Mitch McConnell: Nancy Pelosi Handled Impeachment Like ‘A Happy Bill Signing’

The full story of the impeachment trial in pictures. #ImpeachmentTrilogy pic.twitter.com/DrBJTtvPKV

— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) January 16, 2020

Over the years, better maps kept showing the same bloblike features. One huddles under Africa; the other is beneath the Pacific.

They lurk where the planet’s molten iron core meets its rocky mantle, floating like mega-continents in the underworld. Their highest points may measure over 100 times the height of Everest. And if you somehow brought them to the surface, God forbid, they contain enough material to cover the entire globe in a lava lake roughly 100 kilometers deep.

“It would be like having an object in the sky, and asking, ‘Is that the moon?’ And people are like, no. ‘Is that the sun?’ No. ‘What is it?’ We don’t know!” said Vedran Lekić, a seismologist at the University of Maryland. “And whatever it is, it is intimately tied to the evolution of the Earth.”

The first mystery of these hulking, hidden seismic features is whether they’re made of different stuff than the rest of the Earth’s mantle. The second: How do these patterns in the deep leave traces on our surface world?

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Neo notes that Project Veritas: the left never seems to lose that Gulag impulse and brings back this genocidal blast from the Ameican Left’s past:  Ex Weatherman Larry Grathwohl says Obama’s mentor Bill Ayers wanted to kill millions like Mao

I wonder how many million Bernie Bros blathering today will become compost should order in the US snap and the guns come out. I wonder if they see that their yearnings to start a fight today is just the chronicle of their deaths foretold. Should such a terrible event happen would I weep over their graves? No. But I might drink a few beers before visiting them.

Brian Mast speaks — silence ensues

Rep. Brian Mast is a double amputee courtesy of the munitions disseminated by Qassem Soleimani in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere. (Rep. Mast himself sustained his injuries in Afghanistan.) We posted Rep. Mast’s remarks condemning his Democratic colleagues on the floor of the House last week in “Brian Mast speaks.”

Rep. Mast followed up his remarks on the House floor in the House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing yesterday (video below, C-SPAN video here). This time around, Brian Mast speaks and silence ensues.

The colony has been abandoned for a long time and spans an area roughly equal to 500 square feet, with its tunnels and passages spiraling down some 26 feet down into the surface, and is believed to be one of the world’s largest ant colonies, if not the largest.

Nature’s Secret Power, a documentary, speculated that this wondrous engineering structure was the effort of an active community of leafcutter fans, described as essentially a superorganism. It is estimated that the work resulted in over 40 metric tons of soil being excavated to lay the foundations of the inner structure, which is made up of an incredible network of interconnected pathways.

This complex network resulted in the efficient transportation of foraging expeditions, and a great ventilation system from within the structure. The chambers were used to grow fungus gardens and also to dispose of rubbish in dedicated pits. The leafcutter ants would have foraged for any type of vegetation to sustain their internal gardens.

RTWT@ Giant Ant MEGALOPOLIS Unearthed In Brazil | Disclose.tv

An immense flood of ants, about a hundred yards in width, was pouring in a glimmering-black cataract down the far slope of the ditch. Many thousands were already drowning in the sluggish creeping flow, but they were followed by troop after troop, who clambered over their sinking comrades, and then themselves served as dying bridges to the reserves hurrying on in their rear.

Shoals of ants were being carried away by the current into the middle of the ditch, where gradually they broke asunder and then, exhausted by their struggles, vanished below the surface. Nevertheless, the wavering, floundering hundred-yard front was remorselessly if slowly advancing towards the beseiged on the other bank. Leiningen had been wrong when he supposed the enemy would first have to fill the ditch with their bodies before they could cross; instead, they merely needed to act as steppingstones, as they swam and sank, to the hordes ever pressing onwards from behind…. Leiningen Versus the Ants–Carl Stephenson

The Half-Pint Posse: March 1941. “Children of construction workers in trailer camp. Portsmouth, Virginia.”

My mother’s car for many years.

Five days back I posted a small item about the Last VW Beetle and my memories of much earlier Beetles in Bye-Bye Beetle Bye-Bye [Bumped because its a great thread]. But it turned out that many of my readers also had memories of the little Beetle that did so much for so many. Those memories were, as they say backstage at comedy clubs, “Gold. Solid gold.” If you missed them, you shouldn’t have. So here they all are.

If you’ve got a Beetle memory you want to share, pop it in the comments.

James Bowen That reminded me of my Volkswagen ride in the early 60s.
My Dad arranged for me to ride with a friend of his from work to visit my grandparents. The man’s VW was an early model that did not have a fan on the heater. It was 20F, the man talked non stop for 6 hours and his Great Dane in the back seat had the worst flatulence I’ve ever smelled. Freezing, trying not to breathe and my ears hurt. Ah, the old times will not be forgotten.

John Venlet: Never owned a Beetle, but I did own a Rabbit, called it Rick the Rabbit, when I lived on Oahu while stationed at Pearl. Had a blast with that car, and a few almost perilous adventures. VW made the only car, the Scirocco, which if I put the driver’s seat all the way back, I could not reach the pedals. Being 6′ 4″, back in 1977 when I first drove one, I was rather surprised by this. I’ve not ever been in another car where that happened.

Casey Klahn Yes, I bought a Beetle well used. Well, it was full of mold because: Northwest coast. The window defrost was not even a tenth of what it had to be to do any reasonable job. The heater you might need to crawl up onto to get a leg or an arm burn and still freeze your ass off. The wind and the rain! Oh man, I can still feel it inside that car! My army jeep was way better but it was better kept. Shit, I was a poor SOB. How am I still alive?

Auntie Analogue In ’74 I bought a twelve-year-old 1962 Beetle, a cream puff that had 36,000 miles on the odometer. 1962 was the first year that the Beetle had a gas gauge but still lacked a heater fan, which meant that unless the car was moving forward no heat emerged from the heater ducts or from the two vestigial port & starboard defroster slits. In snowfall at stoplights, I used to disembark to chisel accumulated ice from that Bug’s windshield.

Worse, the heater flue deflector plates at the bottom of its engine were laden with oil & gas, so that turning on the heater (by means of a cable-connected knurled knob that lifted sheet steel plates at the bottom of the engine to deflect heat from the cylinder cooling fins into the cabin) introduced suffocating toxic gas/oil fumes into the cabin. So that in winter, to keep from inhaling too much of that sickening, eye-watering vapor and to keep my skull from frosting, I took to wearing an old WWII flight helmet while having the heat on and the windows open.

In two years of ownership I put over 90,000 miles on that Bug – the penultimate seven miles on three cylinders, and the last two or three miles on just two spasmodically hammering cylinders. Then sold it to a neighbor who dropped a used replacement engine in it and drove it for at least two more years, even after his wife had had a few fender-benders in it that had occasioned replaced fenders of an assortment of colors different from the car’s body.

Prior to the early 1970’s federal emissions statutes the earlier Beetles were exemplars of simplicity and efficiency. They performed adequately the basic purpose of a car: to get you where you wanted to go, and at low operating cost.

Oh, there was one lovely feature in that Bug of mine. It had its original 1962 Blaupunkt AM/FM/MB radio that I could sideband-tune and pull in radio stations that no other car radio I knew of had ever or could ever pull in.

James ONeil Three Beetle stories: [continue reading…]

How Marty Robbins Accidentally Pioneered Guitar Fuzz Effects

Grady Martin, a rockabilly and county legend and A-list session musician, was the secret weapon behind Robbins’ “El Paso,” Loretta Lynn’s “Coal Miner’s Daughter” and other all-time great recordings.

On “Don’t Worry,” he played six-string bass. A relatively tame song sounds way different when Martin’s solo begins about the 1:25 mark. He’d run his instrument through a faulty mixing console. As a result, it sounded like he’d stirred up a nest of metallic hornets. [continue reading…]

Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as œthe truth exists. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event,  It never happened well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five  well, two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs. — George Orwell wrote those words in 1943, in his essay, Looking Back on the Spanish War.

The Economy’s Inequality Dividend – WSJ Wage growth for production-level workers slowed with average hourly wages up 3% over the last year compared to 3.4% in November. Some of this may be monthly statistical noise, and the trend in the last two years has been higher wage growth among lower earners. That’s a contrast to the early years of this expansion when real wages were flat.

The Federal Reserve’s interventions inflated asset values, which helped the affluent but did little for low- and middle-income Americans who don’t own stocks. Enter Donald Trump, whose deregulation and tax reform unleashed a surge of business investment (before his tariff spree) and hiring, which has drawn workers off the sidelines and raised wages.

The comparative data are striking, and mostly ignored by the press. During the first 11 quarters of the Trump Presidency, wages for the bottom 10% of earners over age 25 rose an average 5.9% annually compared to 2.4% during Barack Obama’s second term, according to the latest demographic data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Wages for the middle two quartiles increased 3.2% compared to 2.2% and 2.7% between 2012 and 2016. Wage gains for the top 10% have held steady at about 3%.

Less educated workers have also seen the strongest gains. Wages have risen at a 6.1% annual clip for workers over 25 without a high school degree and 3.9% for those with some college—both about three times faster than during the second Obama term. Wage gains have also accelerated though to a lesser degree—to 3.2% from 2.2%—for college grads.

Handicapping The Democrat Losers The first is that he has legacy black Democrat support. He’s the closest to a traditional Democrat, as opposed to one of the faculty lounge snobs that makes up most of the rest of the race. The second is that he has been designated The Democrat Most Likely To Succeed in beating The Donald. It’s unclear why. Sure, some polls say it (though they are shifting in Trump’s direction), but the problem for Joe is that so many liberal media types are wishcasting his victory that they never hit him hard.

Then there’s Chief Spewing Bull. Her own brother recently dissed her for inventing more fake family history. Trump would chew her up, spit her out, and wash the residue into the gutter. Where’s the enthusiasm for a serial fraud who compares poorly to every bitter spinster public elementary school teacher who either demanded you use your inside voice or tried to make her class celebrate Kwanza?

General Motors shocks nearly 1,000 temp workers with full-time promotions; Ford promotes 592

Humphrey, 27, has been a part-time temporary worker at GM’s Flint Assembly in Michigan for the last three years. On Sunday morning, he and about 250 of his co-workers crowded into UAW Local 598’s union hall. Most thought they were there for a routine meeting.

But when the local’s president stepped to the mic, the room listened in awed silence.

“He said, ‘As of tomorrow, you guys are full-time seniority employees of GM,’ ” Humphrey said. “There was a gasp in the room for a few seconds. Some of us thought he misspoke. Then, we had to say, ‘No, we heard him right!’ It was amazing.”

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Roger Scruton: Conservative thinker dies at 75  Boris Johnson led the tributes, calling him the country’s “greatest modern conservative thinker”, while Chancellor Sajid Javid said “he made a unique contribution to public life.”

RIP Sir Roger Scruton. We have lost the greatest modern conservative thinker – who not only had the guts to say what he thought but said it beautifully. — Boris Johnson (@BorisJohnson) January 13, 2020

Beginning: At any time between 1750 and 1930 if you asked educated people to describe the aim of poetry, art or music, they would have replied “beauty.”

And if you had asked for the point of that you would have learned that beauty is a value, as important as truth and goodness. Then in the 20th century beauty stopped being important. Art increasingly aimed to disturb and to break moral taboos. It was not beauty but originality however achieved and at whatever moral cost that won the prizes. Not only has art made a cult of ugliness. Architecture too has become soul-less and sterile. And it is not just our physical surroundings that have become ugly. Our language, our music and our manners are increasingly raucous, self-centered and offensive as though beauty and good taste have no real place in our lives. One word is written large on all these ugly things and that word is “Me.” My profits, my desires, my pleasures. And art has nothing to say in response to this except “Yeah, go for it!”

I think we are losing beauty and there is a danger that with it we will lose the meaning of life. I’m Roger Scruton, philosopher and writer. My trade is to ask questions. During the last few years I have been asking questions about beauty. Beauty has been central to our civilisation for over 2000 years. From its beginnings in ancient Greece philosophy has reflected on the place of beauty in art, poetry, music, architecture and everyday life. Philosophers have argued that through the pursuit of beauty we shape the world as a home. We also come to understand our own nature as spiritual beings. But our world has turned its back on beauty and because of that we find ourselves surrounded by ugliness and alienation.

I want to persuade you that beauty matters; that it is not just a subjective thing, but a universal need of human beings. If we ignore this need we find ourselves in a spiritual desert. I want to show you the path out of that desert. It is a path that leads to home……. Full Transcript Here

NOW: Looking at the proposed Virginia rally Matt Bracken warns at Seven And A Wake-Up | Western Rifle Shooters Association Matt Bracken | January 12, 2020 at 11:46 |
If anybody cares to check the Richmond Kill Box photo, you will note that the Federal Building is only 2 city blocks from Capitol Square, so all the FBI and ATF agents (including 100s more brought in from out of state for the event) can just walk over to the Buffalo Jump in both their tacticool and undercover garb.

(The Richmond Jail and PD HQ are just out of the top of the image on the other side of I-95.)

Also note that the Richmond Convention Center and Richmond Coliseum are just a few blocks away as well, so if mass-arrests result, they can just march the arrested over for triage and holding while the prison buses are rolled in.

THEN:When word is received that a flash mob is forming at one of their pre-reconnoitered intersections or highway interchanges, the SAV team will assemble. Sometimes cooperating police will pass tactical intel to their civilian friends on the outside. Some clever individuals will have exploited their technical know-how and military experience to build real-time intel collection tools, such as private UAVs. Police will have access to urban security camera footage showing MUYs moving barricade materials into position—a normal prerequisite to a flash mob riot intended to stop traffic. Tip-offs to the vigilantes will be common, and where the networks are still functioning, citizens may still be able to access some video feeds. Sometimes, police will even join the SAV teams, incognito and off-duty, blurring the teams into so-called “death squads.”

The operation I will describe (and it’s only one of dozens that will be tried) uses two ordinary pickup trucks and eight fighters. Two riflemen are lying prone in the back of each truck, facing rearward, with removable canvas covers concealing their presence. Their semi-automatic, scoped rifles are supported at their front ends on bipods for very accurate shooting. A row of protective sandbags a foot high is between them and the raised tailgate. [continue reading…]

Who hath laid the measures thereof, if thou knowest? or who hath stretched the line upon it?
Whereupon are the foundations thereof fastened? or who laid the corner stone thereof;
When the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?

Look not deep but far afield,
beyond the limits of our sight,
It cannot be that all that is
is but night on deeper night.

But if it should be all that is,
and all as purposeless as stone,
The heart still sings the body’s chants,
and moves the light along the bones.
Perhaps this pattern that we know
as slanted time between two lights
Is but some dance cast to amuse
what lies beyond our blinded sight.

— from “Intelligent Design”

HRC’s new Orwellian language guide. According to this, not only can men have vaginas but in fact ONLY men can have vaginas. Real women have “front holes.” And of course this utterly insane debasement of women and appropriation of womanhood will go unopposed by the Left. pic.twitter.com/dRnLPIwv9s

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) January 10, 2020

Russian arms manufacturers must be really ticked off at how inaccurate the Iranian missiles were. Not to mention how their ground to air missile system was used to shoot down a civilian airliner. Not great advertisements for future sales. Buy American!…  A Large Regular: Flotsam and Jetsam

Despite multiple interventions, Africa remains the most corrupt continent by far. Some 200 coups or attempted coups have taken place, 25 heads of state have been assassinated, and roughly fifty wars have been fought.
Get the Hell Out of Afghanistan Now Julius Caesar understood how to pacify a country. So did Curtis LeMay. You go in and wipe out your enemies. You kill them in massive quantities until they beg you to surrender. And you destroy their territory, leaving it a wasteland. We did that in World War II, not coincidentally the last war we unequivocally won.
Another Expensive Solar Scheme Bites the Dust Crescent Dunes was obsoleted by technological advances in the form of photovoltaic based solar plants.  That is nonsense and misses the whole point of the Crescent Dunes project.  It also misses the reality that all utility-scale solar is a failure — not marginal, not growing into being practical, but a total and complete failure. [continue reading…]

 

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2019 Pashkour ! 😊 2020 will be better I promise 🙌

A post shared by Pasha Petkuns (@pashatheboss) on Jan 3, 2020 at 9:29am PST