From some Dead White Guy:
“Thou hast it now: king, Cawdor, Glamis, all,
As the weird women promised, and, I fear,
Thou play’dst most foully for’t.”
Pat Buchanan has similar, albeit less poetic thoughts on the topic.
Never have the words of the Bard seemed so appropriate:
“Fair is foul, and foul is fair;
Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
See y’all tomorrow. I’m off to the range.
I was also there yesterday, btw:
Just getting the old eye in and trigger finger exercised…
Eat shit, Biden.
When they write the obituary of the Republican Party and, for that matter, the republic itself, they may as well just use this lament in its entirety.
Raised to be a Republican, I held my nose and voted for Bush, the Texas-talking blue blood from Connecticut who lied us into 2 wars and gave us the unpatriotic Patriot Act. I voted for McCain, the sociopathic neocon songbird “hero” that torpedoed the attempt to kill the Obamacare that’s killing my family financially. I held it again and voted for Romney, the vulture capitalist skunk that masquerades as a Republican while slithering over to the Democrat camp as often as they’ll tolerate his oily, loathsome presence.
And I voted for Trump, who, if he did nothing else, at least gave a resounding Bronx cheer to the richly deserving smug hypocrites of DC. Thank you for that Mr. President, on behalf of all of us nobodies. God bless you for it.
And now I have watched as people who hate me and mine and call for our destruction blatantly and openly stole the election and then gaslighted us and told us that it was honest and fair. I am watching as the GOP does NOTHING about it. They’re probably relieved that upstart Trump is gone so they can get back to their real jobs of lining their pockets and running interference for their corporate masters. I am watching as the media, in a manner that would make Stalin blush, is silencing anyone who dares question the legitimacy of this farce they call democracy. I know, it’s a republic, but I am so tired of explaining that to people I might as well give in and join them in ignorance.
I think she’s speaking for all of us.
As Longtime (and, probably, Recent) Readers know full well, intemperate speech is not exactly an unknown event on this here back porch, and I often “permit” (okay, encourage) the same in Comments. But I’m just a guy with a digital megaphone, little different from the loons one would find at Speakers Corner in Hyde Park, London or the average screamer on a city street.
I am not, however, a college “professor” who does the same in a classroom:
The investigation found that Castro would belittle students who disagreed with his religious beliefs or lack thereof. Students alleged that Castro made his political beliefs known in the classroom by saying things such as he “would cut off [former U.S. Attorney General] Jeff Sessions’ head and play soccer with it,” and that he would “hang [President Donald] Trump by [President-elect Joe] Biden’s entrails” for example.
Note that I’m not interested in his Twatter account where he said this:
Castro celebrated the news of Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-Texas) contracting COVID-19 and hoped that President Donald Trump and Vice President Pence would contract the virus too, in addition to calling Trump a “fat klansman.”
That’s his right to say that — Glenn Reynolds once suggested on his private Twatter account that we should run over violent protestors who attacked our cars, and there’s nothing wrong with that, either. (Actually, there’s a great deal correct about it, but we can discuss that another time.)
The minute, however, you subject your students –essentially, a captive audience — to your unhinged ravings and penalize them for disagreement, you should be shown the door, the window, the wall and finally the street as you are tossed out on your tenured ass. (Which, amazingly, Texas A&M are doing to him subject to his appeal, which is also his right.)
There is a clear distinction here between freedom of speech and professorial misconduct. For far too long, students have had to toe the line and simply acquiesce with the antics of such professors even (or especially) when they disagreed with these Marxist loons. My own kids used to tell me about this when they were still at college. (I did no such thing, and for some reason none of my professors ever confronted me when I called attention to their silliness.) So it’s long past time that this conduct was censured — and by the way, as a side issue, tenure should not be treated as a barrier to censure either.
Ditto this asshole (same link):
Alvard was reportedly notified of disciplinary sanctions following the results of the investigation into his classroom conduct and behavior. In the memo, Alvard was charged with “creat[ing] a negative learning environment for some students that materially affected their ability to participate and learn” and that Alvard “failed to deliver instruction and class materials in an unbiased and respectful manner.”
What the hell has happened to Texas A&M?
Then we have another academic fuckwit getting his two cents in:
“Republicans, you should not be allowed to speak about being shocked by President Donald Trump or the recent right-wing raid in Washington, D.C., for your words ring hollow,” wrote Jones, who is the chair of the Pan-African Studies department. “You all should be forced to shut the hell up unless whatever you have to say begins with, ‘I’m sorry.’ You should not be allowed to condemn Trump or attempt to distance yourselves from him unless you begin with, ‘I have helped him, and I’m sorry,’” he wrote.
Ummm who exactly is going to force us to shut up, asshole? You? The federal government?
Actually, I know who he wants to shut us up: Big Tech — Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. — and they’re getting down to that with gusto, the Leftist cocksuckers.
Here’s one little statement for our worthy head of the “Pan-African [whatever that is] Studies” department: We’re not going to distance ourselves from Donald Trump — and by “we”, I mean the 75 million people who voted for him over your senile, fraudulent candidate and his cocksucking accomplice — and we sure as hell aren’t going to apologize to you or anyone else for our support of him.
“When you are living in a totalitarian state, and make no mistake, we are living in a totalitarian state, you have three choices; Submit, nullify by refusing to participate or kill them. There is no grey area and you don’t get to refuse to play.”
Challenge accepted.
When I first visited these United States back in 1982, one of the immediate things I noticed was the sheer size of the market.
I don’t think that people outside the U.S. can quite comprehend the scale of industry of all kinds that native-born Americans pretty much take for granted, if they think about it at all. After the Great Wetback Episode of ’86, I remember watching TV in Longtime Friend Trevor’s place, and snorting with laughter at some car dealer whose claim to fame was that he was “The Largest Chev-lay Truck Dealer in South-East Texas” or some such puffery, and wondering why the geographical area was so tightly defined. As it happened, the dealership was a little outside San Antonio, and one evening I and a few others drove south for an evening’s carousing and passed said Chev-lay dealer’s place.
It was the largest car dealership I’d ever seen. It seemed as though the lot contained well over a thousand cars and trucks, and I was completely gobsmacked. By chance, one of the group was involved in a car dealership — I think in advertising — back in Austin, so I asked her how many times this guy was likely to turn his stock over in a year, thinking that it might take at least a year or maybe even two to sell it all. When she said, “About four or five times a year”, I could not believe her. That would involve selling about 5,000 vehicles a year, or roughly 15 vehicles per day, every single business day of the year. And this was one dealer in a small town (as San Antonio was still back then) — and of course we passed dozens of dealers on our way into town.
Similar discoveries lay ahead — such as the fact that Jewel supermarkets in Chicago was larger in both size and sales than the national chain I’d just left in South Africa (OK Bazaars, for those with long memories) — and just about every week brought more and more.
I ran into a fellow consultant in Chicago, a Belgian who was making a very good living in South America by selling a piece of software he’d discovered in France, and whose franchise he’d purchased for the international (outside Europe) market, as the Frogs weren’t interested in selling outside their home territory. It was the only one of its kind in Europe, so after setting up the easy business in South America, he decided that it was time to try and crack open the U.S. market. He attended an industry conference in Miami, and found to his horror that not only did he have competition, but he had lots of competition from companies selling almost the identical product, and at several different points on the pricing scale withal. He stood absolutely no chance of success, so he slunk back to South America, tail between his legs.
This country is enormous. The scale of business and the size of the market simply boggles the mind, and it’s no surprise that when the Euros try to bully us into using metric, for instance, we can them them to piss off because outside the sciences and drug dealers, the U.S. market prefers to work with Imperial units, thank you very much, and the U.S. market is big enough for the rest of the world, in most cases, not to matter.
I told you all that so I could talk about this.
Via Insty, as usual, I read an interesting article entitled A Nation Divided, which bemoans the fact that not only are we facing a permanent political divide between Right and Left, but we run the risk losing our conservative voice by falling under a Big Tech monopoly as well:
Now, Apple, Amazon, and Google are teaming up to make life extra difficult for Parler, a right-leaning alternative to Twitter. Apple and Google are removing it from their app stores while Amazon, who has been hosting the site, is yanking their hosting.
Now, Parler will migrate over to someone else and be back up and running soon enough, but it’s still troubling. Especially with people being de-platformed and then some of the biggest in the tech industry doing everything they can to shut down the alternative.
I doubt that. Remember that when Roger Ailes came up with Fox News, his selling point to Murdoch was the simplest ever: “Half the market.”
At some point, the Left is going to run away with itself. That outlets like Gab and Parler even exist in the face of a near-monopoly like Twitter shows that half the market is still there to be had.
Okay, to put on my marketing wizard’s pointy hat for a moment: not quite half the market because conservatives have better things to do with their time — like holding down a real job — than to fuck around in a glorified chat room 24/7, but remember what I said above: even a third of the U.S. market is a huge number, and perfectly capable of supporting not only a competitor to Twitter, but to Facebook, GoDaddy and [gasp] even Amazon. Think I’m mistaken about the last? Remember when Kmart was the market leader in mass merchandisers? Not so popular now, are they, thanks to Walmart. Think Walmart is too big to fail? Say hello to Amazon.
And if there’s one thing anyone can bet the house on, it’s that at some point a competitor to Amazon will arise, and put them out of business. After all, General Motors was once the Big Cheese of automotive manufacturing, but as little as a decade ago, they required a government bailout to keep their doors open and since then they haven’t exactly gone back to their position of market eminence.
And apart from crappy financial management, the one thing that causes all big enterprises to fail eventually is losing touch with their market, whether in spirit or by the market changing to a different model.
I showed just the tiniest bit of this a couple of days ago when I talked about disentangling myself from Big Tech, Big Retail and Amazon. Sure, I’m just one guy. But let’s just think about what would happen if the 75 million Trump voters like me did exactly what I was doing — individuals and conservative-minded businesses alike. I would also venture to suggest that when it comes to the conservative market, 75 million is a massive underestimation.
As to who would actually fund all this… I would suggest that Elon Musk is not the only billionaire in town — hell, a bunch of old boys at the Houston Cattleman’s Annual Ball in Houston could probably buy the New York Times with the change rattling around in their pockets, if they wanted to. (FYI, if Mexico’s Carlos Slim wanted continued access just to the Texas market, he’d probably sell his share of the NYT in a NY minute.)
Size matters. There is sufficient size in this country, whether geography, population or commerce, to support two competing visions of America. Would it be easy? Nobody said it would be, but if there’s one thing I have faith in, it’s in that restless American spirit which once said, “When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them…” and I think you know the rest.
Let me also offer the words of John Adams, who when he realized the immensity of the task ahead and the purpose and intellectual powers required, cried: “We have not men sufficient for the times!” Whereupon Jefferson, Madison, Hancock, Washington and several others said, “Hold my beer.”
We also have men sufficient for our time. They just haven’t been motivated enough, yet. But they will be.
Unlike the earlier men, though, the only impediment we face is not external (George III, Russia!!), but internal. That would be when the Left attempts to prevent such a severing, or suppressing competition by passing a series of laws forbidding such.
Allow me then to quote, or rather paraphrase the words of George Washington when he was asked why he was preparing a number of boats to cross the Delaware at midnight on Christmas Eve:
“We are going to murder our enemies in their sleep.”
What amuses me about the whole patriotic “invasion” of the Capitol has been the panicked response from the Establishment. Here are a few examples:
Justice Department warns of national security fallout from Capitol Hill insurrection
“We have to do a full review of what was taken, or copied, or even left behind in terms of bugs and listening devices, etc.,” said Rep. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.), raising the possibility that foreign adversaries could have easily infiltrated the crowd that encircled the Capitol.
You mean, apart from the listening devices already in place, planted by (oh, say) Eric Swalwell’s ChiCom mistress or Dianne Feinstein’s ChiCom chauffeur?
But wait, it gets better:
“If this were an organized, fully intent terrorist group — and there were certainly terrorist activities yesterday, but I mean, al Qaeda style — they could have killed a lot of representatives and god knows what else,” Gallego said.
You mean the terrorist who walked around with Nancy Pelosi’s lectern, or the terrorist who was sitting behind her desk? The whole thing looked more like a college fraternity romp, no matter how scawwwwy it appeared to the timorous at the time.
To be serious for a moment: from all accounts, there were about 200,000 pissed-off Trump supporters in D.C. last Wednesday, of which about 0.001% decided to “invade” the Capitol and disrupt the oh-so august proceedings of certifying the results of a fraudulent election. Imagine if that percentage had been, say, 13% — the percentage of Americans who actually fought in the Revolution under George Washington — and if those 26,000 people had been fully armed and quite intent on overthrowing the government?
But they weren’t, of course. They were, to coin a phrase, mostly peaceful people who just wanted their voices to be heard.
But that seems to have been enough to disturb the Establishment from their everyday job of fucking over the people in this country:
Beyond the security question, this person told me the mob action has been a psychological blow on the DC bureaucracy which didn’t think such an open expression of tangible disrespect for the government was possible. In other words, the capitol mob was a blow to their status, and Washingtonians believe the entire protest represents more than just anger at the election outcome: the disrespectful spirit of the day represents a real threat to their power going forward. This is one reason for the paranoia of Democrats at the moment, and they worry that more such protests are not only possible but likely. Part of the reason there is such fury on the left to run Trump out of office right away is that DC is genuinely afraid of him and his followers.
And here’s a news flash for these pricks: we’re not going away, no matter how hard you try to suppress us.
One last giggle:
Among other things, the fact that apparently some Capitol Police were friendly with the protestors who entered the building have federal bureaucrats wondering whether they can fully trust their own security personnel.
Just remember, socialists: these are also the people whom you are going to send out to try to disarm American citizens.
Good luck with that shit.