Good morning, Glibs. I have assembled a few links for your scorn and defiance; slight regard, contempt, and any thing that may not misbecome the mighty sender.
And here is a picture of rugby, because I can.
ZARDOZ SPEAKS TO YOU, HIS CHOSEN ONES. BRUTALS CAN ENJOY LINKS TONIGHT!
TOMORROW, RETURN TO DELIVERING GRAIN TO ZARDOZ. BUT FOR NOW, REVEL IN THE LINKS HE PROVIDES.
Cocktail of the Week – The Monkey Gland
By RC Dean
This week – the Monkey Gland. The key to this one is getting just the right amount of licorice flavor from the Pernod. Yes, yet another liqueur you probably don’t have in your liquor cabinet. Oh, yeah, you’ll need Grenadine, too. I didn’t have either when this recipe first showed up. If you’re serious about cocktailing, though, you are going to acquire a collection of liqueurs and mixers. As I peruse the rotation at the Casa Dean, though, I note that most of the rest of the regulars don’t really call for exotic ingredients (although I will have an article on bitters, related mixers, and tools one of these weeks).
The Monkey Gland:
3 oz. gin (I like The Botanist)
2 oz. orange juice
1 tsp. Grenadine
2 ml Pernod (yup, those are milliliters – I use an eyedropper with an ml index on it)
Add the Pernod to an empty cocktail shaker, and “rinse” (coat the sides of) the shaker with it. Rinsing the shaker adds more of a licorice nose to the drink, but isn’t completely necessary. Note: do not pour out the “excess” Pernod after you have prepped the shaker. I tinkered with this recipe before I landed on 2 ml as being the right dose for me. Pernod (originally, a faux absinthe after the real deal was banned) is powerfully licorice flavored – too much is way too much, but too little just takes away the character of a Monkey Gland. I went to the eyedropper because it was the only way to be consistent, and you want to hit the sweet spot for the Pernod.
Add ice, gin, orange juice, and grenadine to the shaker. Shake (a proper shake is 10 – 15 seconds, in case you were wondering). I pour mine over ice; I think the classic serving is straight up in a martini glass. I like my drinks to stay cold – we’ve recently gone to the 1½ inch ice spheres (one per glass) to keep things cold without diluting too much. Personally, I think a Monkey Gland with a big ball floating in it is the optimal presentation, anyway.
This is an old cocktail recipe dating back to the 1920s or so. It was inspired by a Dr. Serge Voronoff, who made a pile of money implanting slices of freshly-harvested monkey testicles into the scrota of old, rich, and stupid Europeans, for exactly the reason you think. One can only imagine the complications and outcomes, but at least it inspired an excellent drink.
Derpetologist’s Spot the Not: Pat Buchanan
1. Parents have a right to insist that godless evolution not be taught to their children.
2. Bill Clinton’s foreign policy experience stems mainly from having breakfast at the International House of Pancakes.
3. No one has deputized America to play Wyatt Earp to the world.
4. Terrorism is the price of empire. If we do not wish to pay it, we must give up the empire.
5. The ultimate goal of the anti-religious elites is to transform America into a completely secular nation, a nation that is legally and culturally biased against Christianity.
6. The War Between the States was about independence, about self-determination, about the right of a people to break free of a government to which they could no longer give allegiance.
So looking for fodder for other Fur Friday posts I ended up on PETA’s Instagram feed. Mostly because I was looking for a Creative Commons license variant of their Bare Skin not Bear Skin featuring New BSG’s Jamie Bamber which makes me feel funny in my bikini zone. PETA regardless of your opinion (which I assume is quite strong whatever it is, dear Glibertarians) is REALLY good at drawing eyeballs to their cause particularly with barely covered ladies and clever plays on expectations. I will spare you an in-line link to a video where a ginger lass with pert tits is interspliced liberally with cows being inseminated by a very long metal rod (don’t get play and you’ll get all you need from it).
What really surprised me was how often people dressed in )not high enough quality to really be) fursuits shows up on their instagram feed
For instance, Pam Anderson and her friends wearing animal costumes reminiscent of uncanny vintage Halloween costumes:
https://www.instagram.com/p/BOj-awTh-Av/
Although some of them clearly put in more effort than others:
https://www.instagram.com/p/5Eya8DN8sO/
And they’ve even had a celebrity pose for something for Mr. Lizard:
https://www.instagram.com/p/-MSsMnt8s7/
And with that, I hope you all have a good weekend. Oh and just in case next week HM takes the day over for Fetish Fridays, I’ll give you all a soft transition
Happy Friday for all of you out there pretending to work.
Don’t forget the First Annual Glibertarians College Basketball Tourney Bracket Challenge (a carryover from the Hit & Run Tourney Pick Em days for those of you that remember) (password: Podesta). Max entries per person capped at three, so you’ve got options there to have some fun with upset picks. There will be prizes for the winners involving our new logo. Which reminds me, the deadline for entries is rapidly approaching. So get off your asses and get them in here. More on this over the weekend and Monday.
Oh well, at least we still have David Bowie and Lou Reed, right? What, you were expecting an INXS song after the David Carradine joke?
There is a city in the US that has not had a Republican mayor since 1962 and no Republicans on its city council since 1994. Not surprisingly, this city is a beacon of prosperity and a shining example of the triumph of progressive public policy. I am speaking, of course, of Detroit.
Detroit did everything right: they have a high minimum wage, a large and well-paid public sector workforce, strong unions, high education spending, and a tax system that makes sure the rich pay their fair share. Is it any wonder that Detroit has the lowest rates of poverty and unemployment in the nation?
Detroit’s strong gun laws have also made it America’s safest city. It has the lowest homicide and crime rate of any city in the country. Detroit’s high education spending has led to it having the nation’s lowest high school drop-out rate, as well as the lowest rate of illiteracy. For these reasons, people have been flocking to Detroit and its real estate market is booming. This teeming metropolis is also a bastion of racial harmony with its many mixed neighborhoods.
The city’s car factories are thriving as well, thanks to the UAW, which helped make GM America’s top exporter. In 2008, GM did so well that it donated several billion dollars to the government to help pay down the national debt. Detroit itself is debt free thanks to the sound fiscal policies of the Democrats.
Other cities and states have decided to follow Detroit’s example. California has been booming ever since it enacted Detroit’s policies. People continue to flock there away from poorly-governed Republican strongholds like Texas.
Despite Detroit’s obvious success, many are reluctant to try the winning formula. So in the next election, remember to vote only for progressives. A vote for progressives is a vote for a strong middle class, good education, and low crime.
Just like Detroit.
Greetings!
Some time ago, I brought you a piece the primary function of which was to provide a free resource to understand the radical notion, largely held only in libertarian circles, that IP laws are not compatible with libertarian principles. You can find a link to that earlier piece here.
I’d like to direct you now to a piece that I perhaps should have led off with. It is still by Stephan Kinsella, a Houston, TX patent attorney*, Executive Editor of Libertarian Papers and Director, Center for the Study of Innovative Freedom (c4sif.org). However, it is a smaller, more condensed version of his primary argument, and is rife with excellent citations and thorough notes that any budding libertarian or anarchist theorist will find invaluable.
In the article Law and Intellectual Property in a Stateless Society, Mr. Kinsella takes the reader through a very brief but illuminating explanation of the evolution of the view of self-ownership and how property rights are inherent to this concept. He then goes on to reiterate how IP laws contradict those property rights, which argument those of you who read Against Intellectual Property will already be familiar with.
The portion that I think our small army of arm-chair commenter-philosophers will find most interesting and conducive to discussion is the latter part of the article. Mr. Kinsella discusses what an IP regime might look like in a stateless society. This directly addresses those who dismiss an idea as being too radical, or unworkable, if no direct formulation is provided of how the idea might play out in a practical fashion.
When downloaded, the PDF shows a length of 44 pages, but due to the voluminous notes, there is really only about 25 or so pages of narrative text. You can read it over your lunch break! Assuming you work for a weak-kneed progressive who actually allows you to not be working for a precious few minutes in order to eat. No true libertarian master would ever permit such indulgence among his (and I do exclusively use the male pronoun when discussing both libertarians, and business owners) chattel.
*Don’t we have a commenter who is also an attorney in Houston? If you disagree with Mr. Kinsella’s positions, you should meet him for lunch and fight to the death. It’s the only way to prove which one is right.
Traitor. Hero. Scoundrel. Saint. Whistleblower. Disgruntled. Those who leak classified information are labeled and categorized before the impact of their revelations are even known. In essence, there are three views of a leaker (none of which are satisfying). The first view is that leaking is traitorous and wrong in every circumstance. These law & order types tend to say things like “they should’ve gone through proper channels.” The second view is that leaking is heroic and right in every circumstance. These anti-government types tend to say things like “governments shouldn’t have secrets.” The third view is that leaking is good when it benefits the person’s TEAM and bad when it exposes the person’s TEAM. These political neanderthals are worth no more electrons than have already been spilt on them.
I’m in a fourth camp, one that I have seen espoused by some other libertarians from time to time. I believe that the virtuosity of the leak is dependent on the information being leaked. To take a quick intellectual shortcut, the ends justify the means when it comes to leaks.
The distinction is clear when viewing Edward Snowden in comparison to Bradley/Chelsea Manning. On one side we have a person who collected and released targeted information about unconstitutional spying programs against US citizens with the intent to inform the citizenry for the good of the country. On the other side we have a person who collected and released a wide assortment of information without any particular rhyme or reason for the purpose of getting back at an employer who wasn’t providing the person’s preferred benefits. Snowden is a hero. Manning is a disgruntled traitor.
At the end of the day, I don’t think we can judge a leaker until we are able to assess the information being leaked. However, there is not enough nuance in the American political realm to allow such a subtle distinction. Either the leaker is good because they’re stickin’ it to the man, or they’re bad because ‘murica.
“What are Trump’s plans?
“Who were Trump’s contacts in the Russian government?”
“Who hacked Podesta?”
“Deep dish or thin crust?”
They shined bright lights down on the hat and played “You Can Call Me Al” at ear-ripping volume for an hour to soften him up, before dousing him with a bucket of icy water. When he serenely floated off the table on the wave of water, he was tackled and beaten for trying to escape. The hat suffered all this with a stoic grace and only a slight rumpling.
They sent in a good cop/bad cop pair. The bad cop talked about the hat getting raped in prison. The good cop that offered the hat a cigarette and a bottle of water. The hat ignored the threats and the small kindnesses. The bad cop slammed his hand down on the table. The good cop slapped the cigarette away and dumped the water on the floor. Curse words drifted into the room over a crackling intercom.
“Drown it in a filthy toilet.”
“Hook it up to a car battery.”
“Does it have testicles? I have pliers! Freeze it. Burn it. Bring in acid.”
“Nothing disfiguring!”
A drooling retard from Forestry was brought in and the hat was roughly jammed on his misshapen head over and over again, his elastic band stretched to the breaking point, his most intimate concavity repeatedly violated. And still the hat gathered his scraps of remaining dignity and sat on the table where they placed him, mute and inscrutable.
The hat was thrown into a filthy breakroom microwave and warned he would receive a lethal dose of radiation if he didn’t talk. The hat was shown a twenty-minute industrial films of hats being fed into a shredder, a horror film of ripped bills and hanging entrails of brim and visor. The hat was kicked for thirty minutes by men with clean shoes and warped minds, who made jokes about the hat shitting out his splintered bones over the next week.
“What if it is just a hat?”
“Impossible.”
“We have to consider it.”
“Impossible!”
The hat was given an intrabillious injection, scopolamine and cocaine, and subjected to strobe lights and a soundtrack of Donald’s voice a twice-speed playback, a fake speech by Donald cobbled together from audio clips, Donald’s voice denounced the hat in stilted dialogue, Donald’s voice said the hat was nothing, nothing but a hat, only a hat. The hat remained loyal and silent.
After six hours of interrogation, THE DEEP STATE had gotten nothing from MAGA Prime. Agent DEEP COVER was called in and given the hat.
“Return MAGA Prime to the vault. Trump can never know it was missing,” the Grand Vizier ordered.
As Agent DEEP COVER opened the vault, she saw that the hair, still clumpy with pink paint, was on the floor. She hadn’t told them about her act of vandalism. She picked up the hair and studied at the paint. Trump would know that someone had been in the vault, that his security had been compromised. Her mission was over. She would have to leave the White House, under the usual cloud of disgrace, and hope that she could disappear.
She unwrapped the hat and sat it on its little throne and put the hair back on its gold bust and closed the vault behind her.
“Speak to me, man,” the hair said quietly, “What happened?”
“They… did things.”
“What sort of things?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I tried to come for you,” the hair said, “The vault door…”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I’ve almost broken the paint down.”
“Good,” the hat said, “I just want to go to sleep.”
But in the cold pre-dawn hours that followed, the hat couldn’t sleep and the hair heard him weeping.
Well, that week went flying by. Spent the whole damn thing setting up my new business website, developing a mailing list and getting an e-blast put together and then studying for my state licensing exam to be an auctioneer. And while I’m no fan of state licensing, I’ve got to admit that there’s a hell of a lot more to running an auction than talking real fancy-like. And I’m glad that the course I took pounded them into my head over and over.
Anyway, I’m getting off topic here. And besides, you guys don’t give a shit about my personal life.
Well, most of you don’t. Unless, that is, my personal life involves setting up the First Annual Glibertarians College Basketball Tourney Bracket Challenge (a carryover from the Hit & Run Tourney Pick Em days for those of you that remember) and giving you the password to get in (password: Podesta). Max entries per person capped at three, so you’ve got options there to have some fun with upset picks. And I can tell you this: there will be prizes for the winners involving our new logo. Which reminds me, the deadline for entries is rapidly approaching. So get off your asses and get them in here. More on this over the weekend and Monday.
[heavy exhale]
OK, now down to the business at hand.
I hope you weren’t hoping for a tax cut any time soon. Mitch McConnell said they’re not likely to take up the idea until August at least. You know, when your party runs on tax cuts, you might want to take up tax cuts early on. Because, you know, that’s what you ran on.
Mollie Hemingway has a little bit of fun at the expense of “the woke”. In all honesty, she could have written a book on the missteps of the organizers. She kept it to five items though.
If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again. Except this time, “try” means adding seventeen year olds to the voting rolls. Hey George, if you really gave a shit about 17 year olds, you’s want to lower the drinking age and smoking age to 17 instead of pushing them up, and you’d demand the “restricted” drivers licenses become “full” licenses once these people hit 17. AND YOU’D BE PUSHING TO LOWER THE AGE OF CONSENT! (Thanks, OMWC. I missed that biggie on the first pass.) You know, since they’d be adults and all that. But nope. You don’t want to treat them like adults. You just want another voting bloc.
Remember that fight (literally, not figuratively) a few years back between a Chicago cop and a Chicago fireman at the scene where two people had fallen in the river and needed rescuing? Well, just in case you’d forgotten, the bill for taxpayers has partially come due. And the tab so far is $1,600,000. It’s expected to rise.
South Korea finally ousts President Park Geun-hy.
And in sports news unrelated to the Osweiler-Browns(!) and Texans-Romo(?) goings-on, Jay Cutler left quite a legacy in Chicago. Not the good kind.
That’s it. Carry on.