In ascending order of hideousness:
Your suggestions in Comments.
The first time the Son&Heir laid eyes on Britishland, it was after a night-time flight from Dallas. As the sun was coming up, he saw the countryside around The Englishman’s Castle (Wiltshire), and his exclamation of: “Look! It’s the Shire! Where’s Pippin’s house?” has since passed into family lore. Here’s a pic of The Englishman’s estate, taken from a nearby hill:
Lately, however, that same view of England’s green and pleasant land looks more like North Texas (except for the horse):
Needless to say, every July in North Texas we generally describe our heat as “sitting inside with the a/c on and a cold drink in hand, watching the lawn die” because for this area, our natural climate is drought; but it has to be an alien feeling for the Brits, who are drinking nettle tea [sic] to help cope with the heat. (I spoke to Mr. Free Market early yesterday morning, and [cue apocalyptic music] he’s actually had to resort to putting ice in his whisky, so bad have things become Over There.)
Of course, come October when we Texans will still be experiencing temperatures in the 90s, the Brits will no doubt be complaining about their fall’s damp chill, and they’ll be booking flights to Spain or Portugal where the weather will be exactly like it is now in Britishland.
Some people are never satisfied.
Still, it must be alarming for people accustomed to verdant green countryside such as this:
…to be suddenly exposed to this:
Oh, and one last thought: this isn’t “climate change”: it’s weather. Talk to me again when the weather’s been like this in Britain for fifty summers in a row, and we can then state with some degree of certainty that the climate is changing.
From Sarah Vine:
“The boss of Amazon’s UK operations claims that Britain will descend into ‘civil unrest’ if we leave the EU without a deal.
“Clearly, the prospect of not being able to position the company’s headquarters in a nice cosy tax haven while taking advantage of free trade to destroy the High Street is starting to get to the poor chap.”
She’s not altogether wrong.
As anyone of a certain age will know, one of the Leftist tropes of the Vietnam War was the statement: “We had to destroy the village in order to save it.” (Yes, I know those weren’t the major’s actual words, but that was what they became, thanks to that bastard Peter Arnett and the rest of the Leftist Anti-War School of Journalism.) It is the expression which draws the glee of the Left because of its apparent paradox.
My, my, how times have changed. In reading this article, I was struck by how the Left (in the persona of Bill Maher, but I bet he isn’t the only one) has come to adopt this trope as its own. Think I’m kidding? Try this:
Bill Maher, high priest of the Smart Set, despises the working class for its rejection of Hillary Clinton. On his June 8, 2018 broadcast, he hoped that the economy “crashes” so Trump will lose in 2020. Maher’s misanthropy is instructive. As Americans find their footing in a much improved labor market, Maher roots for disaster: lost jobs, lost health insurance, lost homes, aborted college educations, divorces, more opioid deaths.
In rooting for disaster, Maher is suggesting that there is salvation in Trump losing, and he doesn’t care how many Americans lose their jobs.
So in other words: he’s prepared to destroy the village in order to “save” it.
Of course, nobody should be surprised at any kind of inconsistency from the Left: if the aim is gaining power, all can be excused — lies, lawbreaking, inconsistency, destruction of long-established institutions, whatever.
Here’s the thing, though. In all the historic instances of the Left actually seizing total power, they always first made sure that they were the ones who had the guns — whether it was the mutinous Russian Army of 1917 which helped the Bolsheviks, the Wehrmacht and SS of Nazi Germany or the murderous Khmer Rouge death squads (to name but some).
That’s not the case here in our America, is it? In fact, the American Left is the side without any guns, which is why they’ve taken great pains to politicize and weaponize government departments which do have guns (the IRS, the CIA, the FBI, etc.) who can oppress and terrorize the Left’s opponents (instead of “enemies foreign and domestic” — an easy thing to do once you’ve demonized your opposition and turned them into the enemy). Which is also why the Left is the party of civilian disarmament: despite their lying protestations to the contrary, they do want to take our guns away from us. Makes it easier for all those Alphabet Agencies, doesn’t it?
I think that’s why I love this meme:
Make no mistake about it: the lion has a very good chance of killing and eating the porcupine — eventually — but at great, perhaps even lethal cost to itself. Now imagine another porcupine with no quills at all; as the lion, which one would you rather tackle?
And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to the range. My AK- and 1911 quills aren’t going to sharpen themselves, you know.
For about ten years now I’ve been taking a multivitamin pill each day — you know, the “Centrum Silver” type for Ye Olde Phartes — but I have to tell you all, I’m not convinced that it does anything.
Reason I’m pondering the topic now is because I just read somewhere that taking fish oil pills (for Omega-3 reasons) is a complete waste of time — the only way fish oil seems to do any good is if you get it from actual fish, which I eat about once a week anyway.
So I ask myself: what about the multivitamin pill? Is it too a waste of money? The consensus around seem to be that at best, it doesn’t do you any harm — but that doesn’t seem to be enough reason to swallow the stuff every day. Or is there any real value to it? (I should point out that I eat a fairly balanced diet, and I’m not sure that I need any more.)
Serious / informed answers only in Comments, please.
Not for the first time, Victor Davis Hanson explains why the Left have become so totally fucking unhinged:
The National Security Council was weaponized and thus unmasked the names of surveilled Americans and leaked their names to the press to undermine the Trump campaign. The Department of Justice was weaponized to ensure Hillary Clinton was exonerated for her misdeeds concerning her email server and quid pro quo collusion with a variety of foreign and domestic influence peddlers and buyers. The FBI and CIA were weaponized to subvert the Trump campaign, by peddling an unverified smear dossier, paid for by Hillary Clinton, by implanting informants into the Trump campaign, and by undermining a FISA court through dishonest presentations of evidence for warrants to spy on American citizens.
All such behavior was assumed to ensure the landslide Clinton victory and thus would be seen as sacrifice beyond the call of duty to be rewarded by a President Clinton not as illegal behavior to be punished during a Trump administration. And as a result, the more culpability that was exposed, the more the culpable went on the offensive—on the theory that constant attack is the best defense against their own criminal liability.
And they lost, and now they’re going to get investigated and people are (I hope) going to go to jail or face massive fines and criminal records or lose their pensions, or all the above (which I hope even more). As Conrad Black puts it:
Now they must remove him, or he will try to imprison them, and in fact, they have almost no chance of removing him. We are doomed to a fierce battle that will end quickly if the Republicans hold the House of Representatives and Trump can get rid of Sessions and Rosenstein and indict his enemies, who have certainly asked for it.
It’s no less than the pricks deserve, and here’s a warning note to AG Sessions: you’d better get it done, or you’ll be lumped in with them for failing to do your duty.