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September 30, 2016
Is there truth to the Bedouin Legend of the Great River in the Desert?
Apart from the oral legend itself, the evidence for an ancient river in the desert is persuasive. Firstly, the earliest maps of the Arabian Peninsula clearly show two major rivers draining the Rub al Khali, one flowing north into the Persian Gulf, the other south into the Arabian Sea. Although drawn in the 15th century, these maps were based on one by Ptolemy made around 150 AD, so essentially reflect the situation 2,000 years ago.
| Ancient Origins
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:23 PM | Your Say (2)
Since Syria became a problem, the “international community” has quietly stopped deeming regimes problematic.
The problem with Assad is that during Arab Spring, the US, aka “the international community” capriciously and whimsically decided he should fall, and he did not fall, which is a slap in the face to “the international community”.
If regimes deemed problematic by “the international community” always fall, then it is a self fulfilling prophecy. If people believe a regime will fall, it will fall. So if Assad does not fall, then other regimes could potentially get away with being deemed problematic by “the international community”. This is Russia’s objective – to deny “the international community” the power and authority to overthrow any regime that displeases it. Aleppo « Jimâs Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:13 PM | Your Say (0)
Think Different
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:29 PM | Your Say (1)
There was no diversity.
There were no ball caps or blue jeans anywhere in sight in the tour group.
There was no diversity. There were no spy cameras on the bus or in the hotel. There were no worries about “terrorism.” There were no color-coded “security alerts.” But there was the certitude of security without those things. Nor on public transit vehicles in 1960 were there any idiotic signs reading “If you see something, say something.” Americans in 1960 had not been trained to swallow such mush, let alone to swallow it as agreeably as they do today.Singing on a Bus « The Thinking Housewife
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:17 PM | Your Say (0)
I’m familiar with a troop of turkey that visit my yard throughout the day
I’ve gotten to know each turkey’s personality …shy …nervous …aggressive … and each turkey is different.
Born that way - it couldn’t be more plain - particular jostles of the turkey genes.
Now, think about humans, yourself and your acquaintances.
- - Living Close To Nature | HappyAcres
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:06 PM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
US to send 600 more troops to Iraq for Mosul offensive A US-led coalition is carrying out air strikes against IS in Iraq,and Washington has already authorized the deployment of more than 4,600 military personnel to the country. Most are in advisory or training roles, working with Iraqi and peshmerga forces, but some American troops have fought IS on the ground, and three members of the US military have been killed by the jihadists in Iraq.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:16 AM | Your Say (5)
Several major universities now offer segregated dorms for black students.
Seems like only yesterday DC was forcing integration on us and demanding unqualified inclusion in all things while telling us how beneficial diversity was.What these terms mean is pretty simple. Diversity means fewer whites. Inclusion means excluding some whites. Segregated dorms for black students means excluding all whites. Taken singly or together, the intent is clear. And so are the consequences. Woodpile Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:49 AM | Your Say (4)
[BUMPED] Your average piece-of-shit Windows desktop is so complex that no one person on Earth really knows what all of it is doing, or how.
and because it’s trying to talk to other programs on the same computer, or over connections to other computers. Even your computer is kind of more than one computer, boxes within boxes, and each one of those computers is full of little programs trying to coordinate their actions and talk to each other. Computers have gotten incredibly complex, while people have remained the same gray mud with pretensions of godhood. Everything Is Broken – The Message – Medium
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:45 AM | Your Say (17)
Have These Idiots Never Been To Vegas?
Look, I’d love to have the male lead in the “Beauty And The Beast” show,but it Is Not Going To Happen because I’m too FAT, too OLD, and not good looking enough. A 5 foot 2 inch 50 year old housewife with a midriff bulge is NOT going to be a showgirl in Vegas either. Nor likely to be serving at the VIP lounge to ‘whales’.So let me get this straight: The “goods” they have on Trump
is that as a businessman running service enterprise for very wealthy clients, he wanted to staff his places with folks who looked good as part of the image of the place? That’s IT? Golly. Guess it’s time to fire Every Single Hiring Manager in Hollywood! I want Brad Pit and Angelina run out of town for being good looking too. | Musings from the Chiefio
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:34 AM | Your Say (2)
Why does time advance? New theory links flow of time with Big Bang
Space is not the only thing expanding, Muller says; spacetime is expanding. And we are surfing the crest of that wave, what we call “now.”“Every moment, the universe gets a little bigger, and there is a little more time, and it is this leading edge of time that we refer to as now,” he writes. “The future does not yet exist … it is being created. Now is at the boundary, the shock front, the new time that is coming from nothing, the leading edge of time.” | 3tags
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:16 AM | Your Say (6)
“The nostril is really where it’s at.”
When I asked both scientists for the worst possible combination, they agreed that a bullet ant to the nostril would probably top the chart for intensity.Schmidt gave the bullet ant a 4 out of 4 on his index and describes the sting as “like walking over flaming charcoal with a three-inch nail embedded in your heel.” Smith found that the two most painful places to be stung are the nostril and the upper lip, followed by the penis shaft. The penis got more attention in press coverage, but Smith says “the nostril is really where it’s at.” This Is the Worst Insect Sting in the World
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:15 AM | Your Say (1)
The Servitude Bubble
There’s gold in them thar hills. Money’s pouring into the tech industry today. Too much money, chasing too few truly groundbreaking investments. And so a bubble is inflating — but not just any bubble. A bubble of an especially insidious kind. Of stuff that’s beyond eyewateringly, painfully, mind-numbingly trivial.I’m going to call it a Servitude Bubble. For the simple reason that it is largely based on creating armies of servants. You can call them whatever buzzwords you like — “tech-enabled always-on super-hustling freelance personal brand capitalists”. But the truth is simpler. The stuff of the Servitude Bubble makes a small number of people something like neofeudal masters, lords with a corncucopia of on-demand just-in-time luxury services at their fingertips. But only by making a very large number of people glorified neo-servants…butlers, maids, chauffeurs, waiters, etcetera. — Bad Words — Medium
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:07 AM | Your Say (0)
All computers are reliably this bad:
the ones in hospitals and governments and banks, the ones in your phone, the ones that control light switches and smart meters and air traffic control systems.Industrial computers that maintain infrastructure and manufacturing are even worse. I don’t know all the details, but those who do are the most alcoholic and nihilistic people in computer security. Another friend of mine accidentally shut down a factory with a malformed ping at the beginning of a pen test. For those of you who don’t know, a ping is just about the smallest request you can send to another computer on the network. It took them a day to turn everything back on. Computer experts like to pretend they use a whole different, more awesome class of software that they understand, that is made of shiny mathematical perfection and whose interfaces happen to have been shat out of the business end of a choleric donkey. This is a lie. The main form of security this offers is through obscurity — so few people can use this software that there’s no point in building tools to attack it. Unless, like the NSA, you want to take over sysadmins. Everything Is Broken – The Message – Medium
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (3)
The Great Enterprise of this age is the Asshole Industry.
The chain-store; the mall; the hypermarket. The corporation; the firm; the partnership. B-school; law school; med school. The boardroom; the backroom; the trading floor.These are, by and large, Asshole Factories. They don’t make people. Capable of great things. Who create and build and touch and soar. They make assholes. They are designed to disinfect us of our fragility. To cleanse us of our flaws. To disinfect us of weakness. Love, grace, mercy, longing, forgiveness, passion, truth, nobility, dreams. Their objective is to stamp all that out; to eradicate it; to erase it. To replace it with calculation, ruthlessness, self-concern; gluttony; cruelty; anxiety, despair. By using the most sophisticated technology ever made to subjugate, oppress, and goad us into being little torturers ourselves. The Asshole Factory — Bad Words — Medium
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:55 AM | Your Say (1)
September 29, 2016
From now until the next debate, every single person who works for Trump should personally insult him several times a day.
Good morning, sir—your business is a total fraud.
Here are those trade stats you wanted—oh and you lied about opposing the war in Iraq.
The Cincinnati airport needs a tail number—why did you “fat-shame” that poor girl?
If he starts to respond, they should say, “No one cares, sir. Tell me how you’re going to stop Mexican drugs from pouring across our border.”
Ann Coulter -- Ann Coulter
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:24 PM | Your Say (35)
Who Says There's No Good News?
16 ISIS terrorists killed due to explosive belt malfunction near Kirkuk - Iraqi NewsPosted by gerardvanderleun at 7:48 PM | Your Say (2)
The Marx Brothers in Posters
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:45 PM | Your Say (0)
Bad Little Children's Books
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:46 PM | Your Say (2)
I often wonder what happened to America’s battle of ideas.
I lift my gaze wistfully from the gutter – where the current debate takes place,nonsensical 140-character arrows hurled back and forth over a pile of garbage – to contemplate dejectedly the past when the titans of American thought sat astride our purple mountains, rallying a nation to the orbit of their conviction and the consequence of their immense talent. A colossal contest it was, the minds of noble men wrestling with each other over the soul of the greatest nation on earth. They built agendas, waged campaigns and organized coalitions – the clamoring of the populace serving to enhance the volume of the debate, lending it energy and purpose if not substance; for that they already had. Garrett, Rand, Galt And The Fun Of Writing | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:28 PM | Your Say (1)
Huxley got it right and Orwell got it wrong.
The authoritarian model imagined in 1984 could never last because it had to rely on force and the math always works against such a system.The violence required to hold it together eventually exceeds the systems capacity for violence. The Huxley model of a world populated by infantilized adults, cheerfully engaged in busy work requires much less coercion from the state and it has a higher carrying capacity. It turns out that the future is not “a boot stamping on a human face – forever.” The future is a conference call on which a cheery 30-something says things like “progressively coordinate functional strategic theme areas” – forever. Carnival of Nonsense
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:41 AM | Your Say (6)
September 28, 2016
But let's not jump to conclusions....
Two men seen removing undetonated bomb from suitcase left on Manhattan street 'by chicken shop terrorist' identified by FBI as 'Egyptian pilots who have left the U.S.'Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:20 PM | Your Say (5)
A tune that helped me sort out politics
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:40 AM | Your Say (2)
Two Left. Time to Stock Up!
Matthew Criscione, a grower rep at Oregon's Finest, suggests this indica dominant strain from So Fresh, "so we can open our minds and still our bodies and not run away when it gets scary."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:34 AM | Your Say (4)
September 27, 2016
Note on the Comments
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:24 PM | Your Say (5)
New Woodpile Locked, Loaded, Stacked, Racked, and Put to the Torch
So here's what we have. Community organizers put on a movable street party for the 'hood featuring assault, arson and looting with optional Tiananmen Square-like posing for the paparazzi, the congressman counters with a civics scold cribbed from a 1950s educational filmstrip, gets a fist in the face then tearfully apologizes for being insufficiently polite and deferential. You pick the winner. ==>> Woodpile Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (2)
Isaiah speaks of tonight's debate
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:10 AM | Your Say (7)
September 26, 2016
Ah, Communism! This time… it’ll work!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:58 PM | Your Say (7)
The great advantage of the Little Space culture is that every mission is cheap enough to fail.
Planet Labs and other start-up companies have proved that the Little Space culture is ready to take over a large share of future unmanned activities in space.The question remains open whether the Little Space culture can have a similarly liberating effect on manned missions. Can we expect to see manned missions becoming radically cheaper, so that we can travel with our machines at costs that ordinary people or institutions can afford? Neither Big Space nor Little Space shows us a clear path ahead to the fantasy worlds of science fiction, where bands of brave pioneers build homes and raise children among the stars. The Green Universe: A Vision by Freeman Dyson
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:20 PM | Your Say (0)
Many believe it is possible safely to arrive at nuclear zero.
Try to find that in the vastness of Russia, China, or Iran. Even ICBMs and their transporter-erector-launchers can easily be concealed in warehouses, tunnels and caves. Nuclear weapons age out, but, thanks to supercomputing, reliable replacements can be manufactured with only minor physical testing. Unaccounted fissile material sloshing around the world can, with admitted difficulty, be fashioned into weapons. And when rogue states such as North Korea and Iran build their bombs, our response has been either impotence or a ticket to ride.The Gathering Nuclear Storm - WSJ
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:37 PM | Your Say (1)
Generation Meathead
These are the Early Boomers, the first wave that we generally associate with the madness of the late 60’s and early 70’s. That means if you are a young alt-right trouble maker, you only have another decade or so to put up with degenerates like Rob Reiner. This realization may be at the heart of the hysteria we see in the ruling class. Rasping geezers like Hillary Clinton look around and see their time is just about done. They also see that what is forming up behind them is a giant cultural eraser, ready to rub out any trace of what her cohort leaves behind. Her “Basket of Deplorables” are young dudes and dudettes in hazmat suits, ready for cleanup. | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:59 PM | Your Say (4)
This is the age of Morlock America, and of course the Morlocks don’t even know why they are called that.
So it comes as no surprise that those who would demand equality, as if it were some trick or treat candy, argue how important their diversity is as they block highways knowing full well that walking across freeways and fighting cops gets one killed. - CobbPosted by gerardvanderleun at 12:55 PM | Your Say (0)
On the hidden horrors of Soviet life.
From my first salary I bought myself a new suit. . . . Our work was no picnic! Whenever someone wasn’t dead immediately, he fell over and squealed like a pig. . . . You weren’t allowed to eat anything beforehand. . . . You shoot with the right hand, you see . . . I pushed through my demand for a massage of the right arm and the right index finger twice a week with my superiors. We were given certificates. . . . I have a whole cabinet of these certificates, printed on the best paper. . . . Everyone had only one thought: . . . we too. . . . I always had a packed plywood suitcase under my bed . . . and pistol under my pillow. To put a bullet in my head. . . . They will call Stalin a great man someday. The hatchet outlives its master. - - New Criterion
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:37 PM | Your Say (0)
The trans push is geared towards the college-educated and the strivers.
Poor people do not know they can earn virtue and holiness points by chopping their son’s balls off or making their daughter a hairy beast.
The children of poor folk will be damaged in other progressive-approved ways, namely single motherhood, drug availability, or obesity. Middle and upper class kids, on the other hand, interact with the trans push and so can be seriously damaged. It just has to work at the margins, but if 1% embrace the experiment, it has obvious ripple effects on their friends, family, employers etc., first by having to tolerate, and then accept and praise.
The basic problem is that the very university and hospital that pioneered surgery for gender reassignment stopped doing it. They found no benefit. It did not help their patients. There was no benefit for the psychological issues underneath the surface and in their patients’ minds. This same psychiatrist that wrote the WSJ op-ed also wrote that trans people are suffering a mental disorder. The Medicalization Of Frankenstein Politics
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:35 PM | Your Say (2)
Soon to Star in "Gods and Generals and Goofballs"
I see @letterman has entered the civil war re-enactment stage of retirement. pic.twitter.com/SsPQpVeiZT
— Katy Tur (@KatyTurNBC) September 26, 2016
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:35 PM | Your Say (0)
Bet You Can't Eat Just One
with the robed figure of death depicted on the front and, on the reverse, this challenge: "Do you dare to go to hell and back?" You get one—that's right, ONE—standard-size chip per package. That's because this particular snack is spiced with fearsome Carolina Reaper peppers, widely touted as the hottest variety on Earth, topping the Scoville Heat Chart at 2.2 million SHUs. (Suck it, Trinidad Moruga Scorpion! Don't strain your stem looking up from second place!)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:51 AM | Your Say (2)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:45 AM | Your Say (14)
September 25, 2016
Scott Adams: Why I Switched My Endorsement from Clinton to...
I don’t understand the policy details and implications of most of either Trump’s or Clinton’s proposed ideas.
Neither do you. But I do understand persuasion. I also understand when the government is planning to confiscate the majority of my assets. And I can also distinguish between a deeply unhealthy person and a healthy person, even though I have no medical training. (So can you.) Scott Adams' Blog — Why I Switched My Endorsement from Clinton to...
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:33 PM | Your Say (4)
The strategy of "by any means necessary" appeals to the militants confident they possess the truth and are on the 'right side of history'.
"By any means necessary" is a translation of a phrase used by the French intellectual Jean-Paul Sartre in his play Dirty Hands.It entered the popular civil rights culture through a speech given by Malcolm X at the Organization of Afro-American Unity Founding Rally on June 28, 1964. It is generally considered to leave open all available tactics for the desired ends, including violence." The problem is that the strategy works when only one side employs it. When both sides employ it equally they become locked in a race to the bottom. They Had to Improve It | PJ Media
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:23 AM | Your Say (2)
America's Least Wanted
The mugshot was attached to a card inside a manila envelope that included the typewritten text: 'A closed-mouth negro, probably committing burglaries. Allegedly stole several pairs of stockings.' 'It was more than a photo,' Michaelson told Collectors Weekly. 'It was a collage, an artifact, a ready-made, and a work of Pop art—all my fetishes combined. 'The opening bid was $5, and I won the auction without competition. I was hooked.'
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:01 AM | Your Say (0)
September 24, 2016
I don't write the headlines. I just report them.
Hillary: Demonic Possession or Natural Depravity?Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:57 PM | Your Say (5)
From somewhere, re oppression in Charlotte:
- There's a Black President
- There's a Black Congressman
- There's a Black Chief of Police
- There's a Black District Attorney
- There's a Black Mayor until 2014 (Jailed)
- There's a Black Officer who pulled a trigger
- There's a Black Man Dead of that gunshot wound
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:53 PM | Your Say (5)
Why do I love poetry so much?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:19 PM | Your Say (3)
This election represents a secret war. The Red pilled versus the blue pilled.
will be crying himself to sleep in 5 years when his wife is out late again getting turnt up and posting pics of her dancing with someone vibrant. This is not fear-mongering. This is reality. Why people shoot their own self-interests in the foot to appear virtuous is beyond me. I understand that humility and giving are noble virtues. But blue pilled people don’t have any virtues, they just want to *signal* virtues. They want someone on facebook to like their post…and that’s about it. - - | Chateau Heartiste
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:15 AM | Your Say (0)
I don't write the headlines. I just report them.
Family flee deadly banana spiders that can either kill or give you an erection lasting FOUR HOURSPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:49 AM | Your Say (4)
I don't write the headlines. I just report them.
Billions of 'super fleas' with giant penis set to invade homes in Plymouth | Plymouth HeraldPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:31 AM | Your Say (1)
I don't write the headlines. I just report them.
Marley Mills said this has been a recurring event in her Brandon, Florida home. “He’s hopping from side to side and I’m freaking out screaming,” she said. “He will be up under here – like squished up.” Mills said it’s happened to everyone in her family, and at first she got a kick out of it. “Sat down and noticed there was a frog up under him… scared him to death. I loved it!” she said. But then it happened to her about seven times in the past two months.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:21 AM | Your Say (2)
Is it lawful self-defense to “run down” rioters surrounding your vehicle?
if the protestors attempt, or reasonably appear to attempt, to forcibly enter the blockaded vehicles, this would constitute reasonable grounds to fear an imminent deadly force attack.Such conduct would include the smashing of windows or attempts to force open doors. The same applies to attempts to set vehicles on fire, or to flip vehicles over. Note that a defender need not necessarily wait until the protestors have turned violent against his particular vehicle. If they have begun threatening or using deadly force against other blockaded vehicles it is reasonable to infer that your own vehicle is likely to be next — you are, after all, legally entitled to defend yourself not just against the danger already occurring to you but also against the danger that is about to occur, that is imminent.a title="Analysis: Is it lawful self-defense to ârun downâ rioters surrounding your vehicle?" href="http://legalinsurrection.com/2016/09/analysis-is-it-lawful-self-defense-to-run-down-rioters-surrounding-your-vehicle/"> - - Legal Insurrection
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:07 AM | Your Say (6)
September 23, 2016
All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there.
stating that there is “surprising activity” on Europa – the most well known of Jupiter’s 67 moons. NASA has been analysing data from its Hubble Space Telescope which is currently prowling the universe. The space experts said in a statement announcing the event on Monday, to be broadcast live at 7PM UK time: “Astronomers will present results from a unique Europa observing campaign that resulted in surprising evidence of activity that may be related to the presence of a subsurface ocean on Europa.”
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:18 PM | Your Say (3)
Just Clearing Out Today's Trump Hillary Tabs
Clinton's eyes — a window into her health issues Trump is headed for a win, says professor who has predicted 30 years of presidential outcomes correctly HEALTH WATCH: Hillary Clinton Dodges Question on Brain Testing Reconsidering My Opposition to Trump Conan Spoofs Hillary Clinton’s Health Problems Interview Never NeverTrump: Not Voting Trump Is Republican SuicidePosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:06 AM | Your Say (2)
I’m All Blacked Out
I’ve simply had enough. I’m all blacked out.
I’m tired of the blame shifting and excuse making. I’m tired of seeing people, who know better, lying to me on TV. Those rich sportsball talkers ain’t living in my neighborhood. They are as far away from the Black Lives Matter types as possible. They live in gated communities with the honkies. Their honky cohorts on TV are not even driving through my neighborhood. They are despicable hypocrites, who deliberately say things on television that make our lives worse.
Black America does not have a race problem. It ain’t honkies robbing, looting and killing in the ghetto. They don’t have a cop problem. The cops shoot fewer black offenders than white offenders. They don’t have a gun problem either. Black America has a black guy problem. They have far too many black guys robbing, looting and killing, almost always doing so at the expense of blacks. They won’t let me fix that problem, so stop demanding I feel bad about it. I’m done. I’m all blacked out. | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:38 AM | Your Say (3)
Amazed that even at this late date a new religion can be born....
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:11 AM | Your Say (4)
“This is the unpollable election,”
People don’t want to tell you who they’re for. A lot aren’t sure. A lot don’t want to be pressed."That’s exactly what I’ve seen the past few weeks in North Carolina, New Jersey, Tennessee and Minnesota. Every four years I ask people if they’ll vote, and if they have a sense of how. Every four years they tell me—assertively or shyly, confidently or tentatively. This year is different. I’ve never seen people so nervous to answer..... The most arresting sentence of the week came from a sophisticated Manhattan man friendly with all sides. I asked if he knows what he’ll do in November. “I know exactly,” he said with some spirit. “I will be one of the 40 million who will deny, the day after the election, that they voted for him. But I will.” The Year of the Reticent Voter - WSJ
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:37 AM | Your Say (2)
September 22, 2016
Sold!
Built in the high-performance dual magnetic speakers, enjoy the powerful bass and treble fullness while listening to music. Speaker come in hand while walking, biking, hiking and camping, feel the vitality of youth and beauty. Enjoy the amazing sound quality with no radiation, close your eyes and let your mind relax... Amazon.com: LEFON Mutifunctional Dual Channel Digital FM Radio Media Speaker MP3 Music Player Support TF Card / USB Disk with LED Screen Display and Clock
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:47 PM | Your Say (5)
{Bumping Up} My Iron Law of Hats: "Men look cool in very few hats. Women look cool in all hats."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:46 PM | Your Say (16)
I Was RFK’s Speechwriter. Now I’m Voting for Trump. Here’s Why
in all the years of the so-called War on Terror, only one potential American president has had the intelligence,the vision, the sheer sanity to see that America cannot fight the entire world at once; who sees that America’s natural and necessary allies in this fight must include the advanced and civilized nations that are most exposed and experienced in their own terror wars, and have the requisite military power and willingness to use it. Only one American candidate has pointed out how senseless it is to seek confrontation with Russia and China, at the same time that we are trying to suppress the very jihadist movements that they also are attacking. . - POLITICO Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:20 AM | Your Say (0)
Reminder: The Left is Always Composed of Murderers-In-Waiting
On the hidden horrors of Soviet life.Between 1825 and 1905, the tsars executed 191 people for political reasons—not for mere “suspicion” as under the Soviets but for actual assassinations, including that of Tsar Alexander II. In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked that between 1905 and 1908 the regime executed as many as 2,200 people—forty-five a month!—“calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others.” By comparison, conservative estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin—say, twenty million from 1917 to 1953—yield an average of over ten thousand per week. That’s a tsarist century every few days.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:01 AM | Your Say (0)
The U.S. has relied on flawed forensic-evidence techniques for decades, falsely convicting many.
Rejecting Voodoo Science in the Courtroom - WSJAs for past convictions obtained through discredited methods, the outlook remains grim. A 1997 Justice Department inspector-general report impugned 13 FBI lab examiners involved in more than 7,600 cases, including 64 capital cases. But, as John Malcolm of the Heritage Foundation points out, a 2014 Justice Department inspector-general report shows that only 312 of these cases had been reviewed in the past 17 years.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:00 AM | Your Say (1)
New Jersey is a map of Muslim terror plots because of its huge Muslim population.
11 of the 19 September 11 hijackers hung out in Paterson (known colloquially as Paterstine).Head toward Jersey City and you can see where Muslim enemies of this country stood on rooftops and cheered the attacks on September 11. It’s also where the World Trade Center bombing mastermind and the Blind Sheikh who provided religious guidance for a proposed wave of Islamic terror operated.
Go south and in Elizabeth you can pass the First American Fried Chicken joint where the Rahami clan made life miserable for their American neighbors before one of their spawn began his bombing spree. Sultan Knish: Muslim Refugee Terror is Changing America
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:55 AM | Your Say (4)
Is It Here to Stay?
To be sure, baby-boom rock was, and still is, an important part of the story of postwar America’s transvaluation of all values.
Such songs as “My Generation” (“I hope I die before I get old”), Jefferson Airplane’s “Volunteers” (“One generation got old/One generation got soul”) and Buffalo Springfield’s “For What It’s Worth” (“Young people speaking their minds/Getting so much resistance from behind”) served as its soundtrack. But to revisit them now is to be struck by their political naiveté—as well as the immaturity of the musicians who wrote them. | commentary
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:35 AM | Your Say (2)
In the Second Term of the First Black President, Rioting Is the New Normal https://t.co/DSYeTRlt5M pic.twitter.com/XvtH9W8khh
— Something I Said? (@Van_der_Leun) September 22, 2016
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:21 AM | Your Say (0)
September 21, 2016
It is not that Trump really understands or has thought deeply about the Constitution
but he is trying to do something fundamentally constitutional in my opinion.He wants to assert the right of the sovereign American people to control their government, which is the core constitutional principle. I think he understands this in an instinctive rather than intellectual way. But that’s OK because, one, most of the people who claim to understand it, don’t; two, most of those (very few) who do understand it are ineffectual at defending it; and three, nobody has really tried to do what Trump is doing in a generation. So who cares if his understanding is flawed? An Interview with Decius - American Greatness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:50 PM | Your Say (6)
September 20, 2016
Reporting on the Woodpile Report
It's looking like 1860 in America, or the Fourth Turning, or the fourth canvas of The Course of Empire , or the End Times prophesied in Christian eschatology. To get the flavor of what's ahead, consider this statement from a sitting Governor, quoted from the Independent Sentinel: Kentucky Governor Matt Bevin said Republicans might have to fight to win back rights that were lost if Hillary wins. “I want us to be able to fight ideologically, mentally, spiritually, economically, so that we don't have to do it physically,” Bevin said.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:47 AM | Your Say (5)
You Can Follow a Hidden Stream Beneath Indianapolis—If You Know Where to Look
It was very quiet inside, Hyatt says, except when surface sounds echoed through the tunnel. “A car going over a grate is like a giant, huge, reverberating thunder cloud. The train track is incredibly loud. It echoes forever, and it's incredibly creepy.” | Atlas Obscura
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:59 AM | Your Say (0)
Yelp reviews of bomber's restaurant
They use their own custom-made pressure cookers, which looked unusual to me, because of all of the wires attached, but I assure you, they produce delicious chicken, detonating a blast of flavor with every bite! Feel free to dine in, or order delivery. They deliver as far away as Chelsea, Seaside Park, and the Verrazano Bridge, and their whole family will come along for the ride to make sure the delivery gets to you hot and fresh! They also cater large parties and events. The larger the crowd, the better!UPDATE: Ordered delivery. Delivery guy dropped a smoking backpack on the ground and ran away. Will not order again.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:42 AM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
U.S. Warplanes Mowed Down Dozens of Syrian Troops What’s unclear is how the warplanes could have mistaken the Syrian troops for Islamic State fighters.Around 5 p.m. on Sept. 17, two A-10 Warthog ground attack jets, a drone and two F-16 fighters began attacking the Syrian troops around six kilometers south of Deir ez-Zor airport, according to the Russian military. Australian jets were also involved in the strikes, according to the Australian Department of Defense.Of course it will be a long, long series of "regrettable mistakes" when Russia starts shooting down any American planes in Syrian airspace.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:30 AM | Your Say (8)
The “conservatives” have at least two motives for band-wagoning with this nonsense.
One is that they simply don’t understand higher principle anymore, because their whole mindset is unconsciously leftist, so they believe that everything the Left calls “racist” is in fact racist.Oppose more immigration? Racist! Don’t believe the police systematically try to kill blacks? Racist! The other is simple cowardice. Conservatives are terrified of being called racist. I don’t know if this is bad conscience or what—maybe at heart they really believe it? Maybe living in all-white neighborhoods perhaps makes them feel guilty. But being called out for it scares them above all so they are always desperate to make public declarations of their purity as non-racists. They think they will get credit from the Left, which of course they never do, but that never stops them from trying. An Interview with Decius - American Greatness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:49 AM | Your Say (1)
A Description of a Hillary Clinton Presidency
Russian language media columnists – in Russia – are now analogizing Hillary Clinton to Leonid Brezhnev.What they mean by this is: a) a sclerotic and rapidly aging person who is steadily sliding into dementia; and, b) while presiding over a reactionary regime of careerist mediocrities ruling over a stagnated and failing political economy and society. – Jerry Pournelle
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:57 AM | Your Say (0)
September 19, 2016
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:09 PM | Your Say (0)
Hitchens was onto the Clinton schtick as early as 1992
Christopher Hitchens on why testified in the Lewinsky case |I had become utterly convinced, as early as the 1992 campaign, that there was something in the Clinton makeup that was quite seriously nasty. The automatic lying, the glacial ruthlessness, the self-pity, the indifference to repeated exposure, the absence of any tincture of conscience or remorse, the awful piety—these were symptoms of a psychopath. And it kept on getting worse and worse—but not for Clinton himself, who could usually find a way of sacrificing a subordinate and then biting his lip in the only gesture of contrition he had learned to master. (After reading the testimony of Juanita Broaddrick, I’ll never be able to think of his lip biting in the same way again. But no doubt Arthur Schlesinger will be on hand to assure us that all men lie about rape.)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:08 PM | Your Say (3)
Bring in a big minimum wage and kiss your jobs buh-bye.
The retail giant joins other companies like Foxconn and Wendy’s, which both made headlines earlier in 2016 for making similar workforce decisions.
Foxconn’s casualties were the most pronounced, as the electronics maker cut some 60,000 factory jobs and replaced them with machines. And Wendy’s cited the rising cost of labor and competition among fast food chains as motivation for its own decision to replace some cashiers with kiosks. After all, how much friendly service are you really expecting with your burger and fries? - - Walmart is cutting 7,000 jobs due to automation, and it's not alone
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:24 AM | Your Say (3)
PowerLine's John Hinderaker: "Electoral College Math, and Why I Think Trump Will Win"
A company came out with a new dog food, and hired an advertising firm to promote the product. The ad agency placed commercials on television and ads in magazines; millions of dollars went into the campaign. The commercials and ads were first-rate, but still the dog food did not sell. The client called a meeting at the ad agency and demanded to know what had gone wrong. After a moment of silence, the leader of the ad agency team explained: “The dogs don’t like it.”Hillary Clinton can be re-launched, re-packaged, and protected by a phalanx of reporters. The liberal establishment can do its best to jam her down our throats. But we–the voters–don’t like her. | Power Line
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:58 AM | Your Say (3)
September 18, 2016
The kidlets, as I call them, were raised on a diet of racism-this and equality-that
and that’s-not-who-we-are, so they can’t process anything that seems to contradict the narrative. To them “conservatism” is the 1980 campaign’s economic platform spot-welded to Millennial identity politics and sexual libertarianism. Freedom! An Interview with Decius - American GreatnessPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:55 PM | Your Say (0)
And Taking the Gold Medal in the Category of "Regrettable Tattoos" is....
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:32 PM | Your Say (10)
The Greater Depression
The appalling optics of Americans waiting in food lines and/or living on the streets is not being broadcast by the mainstream corporate media, as their duty is to sustain the establishment narrative of economic recovery at any cost.As I drive to work through West Philly, every Thursday the Grace Lutheran Church at 36th & Haverford Ave. distributes food to the local community and the line at 7:30 a.m. in the morning extends around the block. This scene is duplicated in crumbling urban enclaves and deteriorating suburban municipalities across the land. Food banks and homeless shelters throughout the country are being inundated by those who haven’t benefited from the Fed’s QE and ZIRP “Save a Wall Street Banker” monetary schemes. One in seven Americans – 46 million people – rely on food pantries and meal service programs to feed themselves and their families. - - | Zero Hedge
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:44 AM | Your Say (6)
September 17, 2016
The Downfall of ESPN
Now that both college and adult football seasons are underway again,there’s a good chance you’re tuning back into the monopolized Disney Channel of sports to snag a highlight or two, or to just enjoy a bit of visual elevator music while you check your email. But I don’t recall the onetime pinnacle of masculine athletic entertainment being comprised almost entirely of diversity-panel bloviating and celebrity TMZ-style gossip. It is fucking unwatchable garbage. Bright title sequences and stat charts zipping across the screen while gum-chewing, high-heel wearing Millennialettes talk about special teams and third down conversions. And it’s all adorned by a subtle musical score of sterile techno beats, a tactic stolen from drive-time radio which tends to distract viewers and listeners from brazenly uninteresting content. - STREET CARNAGE
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:21 PM | Your Say (5)
Soon, after 100 years, Mr. Israel Kristal will finally become a man
World’s Oldest Man to Have Bar Mitzvah - Neatorama During World War II, Kristol’s two children died during the family’s confinement in the Lodz ghetto.He and his wife were sent to Auschwitz in 1944, where she died. When the Red Army liberated Auschwitz in 1945, Kristol weighed only 37 kilograms (81 pounds). Within a few years, he remarried, emigrated to Haifa, Israel, and had two more children. He now has dozens of descendants. And soon he will have the bar mitzvah he was denied during the Great War. His daughter, Shulamith Kristal-Kuperstoch, told CNN that Kristal's long-delayed bar mitzvah would be held close to his Hebrew birthday, which falls this year on October 2.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:44 PM | Your Say (3)
Amazon reviews of Hillary's new book
But just as I got started, I found myself under sniper fire, passed out, and fell and hit my head. After that I got double vision and had to wear glasses that were so damn thick I couldn't even see to read. Then I had an allergic reaction to something and started coughing so hard I spit out what looked like a couple of lizard's eyeballs, my limbs locked up, and I passed out and fell down again, waking up only to find out I had been diagnosed with pneumonia 2 days earlier. Somehow I managed to power through it all, but it's a good thing I was able to make a small fortune on this random small trade in the commodities market (cattle futures or some such thing) and then, miracle of all miracles, a few banks offered me a few million to just talk to their employees for a few minutes - and all that really helped out because I swear I was dead broke and couldn't figure out how I was gonna come up with the 6 bucks to pay for this book, let alone pay the $1,500 for my health insurance this month. I still want to read it, but, honestly, what difference at this point does it make? I hear it sucks anyway. - - Don Surber:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:23 AM | Your Say (3)
September 16, 2016
Unclear on the concept of hide and seek.
Ready or not, here I come!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:56 PM | Your Say (4)
It's Probably Nothing:
National Interest says the payload weighs ten tons and could carry 15 warheads: ... the Sarmat is being designed specifically to overcome ballistic missile defenses using a combination of decoys, a host of countermeasures and sheer speed. It might also be equipped with maneuvering warheads—which would make it much more difficult to intercept. Russia has a robust, and accelerating, bomb shelter building program. One of 'em in the Ural Mountains is 400 square miles. Underground. Where are our shelters? Anyone? Woodpile Report
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:32 PM | Your Say (5)
The most blatant attempt by the ruling class to subvert the truth regarding our ongoing depression
is the despicably absurd propaganda churned out by the government apparatchiks at the Bureau of Labor Statistics.With a working age population of 253.9 million people and only 151.6 million of them employed (27 million part-time, 15 million self-employed, 7 million working multiple jobs and worst of all 22 million government workers), the BLS has the gall to report only a 4.9% unemployment rate. There are 102.3 million working age Americans not working, but only 7.8 million of them are unemployed according to the highly educated establishment lackeys at the BLS. The other 94.5 million non-working Americans must be frolicking in the surf, sipping margaritas and counting the millions they’ve made in the rigged Wall Street casino. The Greater Depression - Part 1
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:47 PM | Your Say (16)
Hey, remember how well it worked last time the our society declared war on a commonly used recreational plant with many medical uses and few side effects?
No? Well, the DEA certainly does,which is why they’ve decided to expand the drug war by making kratom a Schedule 1 substance. If you feel like doing something meaningless, there’s a petition you can sign. | Slate Star Codex
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:51 PM | Your Say (4)
If one is of the revolutionary mind, you cannot help but look at the managerial class as an occupying force,
a foreign colonial bureaucracy.It’s not that they are bad or evil. It’s that they are so foreign and detached. Walk onto an elite college campus and you, as a Dirt Person, feel as if you are in a foreign country. Spend time in the Imperial Capital and you get some sense of what it was like to be a Hindu during the British Raj. - -Travelogue: The Imperial Capital
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:30 PM | Your Say (0)
NFL Suffers Ratings Drop After Pandering To The SJW Narrative
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:35 AM | Your Say (0)
Which means that Trump, right now, is right and the conservatives are wrong.
His moderate program of secure borders, economic nationalism, and America-first foreign policy—all things that liberals and conservatives alike used to take for granted,if they disagreed on implementation—holds the promise of fostering more unity. But today, liberals are apoplectic at the mere mention of this program—controlling borders is “extreme” but a “borderless world” is the “ultimate wisdom”—and the Finlandized conservatives aid them in attacking the candidate who promotes it. Conservatives claim to deplore the way the Democrats slice and dice the electorate, reduce it to voting blocs and interest groups, and stoke resentments to boost turnout. But faced with a candidate explicitly running on a unity agenda they insist he is too extreme to trust with the reins of power. One wants to ask, again: which is it, conservatives? Is Trump to be rejected because he is too moderate or because he is too extreme? The answer appears to be that it doesn’t matter, so long as Trump is rejected. Restatement on Flight 93
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:12 AM | Your Say (1)
"Mars [stil] ain't no place to raise your kids."
NASA's Curiosity rover has been exploring the lower portion of Mount Sharp on Mars, and it’s just sent back a handful of colour images that give us unprecedented views of the strange rock formations on the Red Planet. As you can see from the images below, Mars looks oddly familiar, and it’s gotten scientists pretty excited. "Curiosity's science team has been thrilled to go on this road trip through a bit of the American desert Southwest on Mars," says Curiosity project scientist, Ashwin Vasavada.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:57 AM | Your Say (2)
Revisiting The House of God
The House of God found it difficult to let some young terminal guy die without pain, in peace.Even though Putzel and the Runt had agreed to let the Man With Agonal Respirations die that night, his kidney consult, a House red-hot Slurper named Mickey who’d been a football star in college, came along, went to see the Agonal Man, roared back to us and paged the Runt STAT. Mickey was foaming at the mouth, mad as hell that his “case” was dying.... Mickey called a cardiac arrest. From all over the House, terns and residents stormed into the room to save the Man With Agonal Respirations from a painless peaceful death. (p. 245) Practicing Medicine - The New Atlantis
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:52 AM | Your Say (0)
What's a Clover?
* Clover (noun):The root cause of every affront to liberty. The spoonful of poo that ruins a gallon of ice cream. Clovers are instinctive authoritarian control freaks. They can be found on the political left and the political right and in between. They do not believe in live and let live. They believe in telling others how to live -- using violence and threats of violence to coerce obedience. - - EPautos
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (4)
September 15, 2016
it would not be technologically challenging to eliminate all mammalian life in Iran
through a combination of nuclear blasts, EMP attacks on the electrical system,delivery of "dirty bombs" into water supplies, and so forth. That is not the sort of thing that governments should go bragging about, but in Mr. Netanyahuâs position, I would arrange for an obscure but respected think tank to publish a report on the subject in the style of the late Herman Kahn. Hezbollahâs horror weapon and its remedy â Asia Times
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:41 PM | Your Say (1)
You'd think this would not end well. And you'd be right.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:17 PM | Your Say (0)
I guess you can say that "Hillary's new book is literally lying on the shelves."
Nobody wants Hillary Clinton's new bookHillary Clinton's newest book is a certifiable flop by the publishing industry's standards, The New York Times reports. Stronger Together sold only 2,912 copies in its first week of sales according to Nielsen BookScan, which charts about 80 percent of nationwide physical book sales. By comparison, Clinton's 2014 memoir Hard Choices, which also didn't meet expectations, sold over 85,000 copies in its first week, and Clinton's 2003 memoir, Living History, sold six times as many copies as Hard Choices.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:40 PM | Your Say (4)
More people die in their government jobs than get fired.
No one ever quits, because there is no better place to work.Imagine if your employer gave you a 30% raise and tenure, meaning you can now come to work naked if you choose. That’s life in the Federal bureaucracy. All those days off, I suspect, are so the Federal workforce can have time to build interesting and self-actualizing lives outside of work. Otherwise, days and weeks of pointless tedium would result in a mass insanity or something similar to a prison riot. Travelogue: The Imperial Capital | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:28 PM | Your Say (0)
With the fate of so many interests at stake it is as if Hillary must make the Oval Office,
Unfortunately for the DNC unless Hillary is replaced only she can sink the enemy in electoral combat. The British could at least mourn the Hood and move on. But Hillary was towed to drydock which poses its own set of problems. For even if one could raise her, the "Mighty Hood" would still have the irremediable material defects which made her a floating bomb Raising the Hood | PJ Media
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:16 AM | Your Say (5)
September 14, 2016
The story of mankind is the tale of someone who wakes up in Paradise and decides to burn it down.
Happens every time. It doesn't matter that the survivors wrote it all down for our edification, because we'll just stop reading the Bible and watch some 'reality' TV show. - Wretchard T. CatPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:14 AM | Your Say (6)
Romans 1 18: For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:57 AM | Your Say (0)
The New Woodpile. Yes, The New Woodpile.
Ol' Remus gives you Ye Olde Woodpile ReportPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:28 AM | Your Say (3)
Hundreds of millions of guns across America are now in the hands of people who are fed up
with being stomped on, ridiculed and marginalized by a corrupt leftist regime that's destroying America.Do the math on this one: You've got 44% of U.S. households that now own guns (and not just one gun each, but several different types of guns). Over the last 8 years, President Obama's anti-gun rhetoric has resulted in the largest surge of gun sales to private citizens ever recorded in American history. As a result of Obama's criminal efforts to try to destroy the Second Amendment via false flag operations such as Operation Fast and Furious, more Americans than ever now own battle rifles such as ARs, AKs and PTR 91s. People bought all these guns for a reason. And they sure didn't buy them just to turn them over to a corrupt criminal government. - - NaturalNews.com
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:21 AM | Your Say (6)
What will “the News” do should Hillary Clinton fail to gain the Oval Office?
The media cannot afford to have the Clinton for President campaign fail.
Clinton could drop dead in public, and the media would do its level best to persuade the public that it was “just a stumble,” “the candidate is recovering nicely,” “her supposed incapacity is entirely her opponent’s fabrication,” and “the inauguration will take place as scheduled.” Liberty's Torch: “The News” Is The News
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (5)
It's Probably Nothing:
South Korea Will Try to Blow Up Kim Jong Un If He Launches NukesPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:04 AM | Your Say (0)
The truth is the unemployment rate is a political number, not an economic one.
There is no policy need for guesswork numbers issued monthly when an accurate account of wages, salaries, unearned income and employment is available quarterly.Since estimated taxes are due around mid-month in January, April, June and September, the IRS could collate the data by the end of the month. There is no guesswork in these numbers; the data includes every employee, employer, self-employed person, gig economy worker, retiree getting a pension, etc. in the economy. -Charles Hugh Smith: What's the Real Unemployment Rate? That's the Wrong Question
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:59 AM | Your Say (3)
Venezuela’s government is becoming increasingly Khmer ‘Rouge’.
As the professional commies flee, rapidly disassociating themselves from yet another failed experiment, the government has become more foolhardy.The decay has made it more wanton – somehow more carnal. The old discussions of ideals and utopias are absent; now they talk about bodily functions. They snicker about sex; their torture has become more corporeal – excrement and nudity and rape. As the great thinkers flee the world their misbegotten ideas created, and former allies fall away or turn their backs on the grotesqueness, the nouveau leadership falls back desperately on arguments of self-sufficiency, spawning forced-labor laws, rationing, and a more sinister discrimination, based on identity. Starvation again. Extreme nationalism has replaced Hugo Chavez’s ill-fated pan-Latin Americanism. Disappearances. Expulsions. Silence. As Venezuela Goes ‘Rouge’ | Joel D. Hirst's Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:52 AM | Your Say (1)
September 13, 2016
" I think Hillary has a touch of the Blues"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:51 PM | Your Say (0)
Extreme Shipping: When Express Delivery to California Meant 100 Grueling Days at Sea
“But if you look at enough clipper cards, you’ll see the vessels are often advertised as the ‘fastest ship in the world.’ Not true.” | Collectors Weekly
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:39 PM | Your Say (0)
Trump should not pardon Clinton.
Instead he should appoint a special prosecutor with the authority to go where the evidence takes him.The Clinton crime family did not operate in a vacuum. Lots of people have greased the wheels so that these two grifters from the Ozarks could hold official Washington captive for close to a quarter century. Getting all of it out into the open would do a lot of damage to the political class, but it would do a world of good for the nation’s politics. The corrupt bargain that has prevailed in DC needs to come to an end. After the Revolution
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:33 PM | Your Say (2)
In The Gulag Archipelago, Alexander Solzhenitsyn remarked
“calling forth tears from Tolstoy and indignation from Korolenko and many, many others.” By comparison, conservative estimates of executions under Lenin and Stalin—say, twenty million from 1917 to 1953—yield an average of over ten thousand per week. That’s a tsarist century every few days.Western public opinion has never come to terms with the crimes of Communism.
Every school child knows about the Holocaust, Apartheid, and American slavery, as they should. But Pol Pot’s murder of a quarter of Cambodia’s population has not dimmed academic enthusiasm for the Marxism his henchmen studied in Paris. Neither the Chinese Cultural Revolution nor the Great Purges seem to have cast a shadow on the leftists who apologized for them. Quite the contrary, university classes typically blame the Cold War on American “paranoia” about communism and still picture Bolsheviks as idealists in too great a hurry. Being leftwing means never having to say you’re sorry. On the hidden horrors of Soviet life.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:37 PM | Your Say (4)
Idea for a Trump Ad
There's a big disaster on TV, maybe U.S. troops under fire in some nameless Middle East hellhole. You can hear an old lady say, "Oh dear." She turns off the TV and starts coughing, climbing into bed and turns out the light. The camera pans out to show the White House, with all the lights going off. It ends with a the sound of her coughing. Unorthodoxy:Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:17 PM | Your Say (2)
Generation Meathead
The Meathead generation has been, on the whole, a national disaster for America. The nation started falling to pieces right around when the first wave of boomers hit adulthood. With a respite in the 80’s when the old and the young teamed up to support a return to sanity, it has been a fifty year slide into cultural turpitude, forced upon us by the Early Boomer cohort. Look around the political class and the worst of the worst were born in the 40’s and were apart of the first assault upon the culture fifty years ago. The good news, if there is any, is that the Early Boomers are starting to croak. The front edge is now 70, which means they are retiring or dropping dead quickly. -- Z ManPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:49 AM | Your Say (3)
September 12, 2016
On Israel’s northern border, Hezbollah now has 150,000 rockets, by far the largest such inventory in the world,
including many precision-guided missiles which can be programmed for evasive flight pathsand are more difficult to shoot down with the Iron Dome air defense system, as I warned two years ago. Many of these are emplaced in civilian homes in the Shi’ite towns of southern Lebanon. To destroy them would entail civilian casualties one or two orders of magnitude greater than the collateral damage in Gaza.... Hezbollah’s vulnerability lies in the fact that it is a militia that lives in the Shi’ite communities of Lebanon rather than an army based far from civilian centers. Iran is prepared to sacrifice Shi’ite life in Lebanon in its own imperial interests, but the Lebanese Shi’ites themselves may not wish to be sacrificed. By spelling out the terrible consequences of war with Israel, Jerusalem would sow fear and doubt among its prospective enemies. Hezbollah’s horror weapon and its remedy – Asia Times
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:38 PM | Your Say (4)
Comrade Hillary Celebrates Robust Health
She briefly stricken byallergiesoverheatingpneumonia yet still attend solemn ceremony in city of New York this Sunday. She also visit flat of daughter Chelsea, greeting her newborn grandchild with love, and later hug noble devochka outside of building. Such selfless acts make historic impact! How great is the dignity shown, for she strong like bull. -- John Gabriel Ricochet
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 5:02 PM | Your Say (6)
Should Have Taken the Bus
Stuck in a Cable Car High Above Mont Blanc, Waiting for Rescue: The system of cable cars can carry up to 140 people,who can enjoy a spectacular panoramic view. Some are climbers trying to scale the area’s snow-capped mountains. The trip takes 30 minutes, and on Thursday there were passengers in nine of the cars. All together 110 people were trapped, including Koreans, Britons, Americans and Italians, among them several children and an older man. After efforts to untangle the cables failed, rescuers were able to retrieve 65 people by winching them up into helicopters starting around 5:30 p.m.
According to the 1950 November edition of Popular Mechanics (which you can also read online), the sky bus was powered by two 185 horsepower engines taking passengers from 3,800 feet all the way up to 6,000 feet, completing the more than 3 mile journey above tree level in less than 10 minutes supported by 38 steel towers up to 72 feet tall.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:49 AM | Your Say (1)
[Bumped] Maybe war with Russia is going to be the October surprise.
What could possibly go wrong?Good news! @USArmy Prepositioned Stock begins arriving to Europe for use by US forces in support of #NATO operations pic.twitter.com/Zo1KZTp5oN
— US Mission to NATO (@USNATO) September 9, 2016
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:41 AM | Your Say (16)
“In 1968, the world’s high tech capital wasn’t just one city: all of America was high tech.
When I moved to Cleveland, defense research was laying the foundations for the internet. The Apollo program was just about to put a man on the moon–and it was Neil Armstrong, from right here in Ohio. The future felt limitless. But today our government is broken. Our nuclear bases still use floppy disks. Our newest fighter jets can’t even fly in the rain. And it would be kind to say the government’s software works poorly, because much of the time it doesn’t even work at all. That is a staggering decline for the country that completed the Manhattan project. We don’t accept such incompetence in Silicon Valley, and we must not accept it from our government. Instead of going to Mars, we have invaded the Middle East.” — Peter Thiel, 2016
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:57 AM | Your Say (0)
My grandfather, Vladimir Yakovlev, was a murderer, bloody executioner, CheKist. His numerous victims included his own parents.
Grandpa and Grandma didn’t buy the sofa on which I listened to fairy tales, nor the cupboard, nor the other furniture. They picked them at a special warehouse stocking furniture from the homes of shot Muscovites. Using that warehouse, CheKists furnished their flats for free. – Alexander BootPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:45 AM | Your Say (0)
Clinton: "I've got binders full of deplorables!"
When Hillary Clinton collapsed this weekend so did her credibility, PIERS MORGAN And if you've lost Piers Morgan....Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:32 AM | Your Say (1)
It's not the collapse, it's the cover-up.
It arranged for the candidate to make her curbside declaration of wellness, even bringing on the girl to give her a "spontaneous" hug. (Clinton's protection detail would never have permitted a genuinely spontaneous embrace on the street, even by a child.) Why did Hillary Clinton lie about her health?In addition, what's she doing hugging a child while sick with pneumonia?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:51 AM | Your Say (4)
Every Picture Tells a Story Don't It?
Doug Ross @ Journal: 10 Pictures of Hillary Clinton Wobbling and Then Collapsing Today That Legacy Media Will Never Show YouPosted by gerardvanderleun at 7:41 AM | Your Say (0)
Who Are Trump’s people? There is something the polls are not seeing.
The heat in mid August was as brutal as I’ve seen it in years. Yet thousands showed up to hear Trump speak.
Look at who showed up. These aren’t the lily white WASPS of Fairfield County CT. No these are the people that make the region work, the people of Greek, Italian, Polish descent, or other places, the people who make the great pizza or keep the air conditioners running. This was a Bridgeport, Norwalk, New Haven or Fairfield below the tracks crowd, not a Westport, Darien or Greenwich crowd. Here are the Trump Voters, the people who make the country work and want to make it work better. The people willing to stand in the heat of the hottest day of the year for hours when the beach was just a very short trip away because they feel that things need to change. | The Arts Mechanical
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:36 AM | Your Say (1)
September 11, 2016
The Fifteenth September 11
America began that autumn day in a state of innocence.
The man in the street knew next to nothing about the Middle East or Islam, subjects about which he since learned a great deal (both the good and the bad). The average commuter took for granted the idea that governments would loyally represent their population. He has since discovered the extent to which that is and is not true. Citizens bought the papers and thought they told them something. Now they understand the limits of that. And the public did not know its own heart. It has since searched its corners, both and good and evil. | Richard Fernandez, Belmont
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:08 AM | Your Say (3)
The fall was said to take about ten seconds.
It would vary according to the body position and how long it took to reach terminal velocity — around 125mph in most cases, but if someone fell head down with their body straight, as if in a dive, it could be 200mph.
When they hit the pavement, their bodies were not so much broken as obliterated.
Nothing more graphically spells out the horror of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers than the grainy pictures of those poor souls frozen in mid-air as they fell to their deaths, tumbling in all manner of positions, after choosing to escape the suffocating smoke and dust, the flames and the steel-bending heat in the highest floors of the World Trade Centre.
And yet, tragically, they are in many ways the forgotten victims of September 11. Even now, nobody knows for certain who they were or exactly how many they numbered. Perhaps worst of all, surprisingly few even want to know.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:25 AM | Your Say (5)
September 10, 2016
An ode to a tampon would once upon a time have been understood as a mock ode, and none but a man would have written it
Olds is evidently in earnest and for that she will not be forgiven.‘Ode to the Tampon’ is a litany rather than an ode, being no more than a series of epithets that garland the tampon with grandiose attributes. It would be surprising if a seventy-year-old poet had anything vivid to say about a tampon, and in fact we learn little more than that the object in question has a cardboard applicator and is made of cotton. The tampon is but one subject in a whole series of poems that might be described as gynaecological. This includes odes to the hymen, the clitoris, menstrual blood, the female reproductive system, the word vulva and the vagina. These poems might be regarded as a subset of a wider anatomical theme, involving withered cleavage, a hip replacement, wattles, unmatching legs, fat, stretch marks and toxic shock. Men are included with odes to the penis, the glans, whiskers and a ‘Celibate’s Ode to Balls’. These are not fascinating subjects; Germaine Greer - Ode Dear
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:22 AM | Your Say (10)
September 9, 2016
The way the zeitgeist feels to me, the ending of this movie has already been written.
I predict that 3% of voters are Shy Trump Supporters. As polls continue to tighten, especially in battleground states, that will be enough for an electoral landslide for Trump. -- | Scott Adams' BlogPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:32 PM | Your Say (6)
"Everywhere around the world / They're comin' to America"
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:00 PM | Your Say (5)
The unbitten Apple
It began to see the bite as a wound, and ever since it has been seeking to heal the damage. Apple wants to be pristine, untouched by outside forces, entire onto itself. Apple’s ideal now is the unbitten apple, the immaculate fruit.One by one the portals go, the entrances and exits are sealed.
The customer is locked out of the device — and locked into the “ecosystem.” Today, in a media ceremony, it was the headphone jack that was exorcised. That tiny analog orifice linking the iPhone back to the transistor radio, the Walkman, the iPod: gone. And why not? With the socket and its audio converter removed, the phone will become even slimmer, even lighter, even more elegant. It will be better insulated against the elements. It will be more totemic. It will be purer - - ROUGH TYPE
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:23 PM | Your Say (7)
Baracktrema obamai .... And the jokes just write themselves.
How does a scientist honor a president who happens to be a distant relative? By naming a turtle parasite after him.Baracktrema obamai isn’t just any parasite. It’s so distinctive that it represents not just a new species but an entirely new genus, according to a new report in the Journal of Parasitology. That hasn’t happened with this type of turtle parasite in 21 years, experts say. - LA Times
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:38 AM | Your Say (0)
For a Man Without a Job, His Unemployment Rate is 100%
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:53 AM | Your Say (3)
Airline Tips: A trick for making more space for yourself.
Arm rests – aisle and window seat:Run your hand along the underside of the armrest, just shy of the joint you’ll feel a button. Push it, and it will lift up. Adds a ton of room to the window seat and makes getting out of the aisle a helluva lot easier. 30 Best Kept Secrets About Flying
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:13 AM | Your Say (1)
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 AM | Your Say (3)
If the country has actually been experiencing an economic recovery for the last seven years,
why would 14% to 15% of all Americans be dependent on food stamps to survive?
When the economy is actually growing and employment is really below 5%, the percentage of Americans on food stamps is below 8%. If the government economic data was truthful, there would not be 43.5 million people living in 21.4 households (17% of all households) dependent on food stamps. More than 100 million Americans are now dependent on some form of federal welfare (not including Social Security or Medicare). If the economy came out of recession in the second half of 2009, why would 6 million more Americans need to go on welfare over the next two years? The Greater Depression - Part 1
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:42 AM | Your Say (1)
Christian faith and life on other worlds
British cosmologist Paul Davies, an active SETI researcher, stated some time ago that there are only three explanations for the formation of life on earth:1. A fluke, just happenstance. 2. A cosmic imperative 3. Outside agency, which is to say, a miracle. Davies says that the first choice is "the ultimate just-so story:" We are here because we are here. As for cosmic imperative, Davies says there is no evidence whatsoever. As for the third choice, Davies really says not much at all. Sense of Events:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:36 AM | Your Say (1)
Totalitarianism was much more than state terror, censorship, and concentration camps;
it was a state of mind in which the very idea of a private opinion or point of view had been destroyed.The totalitarian propagandist forces people to believe that slavery is freedom, squalor is bounty, ignorance is knowledge, and that a rigidly closed society is the most open in the world. And once enough people are made to think this way, it is functionally totalitarian even if a single dictator does not personally control everything. November 1999 | American Renaissance
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:30 AM | Your Say (1)
September 8, 2016
KA-CHING!
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:00 PM | Your Say (6)
I am never sure whether I should lament the state of the world or be complacent about it.
For on the one hand everything is going to the dogs and on the other I am a happy man. Prometheus UnboundPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:14 PM | Your Say (1)
[Bumped] What Today's Cuckservatives Had to Say About Obama in 2009
Obama sprang coatless from his limousine and headed up the steps of Will’s yellow clapboard house.He was greeted by Will, Michael Barone, David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, Lawrence Kudlow, Rich Lowry, and Peggy Noonan. They were Reaganites all, yet some had paid tribute to Obama during the campaign. Lowry, who is the editor of the National Review, called Obama “the only presidential candidate from either party about whom there is a palpable excitement.” Krauthammer, an intellectual and ornery voice on Fox News and in the pages of the Washington Post, had written that Obama would be “a president with the political intelligence of a Bill Clinton harnessed to the steely self-discipline of a Vladimir Putin,” who would “bestride the political stage as largely as did Reagan.” And Kristol, the editor of the Weekly Standard and a former aide to Dan Quayle, wrote, “I look forward to Obama’s inauguration with a surprising degree of hope and good cheer.” The Obama Memos - The New YorkerAny questions?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:23 PM | Your Say (14)
Who Says There's No Good News? "Even when it's killing cells, you feel great."
The US has given fast-track approval to a surprising new cancer drug -A new cancer drug called Venetoclax is causing quite a stir in the medical community, with the announcement that the US FDA has given it fast-track approval for the treatment of patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia (CLL). CLL is one of the most common types of leukemia in adults, and during a recent clinical trial,80 percent of patients treated with Venetoclax experienced complete or partial remission of their cancer. Developed in Australia over several decades, Venetoclax is taken in pill-form, and of the small sample of patients who have been treated with it so far, some reported no adverse side-effects at all. "It causes no side-effects. Nothing, absolutely nothing," Robert Oblak, who had recurring CLL when he was selected to participate in the trial in 2013, told the ABC. "Quite amazing. So even when it's killing cells, you feel great."
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:07 PM | Your Say (2)
“Dangerous Don” and his Dangerous Detractors
Why is it dangerous to say that America is being inundated with illegal immigrants, many of whom are rapists and gang members?What’s so dangerous about blaming global finance for offshoring America’s manufacturing base and allowing unchecked immigration to drive down wages? How is it remotely dangerous to plainly state that a high quotient of Muslims are innately hostile to Western values? What is the danger in stating that political correctness is a distraction at best and a cancer at worst? It’s clear what’s dangerous here: illegal immigration, pro-globalist trade deals, Islamic militancy, and the brain-scorching, humor-murdering, thought-squashing speech codes of latter-day PC run amok. And Trump is the only presidential candidate in my lifetime to address these dangers as, well, dangerous. - Jim Goad
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:14 PM | Your Say (0)
For you hunters out there
Hunting animals is decidedly more difficult than hunting humans. Animals can see movement, hear and smell hundreds of times better than humans. Hunting liberal socialists will be easy and considering how many suppressed hunting rifles are out here in 'fly-over country, they'll probably never even hear the long range shot that takes them out. Just talkin' truth to power here. Sipsey Street Irregulars:
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:03 PM | Your Say (8)
War is easy, peace is hard.
Governments everywhere have forgotten how easy war is, how difficult peace is, and gleefully throw jet fuel on the fire. The natural state of mankind is war. Peace requires a high level of trust, cooperation, and well functioning social technology, all of which are being enthusiastically dismantled. Peace is an elaborate machine with many moving parts, all of which have to work together correctly. The anglosphere has been internally peaceful since the Mormon War and the War of Northern Aggression, so we think internal peace is natural. This, however, is survivorship bias. There will be war ｫ Jim窶冱 Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:54 AM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
A River In Arctic Russia Has Turned Blood Red |
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:28 AM | Your Say (0)
The Beacon of Marcaibo: The Never-Ending Lighting Storm
Starting at 7:00 PM every night, lightning crashes over the water for ten hours every night, 260 nights each year.Nobody knows for sure why it happens. Up until recently, the leading theory was that it had something to do with uranium in the bedrock—although scientists are starting to doubt it. 10 Real Places On Earth That Seem Scientifically Impossible
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:46 AM | Your Say (0)
Signs of the Apocalypse
Huge Australian catfish have started catching and eating mice -Researchers have confirmed that a population of catfish in Western Australia are catching and eating live mice, but they have no idea how they’re doing it.... Ashburton River catfish have not been observed leaving the water, and spinifex hopping mice have not been observed approaching it. Ever.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:18 AM | Your Say (4)
We here in the US already have plenty of collapse.
Entire cities have been leveled, not by plundering armies, but instead by greedy and incompetent governments unable to keep their hands out of people’s pockets until the pockets all went away.My state Connecticut, rather than admit that thing are so screwed up that the state is essentially dead, are trying to bribe large companies to stay. Perhaps if the state hadn’t set it up so that it’s impossible to start, grow or run a business we wouldn’t be looking the black hole in the mouth. It isn’t just one state. It’s the entire country and if the policies that created the problems do not change, well we can look to the fall of the Western Roman Empire as a happy time compared to what’s going to happen. We’ve come so far and risen so high, but if people do not understand that none of it’s permanent, we will still fall. What Can The Fall Of Rome Teach Us? | The Arts Mechanical
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:56 AM | Your Say (3)
"Today's soup lines are electronic, as the government downloads the “soup” onto EBT cards...."
The narrative of economic recovery has been peddled by corporate media mouthpieces, feckless politicians, Too Big To Trust Wall Street bankers, Federal Reserve puppets, and government apparatchiks flogging manipulated data as proof of economic advancement. They point to the lack of soup lines as proof we couldn’t be experiencing a depression.First of all, if there were soup lines, the corporate media would just ignore them.
If they don’t report it, then it isn’t happening. Secondly, the soup lines are electronic, as the government downloads the “soup” onto EBT cards so JP Morgan can reap billions in fees to run the SNAP program. Just because there are no pictures of starving downtrodden Americans in shabby clothes waiting in soup lines, doesn’t mean the majority of Americans aren’t experiencing a depression. The Greater Depression - Part 1
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:41 AM | Your Say (0)
September 7, 2016
The good news is it won't last long.
I think virtue signaling is a side-effect of today’s education that is more interested in spreading degeneracy than actually teaching the youth something useful.The kids who were trained to be “good” for listening to the teachers are now adults doing the same thing to get praise from the society. The people who engage in these shenanigans want to get the figurative pat on the head for expressing opinions that the current culture tells them to have. It’s also a form of attention-whoring for those with low self-esteem. 20 More Degenerate Cultures Of Our Dystopian Society
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 7:57 PM | Your Say (0)
The Terrorism Tax hits Europe
A terrorism tax is an accumulation of excess costs inflicted on a city's stakeholders by acts of terrorism.
These include direct costs inflicted on the city by terrorists (systems sabotage) and indirect costs due to the security/insurance/policy/etc. changes needed to protect against attacks. A terrorism tax above a certain level will force the city to transition to a lower market equilibrium (aka shrink). So, what is that level? Here's what they concluded: - Global Guerrillas
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 4:03 PM | Your Say (1)
Male Hobbyist of the Month
Stingl: Retired electrician created mass of mannequins "Whenever he heard there was a mannequin for sale, he'd go get it.They had a small Ford or whatever it was, and he would strap them to the top or put them in the backseat, wherever he could put them," Rich said. Then Mike would rely on his skill in automotive body work to repair and paint the figures. He used Bondo, the fix for rusted-out fenders, to augment the mannequins' breasts until they were the size of cantaloupes.Bondo?
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:02 AM | Your Say (0)
The Science Is Settled
The secret to living past 100 is rampant sex.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:56 AM | Your Say (1)
It's Probably Nothing:
It’s Impossible to Keep Track of U.S. Special Ops in Africa On any given day, 10,000 special operators are “deployed” or “forward stationed” conducting overseas missions “from behind-the-scenes information-gathering and partner-building to high-end dynamic strike operations” — so Gen. Joseph Votel, at the time chief of Special Operations Command, told the Senate Armed Services Committee in March 2016.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:48 AM | Your Say (1)
September Snapshot. An Questions?
There’s a lot not to like about the man, but he is honest, he loves his countrymen and he is not doing this for the money. Whether or not he understands his role and the movement he is leading is unknown. Maybe his election will just be a false dawn and what follows is what always follows the onset of a low-trust state. If things are going to turn out different for us, Trump will win and usher in an era of reform. Otherwise, what comes next will be much worse. The Low-Trust State | The Z Blog
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:34 AM | Your Say (1)
I don't write the headlines. I just report them.
According to a report in the always credulous entertainment website The Mail Online, Norwegian man Claus Jorstad, 45, was using an Ikea Marius chair in the shower when one of his testicles somehow became trapped in the chair mid-shower. Mr Jorstad claims he was using the chair in the shower because of a "knee injury", when somehow one of his testicles accidentally slipped through a hole and then swelled due to the heat of the water and became stuck.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:25 AM | Your Say (4)
The sacredness of mass immigration is the mystic chord that unites America’s ruling and intellectual classes.
The junta of course craves cheaper and more docile labor.
It also seeks to legitimize, and deflect unwanted attention from, its wealth and power by pretending that its open borders stance is a form of noblesse oblige. The Republicans and the “conservatives”? Both of course desperately want absolution from the charge of “racism.”For the latter, this at least makes some sense. No Washington General can take the court—much less cash his check—with that epithet dancing over his head like some Satanic Spirit. But for the former, this priestly grace comes at the direct expense of their worldly interests. Do they honestly believe that the right enterprise zone or charter school policy will arouse 50.01% of our newer voters to finally reveal their “natural conservatism” at the ballot box?
It hasn’t happened anywhere yet and shows no signs that it ever will. AMERICAN GREATNESS’s Decius To #NeverTrumpers: 2016 Is The Flight 93 Election
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:09 AM | Your Say (0)
Russia is pretty representative of many states which are simply collections of informal power groups.
Whether these groups are called cartels, clans, sects or Communist Partiesthey may essentially be described as what James Madison called factions. He regarded them both a danger to democracy and the natural forge of leadership and so spent a lot of time figuring out how to control them. Successful Failures | PJ Media
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:43 AM | Your Say (0)
September 6, 2016
The Era of Hope and Change has been one prolonged act of suicide.
If anyone had said that Obama would manage to alienate Israel and the Philippines, lose Turkey, pay Iran a hundred billion dollars,preside over the loss of a won war in Afghanistan, lose billions of dollars in military equipment to ISIS, watch a consulate burn, restart the Cold War with Russia, cause Japan to re-arm and go the knife's edge with China would you have believed it?If someone had told you in 2008 millions of refugees would be heading for Europe and that the UK would leave the EU after Obama went there to campaign for them to remain would you not have laughed? He promised "smart diplomacy" and the restoration of American prestige in the world. How did it come to this? The Dragon Comes With a Suitcase | PJ Media
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:10 PM | Your Say (5)
Every city, every country, is a city of the dead. We live in the shadows of those who came before us.
What spurs on progress is the desire to get out of those shadows and make our lives our own. It’s not without its consequences though, as often the past is where the future lies. -- DublinersPosted by gerardvanderleun at 5:04 PM | Your Say (0)
Messieurs, Ship Some Burkinis Over Here
where as many as 5,000 buck-nekkid citizens can be seen on a weekend, where there are no fences, where it’s not always clear where the regular beach ends and the nekkid beach begins, and so…holy whangdoodle, I just saw that and now I can’t unsee it! Let’s go totalitarian on this place and make people go down to wherever Hillary Clinton shops and buy some soccer-mom muumuus. Better yet, there are at least thirty municipalities in France that have outlawed the burkini—those things have to be piling up in evidence lockers. Send ’em over here so we can cage some cellulite because, as much as I like the idea of a nude beach, the reality makes you wonder how it’s possible for human beings to procreate in the first place. - Taki's Magazine
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:24 AM | Your Say (1)
2013 - - The Strange Case of Mexican Emigration
In Mexico, legal immigration is aimed at privileging lawful arrivals with skill sets that aid the Mexican economy and,according to the country's immigration law, who have the "necessary funds for their sustenance" -- while denying entry to those who are not healthy or would upset the "equilibrium of the national demographics." Translated, that idea of demographic equilibrium apparently means that Mexico tries to withhold citizen status from those who do not look like Mexicans or have little skills to make money. If the United States were to treat Mexican nationals in the same way that Mexico treats Central American nationals, there would be humanitarian outrage. - Victor Davis Hanson
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:52 AM | Your Say (1)
2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die.
You may die anyway. You—or the leader of your party—may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances. The Flight 93 Election
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 8:27 AM | Your Say (2)
A Choice Not An Echo by Phyllis Schlafly (1924 - 2016)
A Choice Not An Echo: Full text in PDF
Stefan Molyneux - - Phyllis Schlafly: The Lost InterviewPosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:08 AM | Your Say (1)
September 5, 2016
It's Probably Nothing:
Pentagon is worrying about 'Terminator' coming true. Seriously.“The notion of a completely robotic system that can make a decision about whether or not to inflict harm on an adversary is here,” he added in remarks at the Center for Strategic and International Studies Monday. “It’s not terribly refined, not terribly good. But it’s here.”
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:26 PM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
Walmart is cutting 7,000 jobs due to automation, and it’s not alonePosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:22 AM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
Japan wants British weaponry for South China Sea standoff — Antagonism between China and Japan over a contested island archipelago has the Japanese Defense Ministry chasing an injection of cash to buy a range of new kit. Reuters reported on Wednesday that, among other high-tech equipment, the Japanese are keen to purchase 11 AAV7 amphibious assault craft produced by British arms giant BAE Systems.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:19 AM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
China's 'Little Green Boats' Have Japan on Alert -In early August, Japan's Coast Guard witnessed an unconventional Chinese assault on its territorial waters. According to Japanese officials I met with last week, at least 300 Chinese "fishing vessels" began incursions into the exclusive economic zone around the uninhabited Senkaku Islands, disputed territory administered by Japan but claimed by China and Taiwan as well.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:16 AM | Your Say (0)
The Multiverse Idea Is Rotting Culture
If the author-murdering button doesn’t exist here, it must necessarily exist in another universe.What this means is that the human capacity to imagine a different world is really nothing of the sort. It’s all just the same washed-out reality, and your hopes and dreams are as drearily physical as a sack of potatoes. Want to write fiction? Want to build a better life? Don’t bother. Everything that could happen has already happened, and nothing can ever change. - The Atlantic
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:47 AM | Your Say (0)
"Who Is He To Confront Me?" - Philippines President Unloads On "Son Of A Bitch Whore" Barack Obama
More than 2,000 suspected drug pushers and users have been killed since Duterte launched a war on drugs after taking office on June 30. In his typical foul-mouthed style, Duterte was quoted by AP as responding: "Who does he think he is? I am no American puppet. I am the president of a sovereign country and I am not answerable to anyone except the Filipino people, nobody but nobody. You must be respectful. Do not just throw questions. Son of a bitch I will swear at you in that forum," he said. | Zero Hedge
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:06 AM | Your Say (5)
September 4, 2016
David Brooks: "Those who try to reduce politics to these identities do real violence to national life."
@Anonymous says: "For anyone wondering what an empty platitude looks like." guest says: @Anonymous, I don’t think it is empty. It’s very revealing.Not just for the psychology behind it, but for what it actually says. It empties out the term “nation,” admittedly, but that is what they, the Brooks types, think a nation is. A big nothing, full of interchangeable people. Or consumption units, if you will. You do damage to the Big, Empty, Interchangeable Nation when you take the consumption units and “reduce” them to their particular attributes. Then you make all these smaller units, which might not get along. That’s what Brooksites think, anyway. In reality, the identities are real. It’s the Big Empty image that’s an illusion. And the identities will fight; there will be blood. You can’t avoid it by redefining “nation” to preclude their existence. Brooks: To reduce identity politics, we need more immigration! - The Unz Review
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 3:55 PM | Your Say (2)
Baberowski quotes from the memoir of one proud nkvd officer:
Whenever someone wasn’t dead immediately, he fell over and squealed like a pig. . . . You weren’t allowed to eat anything beforehand. . . . You shoot with the right hand, you see . . . I pushed through my demand for a massage of the right arm and the right index finger twice a week with my superiors. We were given certificates. . . . I have a whole cabinet of these certificates, printed on the best paper. . . . Everyone had only one thought: . . . we too. . . . I always had a packed plywood suitcase under my bed . . . and pistol under my pillow. To put a bullet in my head. . . . They will call Stalin a great man someday. The hatchet outlives its master.On the hidden horrors of Soviet life.
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 1:25 PM | Your Say (4)
Great stupidities do not come from the people. First, they have seduced intelligent men.
Weak and malleable women serve this purpose for the left, but not nearly to the extent that blacks do.Women of all ages are more likely than men to be on the left, but for blacks the ratio is usually higher than nine to one. How is that? Again, it must be the satisfaction, the counterfeit thrill of a theory that explains everything. All you really need to know is that you are black, and all life's mysteries are revealed to you. Such is the meretricious beauty of identity politics, whether one is female, homosexual, Hispanic, Aryan, whatever. It is the key that opens the Cosmic Door. One Cʘsmos: The Cheap Splendor of Liberal Lies
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 12:57 PM | Your Say (0)
Jupiter’s North Pole Unlike Anything Encountered in Solar System
There is no sign of the latitudinal bands or zone and belts that we are used to -- this image is hardly recognizable as Jupiter. We’re seeing signs that the clouds have shadows, possibly indicating that the clouds are at a higher altitude than other features.” One of the most notable findings of these first-ever pictures of Jupiter’s north and south poles is something that the JunoCam imager did not see. “Saturn has a hexagon at the north pole,” said Bolton. “There is nothing on Jupiter that anywhere near resembles that. | NASA
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:02 AM | Your Say (0)
The question is whether Madison's defenses failed and the factions are inside the wire.
America for a long time beat the odds but recently things have taken a turn for the worse.
It is no accident that many of America's troubles have coincided with the growth of identity politics, special interest groups, foreign lobbying and corruption. If so they have spread their poison and created an American version of the "informal networks" that proved so fatal other countries as Madison feared. Successful Failures | PJ Media
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:46 AM | Your Say (1)
8 Frightening Characteristics of Propaganda
7) It Must be Nonstop “[Propaganda] must fill the citizen’s whole day and all his days…Propaganda tends to make the individual live in a separate world; he must not have outside points of reference… successful propaganda will occupy every moment of the individual’s life: through posters and loudspeakers when he is out walking, through radio and newspapers at home, through meetings and movies in the evening. The individual must not be allowed to recover, to collect himself, to remain untouched by propaganda during any relatively long period… It is based on slow, constant impregnation.” | Intellectual Takeout
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:42 AM | Your Say (2)
September 3, 2016
This Luxury Skincare Container Conveniently Doubles as a Caviar Dish
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 6:43 PM | Your Say (2)
Drugs and iPads in the Class Room
I am glad to get the iPads out of my classroom.For two years, these $768 iPads have been sitting in the bottom two drawers of my filing cabinet, rarely used, mainly because my school did not have WiFi until two months ago, and it still doesn’t work well. The Peterson educational software that is supposed to help students with math and English–for $250 per iPad–was never installed even though Peterson was fully paid up front, to the tune of $6.4 million. | American Renaissance
Posted by gerardvanderleun at 2:22 PM | Your Say (4)
We want to put missiles in the suburbs of St. Petersburg; why should they not have a garrison on their eastern frontier?
Russia Positions Troops 50 Miles From Alaska: Putin moves to protect Russian Far EastPosted by gerardvanderleun at 1:54 PM | Your Say (2)
"I tell people that when there’s a bullet in the air, there’s hope. "
TH: I was training Marines out in Utah, and the longest shot that several of us made during the training was a boulder, and it was 4,889 meters away. One of the most impressive shots I’ve seen was when my son shot a pig at 1,668 meters. Long range is different for everybody. I’ve seen phenomenal shots, which were closer distances, because the call was more difficult. Some of the luckiest shots, I’ve ever had were with a pistol. I tell people that when there’s a bullet in the air, there’s hope. Todd Hodnett - The Long-Range Cowboy | RECOIL>Posted by gerardvanderleun at 11:54 AM | Your Say (3)
Cultural Enrichment: Paris Then and Now
Via (47) Paul Joseph Watson Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:50 AM | Your Say (1)
The Gospel according to Pope Francis
Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? Say, what can I do to prevent global warming. Behold the fowls of the air; for they drive not, neither do they have houses with lights and electric ovens; yet nature feedeth them. Take therefore no thought for the morrow; take thought for climate change for then all things will take care of themselves.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 9:49 AM | Your Say (6)
September 2, 2016
In the world of social media, Instagram may be an oasis, but as a collective creative project its size is staggering, almost beyond comprehension. In the past year, 30 billion photographs were uploaded. Eighty million go up every day. What does that even mean? A few years ago I saw an exhibit by the Dutch artist Erik Kessels called “24 Hrs in Photos.” Kessels printed out every photograph that had been posted to the photo-sharing service Flickr (one of Instagram’s predecessors, now moribund in Yahoo’s fatal embrace) over one 24-hour period. The photographs filled a room, climbing several feet up the walls, forming mounds like a snowdrift. There were so many you could make snow angels or take a bath. To do the same thing with Instagram it would take a basketball court or a concert hall. The scale of Instagram beggars all attempts to describe it piecemeal. It’s a tidal wave of visual information sweeping away all the old shibboleths of art criticism as it comes to shore. Camera-phone Lucida | The Point MagazinePosted by gerardvanderleun at 8:27 PM | Your Say (1)
A Preview Of The Trump-Hillary Debates
The class valedicktorian is preparing hard for her upcoming battle with the class wise-ass.The media has already declared her the winner, especially after her devastating George Santayana quote (to be delivered in the debate along with other killer platitudes). Everyone else is going to the party at wise-ass’s house. | Chateau HeartistePosted by gerardvanderleun at 7:26 PM | Your Say (4)
An Un-Conventional Thirst
If it weren’t for hippies, 7Up, the clear lemon-lime soda pop many use to calm the stomach flu, might not exist today. In the late 1960s, just when the company was about to go out of business, brilliant advertising executives at J. Walter Thompson Company in Chicago pitched a complete rebranding of the soft drink. Declaring 7Up “The UnCola,” paper billboards posted above highways mere months before Woodstock in 1969 exploded with colorful and trippy cartoons of pretty girls, rainbows, sunbursts, flowers, and butterflies. Creatives at the agency mined the popularity of the Beatles’ psychedelic phase and appropriated the “peace, love, and understanding” zeitgeist of the youthful antiwar counterculture—all in the name of selling sugar water. - - | Collectors WeeklyPosted by gerardvanderleun at 1:22 PM | Your Say (3)
“We will destroy each and every enemy, even if he was an old Bolshevik;
we will destroy all his kin, his family. We will mercilessly destroy anyone who, by his deeds or his thoughts—yes, his thoughts!—threatens the unity of the socialist state.” - - StalinPosted by gerardvanderleun at 12:23 PM | Your Say (0)
Moonbat Foreplay: You Can Now Do Yoga with Goats on a Farm in Oregon
The No Regrets Farm offers great scenery and fresh air, but the stars of the unique yoga class were the friendly, attention-seeking goats walking among the yoga practitioners and asking to be stroked. Photos taken during the event show the adorable animals --a mixture of Nigerian dwarf and pygmy goats -- interacting with participants, lying down next to them or even on top of them. | Oddity Central - Collecting OdditiesPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:57 AM | Your Say (0)
[Bumped] The National Football League is on TV. It can easily be turned off.
Ingrate of the Century. So far. The National Football League is sponsored by beer and cars and soft drinks that can easily be not purchased. Not that hard. Just turn it off.You better be especially careful because the opening weekend of the National Football League this year is the 15th anniversary of 9/11. Opening Sunday in the National Football League this year is September the 11th, the 15th anniversary. And if a number of you endeavor to try to steal the stage of the National Football League to call attention to a personal political issue, attention you could not get without stealing the stage of the National Football League, you run the risk of doing grave damage to the league and business in which you play and are paid, a business which depends on massive public love and support and attention and money. - - Rush LimbaughPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:55 AM | Your Say (9)
Memo to Kaepernick: Why We Stand
Every adult who stands for the Anthem understands as much as {Kaepernick} does, and knows that Liberty and Justice for All it is not a perfect reality.
However, by standing we make a far stronger statement than his sitting. Standing, we aver that such an ideal is a Good worth striving and dying for. Our personal and grown-up reflections on our shortcomings is a commonality he has not yet discovered, being sheltered as he has from the "common." We can be in agreement with his observation, more than he can guess, but his youth and lack of self-reflection are painfully on display. This is why we stand: we know our faults, and we know that the change doesn't come with consensus about the problem, it comes with consensus about the solution.Posted by: Joan of Argghh! to The National Football League is on TV. It can easily be turned off.Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:58 AM | Your Say (2)
Not for nothing are they called “smart” rather than “wise” phones.
Me: “Hey, Siri, find me a Catholic Mass to go to.” My phone: “I don’t know how to respond to that.” Me: “Okay then, take me to a strip club.” My phone: “Which strip club? Tap the one you want.”Posted by gerardvanderleun at 10:54 AM | Your Say (0)
Open borders is a strange religion with many in Europe.
The news is a pretty much just a non-stop celebration of open borders.They talk about it with such reverence, you could be mistaken for thinking “open borders” is the new name for God. Today the news is celebrating the first anniversary of Alan Kurdi, the hoax perpetrated by the Western media to help sway public sympathy for allowing in a billion Muslims. The news, of course, still maintains it was a real story, which is like watching people talk seriously about Big Foot. - - Travelogue: Open BordersPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:17 AM | Your Say (1)
September 1, 2016
The Inner Nature of Strong Beliefs
The fact that you believe very strongly in something means that you believe in it very strongly. Nothing more.
It also means that you have dispensed with liberality and the marketplace of ideas. It means that you have dispensed with pragmatic and rational thought. It also means that you are most likely wrong. Had Enough Therapy?: How to Wreck Your MarriagePosted by gerardvanderleun at 12:33 PM | Your Say (3)
Take a Look Inside a House Meant for Mars
This home is right for you if you’re a non-smoker, in good physical shape, think backpacking food is delicious, crave occasional check-ins from researchers concerned about your stress level and well-being, and don’t mind the noise generated by roommates and somewhat nearby munitions testing. Also, you may need to be OK with recycling your own urine, which could become an added feature in the next year or so. -- National GeographicPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:49 AM | Your Say (2)
My writing ritual is:
I write. With whatever is available.I typically use my MacBook or, when I’m in a certain mood, a fountain pen in a notebook. But I can write on an iPad or even on a phone. I can write on a legal pad with a ballpoint pen, or on index cards with a pencil. As soon as you say “I can only write when things are just so” you have set yourself up for failure. Settled Things StrangePosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:40 AM | Your Say (0)
It's Probably Nothing:
India and the United States Sign Landmark Defense AgreementPosted by gerardvanderleun at 11:20 AM | Your Say (0)
Look what progress throws up
“We have replaced religion with (at best) religionism, freedom with liberty,wisdom with cleverness, sentiment with sentimentality, justice with legalism, art with pickled animals, music with amplified noise, statecraft with politicking, love with sex, communication with sound bytes, self-confidence with effrontery, equality before God with levelling, respect for others with political correctness – in short, everything real with virtual caricatures.” – Alexander BootPosted by gerardvanderleun at 10:40 AM | Your Say (0)
"I Don’t Give a Flying F*ck Who Pays for the Wall"
With regard to America’s fence, people are getting hurt and killed.It has become de riguer for our governments, at all levels, to respond to the crisis by plying us with a bunch of misleading statistics about the illegal aliens’ propensity to commit crime versus equivalent statistics for the native population — as if that mattered even a tiny bit. Rather than fulfilling their obligation to defend the homeland from invasion, and solving the problem. Opposition to illegal immigration is not opposition to all immigration. There’s nothing racist about it; what color is “don’t trespass”? A fence is no more bigoted or xenophobic, than a front door on your house that locks. House of EratosthenesPosted by gerardvanderleun at 9:54 AM | Your Say (5)
