOR ALL YOUR GIFT GIVING NEEDS. THE GIFT OF THE GUN. THE GUN IS GOOD. THE GUN SHOOTS DEATH AND PURIFIES THE EARTH OF THE FILTH OF BRUTALS. GO FORTH AND SHOP! ZARDOZ HAS SPOKEN.
THANK YOU, ZARDOZ! IT IS JUST WHAT I WANTED!
Doing my American capitalist duty and shopping this morning, I was waiting in a checkout line at Target. The guy in front of me had an Amazon Echo and a couple of Echo Dots.
I *really* wanted to tap him on the shoulder and tell him that he was placing listening devices in his house, on top of wanting to put devices that allow them to unlock your front door. And they host the CIA on the web services side of their business. But that would’ve made me sound crazy, so I left it be.
Would have been a nice touch if you had a cart full of foil.
Also, I bought an XBox One S. Because I haven’t had a gaming system since forever.
I’ve been tempted to pick up a Switch. No real interest in the PS or XBox, as I do the majority of my gaming on PC.
Never really been into PC gaming. Biggest game interests are sports and RPGs, both of which are really more in the realm of consoles than PCs.
I’d argue that RPG’s are more PC friendly then console. Much better controls available on the PC, and a lot more history on the PC side of things.
I don’t see how anything is better on console than PC. For games like sports or racing where thumbsticks might be preferable to WASD, you can just hook a controller up to your computer.
Consoles are the poor mans PC. Sure, they work if you don’t have the cash for a real gaming system, which would be a PC. Top level PC GPUs are 3x the cost of consoles, there’s a reason for that.
Can’t wait to see this thread on Jim Sterling’s channel.
LOL. I pretty much despise game critics and defer to my shitlords on Steam, but that is pretty funny.
WTF? Get yourself a shitlord level PC and play a real shitlord level RPG, like ELEX. GIT GUD, newbie!!!!
I have a Switch. I really get into it with the kids.
Cars 3 and Mario Kart 8.
My daughter is getting a Switch for Hanukkah. So I’m all over the gaming systems all of a sudden.
The Switch is a handheld, although it’s plugged into the TV here.. Great for long flights.
Does Switch allow you to switch places with kids?
That would make for a really freaky Friday.
HM has some really freaky Fridays. 😮
And Mondays, and Tuesdays and…
Ummm….. a little bit. There was one night where I put them to bed, and then got REALLY good at Cars 3. Stayed up until 4am.
Every time I see the Switch brought up, I think it would end up like the Wii and collect dust. Then I think about how I bought the Metroid Prime Trilogy and have hardly touched that, and that I really should play that.
One of the best game series EV*H IMHO. But yeah I’m also too lazy to turn on my Wii.
I have a PS2. And a Medal of Honor game where I shoot Nazis. I amz the resiztenz!
So I’ve heard. That’s what made me go and pick it up for almost the price of a new release from GameStop even though the game had been released a few years before. I’ve played a bit of the way into the first game, but then I just stopped. At some point I need to set the Wii back up and pick up where I left off.
The Wii U was a little weird. It kind of had an identity crisis/
Today was ordering some gifts for Christmas, as well as waiting (in a much shorter then expected line) in a Black Friday line to buy over $100 of beer. This being the big deal beer that was released today. It’s a big, rich, imposing beer.
Death Defying right there
Holy sh*t! 17.4% ABV?
I can feel the delirium tremens coming on already.
The original batch of beer was made to celebrate Ohio removing the ABV cap for beer. Previous to the law passing, beer in Ohio could only be 12% ABV. The owner/head brewer at Hoppin’ Frog was instrumental to the bill passing, and was awarded the gavel that was used in the session of the Ohio legislature that passed the bill (he has it in a case up on the wall in the tasting room). It was the first batch of beer made in Ohio that was over the old 12% ABV cap, and was sold in 22 oz bombers only. Thankfully the brewery has started doing releases in 12 oz bottles, as they do not make timid beers, and I don’t think they even have a beer that’s below 7.5% ABV.
Besides Delirium Tremens is another beer entirely.
Picked up some Backwoods Bastard and Ballast Point Victory at Sea, oh and some Bell Amber Ale for lighter drinking during the football game that matters this weekend – Alabama @ Auburn.
I hope you enjoy the Bastard, it’s one that I can appreciate as a well made beer, but I just don’t enjoy the style. Victory at Sea is amazing, and Bell’s Amber is solid as well. In fact, I can only think of one Bell’s beer that I’d be happy to never have again, the Cherry Stout. It is… not pleasant.
BB and Victory at Sea are top notch – good choices. The Bell’s ain’t bad either.
Nice.
Black Friday? Good ZARDOZ, I believe you mean Smash Capitalism Day!
Got that, guys? Until we seize the means of production from individuals and pass it on to totalitarian government forces, we as individuals can never truly be free!
No no! It won’t happen like that! We’ll seize the means of production and then we’ll all live in equal harmony! All those OTHER times it was tried and it turned into totalitarian government it wasn’t real communism! It was state capitalism!
^this^
It’s a little fucked up how we capitalist pigs gotta write their own shit for them.
I’ll be sure to buy something tonight.
They’ll seize the means of production, realize they don’t know how to run jack shit and then force someone to run the means of production while ensuring they steal off that like the parasites they are.
Like Stalin’s purges, the NKVD and KGB treatment of dissidents, the Holdomor, the GULAGs, The Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, crushing of Hungary in 1956, Czechs in 1968, the Katyn Forest massacres, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Che killing dissidents and gays. Islamic fundamentalism and the repression of everyone except adult males of the ruling class. The Nigerian civil war and Biafra famines, the Ethiopian famine, The Sendero Luminoso terrorism, the Sandinistas killings of the Miskito indian people, etc.
Like those, eh?
Q.E.D.
Yes, exactly like those.
Who knew that sex workers offered their own Black Friday deals?
*scuffs dirt with shoe*
*mumbles about how it isn’t fair that white guys don’t get their own deal day*
You mean like this?
I didn’t do my duty and instead stayed home and bought nothing. I haven’t even checked Amazon for any deals. I did buy Uncharted Lost Legacy on the PlayStation store’s Black Friday sale. I guess that might count? I’m going back and forth on also picking up Crash Bandicoot N. Sane trilogy as well, but not sure $10 off is a good enough discount. I might hold off until it’s at least $25.
You gotta practice your Jap tackle and then head out.
why all the hate for jewish american princesses?
No hate here, I seen some that were really Quite, but Squeaked they cum, so there’s that…..
Edit faerie Help!
Quite Dumb
NM I fucked it all up,
Who’se really Quite Dumb, and squeaked when she Cummed
+1 sandtasted blitz
“Who’se”?
I’m dumb too?
I see you just changed your avatar, too….
I do that a lot
See? those are my 88s
I went to Amazon and noticed that they raised the prices of pretty much all computer components by $100. I guess maybe Cyber Monday is what I’m waiting for.
THE GIFT OF THE GUN. THE GUN IS GOOD.
Damn right. Today I bought my girlfriend exactly what she wanted for Xmas – a HK P2000sk in 9mm.
I got a S&W M&P40c bitone.
?
That may have been my first obsession. So classy. Which trigger did you go with?
V3
Da/sa
Fried chicken skin… it is yummy. It’s so rich though, I had to drink. I mean, it’s not like I was going to drink anyway…
“Friday of color”, please
Wut? You need to progsplain that for your unwoke comrades…
So it is FOC today?
And people think opioids are a problem
Well, they must be, because government says so. Not affected in any way? Must be your privilege that you don’t notice people dying in the streets, like if they didn’t have health insurance.
At some point doing business in the EU is going to be counterproductive.
I work for a big German company and I am amazed at how little productive work they get done. The process is always more important than the result. No one ever works more than 40 hours a week. No one will ever make a hard decision and get on with it. Even when a decision is made, there will be multiple meetings to decide why you decided on the final choice. They want to know why decisions were made.
Any time we have to work with our German colleagues you know that it is going to take twice as long and be four times as frustrating as it would be if we were allowed to do it alone.
The Swiss are just a little better than that. A little.
My old neighbors were from Switzerland. Even German-Swiss or whatever you call it.
When he found out I was working for Germans he started cackling because he knows I get sort of tense about work. Turns out he was absolutely right about almost all of it.
He admitted that they can be pretty bad in American eyes at times, but they were light years ahead of Germans. I have to admit he was right.
The best result should always be left to those who mostly want to achieve it. Any straying from this path, will always result in a less then desirable result. You cannot socially engineer better outcomes, evolution is quite clear on this. The left are a suicide cult.
I worked for the British for 9 years
Something i learned during that time is that most people’s ‘national impression’ of themselves – or, how they think they are collectively seen by others – is often wildly wrong
Americans, for instance, are often apologizing to foreigners because they think Americans are seen as loud, obnoxious, rude, boorish, etc. Whereas the Chinese/Russians/English think we’re *painfully nice* and almost prudishly polite (*as told to me by chinese, russian, brit colleagues) – while at the same time, we’re very aggressive and direct about things that they would be more circumspect about.
e.g. in the first week of working for the company, many american employees struck up informal conversations with the CEO; many of the brits who’d been there for 5+ years had basically never spoken to the guy as they didn’t think they ‘had a reason’ and didn’t want to seem forward or too-familiar. American ‘brashness’ is less about being obnoxious, and more to do with the fact that we have no historical ‘class system’ and we see powerful people as being essentially no different than we are. we have an attitude towards risk-taking that is completely unlike other people. we just assume you’re supposed to take risk, whereas they’re constantly avoiding it in everything they do.
but as for differences in business/work ethic – the brits fancy themselves the common-sense, hard-working, sharp, aggressive, types… mainly in contrast to the French/southern (spanish/italian) ‘wait for someone else to do it’ model. but then they meet americans and wonder why the hell everyone is still working after 7PM. I remember when some guy came to the US office from england, and once the clock hit 6 he was like, “Right. where are we going?” (i.e. where is the local pub where everyone will have their 3 pint post-work drinks) and everyone was like, “eh, i’ll see you there in an hour”. There was this strange look on his face, where he was processing the idea that people were voluntarily still working because there was stuff that needed doing. They are hard-working: but within a very specific box. outside the box … there is no outside the box.
similarly, i remember telling same guy that i’d be in late a following day (like 10am) because i was going to the business library to use their databases for a project i was working on, and he was like, “wheere do we need to file a request for that?” and i just looked at him like he had grown tentacles out of his nose. “no, i’m just doing it”. Same look on face: “you just *do* things?…like, when you feel like?” The idea of simply doing shit on your own authority, rather than waiting to be told to do shit, or asking permission to do shit, was inconceivable.
Working with people from a variety of other countries was one of the best parts of that job. It was an endless source of amusement/learning experiences.
Yeh but what about the Canadians?
EH?!
for whatever reason, i’ve never seen very many in NYC. A few. we had 2 guys @ the startup company; smart, quiet, friendly. You’d have probably just assumed they were American until you got a few drinks in them and the “O”‘s became more prominent.
The Canadians? The ones I have worked with were the rudest most foul mouthed people I have ever met. That was in a different industry than Gilmore resides in though. If I had a toonie for every fight in an airport line I deescalated started by a Canadian oil filed worker I could buy a bunch of beer The polite Canadian? Ha!
Risk/Liability is one of the biggest rubbing points I have currently.
We have entire processes devoted to avoiding risk and offloading liability. I have a German counterpart who absolutely believes that if you don’t accurately document the open source software you use, the customer can and will sue you. To do the documentation takes an expensive tool and an afternoon every week to run.
I have customers (US based) who want to roll IoT solutions out to the market RIGHT NOW. I have had to tell them several times that no matter how much they are paying us, we can’t do a release because my German overlords in the Quality Managment office won’t allow it because we haven’t done all the quality gate documentation yet.
yes, that’s the thing. flexibility and speed, and willingness to make mistakes in order to learn something new, and make some process more-efficient, is basically unheard of in most places. people are terrified of doing something differently because there are ‘unknowns’. How do you learn the unknowns without breaking something? They don’t want the risk.
Entrepreneurialism, broadly defined, even *within* large corporate organizations, is a rare thing.
https://www.virgin.com/entrepreneur/worlds-most-entrepreneurial-countries-2015-revealed
So true… I mentioned earlier how my company just retired our original 1990 policy-issuance system. Most of the long-timer business users were *terrified* of this. Rinse and repeat so many times.
“It’s always been done this way. Why would you want to change it?”
I’ve lost my shit when I hear people say that. There is some wisdom to the whole, “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” mantra but at the same time it’s used as a crutch for those whose careers are due in part, to stagnation.
A perfect summation of the Swiss.
I had an EU law class in law school in 95 and it was already a growing storm of regulation. I can’t imagine how much worse it is now.
I waited as long as I could, but it was time to finally pull the trigger on a new tv. Most of the sales weren’t that great, but I managed to snag a 65” with HDR. Rather than join the unwashed hordes fighting it out in stores, I just bought it online from Dell at a better deal anyway.
I got an SNES classic a couple weeks ago, but haven’t had a chance to start playing it until yesterday. I’ve been having a lot more fun with it than I expected after being used to such niceties as 3D movement. Some of it might be childhood nostalgia too. My kids are interested, and I think I can get them started on Super Mario Wold a lot easier than the Xbox. It looks like you can mod it to play your choice of over 700 SNES games*. It’s a little over my head, but I’ve thinking about giving it a try via YouTube tutorials.
*Of course, I would only add the games I purchased 20+ years ago and are sitting around in storage somewhere.
Where’d you find a SNES classic? I could probably google…but I just assume Amazon will list it when it’s available again. Been checking periodically with no joy.
My sister surprised me with it. She called every Target in her city and the last store had two units expected on a truck. She waited for the truck to arrive and the guy pulled both of them for her before unloading everything else.
It seems like they are shipping a unit here and there out to retailers. Your best bet would probably be calling around every so often until you hit the right place. I’m not sure what Nintendo is thinking by artificially restricting the supply on these. While it drives hype, I don’t think that balances out the lost opportunity to re-associate customers with their brand.
If they release a real Metroid game and some of their other series they seem to have forgotten about, I’ll consider buying another Nintendo machine. Otherwise, meh. Just not enough interesting games.
Your prayers have been answered. Prime 4 coming late next year.
Sweet.
Somebody explain to me why Black Friday exists in countries that don’t have the day after Thanksgiving?! Can’t you culturally appropriate something from us that isn’t complete shit?
You should see the Christmas appropriation that goes on in the Gulf Countries….
Really? your Serial? ‘Splain please
Christmas, complete with all the “seasonal” garnishings, is big all over the place. Sri Lanka went apeshit – and Sri Lankans are mostly Buddhists and Hindus.
Yeah, lots of folks love the idea of just hanging up colored lights and such. Obviously they had no religious stuff, but seemed to think the whole decorating and buying stuff was cool. Nothing like seeing Christmas lights on a palm tree in Kuwait.
Thais love Christmas. I have not been there this time of year I have just heard the stories from friends. It is world wide. I blame american/euro imperialism.
Thais love Christmas.
Really? That wasn’t my experience when I was living there. In Bangkok, at least, Christmas was a day. A day that was only really recognized by stores in the malls. On Dec. 25th, you’d have sales and perhaps Christmas music playing in the stores. Once you left the mall….nothing.
Pure bliss, that was.
My friends there all live in Pattaya and I just heard stories of the wives and girlfriends being very enthused about the holiday. I have no actual experience with this time of year there so I cannot confirm that. I have only visited several times. It might just be they like getting gifts which is something I do have experience in as most Thai girls I have met get very happy when given a gift. I am not sure. It is indeed a culture I do not have a grasp on.
Here,
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wall_Street_Crash_of_1929
that’s the real answer
Requiem for a Hit Man
https://www.wsj.com/articles/requiem-for-a-hit-man-1511461865
If you can get around the paywall, this is a really interesting story. I don’t know how true it is, but the reporters corroborated many of his claims. It sounds like there is a war of assassins wherever Russia tries to exert influence.
That was an excellent article. Made me realize some of the popular spy fiction isn’t entirely fiction.
Boobs.
https://www.pinterest.com/pin/388576274069949421/
Everyone loves ’em (even Rhywun 🙂 )
http://archive.is/Ly93n
I do like #4’s expression, she seems to be saying, “Yeah — can you even believe I talked the plastic surgeon into something this disproportionate? Oh my, the lordosis I will have by the time I’m forty — but it will be worth it for all the jealous half-wits I’ll meet until then.”
Also, I wonder how many of those selfies were originally taken to send to a boyfriend, and got a dick pick in return?
Jumping Jack girl
She’s a gas gas gas
*applause*
I must say I got hung up on the jump rope gif.
tee hee
TW for Zardoz
Lol!!
There’s hope for civilization after all.
In sportsball News, Arkansas just fired Bret Bielema.
Lach should be happy.
Now consider that SOMEONE will hire him.
Strongtowns.org is doing their annual black Friday parking day in protest of parking minimum laws. Usually some really good photos of empty big box/mall parking lots.
In suburbia, I get it. There’s plenty of land and you don’t wanna ever run out of parking spaces.
It’s in the cities I find it gets a little ridiculous. I work on the Jersey side of the Hudson River waterfront, and every plot of land that isn’t a parking lot is an eight-story parking garage supporting an office or condo building. I honestly don’t get the point of “city” living if you still have to own and drive a car everywhere to do anything. There’s so little going on at street level the city decided to institute a program of food trucks to feed all the office workers.
Put 20% down on 4 new Springfields today.
Sweet
Which ones?
two EMPs and two EMP 4s
Sheesh, hope you got a bulk discount.
Are you in the business now?
The UCF-Southern Florda game is amazing.
Last two minutes – best of the season; that was just nuts.
Why is there a Varnish in the menu bar? It will turn blue on hover,but goes nowhere
Ok, so I’m not the only one that noticed that show up recently. Perhaps it’s Heroic Mulatto’s new fashion blog?
it goes nowhere
Still comforting, somehow
“Varnish is an HTTP accelerator designed for content-heavy dynamic web sites as well as heavily consumed APIs. In contrast to other web accelerators, such as Squid, which began life as a client-side cache, or Apache and nginx, which are primarily origin servers, Varnish was designed as an HTTP accelerator.”
See, it looks like English, and sounds like English, but I have no idea what any of it means
thanks?
Pissed there’s no Hell’s Kitchen tonight. College football? Really?
I hate reality shows, but HK is the only one I followed for several episodes, back in its first season IIRC.
I don’t consider it a “reality show”. It’s a cooking competition. “Reality” is garbage like “Real Housewives of New Jersey” *spit*.
That’s a good point. Maybe that’s why I stuck with it a while.
Unions are gonna try to turn Amazon into the next GM.
It’s what they do: Destroy.
I wouldn’t mind private sector unions if we didn’t have the NLRB. The monopoly that the UAW have on auto labor in Michigan is absurd and should be illegal.
Same in Ontario. It used to be in Quebec until GM closed down operations. Gee, I wonder why.
The unions are very good at choking the goose that lays the golden egg. But yet gets angry when the golden goose gets tired of being choked and decides to fly South and stay there permanently.
I remember the reaction. It was all like, whaaaa? Why and how dare they?! Don’t they know we have families? Aren’t they supposed to just take our shit? What’s going on? And then all the usual anti-capitalist rubbish.
It never occurred to them maybe they pushed a tad too hard and over played their card. A company will tolerate employees over rating what they do up to a point and then…dey gone!
I had a debate with a “progressive” relative about unions today, specifically their “right” to forcibly collect dues payments. He argued that it was fair because certain things that unions negotiate for – like workplace safety measures – are non-excludable. I replied that if a private actor chooses to offer a benefit and it unintentionally reaches more people than they intended, that doesn’t give them the right to extract money from all those people – they had no choice in the matter!
I could sing opera songs in my backyard and charge five bucks for entry, but I can’t go to my neighbor’s house the next day and demand five bucks because he heard me singing from inside his house.
It’s an absurd idea… Where does this “right” to collect dues from free riders end? How about this: the NRA offers gun safety classes, and every citizen benefits when gun owners have safe habits, therefore everyone should have to pay dues to the NRA. If forced union dues are OK, why not this?
If you have free riders in your system, it’s your duty to either exclude them or peacefully persuade them to pay you.
Except that the union’s bargaining chip in a negotiation over work practices is collective action, not throwing money around. The dues are there to pay for union-funded benefits and union functionaries. The former can easily be written to exclude non-dues paying members, and the latter exist only in a support role. If the union members decide to offload their negotiations to paid functionaries, that is their choice, and it is not one that non-members should be forced to pay for. If the union ceases to represent the collective will of the workers, then the provisions it has negotiated for may be lost. Such is life when the union cannot use coercion to get what it wants.
But, this exposes what forcing non-members to pay dues is really about: violence against scabs and free-riders. It’s a protection racket.
Installing a toilet is surprisingly easy.
10 minutes if it’s just right, pretty cool huh?
The abso-fucking-lute pinnacle of western civilization.
You are seriously correct, no clean water/poop disposal, no Civilisation
This. The plumber is tied with the garbage man as the unsung heros of the modern world,.
1. Get bucket
2. Put bucket down
3. Have orphan empty when full.
Yeah, pretty easy.
How does that scale?
“Oh piss boy”
That won’t help my Keurig Machine.
I can proudly proclaim that I did no shopping today. Unless you count buying some off-sale.
I bought a holster and went truck shopping.
Are those two connected?
“Cool truck – where’d you get it?”
[pulls back jacket to reveal holster] “It fell off a truck. Know what I’m sayin’?”
Christ, I wish I was that cool.
You mean MinnesodaMan isn’t FloridaMan in a down jacket? I’m disillusioned…
Nope. We fight better, but aren’t nearly as newsworthy.
Polite, though.
Perhaps I was thinking of NoDakMan?
Probably MIkeS is a badass.
This is true.
My faith in humanity is restored.
I found out, after dinner, that Mrs. I had done both of our holiday shopping and we are quite happy.
I’ve done all my shopping except for Dad, who’s getting wine that I’m buying the Friday before Christmas.
I ate pie
It’s already Latino Saturday here. Tomorrow is Arab Sunday. Native American Monday, Aborigine Tuesday. I forget what the rest of the week is. This intersectional shit is confusing.
In Japan, that’s all part of Hate Week.
Quebecois Wednesday.
Wat? For real?
I can’t imagine the Japanese caring about any of that.
Cultural appropriation is rampant here. Other people? Meh, not so much.
Wow, that’s weird. I’m picturing comically inaccurate versions of each culture.
Used to be that way. The blackface stuff is done. My theory is that they’ve seen what nuttiness is coming out of the West and have turned completely inward, A-fucking-gain. Kids here have no desire to study abroad and when people have to go abroad for 単身赴任 (tanshinfunin), or live abroad on business, they hate it.
Ganguro isn’t still a thing?
Sadly, no. Those chicks made me laugh.
Interesting. Extremely small sample size over a very short period but one of the young waiters at the last hotel was chomping at the bit to work in overseas hotels. And a elementary age kid starting chatting with my wife on the subway.
Santa Sanders was still outside of a KFC, in the cultural appropriation department.
Sooooo… That pic outside of Macy’s… When did New York become part of Mexico?
Carlos Slim
Caption contest. I’m going with, “Who Farted?”
Dude on right is reaching: “I am going to shoot that mutherfucker in the head”
“Yes, we’ve all seen your constipated ape impression.”
“Christ, what an asshole”
Washington Post reporter caught plotting liberal agenda with billionaire George Soros
Well, they certainly told her.
FAUX NEWS!
Oh come on. They really need to stop this shit and be honest. Nobody’s buying it any more.
“The Democracy Alliance”
Hahaahhaa! There’s too many ways to say ‘commie’ today.
They are their own best customer’s.
And only ones I might add.
Man. Even if this hadn’t come out, one look at her archive page tells the story. More biased than the opinion writers.
FYI for my Minnesoda friends; your gal Amy K. recorded a video (unfortunately she’s unable to attend) in which she will share her thoughts on how “the Russian interference in the election exposed an alarming vulnerability of voting systems.”
Is she topless? Otherwise, I’m not interested.
I can’t remember if mentioned it when you’ve been on here; I dipped my toe into the world of Scotch. Bought a bottle of Glenmorangie 10 year. I like it. (just poured a glass) I think my next bottle will be your Macallan 12 year.
NIce!
I like the Macallan a lot. Especially for the $$. How are you drinking them?
Neat. I broke myself the ice habit over the last year while I was getting into good bourbons and ryes. I did try a few drops of water, but I just don’t think my palette is discerning enough to notice the difference. Or maybe it’s just all too new of a taste and I’ll notice the difference at some point in the future. How do you drink them?
How much do you pay for a bottle of the Macallan down there? It’s $70+ up here.
Neat works. Water work really well for certain whiskys, but I haven’t figured it out yet.
It’s $60 down here.
Water is fine. There is no “right way”. It’s all about your taste and enjoyment. I’m sipping a Bulliet rye with a splash of filtered water right now.
That being said, the water you do use makes a big difference. Don’t use tap water. The iron in tap water will make your drink cloudy and taste dirty. So, filtered (Britta filter), or bottled water, distilled water, mineral water (Perrier etc) are options. Some distilleries bottle and sell their source water “branch water”.
If you do use ice, make sure it is not tap water ice. And don’t put a bunch of ice in your drink. Whiskey should be close to room temperature to allow the flavors to waft freely.
Also, neat is a good way to go, with a water back. I use Perrier as a water back. The fizzy seems to cleanse my palate. Especially at a bar where I may try a couple different bourbons/ryes.
Drinking song https://youtu.be/Qc3TBogAXcg
@egould; I appreciate the water advice. The couple times I’ve tried it I have used tap water. No more. And good tune, too! I’m listening to more of those guys right now.
I really like that Bulliet rye. Especially for the price. It’s a good deal.
Jesus snobolas. If you are not using a bud or coors light as a back you have issues. Cleanse your pallet? Eat some nachos.
Bulliet rye is my new favorite etoh. It really makes a killer Manhattan.
If I may, I recommend Balvenie.
You may. I appreciate it. Is it smokey/peaty? I don’t think I’m ready for that yet.
Those aspects are nicely subdued due to it being aged in sherry casks. Wicked smooth.
Sounds intriguing. I’ve added it to my “Scotch to Try” list. Thanks!
The Balvenie 14 year Caribbean Cask may be up your alley. I just picked one up on Wednesday for $70.
Ah one of those secret meeting that has a full color 38 page brochure listing the speakers and panels and agenda, good Christ people, make your case without the histrionics please. It’s this kind of overkill that loses me.
Good lord. Can you imagine the non-believers that make up the majority of that cohort reading thru all that blather with a straight face. You thing Soros believes any of that shit?
There’s a wonderful scene at the beginning of Deutchland 83:
And after the wrongthinkers get sent away, the two guards turn to each other and burst out laughing.
That’s exactly how I picture the goons running these “progressive” shindigs.
Paging Derpetologist. Yes, this is clearly derp – but exactly what type of derp is a mystery.
https://www.salon.com/2017/11/24/heres-your-leftover-turkey-the-case-for-hillary-clinton-2020/
I can’t think of a single political figure in recent American history who has been hated as deeply, or for as long, as Hillary Clinton.
So let’s nominate her again.
Hillary Clinton is the Winston Churchill to Vladimir Putin’s Adolf Hitler’s Pol Pot’s Mao Zedong’s Slobodan Milosevic’s Robert Mugabe’s most magic Little Pony.
My Little Pony is the white people of equine toys.
What is the black people of equine toys?
This
She’s white, riding black. Not acceptable.
She’s white, riding black. Not acceptable.
*raises an eyebrow*
LOL
He said black people of equine toys.
Winner, winner, fried chicken dinner.
I can’t even.
Dayum… I was expecting HM to stroll in and provide the definitive answer.
Duh Black Beauty
Salonderp is in a class by itself.
The Dirty Dozen is on TCM.
And the Wild won.
So I got that going for me – which is nice.
O.K. I’m going in, watching Zardoz one more time, pray to your Gods for me, BTW what happened to Bear Odinson? he was cool,
Are you high?
Agile Cyborg Flashback:
Agile Cyborg|4.26.15 @ 10:00PM|#|–|filternamelinkcustom
so all today my wife bent over the bed with her tight cherry ass and I fuck her pussy all le’ time but I wanted all the cums to show like dripplets and she smiled her blonde lovey hot face at me and bent over the bed and pulle down her thong and her tight ass reveald a plutonium crack with a sweet suger butthole and puffy lips and she spreaded her legs on the bed and my cock screamed for heavy metal enb and you don’t even fucking kno her lips spread into layers of pink lasers and I decided for all the astronauts to lick her queen ripples and her bean lifted up like a rocket into space and licked her mountain ass curves and the clouds of the reality realized that I was own all this the living with my tongue on my wife clit and i pulled apart the lips and she shuddered and shook and a tiny muscle on her female prowess jammed and delivered and she felll….into utter sleep,,,,
Florida man pulls a heist in LA. Where can you even store ~57 barrels of vodka anyways?
I know a guy.
The above Salon link, chopped down to its derpy goodness.
***
….Clinton offers a quality that no politician in America can beat. While Republicans are trying to tar her with a bogus scandal connecting her to Russia (and anyone who believes Clinton did something wrong in the Uranium One deal lacks credibility on all matters political), the reality is that no candidate can be better described as Russia’s nemesis than Clinton. Putin has always hated Clinton because of his innate sexism, which has manifested in his policies, and she certainly didn’t endear herself to him by publicly criticizing Russian corruption in 2011.
…
I can’t think of a single political figure in recent American history who has been hated as deeply, or for as long, as Hillary Clinton. From the moment she emerged on the national stage in 1992 as a distinctly feminist prospective first lady, she has been the target of right-wing wrath woefully out of proportion to anything she has ever said or done.
The reason for this is sexism. It’s not the chic thing to say right now, but no other explanation really makes sense.
…
At the very least, the next Democratic presidential candidate needs to be a woman — perhaps not Clinton specifically, but certainly a woman, to offset the symbolic gut-punch of the first female candidate getting cheated by an overt misogynist. And speaking of cheating …
3. By winning the popular vote convincingly in 2016, Hillary Clinton has earned the right to be considered the presumptive nominee in 2020.
Let us not forget that, for all of the smack talk about how poorly Clinton ran her campaign, she bested Trump by nearly 3 million votes. This was no razor-thin margin of victory, but a decisive expression of the American public’s preference.
***
Pretty much all those votes were in California. Clinton got 93% of the DC vote, which I think is the best single statistic to illustrate the difference between her and Trump.
There were only 4 or 5 states where Clinton won by a solid majority (60% or more) and you can probably guess which ones.
She is a prime example of a lefty who I’m certain doesn’t believe any of the shit she’s peddling.
I was going to plead Poe on that one – was this someone mocking Clinton or could they truly believe the nonsense they were writing?
THE GUN SHOOTS DEATH AND PURIFIES THE EARTH OF THE FILTH OF BRUTALS.
I did no black friday deals but did drive to a store for smoking biscuits for my smoker and then did shoot some guns. No brutals where hurt though. I would not buy that smoker knowing what I know now but I want to make some jerky and it is good for that. I stood in line and grumbled for my stupidity of being out of them. When that was done I shot guns with some extended family which made it a good day. Now I am drinking which makes it a better day. Tomorrow I will cook my Thanksgiving feast as I had to work on thanksgiving and today was planned out. I shall slice a turkey breast and roll it with ham, mushrooms, spinach, swiss cheese, and bacon. She shall be done on the grill with the smoker box. Tomorrow I will be thankful with turkey rolls and green bean casserole.
US troops killed in plane crashes skyrockets in 2017
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2017/11/24/us-troops-killed-in-plane-crashes-skyrockets-in-2017.html
***
Even before the Navy cargo plane crash Wednesday, the number of U.S. troops killed in plane crashes had skyrocketed this year along with the total number of crashes overall compared to this point a year ago, a Fox News investigation has uncovered.
So far this year, there have been 22 U.S. military noncombat plane crashes flying routine operations. That’s up 38 percent from this time last year.
The number of American troops killed in these plane crashes has more than doubled. Following the announcement by the 7th Fleet Thursday night that it has ended its search for three missing American sailors hundreds of miles off the coast of Japan, the number of U.S. service members lost to plane crashes in 2017 stands at 37. That is more than 130 percent higher than the number killed in non-combat plane crashes at this point in 2016.
…
Just two days before the Navy plane crash, an Air Force T-38 training jet — with parts also dating from the 1960s — crashed in Texas killing one pilot and injuring another. A mechanical failure is also suspected. A similar Navy training jet, a T-45, crashed last month killing both pilots.
…
The head of naval aviation says only half the Navy’s 542 F-18 Super Hornet jets can fly right now and only 31 percent are fully mission capable and ready to “fight tonight.”
It’s even worse for the Marine Corps where roughly 70 percent of its fleet of older model F-18 Hornets can’t fly.
In the Air Force, only half of the bomber fleet of B-1 and B-2 bombers can fly, forcing airmen to scrounge for spare parts in places in a remote desert scrapheap known as “The Boneyard.” The secretary of the Air Force told reporters earlier this month she was almost 2,000 pilots short, forcing the service to ask retired pilots to come back.
***
It sure would be great if the money being spent on new stuff was instead spent on fixing the old stuff.
Also, if our stuff is so broken down, I imagine the readiness of the Russians and Chinese is even worse.
It’s almost like that’s a perennial problem with every government project or something.
yet Not a peep about the A-10…
Yeah the A-10. People keep asking, “why don’t we just build more of them?” Unfortunately it’s for the same reason GM can’t just rebuild the 1978 Pontiac Trans Am–production shut down in the 70s so they’d have to start from square one. Even if they somehow managed to do it, with the clown show that is military acquisitions it would still be a $100 million POS that would have to get towed into the air by a C-130.
It’s a miracle those are still flyng and still as effective as they are.
It’s incredible that it can be cheaper to design and build a new plane than to retool a factory to build more of an existing plane. Were all the blueprints lost in a fire?
I don’t know. Who acquired Fairchild? Boeing? Ask them.
My uncle is a pilot and engineer. The way he explained it to me was they would have to recreate the tooling, processes and most importantly train people in the antiquated system in order to get the exact same plane. Sounds simple enough but if you happen to be Milwaukee and are machining drill bits you might be able to get away with it, but a plane is much more complicated.
I was still skeptical until he asked me, “if you give a millenial say, a Zippo lighter, how many do you think can get it to work?” I pulled my Zippo from my pocket and slid it across the table to his daughter (now 19) who failed to get it to light.
Not only that but materials and manufacturing sciences are different than they were then. To recreate the A10 you might have to use something when a better replacement already exists.
Sometimes it costs more to fix old stuff than to buy new stuff.
Some of the airplanes, to really fix, you need to tear them apart completely, inspect everything, replace parts that aren’t made anymore, and put everything back together. And you hope you didn’t miss anything. And the resulting plane may not be as good as what other countries are building.
A lot of our planes are old, and are being used far more heavily than planned. Many have been rebuilt more than once.
By comparison, the Osprey killed 23 people in 2000 in only two crashes.
I know the western states are a mystery to people from the eastern states. But the “boneyard” is on Davis Monthan Air Force Base and surrounded by the city of Tucson. Now I know Tucson is not like travelling all the way to Staten Island from Manhattan but it is the second largest metropolitan area of Arizona and the home of ~1M people. Remote is not the word for the boneyard.
Remote may be very valid if the planes are in ND, or TX, or…well, CA probably isn’t that far, but it’s not just around the corner.
The USAF routinely flies parts and engines all over the world. DMAFB’s runways can easily handle anything that flies. Remember that the USAF made $100M repairs to a damaged B-2 on Guam so they could fly it back to do another $250M worth of repairs in the continental US. The best part of that situation was the plane was damaged by the pilot making unauthorized flight maneuvers as part of “no shit, watch this” while landing.
via Clarkhat
a radical lefty implores his peers to actually engage in dispassionate debate with Righties rather than flippantly condemning things as ‘wrongthink’
in the process he talks quite a bit about how leftism is really all about ‘caring’. which i found sort of absurd. take this:
i think he’s 70% right about something there. The whole ‘caring vs coldness’ thing aside.
but then he drops this gem
Clark liked the piece because he felt the guy does properly identified some of the fatal-flaws of the contempoary left’s unwillingness to engage in the world of ideas
I found it hard to be charitable after that bit. How many bodies in the 20th century were piled up for the sake of that ‘engineering problem’? And they still have the gall to think of themselves as monopolizing ‘caring’.
“I care” is one of the biggest leftist lies. Unless you’re a saint or personally connected to a specific issue, it’s complete BS.
Do they not know they are recycling the views of numerous failed states and murderous assholes throughout history? I find it fascinating they do not see that.
The key words in the phrase “I want to help” are “I want”.
So we just need to engineer compassion? Interesting.
Communism: caring people to death for over a hundred years.
Or, Genocide: when you care enough to kill the very most
***
Because living as a human being under capitalism requires hypocrisy….
***
OK, time out.
Has this guy read *anything* about daily life in communist countries? Russian his a rich vocabulary for deception:
vranyo- the closest English equivalent is make-believe. The best example of vranyo are the fake sinks which were common sights in Soviet buildings.
Potemkin village- the term predates communism, but the staging of “regular life” scenes for foreigners was the norm in the USSR
There’s a great word I can’t remember exactly that sounds like vosemulik or some such. It means a person who pretends to be stupid in order to avoid trouble with authority figures.
It never hurts to re-post this old classic:
***
The manager of a fruit-and-vegetable shop places in his window, among the onions and carrots, the slogan: “Workers of the world, unite!” Why does he do it? What is he trying to communicate to the world? Is he genuinely enthusiastic about the idea of unity among the workers of the world? Is his enthusiasm so great that he feels an irrepressible impulse to acquaint the public with his ideals? Has he really given more than a moment’s thought to how such a unification might occur and what it would mean?
{5}I think it can safely be assumed that the overwhelming majority of shopkeepers never think about the slogans they put in their windows, nor do they use them to express their real opinions. That poster was delivered to our greengrocer from the enterprise headquarters along with the onions and carrots. He put them all into the window simply because it has been done that way for years, because everyone does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble. He could be reproached for not having the proper decoration in his window; someone might even accuse him of disloyalty. He does it because these things must be done if one is to get along in life. It is one of the thousands of details that guarantee him a relatively tranquil life “in harmony with society,” as they say.
…
Obviously the greengrocer . . . does not put the slogan in his window from any personal desire to acquaint the public with the ideal it expresses. This, of course, does not mean that his action has no motive or significance at all, or that the slogan communicates nothing to anyone. The slogan is really a sign, and as such it contains a subliminal but very definite message. Verbally, it might be expressed this way: “I, the greengrocer XY, live here and I know what I must do. I behave in the manner expected of me. I can be depended upon and am beyond reproach. I am obedient and therefore I have the right to be left in peace.”
…
{7}Let us take note: if the greengrocer had been instructed to display the slogan “I am afraid and therefore unquestioningly obedient;’ he would not be nearly as indifferent to its semantics, even though the statement would reflect the truth. The greengrocer would be embarrassed and ashamed to put such an unequivocal statement of his own degradation in the shop window, and quite naturally so, for he is a human being and thus has a sense of his own dignity. To overcome this complication, his expression of loyalty must take the form of a sign which, at least on its textual surface, indicates a level of disinterested conviction.
***
https://history.hanover.edu/courses/excerpts/165havel.html
2 other gems
***
In my view, this tradeoff between being correct about how the world works and caring for each other enough that we can cooperatively change it in the direction of peace and abundance for all—this is perhaps the most vexing and urgent puzzle for a genuine revolutionary left today.
…
I am keenly suspicious of the politics of high-IQ subcultures, precisely because I know there is a trade-off between being correct and caring.
***
And there it is. The smarter you are, the less likely you are to “care” (read: be a leftist).
And yet, high-IQ or no, I have rarely seen them be “correct” about how the world works. The best pieces of leftist (vs. just liberal or left-leaning) writing I have read are a mix of accurate assessments and personal judgments, with the exact balance determining whether or not the conclusions reached by the author have some validity, or none at all. For example, I have yet to find a leftist writing about CEOs who genuinely understands what it is that a CEO of a large corporation does and why they get paid such obscene sums, never mind why so many of them get “golden parachutes” when they leave. Yes, yes, just keep chanting “smash capitalism” while the people you despise remain better informed and organized than you. Maybe, just maybe, the system of incentives in a liberal country like ours was not constructed solely to recreate aristocracy but actually arose due to the complex interaction of well intentioned but poorly thought through incentives, and until you understand why those things happened and why they so consistently fail to produce the intended or stated outcomes, you will continue to fail to reform the system.
So for Black Friday I drove to Mexico and bought drugs. Later I had to explain to my son the concept of, “let me do the talking.”
^ winner for black friday purchases
Yeah, that’s hard-core.
you saying it was off market Cialis MS was after?
Border agent: “do you have anything to declare?”
Mexican Sharpshooter: “no, sir.”
MS son “yes you do dad! Don’t you remember? We went to that pharmacy and bought drugs!”
Border agent: “step out of the car, sir”
Close. It was the step before them: Customs. Border patrol stopped giving me shit about me once I ponied up for a late model vehicle.
I went through a border control check point near White Sands, NM a while back. I have a mustache and was wearing a floppy hat. He had a mustache and a floppy hat. After a quick glance, he waved me on.
So… I need to shave my beard and buy a floppy hat to start a new career as a smuggler. *Scribbles notes* got it, thanks
I have driven through those in southern TX with my camper. Both truck carried and a trailer at different times. Both times I regretted not smuggling people for money. They never checked. Then again I do not look shifty, No mustache and or a floppy hat.
What is the policy for bringing drugs back from Mexico? Is that illegal?
I’m talking about having a Mexican doctor who writes you a scrip.
If you can buy it in a border town, you can take it across. No opiates, basically. Steroid ointments, insulin, viagra, antibiotics and the like are fine.
I have been down there many times but never took anything back. It is fucked up that someone can’t have a Mexican doctor that can write a prescription. I have a buddy who lives in SD and goes there for his dentistry.
Interesting approach. I just married a white girl. Problem solved.
Went through SFO yesterday. CBP agents just waived me through after taking a glance at my slip. In my defense, I did mark both food and over personal exemption. No interest. Only person who was slight interested in what I had or didn’t was the Ag Inspection x-ray agent. Even then straight through and out the exit.
They seemed to want to chat with my wife though. Still didn’t open bags or such. Even fake SFO TSA didn’t open up the bags this time. Usually they see bottles on the x-ray and leave their calling card behind during baggage screening.
I’m not sure what’s more embarrassing here. The “scientific” racist or the idiot leftists who struggle to debunk him.
https://youtu.be/yeEFjr1pfaY?t=8m15s
It doesn’t do any good to pretend that all groups of people are the same. All that does is make easier for bigots to peddle their crackpot theories to explain the differences.