Tuesday Morning Links

by | Sep 21, 2021 | Daily Links | 399 comments

Pack win!

The Packers drilled the Lions.The push is on as MLB enters the last two weeks of the regular season.  Tampa has all but locked down the best recording the AL, and the Astros have a nice lead to get home field over the White Sox for their series.  Over on the NL side, The Giants are clinging to their lead in the NL west, and hopefully they’ll force the Dodgers into the Wild Card game.  The Reds picked a bad time to fade but at least have an easier stretch run than the Cardinals. Hopefully they sneak in. Across the pond, Ronald Koeman is a dead man walking at Barcelona. But he’s not really the problem. And there’s a boatload of League Cup games today and tomorrow in England. In case you’re one of the few people that care about that competition anymore (I do, by the way). And that’s sports.

America, I salute you!

First American flag designer Francis Hopkinson was born on this day. He shares it with Sci-Fi author H.G. Wells, Penguin Books founder Allen Lane, hockey great Howie Morenz, animation heavyweight Chuck Jones, TV mogul John Kluge, actor Larry Hagman, Singer-songwriter Leonard Cohen, actress Fannie Flagg, Horror writer and anti-Trump zealot Stephen King, comedic genius Bill Murray, underwhelming soccer coach Bruce Arena, Motorhead’s Phil Taylor, baseball player Cecil Fielder, singer Faith Hill, rapper Trugoy, actor Luke Wilson, Windies batsman extraordinaire Chris Gayle, and actor Joseph Mazzello.

Right, now on to…the links!

Here’s an incredible and touching story. Of course it happened a long time ago. But it still says a lot about people standing up for the life and liberty of others. Hopefully that mindset makes a comeback.

FYTW

Aaaaaaaaand of course he’s not being charged. Because either the rules don’t apply to the king’s men, or because he was there undercover and stirring up shit. Which means I could have just said “because fuck you, that’s why”.

“Yee haw, boys. It’s a round up!” What a freaking shitshow.

How about a warning next time, asshole. Oh wait, there won’t be a next time.  Still, what a dick move.

Crooked crooks are crooked

I’m not holding my breath. Why? Because this kind of thing never results in the flood of indictments it should result in. It still makes me happy though.

Rules vary by location and participants. Because of course they do.

Will one crook displace another crook? Because they’re all crooks.

Of course they were over a week old. I could have told you that, since they were adults.  Get an editor, SFGate.

Talk about a boys club. I sure hope some women’s groups voice their opposition to this horrible oversight. And while they’re at it, they can address the fact that they’re a barbarous and sociopathic regime.

I don’t play these guys nearly enough. I’ll fix that. Enjoy.

And enjoy a lovely Tuesday, dear friends!

About The Author

sloopyinca

sloopyinca

399 Comments

  1. AlexinCT

    Talk about a boys club. I sure hope some women’s groups voice their opposition to this horrible oversight. And while they’re at it, they can address the fact that they’re a barbarous and sociopathic regime.

    This will be the new justification for nuking Afghanistan…

    Cause nothing is more dangerous to America then climate change, racism, diversity, and stopping people that think anything but these things the left peddles are the problem…

    • waffles

      We really ought to not go anywhere near the place ever again. How about we invade Alaska instead? (sorry Animal)

      • AlexinCT

        Warmongers will want to warmonger, and no racket is as lucrative as nation building a country that doesn’t want you there. The amount of money these hacks would make from the military industrial complex arming the US military would be peanuts compared to what they can steal when they can piss away a couple of trillion dollars that nobody can track (and arming the military might end up backfiring on them if the military resists their effort to Sovietize it)…

  2. Rat on a train

    How about a warning next time, asshole.
    Manslaughter-suicide?

    • waffles

      Weird story. Accidental? From that height you could definitely see the landing zone. I kinda doubt that the precision required to pancake someone with your own carcass is easy to come by. Not that I’m going to try testing it out.

      • UnCivilServant

        If you’re going to do something as drastic as off yourself, why would you pick a method where you have the chance to regret it after the point of no return?

        And such a messy one as well.

      • waffles

        I’ve jumped from some pretty high places but nothing more than 50-60ft. Any fall above 20 feet gives you enough time to really think about the landing. 12 stories would feel like eternity.

      • hayeksplosives

        Craig Ferguson wrote a (semi-fictional) book on the subject titled “Between the Bridge and the River”.

        He was suicidal a few times in his younger years and has done some research about people who survived suicide attempts after jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

        The survivors (all of whom now consider life precious…) all speak of this instant realization right after jumping but before they hit the water that “Oh shit. All the things I thought were insurmountable aren’t. Shitshitshitshit. I made big mistake.”

      • Ozymandias

        I have a short story I’m going to share here – call it “life advice one learns from long drops from, say, 150′.”
        I’ve already written it. Suffice it to say, waffles and your analysis is correct.

      • Bobarian LMD

        So far, so good?

  3. Rat on a train

    I’m not holding my breath.
    The sacrificial lamb has been revealed.

  4. Winston

    WARE MA INCLUCKSIVE TALIBAN?

    • AlexinCT

      To the left that’s the unforgivable crime…

      Attack America and killing its people is nothing compared to fucking with the pillars of marxist cultism…

    • Drake

      How could they win with the strength of diversity?

    • R C Dean

      Apparently, child brides, forced seclusion, and just generally treating women as subhuman is NBD as long as the women are just, you know, ordinary people. What really matters is denying Women Who Matter the opportunity to grift, steal, and impose their own irrational, totalitarian diktats.

      • waffles

        Oh that’s the issue. I wonder which is overall worse, patriarchal or gynocratic rule?

      • Surly Knott

        “Never let them give you to the women.”
        Military maxim from way back.

      • Gender Traitor

        Death by snu-snu?

      • Not Adahn

        When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
        And the women come out to cut up what remains,

    • trshmnstr the terrible

      Who’d have thunk that WWIII would be kicked off by zealous postmodern atheists lobbing nukes at the musselmen? I sure didn’t have any money on that one.

      • Count Potato

        It’s not WW3 without Germany.

      • waffles

        Really? I thought they lost their main character power.

      • Rat on a train

        And six hundred million screamin’ Chinamen.

      • Atreides

        “Last I heard, there were a billion screaming Chinamen.”

      • AlexinCT

        What happened?

        /Throws his whiskey on the camp fire and watches the flareup

  5. The Late P Brooks

    That goose; the one who lays those golden eggs. Let’s kill it.


    That the Biden administration and the Democratic-majority Congress have set their sights on the oil and gas industry as the ultimate culprit behind a changing climate was clear even before last year’s elections. Now, it seems, Washington is doubling down on its promise to crack down on oil and gas in any way possible. But the move may backfire badly.

    Last week, the House Oversight Committee wrote to the executives of the biggest oil companies operating in the United States along with the American Petroleum Institute and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to inform them that it is now investigating these companies for disinformation on climate change. The letter also called on the executives to appear in Congress next month to testify on the issue.

    “We are deeply concerned that the fossil fuel industry has reaped massive profits for decades while contributing to climate change that is devastating American communities, costing taxpayers billions of dollars, and ravaging the natural world,” the committee wrote.

    “We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.”

    That’s the thing about profits derived from the market. They are totally a one way street. It’s no different than if Exxon sent out teams of thugs to rob people on the street.

    • AlexinCT

      They don’t like the existing energy cabal, because it isn’t owned and run by them. It’s as simple as that. So they will cause as much damage as they can to drive down the cost of them taking it over…

    • Winston

      Wow Demicrats with terrible policies are actually implementing them. I thought Bill Cinton’s speech was supposed to be the end of history.

    • sloopyinca

      “We are also concerned that to protect those profits, the industry has reportedly led a coordinated effort to spread disinformation to mislead the public and prevent crucial action to address climate change.”

      That’s a fancy way of saying they’re exercising their First Amendment rights in a way you don’t like so you’ll rob them for doing so.
      Also, you’re lawmakers. You can pass whatever laws you want, you fucking worm.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Given that the only reason we didn’t fall into a full blown depression in 2008 was the boom in the fracking industry, I think they vastly underestimate the importance of that sector to the health of the entire economy.

    • rhywun

      I’m not seeing a “backfire” in that article. The entire point of this farce is to punish the public by doubling and tripling their energy costs and I’m not seeing any evidence that the public is even remotely aware of what’s coming.

    • Michael Malaise

      Democrats really really really hate poor people.

  6. Winston

    So Canada once again willingly votes for their own enslavement. Well at least we can poke holes in our masks to smoke weed…

  7. The Late P Brooks

    John D Rockefeller saved more whales than Greenpeace.

    • Certified Public Asshat

      The turtles too.

  8. Sensei

    A 25-year-old man jumped from the roof and fell 12 stories onto a parking garage roof, where he hit a 61-year-old man, police said, citing preliminary information.

    Wrong place – wrong time.

    • Count Potato

      Dr. John couldn’t save him.

      • DrOtto

        Is it just me, or do you hear a little bit of the Mission Impossible theme at the beginning of that song?

  9. rhywun

    In case you’re one of the few people that care about that competition anymore

    The English don’t even care about that competition. I might care if they hadn’t moved all the matches off of cable.

  10. Gender Traitor

    Good morning, sloopy, Alex, ROAT, and other lurkers and leftovers from the “pre-AMLynx” gang! I’m still enjoying my staycation, relishing the fact that rain is still preventing us from doing any yardwork.

    As befitting the second half of my screen name, I’m rooting against the “local” baseball team and rooting for the Cardinals to take the second NL Wild Card slot. Go, ‘Birds!

    Among other birthdays today is that of my ex-husband, the Rev GT. Fun fact: he was born just a few miles up the road from fellow birthday boy Bill Murray (in the future Rev’s case, in Lake County, IL) on the very same day. I just sent him an e-mail wishing him many happy returns, so I’m hoping that e-dress still works. He DID send us a Christmas card this past year, complete with a photo self-portrait showing him wearing (ironically….I hope) a gas mask, so I hope he hasn’t since succumbed to either the ‘VID or the related idiocy.

    • AlexinCT

      Good morning, sloopy, Alex, ROAT, and other lurkers and leftovers from the “pre-AMLynx” gang! I’m still enjoying my staycation, relishing the fact that rain is still preventing us from doing any yardwork.

      Party like you read about!

    • UnCivilServant

      I’m going to guess you slept in then… explains your absense from the early morning chatter.

      • Gender Traitor

        Slept in just a bit. It takes a while to load up my “camping gear” to set up shop out back at Tranquility Base, then I was composing & sending the aforementioned ex-spouse e-mail. Now I can participate in AM Lynx proper, which I rarely get to do on a weekday!

      • Nephilium

        It’s a silly place.

  11. The Late P Brooks

    NPR go slurp slurp slurp

    Liberals governed Canada for 69 years during the 20th century. Pierre Trudeau called for a “just society” and ran the country with a panache not seen before from a Canadian leader. He is responsible for Canada’s version of the bill of rights and is credited with opening the door wide to immigration.

    Trudeau’s Liberals dominated in Toronto, Canada’s largest city and one of the most multicultural cities in the world.

    Why can’t America be more like Sweden Canada?

    • Winston

      Urbanites and immigrants supporting tyranny: how do libertarians explain that?

      • UnCivilServant

        Why don’t you ask them, I don’t pretend to understand that group.

      • WTF

        Why would you think libertarians need to explain somebody else’s politics?
        We don’t ask you to explain your mom.

      • SDF-7

        We might want to ask Winston’s Mom to explain his strawman tendencies, though.

        Too many sex dolls lying around the house he used to use as punching bags?

      • AlexinCT

        Euphemism?

      • Not Adahn

        That’s actually an interesting question. How do they justify that idea? You’d think that cities which by necessity rely on outside inputs to sustain themselves would tend toward collectivism, authoritarianism, and general forced servitude.

      • SDF-7

        I’ve always heard (and agree with) that it is the living cheek to jowl that makes it more important that your neighbor behave “appropriately” than if they were 2 miles down the road with woods between you. And if that eventually means the hall monitors (aka police) enforce those social norms, so be it.

      • Winston

        There is also the fact that urbanites depend on food bought in stores and consumer goods bought in stores. This was to make them support laissez-faire since how else would they get cheap food?

      • Not Adahn

        how else would they get cheap food?

        Vote for the person who promises cheap food? They outnumber the field-working peasants, after all.

      • EvilSheldon

        “You’d think that cities which by necessity rely on outside inputs to sustain themselves would tend toward collectivism, authoritarianism, and general forced servitude.”

        While I agree that observation bears this out, I’ve never heard a decent explanation as to Why.

      • Not Adahn

        A farmer can produce food for xemself plus multiple city dwellers. The city dwellers can vote to force the farmer to keep producing food. Repeat ad infinitum.

      • Gadfly

        This, plus what SDF-7 said above, plus the fact that cities, being a concentration of people and commerce, offer a greater source for graft so on top of everything else they will attract the worst politicians. I don’t think it is any coincidence that in the US the worst political machines have been in cities.

      • EvilSheldon

        This seems to be more a criticism of democracy than anything else.

        What about the cities makes people think this way? That’s the question I’m pondering.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        Getting your ass kicked by nature day in and day out grows a form of humility that is less compatible with technocracy. Plugging numbers into spreadsheets does not.

        I don’t think it’s a case of polar opposite worldviews. That may be changing as liberty lovers flee the large metro areas, but it’s still a matter of degree not direction. Rural folks are just as happy to vote for and receive subsidies. However, rural folks aren’t equipped for or in enough density for the type of activism that drives the massive growth of government in the cities.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        ??

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        I’ll add that social media is a huge X factor here.

        If it once took canvassing 2 city blocks to assemble enough people to agitate for a certain issue, perhaps it took canvassing 25 square miles in the boonies to get that same critical mass, if not more because the barrier to entry (traveling 15 miles plus) to activism was that much higher.

        Today, that difference doesn’t exist. Slacktivism (I dislike that term) means even the farmers don’t have to move their asses out of the computer chair.

      • EvilSheldon

        Maybe not plugging numbers into spreadsheets, but installing 480V electrical panels or knocking tin as a commercial HVAC installer might. It’s a valid point, I just don’t know if it applies to the rural-urban split.

      • Pine_Tree

        My short answer: urban life enables anonymity, which deprives folks of the more natural/tribal/social connections. The anonymity drives a recursive, focused cycle in each person’s selfish inner tyrant. They can get away with things they’d never get away with in a smaller town or rural community where they’re more known.

      • Count Potato

        The Las Vegas business model?

      • Bobarian LMD

        Ding Ding!

        Unleashing the inner Karen.

      • Not Adahn

        Meh. The outer Karens thrive just fine in small towns.

      • Pine_Tree

        Yeah but they’re fewer and are easily ignored. What I’m describing is when everybody’s Karen (Bobarian’s note above) is allowed to flourish.

      • R C Dean

        I think its a little different than “Karens unleashed”. I think its that cities force you into close proximity with strangers who, at a deep level, you don’t quite trust. Groups bigger than the proverbial Dunbar number need a state (like) authority to keep from fragmenting into warring clans. A city means social and familial restraints are weakened to the point of meaninglessness, and the state steps into the void, perhaps of necessity.

        That’s one side of the “anonymity” of cities. The other side is that when the jackboot is applied, its not being applied to people known personally to the wearer or his masters.

        Cities are also centers of state power – they are the natural homes of the bureaucracies that have applied state power throughout history.

        Cities are also essential economic and perhaps cultural engines. How to square this with their natural and I believe ineradicable authoritarian tendencies, I couldn’t say.

      • Michael Malaise

        “A city means social and familial restraints”

        Sadly in some ways, Little Italy is even littler.

      • Loveconstitution1789

        Remember, farming in a free market can be very volatile. Once you set your crops, youre locked in no matter what the price is upon harvest.

        Along comes federal govt to set prices. In the USA, crop food prices are set artificially low to benefit consumers. Farmers get subsidized by taxpayers on the backend. There would be a massive change in who controls farming capital if farmers were able to charge market prices for food.

    • Rat on a train

      Our cities tend to be monocultural. Try to find even a moderate Democrat in one.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      You know what other political party had a great sense of style?

      • Tonio

        You might even say they were snazzy.

      • DrOtto

        You could say they wore it like a Boss.

      • Tonio

        [golf clap]

  12. The Late P Brooks

    How many of the people currently weeping and wailing over Afghanistan’s backsliding into antediluvian cave-man-ism are asking themselves just what the fuck our crack teams of social justice enlighteners have been up to for the past twenty years?

  13. Not Adahn

    Tampa has all but locked down the best recording the AL

    Dude, the Grammys aren’t until January. Please don’t start hyping them now.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder
    • Rebel Scum

      Book burnings might be all that bad of an idea…

  14. Rebel Scum

    at Saturday’s rally at the U.S. Capitol billed to support the suspects charged in January’s insurrection

    The what? Words have meaning except for when leftists manipulate them.

    • Tonio

      All the reporting on the Sep 18 was a fapfest for TMITE. They got to use their favorite words again.

  15. Winston

    https://www.wsj.com/articles/xi-jinping-aims-to-rein-in-chinese-capitalism-hew-to-maos-socialist-vision-11632150725?redirect=amp#click=https://t.co/1PhMdiVIcq

    Shit is truly hitting the fan in China. The long hoped for confrontation between the Chicoms and private companies that the free-traders hoped would liberate China is well underway.

    And it is looking like Xi has decided that China has enough free shit to make Communism work this time…

    Such gestures, once dismissed as political stagecraft, are being taken more seriously by China watchers as it becomes evident Mr. Xi is more ideologically driven than his immediate predecessors.

    Jesus, why gave the last 30 years so fucked our brains into thinking that politicians “don’t mean it” when they advocate truly awful things? Bill Clinton?

    • rhywun

      Xi Jinping Aims to Rein In Chinese Capitalism, Hew to Mao’s Socialist Vision

      Good. Can we stop taking them seriously now?

      • AlexinCT

        Not going to happen. Our elite here have trillions of dollars of their money tied up in China, and China has already made it clear they don’t get to repatriate it. So this either ends with them deciding they will subject us to the CCP in Beijing so they can keep their wealth or with them stealing money from us and starting a war with China to punish the CCP. In either case, we fucking take it in the ass without wanting or liking it.

      • Winston

        One interesting theory I have read is that Xi is backstabbing the Globalists and is seizing power for himself rather than sharing it with the Davos set like they expected. Xi is betting that the US will be too weak to stop him…

      • SDF-7

        I strongly suspect Xi is right.

      • waffles

        Well, we are too weak to stop them.

      • AlexinCT

        Really? You think a fucking group of totalitarian assholes that believe they are superior than everyone else suddenly, when they figure they have fucked over their coconspirators over and robbed them blind, won’t backstab others to keep all the power for themselves? How did our leaders miss that? They suck at the fucking top men game, while the CCP plays for keeps.

      • Winston

        It is possible that ether they really believed in the “free trade will liberate China” or they planned to backstab the Chicoms once they contrlled China’s trading partners. If the latter it seems Xi has decided to backstab them first…

      • AlexinCT

        They figured that by the time China actually profited from the deal they (and their children and grand children) would be long dead, and someone else would deal with the fallout. Only the CCP outplayed them (they were playing Tic-Tac-Toe while the CCP played Go and ran circles around them) and made it happen in their lifetime and they have no clue what to do because they were totally outplayed and they ended up being the bottom instead of the top as they planned.

      • waffles

        It’s certainly possible. And it weirdly makes me admire him. It feels strange but I hate Davos more than I could ever hate Beijing.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        Can we stop taking them seriously now?

        Until we can manufacture domestically and get the prices in the same ballpark, the answer is “no”.

      • rhywun

        Yeah, that is a small problem.

      • Gadfly

        Until we can manufacture domestically and get the prices in the same ballpark, the answer is “no”.

        Realistically this is not necessary, we would just need to pivot to focusing on encouraging development elsewhere. High-skilled manufacturing already comes from countries that are American allies (Taiwan, South Korea, Japan), and low-skilled low-cost manufacturing could be increased in other places (Vietnam, Thailand, Indonesia, India, various industrializing African nations) or even developed where it doesn’t exist.

      • Bobarian LMD

        Well, to be fair, if he actually does go full maoist communism, the chinese economy will backslide back into 3rd world shithole, but the trip there is gonna suck for the entire world.

    • waffles

      I mean, maybe? Bill Clinton said a lot of things he didn’t mean. Xi, on the other hand, we should probably trust him when he says what he intends to do.

      • SDF-7

        I’m sure it will screw over the multinational corp I work for — but I really, really hope China just starts nationalizing all the cash, property and IP these companies were dumb enough to send over there even with the “set up our subsidiaries that we must own and keep all the money here” rules. Stupidity should hurt. And maybe they’ll pay attention if there are some actual damned consequences this time.

      • AlexinCT

        I’m sure it will screw over the multinational corp I work for — but I really, really hope China just starts nationalizing all the cash, property and IP these companies were dumb enough to send over there even with the “set up our subsidiaries that we must own and keep all the money here” rules.

        China already did this, brah (are you just using sarcasm and I missed it?). Their law prohibits gweilo companies from repatriating ANY investments and profits from said investments without explicit CCP approval (which means your money & property in China – and even other nations where China’s CCP has control of the top men – belongs to them). China is where it is today because its army of spies has stolen hundreds of trillions of other people’s IP, and continues to do this because nobody can now stop them anymore. And they used a huge chunk of that wealth they managed to make off our backs to massively militarize to the point that even if their military isn’t on par with ours, it now has the ability to cause so much damage to us that we want to avoid the fight at all costs. But the real winner was using a good chunk of that wealth to buy our top men and Wall Street.

        We are fucked, because they have us by the fucking balls, and we can’t take them down without our top men and Wall Street going down with them. That means the American people will take it in the ass.

      • SDF-7

        No, I wasn’t being sarcastic — and yes, I know that’s the law (and said so).

        My point was that I’d like to see them move from their current softer “Come to China and invest! Here are our simple rules (that amount to keeping all your money here, but you still control it… no really!” to flat out overt “All your base is belong to us!”. Take every last bit of wealth *explicitly* that these idiots put into China so there’s no fig leaf for the Boards, CEOs, consultant class, etc. to hide behind.

      • AlexinCT

        Why would they need to be in your face about what is already the reality? All that would do is embarrass the fucking idiots they played and force them to do something to save face. The CCP KNOWS these fuckers are their bitchez and the idiot bitchez KNOW the CCP knows and treats them as bitchez, and they keep complying.

        I would say China has no reason to go all in your face, cause they are doing the fucking while everyone else pretends not to be the fuckee.

      • SDF-7

        Because Xi looks to be on more of a nationalization / power consolidation track (possibly to keep internal unreset in check due to the real estate bubble). I would tend to agree with you otherwise, but I think he feels he can take more explicit control and manage the economy to keep the government (and hence him) from losing face.

      • Gadfly

        I would tend to agree with you otherwise, but I think he feels he can take more explicit control and manage the economy to keep the government (and hence him) from losing face.

        The CCP has a history of being a bit more finessed with their domination than other totalitarians. Consider the contrast between how the Communists in Russia handled the tsar versus how the Communists in China handled the emperor. The Russian Commies murdered the tsar and his entire family, while the Chinese Commies, even though they had a greater claim to justice in executing their former emperor (he had collaborated with the Japanese imperialists by being their puppet – a clearly treasonous move) chose instead to “reeducate” him. Even today the CCP prefers to “reeducate” those who they can rather than just disappearing them (although they do plenty of that as well), I presume because they prefer the type of dominance that says “we can make you do what we want” over the more brutish and straightforward “we can do what we want”.

      • AlexinCT

        Because Xi looks to be on more of a nationalization / power consolidation track

        Westerners keep forgetting that China feels it was robbed & raped by them during the colonial age, and that people like Xi have a big score to settle because of their inferiority complex and their belief China was destined to rule the world.

        They thought they would play China, make oodles of cash for themselves and their family and friends, and in the end stay on top, then found themselves just 30 years later with their faces pushed into the pillow while Xi did his work to their backside, and they have no way to extricate themselves out of the Chinese trap they put themselves in….

      • AlexinCT

        Even today the CCP prefers to “reeducate” those who they can rather than just disappearing them (although they do plenty of that as well), I presume because they prefer the type of dominance that says “we can make you do what we want” over the more brutish and straightforward “we can do what we want”.

        As Orwell showed in 1984, disappearing someone before you had broken their will and actually made them believe the tripe the totalitarians were peddling was a far greater victory than just disappearing them. And it had a lot more benefits for the people that are on top. That’s why the new fascist movement no longer need death camps: it prefers to reeducate people, and if that doesn’t work, simply make it impossible for them to make a living or participate in society. Soft people break easy when they don’t get to be part of the team.

      • Loveconstitution1789

        Plus you need slaves. If you disappear everyone, nobody is left.

        Its war against slavers all over again.

  16. Rebel Scum

    Aaaaaaaaand of course he’s not being charged…or because he was there undercover and stirring up shit.

    The whole rally was glowies.

    • AlexinCT

      The left has desperately wanted something bad – anything – they could blame the right for. Unfortunately they never got what they wanted while their agents ran rampant causing damage and destruction. Then they managed to take a bunch of fucking assholes LARPing on Jan 6, and turn it into an “insurrection” by infiltrating them and encouraging them to do stupid shit. Unfortunately for liberty minded people the evil cabal only needed to make it work once. But they want another instance, because the Jan 6th story is collapsing and more and more people are realizing they were played (Afghanistan showing what a real insurrection looks like kind of fucked their plan over). They really thought they would be able to get a bunch of redneck racist rubes (what they believe their opposition is comprised of) to get out of line again. It didn’t happen, and it was blatantly obvious that was the agenda.

      I am now afraid that because they need another incident (or two), and they want it to fortify the 2022 elections, they will just stage something (Look for Jussie Smollet being hired as a consultant to give them ideas).

      • Rebel Scum

        they need another incident (or two), and they want it to fortify the 2022 elections, they will just stage something

        I don’t suppose it is out of the realm of possibility that the FBI has a couple more Dodge pickups lying around that they can sharpie and etch swastikas into.

      • AlexinCT

        When infiltrating a bunch of rubes and trying to get them to do something bad they would otherwise not do fails, your best option is to replace the dudes with reliable agents to do it. Mark my words: they will fake another incident, because they need it to fucking hide the evil shit they plan to do.

    • WTF

      And nothing else will happen. Because FYTW.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Federal agents say the use of rubber bands and other ordinary methods of storing cash were indications of drug trafficking or money laundering.

      They also cite dogs’ alerting to the scent of narcotics on most of the cash as key evidence. But the government says it deposited all of the money it seized in a bank, making it impossible to test which drugs may have come into contact with which bills and how long ago.

      Rubber bands! OMG!

      Never mind that most currency in circulation has trace amounts of cocaine on it.

      • rhywun

        the government says it deposited all of the money it seized in a bank

        The FBI Stolen Loot Credit Union?

      • Tonio

        “the government says it deposited all of the money it seized in a bank”

        If anyone else did that it would be destruction of evidence.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        It really is nothing more than than an extortion racket.

      • Chafed

        It’s ample fodder for a suppression motion.

      • Rat on a train

        I bet the bills were non-sequential like what is requested for ransom.

      • Drake

        So now the drug smelling money is back in circulation? Win – win!

    • SDF-7

      I need to find a gamma bomb or something, I think. The news is just making me Always Angry — might as well take advantage of it.

  17. Winston

    Interesting that the entire post-Cold War consensus is literally collapsing everywhere right now. Xi in China and the lockdowns wokism and environmentalism everywhere else.

    • Not Adahn

      The first assumption of technocracy, “for any given problem experts exist with useful information,” is a lie.

    • Gadfly

      It’s been over a generation since the Cold War, which is generally how long it takes society to forget things they don’t make an effort to remember.

  18. Festus

    I could cry, literally cry over what has happened to our society. I’m not a crier, I’m a laugher. This is fucked and I’m powerless to stop it.

  19. The Late P Brooks

    The what?

    The insurrection, man.

    You know, when Trump’s robot army invaded the nation’s capitol in tanks and armored personnel carriers and fought their way door to door to the Temple of Democracy, where they blew the doors off their hinges with shaped charges and slaughtered all the priests. Now we’re all slaves.

    • waffles

      We really got a raw deal.

  20. Rebel Scum

    “The Department of Homeland Security does not tolerate the abuse of migrants in our custody and we take these allegations very seriously,” a department spokesperson said. “U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Office of Professional Responsibility is investigating the matter and has alerted the DHS Office of Inspector General.”

    The Dept. of Homeland security also apparently does not concern itself with homeland security.

  21. Rebel Scum

    Two people are dead after a man apparently jumped from a Yonkers, New York, building Monday in an apparent suicide and struck another man below, police said.

    Suddenly “It’s Raining Men” does not sound like much fun.

    • Gender Traitor

      Too soon, man! ::fails to suppress laughter::

      • Festus

        Yeah, it was funny!

  22. Nephilium

    Today in local news with crap headlines:

    Ohio among worst states for kids hospitalized with COVID-19; 9 have died during pandemic

    Now, I’m not a sciencetician, but I’m pretty sure that more then 9 kids have died of a metric fuckton of other causes over the past 18 months (skimming the article, at least they do mean kids 18 and under).

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      A quick review of the data indicates that approximately 1,300 kids aged 0 to 14 die in Ohio every year.

      • Drake

        My mother got mad when I told her my young nephews had a higher chance of drowning in her pool or being hit by lightening than dying of covid.

      • Gadfly

        Kids are more likely to commit suicide than die from COVID. Which really should make all the people rushing to restrict the young people to save them from COVID pause and think about what they are doing.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Pausing and thinking? Nobody has time for that! It’s a pandemic!

    • Akira

      Ohio among worst states for kids hospitalized with COVID-19; 9 have died during pandemic

      It’s all in the framing. If you want a number to be shockingly high, just present it as though it is, and most people won’t know the difference.

      I’m pretty sure that more then 9 kids have died of a metric fuckton of other causes over the past 18 months

      If you proposed banning swimming pools based on the data, you’d be on more solid footing than the COVID extremists are.

  23. Scruffy Nerfherder

    It’s that time again….

    Tard Tuesday: How Can You Have Any Pudding If You Don’t Get Your Vax?

    Regulators have made clear they are as working as fast as possible, but also need to ensure the vaccine meets the highest standards — especially because a rare, but concerning vaccine side effect of heart muscle inflammation has been identified, most frequently in 12- to 15- year old males, the youngest group eligible for the vaccines. With the school year in full swing and cases soaring among children, pediatricians have been inundated with requests to bend the rules and give children a shot now. The new data seems likely to intensify the pressure, even though the existing vaccine is triple the dose tested in the trial. Younger children’s immune systems are not the same as adults, and the companies tested and found a much smaller dose was safe and effective.

    Obligatory comment sample:

    This is just awesome!

    Start giving the school kids their vaccine as soon as possible.
    Maybe we’ll get back to “normal” by next year.

    • Festus

      Maybe we’ll get back to normal by last year. FTFY.

    • waffles

      This is just awesome! Why do people still believe we can just get enough shots in arms and everything goes back to normal? It doesn’t. Things only get back to normal when people decide to do it. If you’re waiting for a go-ahead from some kind of authority you’re never gonna make it.

      Lol, this is just awesome!

      • AlexinCT

        SHUT THE FUCK UP AND DO WHAT WE TELL YOU, YOU FUCKING SERF!

        /idiots

      • Akira

        Things only get back to normal when people decide to do it. If you’re waiting for a go-ahead from some kind of authority you’re never gonna make it.

        Exactly. They’ve lied from day one of this thing, starting with “15 days to flatten the curve”. And just recently, they told Californians that they can unmask since there’s a vaccine now, but then went back on their word and made them mask up again. Nobody should trust the “public health experts” to actually honor these trade-offs they keep offering.

        It will end when the politicians pushing it are removed from office. That’s my goal. Trying to get your freedoms back by means of obedience is stupid.

      • Loveconstitution1789

        The dangerous virus is tyranny NOT sars-covid.

    • Certified Public Asshat

      Sugarfree pudding, bleh.

    • rhywun

      cases soaring among children

      Thanks to mandatory testing.

      How many of them even get sick?

    • Rebel Scum

      Start giving the school kids their vaccine as soon as possible.

      Child abuse.

      Maybe we’ll get back to “normal” by next year.

      Just 2 weeks to flatten the curve, comrade.

    • Gadfly

      Sure, go ahead and vax people for whom the vax is arguably more dangerous than the disease (simply by merit of the disease having such a low incidence of harm in that age group). Why let a few dead kids stand in the way of getting some good looking statistics (Yay! We vaxxed everyone!).

      • Akira

        Why let a few dead kids stand in the way of getting some good looking statistics (Yay! We vaxxed everyone!).

        Look, the ethos is “if it saves just one child’s life”. There’s no caveat in there about how many other children you kill in the process, nor is there a burden to prove that the one child would have actually died.

  24. Festus

    Two more deaths chalked up to Covid, to sure.

  25. Winston

    The thing that annoys me about the current catastrophe was how complacent many of the “freedom-lovers” were over the last 30 years. Western Society and Culture were fine. Our politicians would never implement anything truly terrible. Someone like xi Jinping would never gain power in China. All of this was taken as a given because Progress and Change..

    • Festus

      Fucking Winston. It’s not even a Straw-man any more, it’s the Wicker man. Oh God No! Not the bees!

      • Winston

        How did it get burned?

    • Not Adahn

      Well, optimism is a necessary part of libertarianism. If you believe that people are always going to seize power and enslave everyone they can then there’s no point in playing any other game.

      • Winston

        Except this Wasn’t optimism but complacency. If we think happy thoughts then everything will be fine.

        Rothbard believed in optimism as he thought it would make libertarians better activists.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        To be fair, libertarians and fellow travelers are maybe in the low teens percentage-wise. Even if we were on top of every concerning development, it would’ve only served to drive a lot of us insane as we became increasingly hopeless.

    • EvilSheldon

      I’m curious, Winston. What exactly should my friends and I have been doing, this past thirty years? Give us the benefit of that 20/20 hindsight.

      • Winston

        I don’t know. It is possible that nothing could be done?

      • EvilSheldon

        You ever consider that having nothing to add, might mean you should get off the topic?

  26. The Late P Brooks

    I’m pretty sure that more then 9 kids have died of a metric fuckton of other causes over the past 18 months

    Get back to us when you have those bodies neatly stacked into a lectern from which to promote a comprehensive political propaganda campaign.

  27. The Late P Brooks

    Federal agents say the use of rubber bands and other ordinary methods of storing cash were indications of drug trafficking or money laundering.

    And the bundle of tywraps in my toolbox means I’m a domestic terrorist.

    • Not Adahn

      HUNTER-KILLER SQUADZ!

    • Rat on a train

      Opposition to the Democratic regime means you are a domestic terrorist.

  28. db

    Question for RC Dean: sitting in a hospital room waiting for a procedure for a family member and wondering how much hospitals spend on installing and maintaining sharps containers in every single room versus having portable ones or sharing between rooms. Seems there are a number of probably unnecessary redundancies with several types of utility medical devices.

    • Festus

      Sharps are in every government building. The unions demand them and because they are cheap, the Gov complies. Simple as that. I’ve yet to see one emptied.

      • db

        Right, but every single room seems like wasteful overkill.

      • Not Adahn

        If there is a room without a sharps container, that room will have sharps in the general trash container.

      • db

        That could be solved with disciplinary measures.

      • Not Adahn

        Aww, you’re adorable!

        *laughs in union*

      • db

        Yeah…

      • Not Adahn

        Plus, I’ve got a powerpoint presentation that proves when you take into account the lost time spend walking to find a sharps container, plus the time spent enforcing the sharps discipline, plus the costs of arbitrations, etc, it saves money having boxes everywhere. You know it’s SCIENCE because it’s for an embedded .xlsx

    • Tonio

      Hoping for a good outcome for your FM.

      • db

        Thanks!

    • R C Dean

      They are really quite cheap.

      It’s required.

      Without them, what db said.

    • grrizzly

      Too much. Ask me how I know.

  29. The Late P Brooks

    Prohibitionism in a new frilly frock

    Facebook spent the weekend on the defensive after a series of stories in The Wall Street Journal last week exposed just how far the company has gone to prioritize profits over the health and safety of its billions of users.

    ——-

    The Journal’s investigation showed how Facebook has repeatedly failed to properly address crucial problems highlighted in internal studies conducted by the company’s own employees, such as how the most divisive content surfaces in so many news feeds because of its high engagement. The reports come two months after President Joe Biden said Facebook is “killing people” with misinformation about Covid-19 and vaccines and after the company struggled to find a consistent message for dealing with false information about the 2020 election.

    The problems highlighted by the Journal were consistent with what Facebook critics have been saying for a long time: Executives are consumed with revenue growth and engagement.

    Facebook doesn’t automatically censor stories people want to read.

    We must save the weak-willed rubes from the depredations of the slick and devious profiteering snake oil salesmen!

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      They care so much about us.

      • Festus

        They pet us against the grain like a cat just to piss us off. “Whatcha gonna do?”

      • EvilSheldon

        I was just thinking… I care deeply about my pets, but there’s never any doubt that they are the pets and I am the owner.

      • Not Adahn

        I have trouble justifying it intellectually, but based on feelz, I’m totally ok with lethal force to stop person who’s attacking my dog.

      • EvilSheldon

        One of the many good reasons to have a less-lethal force option as well.

        You might not be able to legally shoot someone who’s attacking your dog, but pepper-spraying them won’t even get a raised eyebrow.

      • R C Dean

        I’m totally ok with lethal force to stop person who’s attacking my dog

        “Your honor, a man who will trespass onto my property to try and kill my dog is a man who will trespass onto my property to try and kill me. I saw a man committing violence, and thought I was next, so I acted accordingly.”

      • EvilSheldon

        Problem is, your statement doesn’t articulate a justification for deadly force. Right, wrong, or indifferent, you try that line in court and you’ll go to jail.

      • R C Dean

        I assumed (although I didn’t mention it) that the trespasser is using a weapon to try and kill my dog – an armed trespasser committing a crime of violence on my property is a running start, at least, on a good defense. Somebody trying to kill one of my dogs without a weapon is going to have more problems than me. Since I have two dogs, they are going to have their hands full, at least as long as their hands are attached to their arms.

        And somebody who can beat a pit bull (or two!) to death with their bare hands is somebody I would shoot before getting into a fistfight with.

    • rhywun

      the company struggled to find a consistent message

      Like… a publisher?

  30. robc

    Baseball birthdays: The only player over 20 WAR is Sam McDowell at 41.8. Doug Davis also tops the aforementioned Fielder with 18.4 to Cecil’s 17.2. Davis also did that with a cancer interlude.

    Cecil, on the other hand, produced Prince Fielder, who had 23.8 WAR in a career even shorter than his Dad’s.

    • Festus

      They could never put down the cheeseburger.

      • robc

        Didnt Prince go vegan?

  31. Winston

    https://brownstone.org/articles/the-wrecking-of-new-york-city-accident-or-design/amp/?__twitter_impression=true

    The once-great city of New York – an inspiring monument to human productivity, creativity, financial and artistic genius – is being harmed and devastated. Even this paper has noticed, and fills its pages with sad reports.

    ….

    The primitivist/communist view of human life has always detested the city. Think back on Mao’s campaign to disperse the population into rural areas and depopulate urban centers. And think about how China daily controls people through technology and propaganda designed to crush individualism. There is that impulse at work among those who created lockdowns and continue their plans for mandates and restrictions.

    One of the goals of creating chaos is to make it impossible to notice details. If, for example, your goal is to destroy the greatest city in the world, you would need an environment of cacophonous confusion to distract people from what was happening. That seems like a pretty good description of the last 19 months.

    We find ourselves in an emergency situation. The world is tottering between two visions of human life. One centers on freedom and all its creativity, including cities, arts, friendships, technology, and great lives. The other centers on despotism and the relentless drive back to a state of nature: foraging for food, living in rural settings, stuck in one place, and dying young.

    So there you have it: freedom is the city and rural life is despotism and the state of nature.

    But left unexplained is why is the “primitivist/communist” mindset most supported by wealthy educated urbanites and opposed by rural people? The failure of the liberals to forsee this happening is I think the main reason we are in the mess right now.

    The assumption was clearly that once more people live in cities and get educated and wealthy then freedom would flourish. The desire for educated urbanites was a key justification for the creation of public schools by the way…

    • Festus

      The key justification for public schools was to push back against parochial schools. Do you even hear yourself?

      • Winston

        It was both actually. The argument was that we need educated people for true liberalism. However since too many schools were run by reactionary Catholics theybdecifrd that state-run schools were needed to ensure educated urbanites wouldn’t be taught reactionary ideas.

    • wdalasio

      Except this delusion has always been challenged. Jefferson noted that the best example of individual liberty was the yeoman farmer, for example. That is a supposition that was long rooted in the thinking of classical liberalism, that saw the simple country squire of the gentleman farmer as the target for their ideas. And, Tucker really fails to provide an iota of support for his claim that “primitivist/communist view of human life has always detested the city” beyond Mao. The entire Stalinist episode, for example, was heavily focused precisely on urbanization. Tucker strikes me as a sort inclined to conflate his personal idiosyncratic tastes and preferences with liberty. He’s really not all that deep a thinker.

      • Not Adahn

        Yeah, Pol Pot was also anti-urban, but the Western commies were all about the cities.

      • wdalasio

        Well, yeah. I mean, the views of Marx himself mostly mirrored the sort of tripe Tucker is pushing. Marx viewed the peasantry as an essentially reactionary class. It was only really the later Marxists, realizing that, in Russia, for instance, the peasantry vastly outnumbered the proletariat and decided to incorporate them.

    • trshmnstr the terrible

      One centers on freedom and all its creativity, including cities, arts, friendships, technology, and great lives. The other centers on despotism and the relentless drive back to a state of nature: foraging for food, living in rural settings, stuck in one place, and dying young.

      Never mind him, it’s just Tucker doing Tucker things. ?

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        Gah, I find his city mouse luxuriant libertarianism so ridiculous.

        If you find your joy in life from arts, technology, and global jetsetting, so be it. Let’s not act like those things are some universal key to meaning and happiness.

      • Not Adahn

        To get into the woo for a minute…

        Finding joy in the arts is a thing people have been doing for a VERY long time. And the arts do require a supply of surplus resources ranging from the moderate to the vast, depending on the complexity involved.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        I was imprecise. I don’t write off all arts as optional luxury. Only the pretentious institutional arts associated with urban elitism.

        Art and creativity is a core part of humanity. Institutional arts are like institutional anything else, a channel for graft and elitism.

    • Surly Knott

      So which of the specific claims you quote are false? They seem a very weak foundation for your prejudices and ingrained negativity.
      Was New York not seen as great? Was it not a center of, and driven by, human productivity, creativity, financial and artistic genius? Is it not being harmed?

      I could go on, every point you quote is subject to the same question, but let me just jump to the last quoted paragraph. Is the world not tottering between visions of freedom and despotic control? Were great cities, great centers of arts and technology, not the result of freedom? What despot built them and managed them as images of the high aspirations of humanity? You prefer maybe Pyongyang?

      Your relentless misreading of texts in service of finding “assumptions” rather than descriptions of consequences betrays a view that seems to reduce to one wherein the despots forcibly relocated people to cities, that urban centers are inherently unfree and unconducive to freedom [Mao’s line, btw, and even more so Pol Pot’s]. You seem to believe that any celebration of human choices that eventually and inherently [as opposed to as a result of other human choices] fall away from the shining vision with which they began is an unholy assumption, or were based on never stated assumptions, a contaminating presupposition that must be stamped out, with nothing ever presented as an alternative.
      Why is that?

      • wdalasio

        Were great cities, great centers of arts and technology, not the result of freedom?

        Not necessarily. Bear in mind, New York was fairly unique among cities in that it rose almost entirely as a commercial center. The other great world cities, London, Paris, Rome, Tokyo mostly rose as national capitals extracting tribute from the local countryside.

        And, while he may go overboard at times, he does raise a valid point, a point that shouldn’t be overlooked in thinking about liberty – the prevailing culture of the cities is decidedly anti-liberty. And the great financial, artistic and commercial developments that we celebrate the cities for were the products of arrivistes, often bitterly despised by the urban cultures of their day.

      • Not Adahn

        To the extent that ANY of the great cities were the result of freedom, it was the city charter that allowed its residents independence from the otherwise extant sovereign.

      • Not Adahn

        The Fine Arts require the existence of a leisure class and some entity with a vast amount of resources — these by themselves necessitate that they are living off of the products of others. Take the amount of time and money required to have one virtuoso violinist, then multiply by a crapton in order to have a Grand Opera company.

      • Gadfly

        This is a good point, and the reason why cities will always be the center of arts and luxury (and therefor a big contributor to the culture of the times). Conversely, cities will always be the center of bad ideas as well, as the same leisure class that has the time and resources to create great beauty also has the time and resources to dream great nightmares. As the old saying goes, idle hands are the devil’s tools.

      • Winston

        First of all I have been fascinated by the whole debate or whether or not the true freedman is the independent farmer or the urban merchant. This has been debated for centuries. Has either side been proven? Or is it just personal preference? Lately the latter has “won” but recent events such as lockdown have rendered it questionable.

        People have accused me of strawmanning so I felt necessary to point that the “city air will set us free” talk is not a strawman. There are people out there that believe it and this article is a good example.

        Also it is very clear that urban libertarians believed that urbanization would destroy this despotism as this despotism was a rural phenomenon. However the despotism Tucker bemoans is primarily a creation of the wealthy educated urbanites. I don’t think the urban libertarians expected this to happen.

        Does this prove the agrarians were right? I don’t know. Is the supposed live if liberty of the independent yeoman anymore inherent than that of the urban merchant? I don’t know.

      • Winston

        *love of liberty*

        Also: in a liberal society you would have quite a few farmers and merchants who are liberals. Did one or both sides mistake this possible accident of history as an inevitable law of history?

      • Not Adahn

        This is a false dilemma like “are people inherently good or inherently evil?”

        There’s never going to be a system that ensures freedom. All systems are about control of other people. The best solution is to have multiple kinds of living conditions and limits to the kinds of authority that can be exercised over other people.

      • EvilSheldon

        Pretty much every you say, “It is very clear,” it turns out to be something that you’ve pulled out of your ass.

      • Winston

        https://www.libertarianism.org/publications/essays/new-toryism

        The truth is familiar that, here as elsewhere, it was habitually by town‐​populations, formed of workers and traders accustomed to cooperate under contract, that resistances were made to that coercive rule which characterizes cooperation under status. While, conversely, cooperation under status, arising from, and adjusted to, chronic warfare, was supported in rural districts, originally peopled by military chiefs and their dependents, where the primitive ideas and traditions survived. Moreover, this contrast in political leanings, shown before Whig and Tory principles became clearly distinguished, continued to be shown afterwards. At the period of the Revolution, “while the villages and smaller towns were monopolized by Tories, the larger cities, the manufacturing districts, and the ports of commerce, formed the strongholds of the Whigs.” And that, spite of exceptions, the like general relation still exists, needs no proving.

      • wdalasio

        I don’t think he’s entirely pulling it out of his ass. There is a libertarian contingent that has argued for the “wealth and sophistication means the end of tyranny” thesis. I just think it’s wrong to generalize from that contingent to all libertarians.

      • Not Adahn

        No true libertarian would collectivize others.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        ?

      • Gadfly

        I think this faction is far more represented in the class of professional libertarians than it is in libertarians at large, which is what would give this false impression.

      • Loveconstitution1789

        Germany in the 1930s was considered very sophisticated. They were known for excellent education and science programs. Germany had wealth but the WWI reparation had caused hyperinflation, so the deutchmarck was nearly worhtless.

      • Gadfly

        This has been debated for centuries. Has either side been proven? Or is it just personal preference?

        In truth it seems that the default preference of man throughout the ages is to himself be free while he enslaves others. So those who feel outside of the power structure (such as urban merchants during the Renaissance/Industrial era, when power was still centered on aristocratic landholders) will seek to topple it while those who feel they are a part of it (such as urban merchants during the modern time, when power is centered on multinational corporations and elected governments) will seek to enforce it. Whether toppling/enforcing the power structure will place such people on the side of liberty will vary with time and place.

      • Surly Knott

        It’s not personal preference, it’s personal character. It is not restricted to a particular locale nor socio-economic status [broadly speaking]. Most especially, it is personal.
        The quoted bits of the article do not make the point you claim they make, which is both all too frequently the case and the primary grounds for my disagreements with you. Torturing the text to claim it shows what you alone have brought to it is at best dishonest.
        To be fair, I have not read the linked article; it may well support your argument. But in that case, I’m forced to wonder why you quoted these bits rather than those that actually support your case.
        I do find it telling that you invariably frame your issues as both ‘final battles’ and as conflicts between collectives. IMNSHO, you need to stop focusing on eternal archetypes and collectives and bring your focus down to time-bound individuals. And stop reading your own prejudices out of texts that do not explicitly make your case.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        The quoted bits of the article do not make the point you claim they make, which is both all too frequently the case and the primary grounds for my disagreements with you. Torturing the text to claim it shows what you alone have brought to it is at best dishonest.

        I’m not seeing the dishonesty. Maybe I’m reading my biases against Tucker into my interpretation of the quoted text, but it sure sounds like he’s saying “rich cosmopolitan urban living is freedom, simple rural living is the goal of despots”. Of course, this flies in the face of the modern evidence that the various forms of authoritarianism gaining traction are built on the urban political machines.

  32. robc

    Across the pond, Ronald Koeman is a dead man walking at Barcelona. But he’s not really the problem.

    At Barcelona, he is merely a problem.

  33. Sensei

    Polls suggest that a third or more of Americans younger than 45 either don’t have children or expect to have fewer than they might otherwise because they are worried about climate change.

    Unlike the Atlantic I think that these particular people having fewer children is probably a net benefit to the world.

    A World Without Children
    A generation facing an intractable problem debates whether to bring a new generation into the world.

    • rhywun

      OFFS what a steaming pile.

    • Gadfly

      Meanwhile, the Amish, Orthodox Jews, and other “regressive” sorts have no issue ensuring that the commandment to “be fruitful and multiply” is fulfilled. If demographics is destiny, then what does that say for the future? (Of course, demographics is not destiny, but quite a few political observers believe otherwise)

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        Er, don’t they have a lot of issue? /ducks

      • Gadfly

        LOL

  34. Rebel Scum

    Dem plot to ‘Steele’ the White House: Anatomy of a political dirty trick

    Unfortunately Trump was not able to stop the Steele.

  35. Count Potato

    “Woke ice-cream maker Ben & Jerry’s has unveiled a new flavor whose proceeds will partly go to support lefty Rep. Cori Bush‘s $10 billion, anti-police bill that seeks to defund cops and replace them with social workers in certain incidents.

    A portion of the proceeds from sales of the flavor, called “Change is Brewing,” will be donated to “grassroots groups working to transform public safety in America,” according to Ben & Jerry’s.

    And when customers navigate to the Ben & Jerry’s site to buy the ice cream, they’re urged to “Join the Movement for Black Lives and support the People’s Response Act!””

    https://nypost.com/2021/09/21/ben-jerrys-releases-anti-cop-flavor-with-rep-cori-bush/

    • UnCivilServant

      How can I boycott them harder than not having bought their products in years?

      • EvilSheldon

        If there’s a company easier to boycott than Ben & Jerry’s, I haven’t found it. Maybe someone out there is producing ice cream made out of actual dog shit? It probably wouldn’t be much worse…

      • WTF

        Well, Unilever is obviously on board with their horseshit, so you could go all out and boycott anything Unilever.

      • Not Adahn

        It really sucks boycotting Gillette and Gillette-corporate family products. If I have to add Unilever I’m going to start smelling pretty rank.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        All P&G? If so, feasible but not easy.

        Look at this silly photo of the blond kid at the top. I highly doubt a 5-year-old needs to borrow his grandpa’s bifocals. https://us.pg.com/

      • rhywun

        That page is prefect crystallization of today’s woke corporate America. Puke.

      • Certified Public Asshat

        Dark day for the glibs when Irish Spring goes woke.

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        Not t’same since retiring Wavy Gravy anyway.

    • Akira

      I have to ponder how much Ben & Jerry actually believe their own bullshit. They could be like the American apparel companies who are raking in fat profits by selling Che Guevara t-shirts (made in Vietnam) to deluded college students.

  36. Rebel Scum

    Los Angeles Department of Health insists Emmy awards ceremony didn’t violate restrictions because is ‘classed as a TV production and stars are considered performers’

    The peasants need to learn their place.

    • db

      Of course the entertainment industry worked with their close partners, the politicians, to have a carve-out written to exempt them from the rules. It’s how one gets shit done in this country now.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Yep, have a look at the staff running these events. They’re masked up and I guarantee they’d be immediately shitcanned if they dared to pull it down or take it off. It’s disfuckinggusting.

    • EvilSheldon

      I caught a few minutes of the Emmys at the bar, before i managed to convince the bartender to change it to, “Please, God,anything but this…”. It looked like a bunch of assholes doing low-budget Hunger Games cosplay. Disgusting and pathetic at the same time.

      • Not Adahn

        NPR declared the show a failure because it was “too scripted and too white.”

    • Gadfly

      Any health policy that exempts artists is not a health policy.

  37. CatchTheCarp

    “The Reds picked a bad time to fade but at least have an easier stretch run than the Cardinals. Hopefully they sneak in.’

    Hopefully not. Go Cards!

    • Gender Traitor

      ::fistbumps CTC::

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      And that’s most assuredly an undercount.

    • Rat on a train

      Only approved experts can properly interpret those numbers. You aren’t allowed to make your own decisions.

      • Drake

        If it kills or cripples less than half the vaccinated, it’s still “safe” for most people.

    • Urthona

      I’d be curious to know how that compares to the unvaccinated.

      • PutridMeat

        That was sort of the point of an article that was linked here recently. Namely that, in the original trials that led to the EUAs, the only metric for determining the value of the vaccine was whether you got Covid-19 or not (died from as well, but I think the number of deaths was so small – 0 and 1 maybe? 2? so as to be completely statistically insignificant).

        As the author pointed out, that’s not the correct metric at all; the overall health of the two groups is the relevant end-point metric for any trial. The example used in the paper was cancer I believe – you can envision a trial for a cancer treatment in which the trial group sees shrinking of tumors and no deaths from cancer whereas in the control group, tumors progress and 20% of the control group die from cancer. However, the cancer treatment results in half of the trial group dying from organ failure due to the chemo treatment. Under the metric used for the Covid-19 vaccines, this is a successful trial and the cancer treatment would be reported as safe and effective. That’s obviously exaggerated, but the principle is there.

        If one looks at a broader metric (overall health, lack of illness – e.g. adverse events from the vaccine) in the EUA trials, the control (un-vaccinated group) had better overall outcomes compared to the trial group. So if one uses the metric of overall population health rather than ‘resistance’ to a single issue, the authors contention is that the Covid-19 vaccines should never have received EUAs.

        That’s along way of saying, yes, it would be interesting to see in the general population the same sort of statistics as the VAERs. Outside of controlled trial, seems like it would be very difficult to tease out, especially given the un-reliability of VAERs. It would be nice to have well defined trial and control groups; unfortunately, ‘we’ destroyed those groups in the vaccine trials. [dons tinfoil hat].

    • Drake

      Most are direct results of the vaccination. The rate of Myocarditis is 100 times higher than the unvaccinated. Almost all of them will need a heart transplant or be dead in 5 years.

      • Urthona

        Eh that’s not accurate. There’s a 1% likelihood that you need a heart transplant after myocarditis.

    • Mustang

      I treat these numbers about the same as I treat the reported COVID case numbers. Every hypochondriac who gets a fluttery heart after their shot is going in there. Does it provide data for the decision-making process? Yes. Is it 100% accurate and accounts for every scenario? No, certainly not.

      On the flip side, I have a small sample size right in my office. About 15 people got their first shot at the same time. 2 of them had severe reactions that required a trip to the ER within hours. Vomiting and nausea for one, heart inflammation for the other. The docs sent them home to rest with ibuprofen and I was told not to call it an “adverse reaction” by higher-ups because the docs didn’t explicitly say it was a reaction to the shot. Could have been anything, they said. Lots of things cause those problems.

      Shorter Mustang: I fuckin’ hate everyone.

      • ron73440

        I fuckin’ hate everyone.

        Usually the correct answer and very rarely outright wrong.

  38. CPRM

    a man apparently jumped from a Yonkers, New York, building Monday

    Was his name Willy Lowman?

  39. The Late P Brooks

    You know- morons

    Here’s the scoop: Social justice awareness can now be found in the ice cream aisle.

    Ben & Jerry’s has unveiled a new flavor to promote the People’s Response Act, legislation proposed by Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., that seeks to curb the disproportionate share of police violence against people with mental illnesses and other health complications.

    The Vermont-based ice cream company on Monday launched Change Is Brewing, a limited-batch flavor of cold brew coffee ice cream with marshmallow swirls and fudge brownies. Jabari Paul, the company’s U.S. activism manager, announced the new flavor during a press conference along with the company’s declaration of support for the legislation and its continued commitment to advancing racial justice.

    Let’s hear it for vapid moral posturing in the pursuit of profit. It’s okay when Democrats do it.

    • db

      “…social justice…Can now be found…Ben and Jerry’s”

      Those assholes have been at leftist causes since I first heard about them in the 1990s. “Can now be found,” indeed.

      • rhywun

        Have they turned on a television lately? Every commercial is some woke bullshit or other.

      • db

        I actually watched the final part of the monday night game with family last night. First TV I have seen in well over a year (other than what might be on on a distant tv at a bar or restaurant).

        It was actually pretty jarring. The number and content of the commercials was odd. It really was kind of unpleasant. I think people get used to being constantly bombarded with commercial messages and vapid attempts at humor and they eventually become conditioned to accept it. Disconnecting from it for a significant time helps reset and refresh the mind. It really is corrosive.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        It was actually pretty jarring. The number and content of the commercials was odd. It really was kind of unpleasant.

        I’ve noticed that, too. Haven’t really watched much (if any) live TV in over a year and, even though the football game was good, I found myself not particularly compelled to finish it because the rest of the broadcast, including the commercials, was noxious.

    • Festus

      Thanks for that! I hate that it’s dark and cold now up here. No more bird-watching.

  40. Rebel Scum

    There is no such thing as election fraud.

    Russia’s ruling United Russia party, which supports President Vladimir Putin, won an emphatic parliamentary majority after its most vociferous critics were prevented from contesting an election that opponents said was marred by large-scale fraud.

    With 98% of ballots counted on Monday, the Central Election Commission said United Russia had won nearly 50% of the vote, with its nearest rival, the Communist Party, at just under 20%. United Russia won 54% in 2016, the last time a vote was held.

    The scale of the victory means United Russia will have more than two-thirds of deputies in the 450-seat State Duma lower house of parliament. This will enable it to continue to push through laws without having to rely on other parties. …

    Kremlin critics alleged large-scale vote rigging. They said the election was a sham and that a newly-introduced electronic voting system had been used to deprive opponents of United Russia of victory in Moscow.

    Sounds like insurrectionist talk to me.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Never ever ever allow electronic voting systems to get their foot in the door.

      • rhywun

        Seem obvious, right? And yet here we are.

  41. The Late P Brooks

    Well, optimism is a necessary part of libertarianism.

    THIS.

    If you fear and distrust everyone you meet, you’re not cut out to be a libertarian.

    • hayeksplosives

      But how is civilization to survive without the benevolent hand of government guiding all of our interactions??

      • Festus

        We’ll soon find out.

  42. Rebel Scum

    Dems seem to want an underclass of POC’s.

    The last year and a half … have shown how vital our [illegal] immigrants have been to keeping our economy going during the time of crisis … We’re short of workers from one end of America to the other — one of the reasons? The Trump administration dramatically cut back on immigrants in this country. We need them. We need them in our labor force. We need them to continue American vitality. We need them because they’re part of the American dream.

    • Q Continuum

      “We can’t pay citizens to stay at home and not work without millions of peasants working under the table for slave wages!”

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Citizen workers have to meet the coronavirus hysteria nonsense standards while they’ll look the other way for people who snuck in.

  43. Q Continuum

    “Taliban name deputy ministers, double down on all-male team”

    LOLOLOL!!!!

    How fucking disconnected from reality are these twerp “journalists” to think that the Taliban actually give two shits about their retarded woke nonsense. OF COURSE their government is going to be run by men considering that, in their mind, women are only good as breeding vessels and housekeepers and, oh by the way, they’re not allowed to show their face or walk unescorted in public.

    Fucking idiots.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      All one has to do to determine what their policy will be vis a vis women in positions of power is read the Koran.

    • SDF-7

      That’s just your cis-hetereo perspective, MAN! What I believe is what the universe must conform to! My Harvard professors and my kindergarten teacher (but I repeat myself) told me so!

    • AlexinCT

      How fucking much of an idiot do you have to be that the thing that really, really worries you is that a bunch assholes with a mindset from the 13th century don’t think diversity matters, because unlike you, they are not stupid enough to have been indoctrinated that physical characteristics are more important than actual competency (and I guarantee you the idiot the Taliban picked is as incompetent as hell, but that’s not the point) or other factors.

      • SDF-7

        SJW Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be engaged in Wrongthink.

    • tarran

      They’re not idiots. The Taliban are not the room they are playing to.

      Bitching impotently about the misogyny half a world away allows them to stay quiet about the misogyny happening here in the U.S… if anyone points out that they are soft on misogyny coming from Islamists here in the U.S. they can point to their criticism of the Taliban as proof that they are even-handed.

      Remember, most proggie propaganda isn’t intended to convince non-progressives to become proggies. It’s intended to keep the existing proggies on the reservation and to condition them to fearfully ignore non-proggie publications.

      • Gadfly

        Good point. But it does still mean that idiots are involved somewhere in this conversation, but in the audience rather than at the podium.

      • Ozymandias

        Porque no los dos?

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      I’m having a “discussion” with a LP of VA member who is pissed off about the LP of NH messaging. He’s the quintessential millennial libertarian. He’s upset about this.

      https://lpnh.org/billboard/

      He believes the hard line in messaging is detrimental and won’t help membership numbers. The guy would happily be recruiting new LP members while taking the ride in the cattle car to the camps.

      • rhywun

        Oh, nice image. Spot on.

      • Rat on a train

        They’re never going to get cocktail invites with a message like that.

      • EvilSheldon

        Now that I’ve started looking for examples, it’s astounding how many organizations get caught up in ‘Increasing Membership’ at the expense of ‘Succeeding In Our Organization’s Goals”. Looking in your direction, USPSA…

      • Not Adahn

        Hmmm?

        Is this a case of lowering the barrier to entry pissing off the established elitists? Just as a personal whine, if USPSA goes 15-round production It’s going to suck shooting classifiers with NY mags. Our CO shooters are already bitching about that.

      • EvilSheldon

        More a case of ignoring serious demographic and structural problems (lousy Nationals matches, RO burnout, a major shortage of places to shoot) in favor of bumping up membership numbers (without any concern for actual member engagement.)

        I have no real opinion on 10rd. vs 15rd. Production, but I do agree that classifiers need to be capacity-blind.

      • Gadfly

        Realistically the hard-line messaging probably is detrimental to the goal of winning elections, but since the Libertarian party is in no danger of winning they don’t have to worry about that. Since the LP can at best move the Overton window, going hard to the paint is the right move. Their best hope is that they can do to the Republican party what the Socialist party did to the Democratic party.

    • SDF-7

      I don’t think we had quite enough of it, actually. Faith in experts / institutions / people we pay a crap load of money to be at least border line capable and responsible was still strong through the 90s — and a lot stronger than it should be in the 00s.

  44. The Late P Brooks

    Headline:

    “Pfizer says its vaccine is safe for kids”

    Okay, then. That settles it.

    • AlexinCT

      I hear that that pedophiles use the same defense…

      • AlexinCT

        Proof…..

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      We’re going to find out real soon if the coming for the kids line in the sand stand has anything behind it or not…because they most certainly about to come for the kids.

    • Drake

      Remember way way back in like 2015 when every lefty knew that big pharma was evil and never to be trusted? Good times.

      • rhywun

        Or 2020 when every lefty denounced the “Trump vaccine”.

        People do seem to have short memories.

      • creech

        I remember one prog telling me, about the Warp Speed, that Trump and family held all sorts of investments in pharma companies and were going to promote “snake oil vaccines” in order to get filthy rich.

      • Akira

        People have actually told me that the Trump administration was creating an extremely dangerous situation by trying to fast-track the vaccine, and the fact that they called it “Operation Warp Speed” highlights how reckless they all are… But now The Scientists™ are saying that it’s safe and effective, so everyone should get it.

  45. Rebel Scum

    Mayor DeBolshevik likes poking children.

    “We will now go to weekly testing. We’ll be testing in elementary, middle, and high school each school every week,” de Blasio said Monday, announcing the updated protocols. “That will allow more kids to safely remain in the classrooms.”

    He added that they are changing the quarantine approach as well. If there is a positive case in the classroom, unvaccinated children will no longer have to quarantine, as long as they were masked and maintaining a distance of three feet. Previously, such students had to quarantine for ten days.

    “That will allow more kids to safely remain in the classroom,” the Democrat mayor said.

    Abide by our new religious observances and you will be safe.

    • SDF-7

      The chicken entrails and incense told him the mask and 3 feet rule sufficed. Surely the little plague daemons will be appeased…

    • rhywun

      And this is how part of how you arrive at a $42K yearly spend per pupil.

      • Gadfly

        Damn. At that rate, they’d be better off hiring individual private tutors for the kids and abolishing the school system entirely.

  46. Jerms

    Astros have a nice lead to get home field over the White Sox for their series.

    Looking forward to that series, both teams are stacked. Looks like Rodon is done for the season which is a big break for the Astros.

  47. Rebel Scum

    The Twink of the North survives re-election somehow.

    BREAKING: Justin Trudeau’s Liberals will form government, CBC News projects. It is still unclear whether it will be a minority or majority.

    But from the limited amount I saw from the “conservative” challenger I guess it is not surprising when there is little difference.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Good luck Canada, you’re gonna need it.

      • hayeksplosives

        Reminiscent of the scene in Empire Strikes Back where Han Solo brushes off concerns about the Millennium Falcon. He says dismissively, “She’ll hold together”, then says quietly and earnestly to the cockpit console, “Hear me baby? Hold together.”

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      They basically offered up a guy with no meaningful policy differences, especially as it comes to coronavirus measures, to Trudeau. Why bother when you can get the devil you know? See also 2012: Obama vs Romney

    • Festus

      They didn’t name him O’Toole for nothing.

      • Festus

        There are maybe about 20% of us willing to fight back. That’s not enough. We are fucked in the ass and not in the fun way that some people seem to prefer. Jesus Christ on toast!

      • Sean

        20% is plenty, imo.

    • Not Adahn

      NPR had a sad that he wasn’t able to win a majority.

    • Gadfly

      It should be noted that once again Trudeau lost the (meaningless) popular vote.

  48. Rebel Scum

    Toning down the rhetoric.

    Guest host Jason Johnson asked, “The idea of overt actions of violence against members of Congress seems to be part and parcel of the current GOP.”

    He continued, “Does that work, polling-wise? Or is it all in the heads of Republicans?”

    Amandi replied, “Well, Jason, it certainly works in the radicalized fringe segment of the electorate that the MAGA paramilitary cult caters to.” …

    He continued, “The very nature of the American republic was facing a moment of a potential domestic terrorist takeover. And the actions that I think General Milley were taking were trying to deal with a terrorist takeover. And I think frankly until we start speaking in the language of what is front of us – however alarming it may sound like, however dangerous it may be – I don’t think we’re doing justice to the point. I think that means calling Donald Trump what he is. He’s a terrorist. Donald Trump is a terrorist. This radicalized fringe element of what is today’s GOP is using violent threats.”

    Curious that all the “threats” seem to glow in the dark.

    • waffles

      Aside: I’m amazed at how pervasive the term “glowie” has become. And to think it was coined by a schizophrenic programmer (RIP Terry)

      • Festus

        I first heard that on the Clanks.

      • Ownbestenemy

        Is that the Canadian version of Clerks ?

      • Toxteth O'Grady

        Festus isn’t even supposed to be here today!

    • R C Dean

      The idea of overt actions of violence against members of Congress seems to be part and parcel of the current GOP.

      Just ignore all the actual overt actions of violence against members of Congress perpetrated by non-GOPers. Which, as far as I can tell, is all of them in the last 50 years.

  49. Tundra

    Good morning, Sloopy!

    Here’s an incredible and touching story.

    Wow. I’ll say. I’m not sure that would happen today – the surveillance state would make it really challenging. Hopefully we don’t ever find out.

    Excellent song selection. Their music has aged well.

    Have a fantastic day, people!

    • Festus

      I’ll just leave this here – Tundra, you are a sweet man. I don’t dig most of your music selections but you are one of the best of us. I’m happy to have to have met you on these boards. I hope that you keep on keeping on!

      • Tundra

        Wow, thanks Festus! This place is my island of (mostly) sanity and I appreciate You People more than you know.

    • SDF-7

      Excellent song selection. Their music has aged well.

      So you light your torch and wave it for an old tune on Tuesday?

    • rhywun

      *ban on trips to Alabama incoming from San Francisco in 3, 2, 1, …*

      • Ownbestenemy

        If Team Biden had any balls they would put up Federal checkpoints leading out of Alabama. Come on, you know they want to

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      An incredibly dangerous course of action to take.

      • rhywun

        Discovery will be fun. And rather embarrassing for them.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      Rothschild is now representing spouses, children and parents of unvaccinated COVID victims in soon-to-be-filed wrongful death suits against the Disinformation Dozen.

      So let’s see… the vaccine manufacturers are shielded from liability for their product.

      But anyone who questions the safety of that product is liable for harm caused by someone choosing not to take said product.

      I got nuthin’. We’re fully into lunatic territory here.

      • Sean

        We’re fully into lunatic territory here.

        Agreed.

      • Rebel Scum

        Honk honk.

  50. sarcasmic

    I heard Red Tony got the boot. I always liked John, despite the constant disagreement. What’s the story?

    • sarcasmic

      Yes I’m late to the party. As usual. But still….

      • rhywun

        Yeah, that was like three years ago.

    • waffles

      You can get banned?

      • UnCivilServant

        It takes effort to recieve the banhammer.

    • Not Adahn

      Dragging personal fights over/across multiple threads, iirc.

      • sarcasmic

        Hm. One of the reasons I liked the guy was he didn’t appear to hold grudges. Unlike myself. Guess he was human after all.

      • Not Adahn

        The post changes didn’t always align with him being done fighting.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        John is one of those guys whop cannot resist the temptation for ad hominem attacks.

        Reminds me of someone else I know who fantasizes about others’ motivations and then treats those fantasies like reality.

      • sarcasmic

        Mmmm k…

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        I was referring to a relative of mine.

      • trshmnstr the terrible

        There have been a handful of people who got booted or self booted. Almost to a person, they were doing anti-social shit (no shit racism, unrelenting personal attacks, unrelenting shitposting, etc.) and were told to knock it off multiple times before disassociating/being disassociated.

    • Nephilium

      IIRC, direct insults and threats to TPTB.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        At least we know where Reason’s priorities lie.

      • Scruffy Nerfherder

        Ignore that comment. I misread the original post and thought Tony got booted from Reason.

        Need more covfefe.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        I’m late to the party, Who got banned? when did this happen?

      • sarcasmic

        Apparently John aka Red Tony got banned from these Glibs. No idea when. I’m not a regular.

      • Nephilium

        So far… I think only three people total. sarcasmic was asking about John. He of the hatred of bullet proof vests and rational arguments.

      • Yusef drives a Kia

        I remember that, I thought this just happened..
        /carry on.

    • tarran

      Hi sarcasmic!!! Good to see you!

      • sarcasmic

        Howdy. Been a while. I’m gonna try to be a regular here. Reason is really stale.

  51. waffles

    How much do you think it costs to get a Haitian immigrant to the Texas border and then back to Haiti? That has to be thousands at minimum. Somebody is funding this stuff for sure.

  52. Not Adahn

    Change Is Brewing

    Using “brew” as a synonym for “coffee flavored” is boring and unoriginal. They need to use it to indicate beer or chai flavored ice cream too.

    On a related note, Stewart’s pumpkin pie ice creams are yummy. Yes they have multiple kinds.

    • UnCivilServant

      Stewarts started as a dairy, and expanded into the gas station/convenience store market. They still make their own dairy products.

      • Not Adahn

        Oklahoma (and north TX) has Braum’s, which a completely vertically integrated company (at least on the dairy side). If Stewarts is like an upgraded 7/11, Braum’s is like an upgraded McDonalds. They also make the best limeades.

    • Nephilium

      A couple of the local ice cream makers have partnered up with local breweries to do ice cream with the wort (pre-fermented beer) which tastes delicious. If I’m hosting Thanksgiving this year, I’ll probably make a swing at it. Currently thinking about doing a spiced brown ale with some pumpkin puree.

      • sarcasmic

        “the wort (pre-fermented beer)”

        Basically you mean malt, right? Like malted milk balls?

        I made a pumpkin batch once. Spiced brown, but I’m pretty sure I made a lager. Fermented at 50 or so before lagering in a near-freezing keg. Put actual pumpkin into the mash. Might have used 6-row to be on the safe side. Came out great. Started off cloudy but eventually cleared.

      • Nephilium

        Malt is made into wort during the mash. That’s when the starches get converted to sugars. They flavor of the wort ice creams I’ve had did have that nice malted milk ball note in them.

      • sarcasmic

        I thought malt was the barley sugars after the enzymes convert the starches. Semantics. Whatever. We’re in agreement.

        Sounds tasty.

        Someone opened a Caribbean bodega type place in the small town in Maine where I live, and they sell many malt beverages. Not as in fermented. But malty. Like milk balls with fizz.

        Tried one, wasn’t impressed. Will have to try another.

      • sarcasmic

        Vita Malt. I don’t recommend it.

      • sarcasmic

        Seems like a hangover from prohibition. “Whatever you do, don’t add yeast to this!” kind of thing.

      • Nephilium

        You don’t expect pedants here?

        Yeah, I’ve seen the malt beverages on the shelves around. Never had the inclination to try one. I seem to recall Goya has one as well.

      • sarcasmic

        “You don’t expect pedants here?”

        To the tune of the Pink Panther: pedant… pedant… pedant pedant pedant pedidadaaaaaaaaant, pedadiddant…

        Nope. Never.

      • sarcasmic

        Seriously though, if you do a pumpkin ale with pumpkin, here’s my unsolicited advice.

        Go light on the flavor and aroma hops. Let the caramel malt and spices shine through. Use 6-row to eat the pumpkin starches. Expect it to be cloudy for a while. Age it.

    • tarran

      I kind of miss Terry and his attempts to recruit us into his hard-hitting uncompromising Libertarian Militia.

      I wonder why he stopped? I guess the ATF must have transferred him into another ‘investigation’.

    • EvilSheldon

      I’m pretty sure I know the dude second from the left…

      • PutridMeat

        I know the dude

        Like ‘biblically’?

      • EvilSheldon

        You’d think so, wouldn’t you? But no. The Gay Prep look is kind of a turn-off…

      • R C Dean

        “So, hey guys. I’m guessing your with the Pink Pistols? Mad props for supporting the political prisoners, but I hadn’t heard the Pink Pistols were on board. Welcome to the party! I hope you didn’t bring any guns (although with those tight shorts, I don’t see where you would conceal one), because *looks around furtively* I hear there’s feds here.”

      • R C Dean

        I can barely tell them apart. How you can pick one out as somebody you might know is impressive.

      • Stinky Wizzleteats

        He just has a familiar look. I was thinking the same thing and I doubt we’re talking about the same person.

    • WTF

      The memes coming out of that clown show are hilarious.

    • EvilSheldon

      Y’all know I’m not real big on open carry. But if I lived in Afghanistan, I wouldn’t go anywhere without my AK either…

      • ron73440

        Open carry is cool, you should try it.

      • EvilSheldon

        There are appropriate times and places for open carry, just like there are appropriate times and places for wearing leather bondage gear. Outside those times and places, it’s just rude attention seeking.

      • R C Dean

        I completely agree that there are societal expectations about open carry. I don’t regard them as valid or appropriate, but at this point am not willing to challenge them, at least with respect to handguns. Dragging your AK around the grocery store seems . . . unnecessary. For ease of access and variety of handguns, open carry has advantages.

      • EvilSheldon

        It has massive disadvantages as well.

      • ron73440

        For clarification, I OC my pistol everywhere outside of work.

        Was it rude attention seeking at Gourmeltz?

        I think Tonio was the only one to comment on my OC’ing there.

    • Sean

      LOL @ Jr’s tweet.

    • sarcasmic

      I saw that on the Daily Mail. The pic of the guy with the RPG on a tandem paddle boat is priceless.

    • Gadfly

      The guns are to show that they’re not gay. Hanging out with the bros in swan boats without weapons might give people the wrong impression.

    • rhywun

      I didn’t realize it was actual “swan boats”.

      ??

  53. wdalasio

    He believes the hard line in messaging is detrimental and won’t help membership numbers.

    Color me cynical, but I’ve noticed that the people objecting so much to hard-line messaging never seem to have any problem with messaging that gores conservative oxen. If the libertarian message is “attack conservatives and their values, but be respect and defer to progressive sensibilities”, there really isn’t much point to libertarianism. Progressivism isn’t really that much in need of a farm team.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      It’s not the libertarian message but it is the Libertarian message.

    • R C Dean

      Progressivism isn’t really that much in need of a farm team.

      I would say “another farm team”. The Repubs and misc. limpwristed conservatives seem to fill the AAA roster just fine.

    • Akira

      Progressivism isn’t really that much in need of a farm team.

      I gotta say, I never understood the point of libertarians catering to Leftists in any way, shape, or form. They’ll gladly team up with us if it means they get what they want and we make all the concessions. But the second you express misgivings about the federal government mandating gender pronouns, they’ll tell you you’re worse than Hitler and go full attack mode.

      I know there are plenty of hardheaded conservatives out there, but I’d bet money that I could convert a conservative to libertarianism a hell of a lot easier than a “progressive”. Most conservatives (in my Lived Experience™) recognize the threat posed by government and believe in personal liberty, but they carve out way too many exemptions for things that they personally dislike. Almost every “progressive” I’ve met is full-bore authoritarian at the core, and they merely use the language of liberty when it can be useful in getting something they want (taxpayer funded abortions and sex changes, mandatory participation in gay weddings ceremonies, and most recently vaccine passports).

      • R C Dean

        Almost every “progressive” I’ve met is full-bore authoritarian at the core

        Authoritarians want to control behavior that threatens their power.

        Totalitarians want to control your thoughts. Progressives are totalitarians, not authoritarians.

  54. Sean

    https://www.theintell.com/story/news/health/2021/09/21/pfizer-covid-vaccine-safe-children-your-questions-answered/8417739002/

    Pfizer’s clinical trials in children 5 to 11 did not measure the vaccine’s effectiveness against COVID-19. Effectiveness was “never the intended primary endpoint,” Anderson said.

    Instead, they assessed “immunobridging,” which measures the level of immune response in children and compares that to the immune response in adults.

    “This was a study of, ‘Do kids that get this dose have an adequate response similar to adults?’” said Jason Gallagher, clinical professor at Temple University’s School of Pharmacy and a clinical pharmacy specialist in infectious diseases at Temple University Hospital.

    Kids don’t need it.

    All children in the clinical trials were vaccinated, which means there was no placebo group of unvaccinated children to compare to vaccinated children. A clinical trial like this would have delayed authorization well into the next year, Gallagher said.

    Emphasis added. I’m no scientist, but that seems off to me – much like the original trials…

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      It’s a shit study aimed only at receiving expedited approval with little regard for side effects, efficacy, or any kind of cost benefit. First do no harm and all that has gone out the damn window.

    • R C Dean

      Effectiveness was “never the intended primary endpoint,”

      That’s because the way to measure effectiveness is to compare mortality rates in the vaxxed and Unclean test groups. The mortality level in Unclean children is too low to permit this measurement, so they had to invent another one. That’s also why there was no placebo group. I seem to recall the testing on adults was concluded only when there were 1,000 deaths in the control group. To date, there have been maybe 400 deaths of children under 18. Its simply impossible to design a good study for a vaccine there is no real need for.

      So they cooked up a study using a poorly measured second or third order effect of the vax. Oh, and the FDA knows already that the vax itself is more dangerous for males under 40 than the disease. Why this is being allowed at all is a mystery, likely explained by politics and corruption.

    • Scruffy Nerfherder

      ???

  55. Rebel Scum

    Trunalimunumaprzure

    Joe Biden spoke before the UN General Assembly on Tuesday morning.
    It was as awful as you’d expect.

    The American leader coughed and mumbled incoherently through his speech.
    Joe is the laughingstock of the entire world.

    • Stinky Wizzleteats

      Don’t sweat it too much, they’ll 25th him right after the midterms.

      • Rat on a train

        20 January 2023

    • creech

      FDR at Yalta.

  56. Tres Cool

    Tech question (that I think I already know the answer to)- is it possible to brick a printer? Here @ the Palatial 2X-Wide, Jugsy’s Canon MG7520 finally conked out, presenting the dreaded Error B203 . From reading forums, there can be a temporary workaround with a combination of open/closing the cartridge lid during power-up. Following the procedure, things seemed to work as advertised until it turned itself off. And wont turn back on despite multiple power cord plug-ins/un-plugs.

    Did I manage to brick a printer ?

    • UnCivilServant

      Yes, you can brick a printer.

      Congratulations.

      • Tres Cool

        Gee, thanks. I havent destroyed anything in at least a decade, when I played the “overclock game” with a new desktop.

        I lost.

    • Sean

      ?

  57. Sean

    SGammo’s in stock email prices are a buzzkill.

    🙁