AMERICA’S LOSS OF TOUGHNESS ENABLED CORONAMANIA
Mark Oshinskie Feb 9 220 168
Mark OshinskieFeb 9
In the late 1980s-early 1990s, I spent many Saturdays rehabbing an apartment building above an old, fire-gutted bank at 292-98 South Orange Avenue, Newark, New Jersey with Habitat for Humanity. The red brick structure was three stories tall and a half-block wide, with boarded-up windows. Working on the upper floors, we walked across tattered sheets of plywood lightly fastened to the remaining floor joists that spanned the inner shell of the building. Watch your step.
The project manager was a sturdy, brusque, coarse-blonde-haired, construction-experienced recovering alcoholic named Dave who, on cold mornings, wore a khaki-shelled Carhartt work suit. Dave had replaced a slim urban fellow named Johnny, who was a recovering heroin addict suspected of stealing power tools from the site and selling these to buy drugs. We kept the tools in the basement vault that withstood the fire and only Johnny had the keys. So they fired him. And changed the locks.
Dave was a blue-collar philosopher. The Twelve-Step process seems to make those who go through it reflect deeply on their own, and others,’ lives. Or maybe Twelve-Step just makes them more likely to share with others their impressions of the human condition. As we worked alongside each other, Dave would sometimes tell a short story about something that had happened and then add, with conviction, a larger life lesson like “Everybody’s suffering is real to them.”
We often made batches of concrete for footings. Because we lacked a cement mixer, we mixed the concrete on top of old plywood, using shovels. On the first day we did this, Dave began the process by declaring, “You’ve got to have some hate in you to mix concrete by hand.”
I’ve done harder work—for example, I’ve been a garbageman and roofed during the summer—but mixing concrete by hand is kind of unpleasant. You have to haul multiple bags of sand and cement mix and five-gallon buckets of cold water, which splashes on your pants in chilly weather. When you tear open and pour out the bags, cement dust gets in your eyes and hair and on your clothes. The dust would wreck your lungs if you mixed concrete often. I tied a bandanna over my mouth and nose; it seemed more effective than a Covid mask later seemed.
After you blend the dry sand and cement, you shape the pile into a wide volcano and pour water into the depression on top. Then, shovelful-by-shovelful, you scrape the dry mix from the plywood at the volcanic base into the ponded water in the crater, circling the crater on foot to preserve the pile’s symmetry. You work quickly so that the weighty gray sludge doesn’t harden before you sling it into its final resting place. Multiple batches are typically required.
Mixing concrete is grunt work. It doesn’t create something that looks good, or finished, as does hanging drywall, painting, refinishing floors or building bookshelves. But you have to do this task. If you don’t, there’s no foundation for the more satisfying, visible building elements that follow.
Before I heard it from Dave, I had known and seen that anger could be channeled into a constructive response. But Dave’s concrete-mixing metaphor and his use of the word “hate” stuck with me. In life, as when mixing concrete, people need to show some grit and push through unpleasant tasks or life phases.
Americans used to better understand this link between hate, perseverance and getting stuff done. Over the centuries, countless people in the US and abroad have done plenty of very hard work to sustain themselves and their families. In order to do so, they needed to internalize some risk and bring some toughness to bear.
For example, my grandfather and countless others of his generation deep-mined coal. Many were killed in mine accidents. Many more, like my grandfather, at 47, died from black lung disease. Other men worked in steel mills. In the first half of the 1900s, 9% of steelworkers died on the job from, e.g., having heavy beams land, or molten steel poured, on them. Similarly, millions have planted, cultivated or harvested crops all day in scorching hot fields. Before those fields were used to grow crops, they needed to be cleared. Imagine cutting thick, massive trees with two-man handsaws all day in very hot summers. Many humans did such work for years, for little or no pay.
Despite being subjected to much greater threats than people were from Coronavirus exposure, coal, steel and agricultural laborers pressed on because they needed income and because everyone needed coal, steel, lumber and food and fiber to build and heat houses, schools and businesses, to eat and wear clothes and to travel. Those who provided these commodities were the original “essential workers.” On balance, far more lives were lengthened and improved—not shortened and worsened—because laborers tolerated serious risk and did exhausting and dangerous work.
In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, workplaces were made safer and hard work was increasingly done by machines and/or outsourced abroad. But as this occurred, many Americans lost their mental toughness and sense of history. As a society, we overshot the safety mark. This was never clearer than in the past three years of Coronamania, during which bizarre, ineffective public safety measures were substituted for sane risk/reward analysis and the general welfare.
Many contemporary people have never done physically challenging labor. Over the past fifty-plus years, increasing numbers of workers sit in front of screens and do some oddly-titled job, the process or purpose of which can be hard to explain or understand. Modernity, occupational and otherwise, has pacified people and lessened their ability to recognize true adversity, or to assess risk. Additionally, excessive exposure to the media and academia have fostered the false, yet prevailing belief that the world is always in crisis and that only “Science(!)” and the government can save us.
Having been disconnected from hard physical work, and having become dependent upon smartphones, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and abundant “recreational” herb, many Twenty-First Century Americans have become emotionally soft, psychologically frail and cognitively challenged. Even though 7,600 Americans died daily before Coronamania, during the past three years, many thought, or at least pretended, that no one should get sick or die, no matter how old or overweight. They feared things, like coronaviruses, that aren’t fearsome.
Manifesting extreme safety-ism, they staunchly but naively supported ridiculous measures that they thought might “just save one life.” In so doing, they ignored the obvious, major downsides to such plainly unhelpful interventions.
The important thing in present-day America is to be nice, or to act like you are. Mostly, neo-niceness means favoring politically correct groups of people, hating the politically incorrect, studiously using PC buzzwords, hewing to PC narratives, up-talking to connote deference to others and uncertainty about even the plainest facts, and giving pedestrians the right of way while driving a Prius. Such symbolic steps require no serious effort but allow the neo-nice to feel good about themselves.
Obeying, and demanding that others obey, the Covid “mitigation” measures exacted little or no cost from the laptop class. Their incomes were undiminished. They got to “work from home” or were paid not to work at all. Many laptoppers even profited from Coronamania via various CARES Act subsidies, running various Covid-boosted businesses or Med/Pharma shareholding. The nice laptoppers’ support for Covid mitigation was passive, performative “kindness” run amok.
Yet, isolating people from each other wasn’t kind or nice, or helpful. Nor was stealing irreplaceable time from those, especially kids, who need human interaction. Nor was making others wear silly masks or take harmful, lethal shots. It also wasn’t nice to widen the gap between the rich and the working poor; the government caused major inflation by giving away trillions of contrived CovidBucks for nothing of value.
Our culture’s debilitating shift toward neo-niceness began several decades ago. From young ages, kids have increasingly been given many unnecessary toys, clothes and experiences. Young people have also been shielded from physical challenges. For example, most boys have given up football for soccer. They don’t even wrestle in gym class; it’s considered too rough. Sitting alone in front of screens—on social media—and playing video games is far more common. Few young Americans have done hard work even in their teens or twenties. Instead, they get corporate or non-profit internships, often unpaid, as their parents subsidize them.
During Coronamania, politicians, the media and laptop-class liberals opportunistically feigned outrage over the passing of already ill septuagenarians, octogenarians and nonagenarians, or the obese. Our forebearers would have dismissed those who deemed such deaths unexpected or tragic. They had faced much bigger risks and challenges. And there were far fewer old or obese people then.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have sacrificed normal life, an economy and a young generation so that they could work in sweatpants and their party could win elections. Instead, they would have seen the costs of extreme safety-ism, scoffed at the idea of locking down a society over a respiratory virus and understood that the human toll of doing so far exceeded any insincerely-proffered, and ultimately unrealized, benefits.
SKFebruary 13, 2023, 1:47 PM
Thank you for sharing this excellent essay.
Casey KlahnFebruary 13, 2023, 8:16 PM
Well done.
AnneFebruary 14, 2023, 8:09 AM
Well done.
RoadieFebruary 15, 2023, 6:20 AM
Bravo.
ghostsniperFebruary 13, 2023, 8:56 AM
soft times begat soft people
soft people ain’t worth a fuk
It is okay to hate, especially to hate what is evil, and neo-niceness adherents are actually supporting evil under the guise of inclusion.
azlibertarianFebruary 13, 2023, 12:04 PM
“…neo-niceness….”
I’ve long thought that those who display those “Be Kind” messages on their cars or t-shirts are nothing more than passive-aggressive leftists who have managed to contain their inner Karen’s.
ThisIsNotNutellaFebruary 13, 2023, 4:54 PM
I seem to a recall a once-best-selling Bildungsroman which contained the the fateful words, “Slowly I began to hate Them.”
He then proceeded to over-egg the pudding and generally fuck things up for everybody.
And that, Dear Friends, is why you’re not permitted Righteous Hatred by your present Masters. Which fact will be our collective doom. Because there is no robust Natural Law or Muh Founding Principles argument against Somalis living next door to you. Visceral Digust and Hatred IS the only winning argument. True you cannot build a thriving civilization upon a foundation of pure hatred. You need more positive ideals and virtues. But without the leavening (sic) of Hatred, Forgeddaboudit.
AnonymousFebruary 14, 2023, 8:00 PM
Yet slowly I begin to hate anyway.
ghostsniperFebruary 13, 2023, 12:25 PM
Did you know this?
I did not.
Quote:
“The AR-15 and M4 are both designed to fire a .223 round that
tumbles upon hitting flesh and rips thru the human body. A single round is capable
of severing the upper body from the lower body, or decapitation.”
Wonder how much the state of CA had to pay him to denigrate semi-auto rifles in general, versus automatic rifles, i.e. machine guns, and the .223/5.56 round specifically. I note he did not work into his blather that if the rifle is black, it’s even more dangerous than if it was pink, or rainbow flagged.
ghostsniperFebruary 13, 2023, 12:53 PM
Little more diggin’.
He compromised hisself.
It’s always sumfink. lol
That crib in the background is begging for a white tin roof, and maybe a little more gingerbread.
ThisIsNotNutellaFebruary 13, 2023, 5:02 PM
Yep. Knew that despite being more of a knowitall than firearms guy.
The Rules of War requiring full metal jacketed bullets to prevent fragmentation doesn’t forbid workarounds. The boat tail on these projectiles is there precisely to induce yaw and tumbling inside body cavities.
Similar to large caliber sniper rounds being ostensibly ‘anti-materiel’ and the fig-leaf claim that White Phosphorous is used for defoliation or illumination. Both are mainly anti-personnel but would be classed as inhumane if this use explicitly stated.
Its not a game for Gentlemen.
ghostsniperFebruary 13, 2023, 5:26 PM
TINN sed: “Its not a game for Gentlemen.”
========
Always police your brass.
Someone else can use it at a crime scene, with your fingerprints on it.
TerryFebruary 13, 2023, 5:39 PM
I did not know that the 5.56×45 55grn military round was ‘designed’ as described by ghost. But I have viewed combat wounds caused by the 5.56×45 mil round in medical books with photos of combat wounds. Very damaging round indeed. Just the velocity of the projectile is sufficient to sever human limbs. No bullet expansion necessary to inflict hideous wounds.
But, if you research the 5.45×39 Russian round you will read that the bullet was designed to yaw in flesh and create a massive wound channel. I saw this demonstrated by a spetsnaz Russian using ballistic gelatin. The 5.45×39 projectile has a wicked aspect ratio. The bullet cannot drill straight into flesh but has to yaw and turn and tumble. The Soviet AK-74 (not AK-47) was the first weapon so designed for this cartridge I believe.
Speaking of Russian special operators, I truly believe they are as tough as it gets. Could be the Israeli spl. people are up to the same level of hell. It could be our people are as well, but the “others” do not depend on any air support. I have nothing but the very highest respect for our guys. I wish I could have been good enough to be one of “our” guys. My brother Tim was one of our guy’s. He returned back home with a very poor disposition. He did not (and still does not) tolerate anyone who claims to be an “authority”. God is the only Authority over any free human being.
Sorry for the rant-
John A. FlemingFebruary 13, 2023, 8:58 PM
We had a recent visual example with that Kyle Rittenhouse vaporizing a guy’s bicep from point-blank range. If he’d hit the shoulder or elbow joint instead, the poor unfortunate antifa-adjacent Grosskreutz would probably have lost a lot more use of his arm. Would it have severed the arm at the joint? Hmm, possibly, connective tendons, ligaments and bone are tougher than muscle.
A point-blank shot is not quite the same thing as being hit past 100 yards. A 55-grain M193 at 100 yds carries 80% of muzzle energy, 60% at 200 yards. Those ballistic guys talk about “hydrostatic shock”, which only happens for high-energy bullets. But some others dispute the details.
But a single shot to the torso? No, I don’t think so. You’ll need a MG-42 for that.
hooodathunkitFebruary 13, 2023, 8:06 PM
GS – may not be your ‘fault’, but can you cleanup on aisle TINN and Terry below
which seem to be accepting the link you posted as “your explanation” ?
ghostsniperFebruary 14, 2023, 4:42 AM
I saw that, thanks.
Doods, that wasn’t MY opinion, it was a quote from someone else, an asshole.
John A. FlemingFebruary 13, 2023, 8:33 PM
I was an all-American boy. We played Cowboys and Indians. We built dirt forts and threw fistfuls of dirt clods at each other, and it was oh-so-glorious to score a direct hit on the other guys and see the clod shatter into a cloud of dust. We had cap guns of all kinds, little derringers to big revolvers. One year I got a Johnny Seven OMA for Christmas and wore it clean out. I nailed my sister in the eye with one of the grenades it threw. I got in big trouble for that, but I didn’t care. We had bb guns and shot into ant holes. We had those stupid fake bb guns that only shot out some air, so we packed dirt into the muzzle and got a poof of dirt for every trigger pull. We were smart enough to not shoot bb’s directly at another boy, only targets. We knew if we hit a person or damaged property there would be holy hell to pay, so we didn’t do it.
Lots of guys talk about how they did stuff with their dad and grampa. That was not the way for us. Grampa was far away, and Dad was always busy with his work, providing for the family.
We graduated to bigger and louder. We had Cox gas-powered control-line airplanes that we flew in our cul-de-sac. All of us boys knew the sound of those little Cox engines winding up somewhere in the neighborhood, and we’d all bicycle and walk over to see what was going on. The sound of “thrupp”, “thrupp”, “thrupzzzreeee”, the smell of glow-plug fuel splashing onto the pavement, it was the sights and sounds of summer. I think I destroyed three of those Cox PT-19 trainers, held together by rubber bands until they augered into the pavement. I was just too aggressive on my maneuvers, couldn’t just let it go round and round, no, I had to go high, then dive for the pavement intending to pull out at the last minute and skim the ground at high speed.
Then I got into model rockets. Oh yeah, the smell of black powder, glue, balsa filler, hot fuel-proof dope, plastic cement, enamel and lacquer paint. We’d spend days building them, then bicycling over to the big vacant lot down at the end of the neighborhood. The little A6-3 mouse-fart motors were not for us. No, we used the mighty C6-7’s. It was bragging rights to launch a rocket so high you never saw it again. The next step down was to have to run for it as the rocket, oh so high popped its now microscopic chute and drifted on the winds far away,
We got tired of store-bought models and started making our own designs. We tore apart motors and lit the black-powder slugs on the cul-de sac and watched it madly spin around and burn up in a flash of smoke. We’d go down to the local Hobby Shop and peruse the hobby chemicals they sold there, and read up on pyrotechnic formulas. We’d always ask the guy behind the counter for sodium nitrate, which they never had, so we used potassium nitrate. The guys at the counter I realize now knew exactly why we wanted sodium nitrate and sulfur, but they kept up the fiction and said no, we’re out, they never asked and we never said as to why and what for. I crafted a simple cheap rocket, nothing more than a motor, fins, nose cone and pyrotechnic powder, and launched it right from our backyard. I got a shower of sparks out of that. I never did it again. I wonder what one of our neighbors thought when they found the exploded remains in their yard.
Well, it wasn’t enough. Soon we were sneaking shotgun shells from Dad’s supplies, disassembling them and lighting the loose powder piles. I put an empty shell in a vise in the workshop, pointed the open end towards the open door, and struck the primer. I just had to know.
The end of my pyro days came soon enough. I made a molotov cocktail, a coke bottle, a rag, a little gas from the gas can in the shed. Man was I stupid that day, but I just had to do it. I walked out to the alley with a box of matches and the bottle. No one was around. It was a hot summer day. I stood there and thought about it. And finally the dread got to me, that this was a step too far, that if I lit and threw it my life would be changed forever. Years before my oldest brother got in trouble for playing with matches in the alley and lighting the weeds on fire next to the wood fence, with my mom having to quickly get the garden hose and put it out. One day the cops caught me flicking matches into the dirt of the vacant lot as I walked home from school and gave me a stern talking to as I shook from head to toe.
Nope, that moment of paralyzing dread cured me of pyromania and explosives. Some of my friends went farther. One said he’d made, or almost made, a little nitroglycerine during high school chemistry lab, making it while the teacher wasn’t looking. He said he almost lost control of the reaction, it has to be kept cool with ice or it will go unstable. In those days the Anarchist Cookbook was available at certain bookstores, if you knew where to look. After that molotov cocktail incident, I had lost my taste for those kind of risks. I went on to other things, stories for another time.
The past is another country, and the country of our youth is gone. We don’t seem to let our children have that kind of freedom anymore. And we seem to deny them the experience of finding their own way to wisdom. “Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.” Their lives are programed, school and sports, extra classes, summer school, Junior Lifeguards in the summer; sport, school, Church and Scout camps. We don’t allow them to just fafo, while they are still small and can’t do much damage. I think the reason I didn’t keep going is because I was on my own in those days: no wise grandpa, no Dad, no wise older brother to show me the way. I had to limit myself. We learned from the stories of our brothers, all our friends and the experiences they had with their friends and family. Sure, with all that freedom came extra danger, but also lots more stories. You could learn fast in those days, everybody had a brother who did something stupid. What stories can the children of today tell each other?
ghostsniperFebruary 14, 2023, 4:56 AM
Funny how similar our childhoods were. The models, the control line planes (I built the planes from scratch), the BB guns, etc. Where we split though was with the pyrotechnics. I never got burned (though I should have) and eventually became a demolition specialist in the army. A long time has passed since then and the idea, now, of such things are terrifying. I got old, or rather, I lost my absence of fear. Consequences matter.
ghostsniperFebruary 14, 2023, 6:57 AM
I replied earlier, what happened to it?
Casey KlahnFebruary 14, 2023, 7:29 AM
Ha ha. Love it. Well, John, you’re the kind of guy (or the youthful pyro guy in this story is) who is needed when the SHTF. One time we had a post of artillerymen with their binoculars up their asses, and they couldn’t call or adjust fire very well. I was forced to end my range day by expending a couple of palettes of 81mm and 4 deuce mortar rounds as fast as possible. That, my friends, was the 4th of July. It was known in my era as a “Mad Minute”.
AnneFebruary 14, 2023, 8:31 AM
Oh… what a wonderful way to start the day! Thank you for the good read! This is the way we will keep Gerard’s place alive and well. Even DH enjoyed your well-told tale.
AnonymousFebruary 14, 2023, 8:03 PM
Re: “We don’t allow them to just fafo”
Anymore, any parent that did so would likely end up in jail for “child abuse”. I always figured warn the kid once about touching a hot stove, maybe twice. Third time, let him.
Yeah, I saw the articles on Patriot spying several days ago, and call me Scepticus Americanus, but I did run the numbers on that in my head. IOW, I am ruling out, logically, whomst is not sending balloons, and who izst sending them. Airstream highway: not space aliens. Close to Russia/motive: suspect Russia. Xhina fingered by the pentagon/Xhina motive: suspect Xhina. I undertsand that the US ended the balloon internal spying because they didn’t get the results from the testing they wanted. Not out of any altruism. That the CIA/DNI want to balloon spy Americans is a big shit sandwich and makes me mad as hell. But, idk about shooting your own foot repeatedly just to exonerate Biden. That is far fetched to me. I am noting that they had 3 sho ot down days in a row, and then the SuperBowl began and they shot down the last one that morning. It’s a nugget of information and it does make you think.
With all respect to Ann’s idea, I believe that the gubmint uses both real and fabricated information to gaslight us. Just because the gubmint is saying it doesn’t mean it’s a lie – it just means it’s weaponized against you, whatever it is. Logic, my friends. If the first big white balloon is Chineez, then the subsequent ones floating on air likely are the same origin. But, my mind is wide open.
While I’m pontificating, I continue to complain that DC has sent pentagon spokespeople to tell us one shitty item of data a day, and Biden has not addressed the nation. Do you feel unified or rallied against this “attack”? I doubt it. Biden is a joke/ fuck him.
John A. FlemingFebruary 14, 2023, 12:31 PM
Even little pissy balloons with metallized mylar or kapton have military value. An “octagonal” or “cylindrical” balloon with a simple radio payload and a known radar cross section can test your adversary’s ability to detect, track, and intercept. A simple payload could be built that just repeats back any radar pulse above a certain power level, which could explain that the pilots reported the balloon interfering with their air-to-air sensors. A Raspberry Pi and and radio is more than enough.
And today the USG Woke Department of Military Idiots (WDoMI), reported that maybe the balloons were commercial not military. I say bull! There isn’t any commercial activity allowed to launch an uncontrolled balloon above a certain size into navigable airspace without full knowledge of the aviation authorities. There’s a group of high-school students in Bishop, CA who regularly launch scientific balloons to the stratosphere at 100,000 ft. . Go ask them, they will tell you about the coordination required.
It’s fun to guess that we are being gaslit hard and stray-voltaged by the psychopaths that infest the federal government. It looks to me like its more likely that they are just following the brain-dead leadership of the Commander and being stumble-bums. Where the best response is to do nothing, and if forced then do something, anything to excess. The Soviet Union stumbled on for quite a few years with their gerontocracy at the top before it all went smash. It looks like we are on the way.
AnonymousFebruary 14, 2023, 8:05 PM
A little bit of truth is the best way to tell a lie
nunnya bidnez, jrFebruary 14, 2023, 8:35 AM
“the balloons are for tracking vehicles ”
There are already private companies with license plate readers, all over the country; ostensibly to keep tabs on leased or financed cars where the drivers may be behind on payments. Also, most new cars have some type of connectivity, probably hackable, which allows them to be hacked & tracked. All available to law enforcement through back channels, so there’s no need for balloons to track people.
John A. FlemingFebruary 14, 2023, 6:23 PM
This may be a repeat, the first time the post disappeared. Those three mysterious balloons are also spy devices, made to test our air defense radars. Send out fleets of metallized mylar or kapton balloons of unique sized and shapes, e.g. cylindrical or octagon, for which they know the radar cross section. Hang simple radios off the balloon that phone home regularly. With a Raspberry Pi and a radio somebody could create a repeat jammer, if hit with a radar pulse above a certain power level, just repeat it back. As was reported by the pilots on the Northern Alaska balloon, the balloon interfered with their air-to-air radar, a very curious admission in the public literature as everybody in the military knows that your own susceptibilities are never to be discussed in the open and are automatically classified.
If I were Xhina, I’d be sending these things all the time. They would watch what we do. And we are supposed to try to do nothing and say nothing lest we give away the secrets of our capabilities or lack thereof. And now, with these four acts, they know.
So now the Woke Department of Military Intelligence (WDoMI) is gaslighting and lying to us, throwing out stray voltage, by now reporting that these balloons are commercial operations. I call bull! What a pathetic and flimsy cover story. Any commercial operator of balloons operating in navigable airspace must obtain permits and licenses and coordinate with the aviation authorities. There is a group of students in Bishop, CA that regularly launch scientific payloads to the stratosphere up to 100,000 ft. Ask them about the coordination required for their launches.
This whole thing is a cf, fubar, and snafu. It’s a leadership failure. It’s a bread and circus trick, take the people’s attention away from the real damage being done and the sheer incompetence on display. We are like the old Soviet Union in the 1970s, with people at the top a feeble gerontocracy as the apparatchiks below them just went through the motions. Where have you gone Casey Stengel, do we have anybody left who can play this game? Well, with the proggros willing and able to elect dolts, psychopaths, cretins, and feeble old men and women, we will follow in the path of the Soviets. We will go smash slowly, and then all at once.
Then again it could be tradecraft wheels within wheels. They know they are spying. We know they are spying. They know (maybe, maybe not) that we know they are spying. We know (maybe, maybe not) that they know (maybe, maybe not) that we know they are spying. And yet they keep spying, it only takes one or two screwups and our capabilities are exposed.
And the American people know nothing, are kept in the dark. Sit down peasants, shut up, and watch the squirrels go by.
Thanks Anne.
Luvly, innit?
Anyone can throw pigments at the wall but only a master can make them land just right.
What sentient creature could stand before such a thing and not marvel?
I get caught up in the details of the thing.
To know, that every single mark on “The Little Street” was specifically placed where it is.
I am in awe.
See a BIG version here:
I guess I’ve only seen 2 little Vermeer paintings, in person. They’re all little, but the treatment of tones has a spiritual measure to it. He da man.
Now that the pentagon has cast shade on the theories about the 2-4th balloons being Xhinese, I am trying to recalibrate my thinking on the matter. I have to give the gubmint credit for their very evil cunning at metering out little data nuggets one or two at a time. Their information discipline is something to marvel at. They suck ass like no other entity on earth, and haven’t won my approval for their egregious behavior. Since Biden has not addressed the nation, I can only surmise that he has admitted defeat on the matter. He did not shoot down the Xhina Balloon Pacific-Alaska-Canada-Montana-South Carolina, and he’s doubtless the worst president on the world stage ever. Banana Republic ersatz Castros in olive drab outpace him. If Montana Man hadn’t rocked the boat, we’d all be in happy ignorance and balloons ‘d be traversing the continent unmolested and doing malign deeds like free birds. Hundreds have traversed our airspace without detection or molestation. Until: Montana Man.
My current feeling is that Montana Man (who saw the first balloon) is everyman, and we need to call Biden, et al, on every tiny thing they do. If Biden sneezes, we need to ask why he’s a sicko and demand his resignation. If he wakes up in office tomorrow I want to know why. The shoot downs are nothing more than CYA for Biden’s mismanagement of the first balloon, Afghanistan, and the Mechican border crisis. He’s hands down the worst guy we could have, and I can’t make up a worse guy no matter how hard I imagine one.
The pentagon spokesmenz must go to bed nightly on valium to deal with how cukd they look. In my day, that shit would get called out, and they’d be embarrassed publicly for this kind of shit. Space aliens?? Unidentified Objects? Couldn’t shoot it down for days?? Fuck you are stupid shits. Idiots. (I’m talking to the DC elites here)
Tomorrow another little poop nugget of balloon info will float out from DC, and if any of the reporters in DC have stonnage onboard them, they’ll blurt out: “isn’t Biden a complete and total incompetent and why is he still in charge of this shitshow?”
OK. Taking a breath.
Not surprised this one went down the filter hole.
Casey KlahnFebruary 15, 2023, 6:51 AM
Well, that was rather unkind of me, wasn’t it? Let’s just say I got frustrated at trying to piece the balloon event together by listening to the news. Consider me: gaslit.
Events are happening and the nonsense factor is paramount. Summary: the administration lost face because a citizen called them out about spy balloons, and now the entire USAF and ANG are playing Keystone Cops with weather balloons to save face for Biden. That’s my suspicion.
Carry on.
ghostsniperFebruary 15, 2023, 7:21 AM
A distraction from the Apocalypse Now event in eastern Ohio.
Once again, the gov’t failing supremely.
These fuknutz are gonna get us all killed.
Casey KlahnFebruary 15, 2023, 1:21 PM
Ohio is a lever and a hammer. Look at the chem cloud…bang on your head!
What is more corrupted than the EPA and our current Dept. of Transportation, which is led by a Rear Admiral?
I’ve had plenty of the environment to last me another couple of lifetimes, thanks. I don’t dig nature. You can’t trust it.
AnneFebruary 14, 2023, 9:41 PM
Thank you for the larger version–glad you enjoyed it!
SKFebruary 15, 2023, 9:56 AM
What a wonderful thread! So glad I checked in to have a look. Made my day. Thanks to you all.
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Who Am I? by Carl Sandburg
My head knocks against the stars.
My feet are on the hilltops.
My finger-tips are in the valleys and shores of universal life.
Down in the sounding foam of primal things I reach my hands and play with pebbles of destiny.
I have been to hell and back many times.
I know all about heaven, for I have talked with God.
I dabble in the blood and guts of the terrible.
I know the passionate seizure of beauty
And the marvelous rebellion of man at all signs reading “Keep Off.”
My name is Truth and I am the most elusive captive in the universe.
Duty, Beauty, Liberty, Country, Honor, Family, Faith — Plus a few simple easy to follow rules for guys
Men saw the stars at the edge of the sea
They thought great thoughts about liberty
Poets wrote down words that did fit
Writers wrote books
Thinkers thought about it
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
Many’s the road I have walked upon
Many’s the hour between dusk and dawn
Many’s the time
Many’s the mile
I see it all now
Through the eyes of a child
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
Lost dreams and found dreams
In America
In America
In America
And close your eyes
Leave it all for a while
Leave the world
And your worries behind
You will build on whatever is real
And wake up each day
To a new waking dream
Take it where you find it
Can’t leave it alone
You will find a purpose
To carry it on
Mainly when you find it
Your heart will be strong
About it
[Chorus]
Change, change come over
Change come over
Talkin’ about a change
Change, change
Change come over, now
Change, change, change come over
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I’m gonna walk down the street
Until I see
My shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
I see my light
See my light
See my shining light
Gerard Van der Leun
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AMERICA’S LOSS OF TOUGHNESS ENABLED CORONAMANIA
Mark Oshinskie Feb 9 220 168
Mark OshinskieFeb 9
In the late 1980s-early 1990s, I spent many Saturdays rehabbing an apartment building above an old, fire-gutted bank at 292-98 South Orange Avenue, Newark, New Jersey with Habitat for Humanity. The red brick structure was three stories tall and a half-block wide, with boarded-up windows. Working on the upper floors, we walked across tattered sheets of plywood lightly fastened to the remaining floor joists that spanned the inner shell of the building. Watch your step.
The project manager was a sturdy, brusque, coarse-blonde-haired, construction-experienced recovering alcoholic named Dave who, on cold mornings, wore a khaki-shelled Carhartt work suit. Dave had replaced a slim urban fellow named Johnny, who was a recovering heroin addict suspected of stealing power tools from the site and selling these to buy drugs. We kept the tools in the basement vault that withstood the fire and only Johnny had the keys. So they fired him. And changed the locks.
Dave was a blue-collar philosopher. The Twelve-Step process seems to make those who go through it reflect deeply on their own, and others,’ lives. Or maybe Twelve-Step just makes them more likely to share with others their impressions of the human condition. As we worked alongside each other, Dave would sometimes tell a short story about something that had happened and then add, with conviction, a larger life lesson like “Everybody’s suffering is real to them.”
We often made batches of concrete for footings. Because we lacked a cement mixer, we mixed the concrete on top of old plywood, using shovels. On the first day we did this, Dave began the process by declaring, “You’ve got to have some hate in you to mix concrete by hand.”
I’ve done harder work—for example, I’ve been a garbageman and roofed during the summer—but mixing concrete by hand is kind of unpleasant. You have to haul multiple bags of sand and cement mix and five-gallon buckets of cold water, which splashes on your pants in chilly weather. When you tear open and pour out the bags, cement dust gets in your eyes and hair and on your clothes. The dust would wreck your lungs if you mixed concrete often. I tied a bandanna over my mouth and nose; it seemed more effective than a Covid mask later seemed.
After you blend the dry sand and cement, you shape the pile into a wide volcano and pour water into the depression on top. Then, shovelful-by-shovelful, you scrape the dry mix from the plywood at the volcanic base into the ponded water in the crater, circling the crater on foot to preserve the pile’s symmetry. You work quickly so that the weighty gray sludge doesn’t harden before you sling it into its final resting place. Multiple batches are typically required.
Mixing concrete is grunt work. It doesn’t create something that looks good, or finished, as does hanging drywall, painting, refinishing floors or building bookshelves. But you have to do this task. If you don’t, there’s no foundation for the more satisfying, visible building elements that follow.
Before I heard it from Dave, I had known and seen that anger could be channeled into a constructive response. But Dave’s concrete-mixing metaphor and his use of the word “hate” stuck with me. In life, as when mixing concrete, people need to show some grit and push through unpleasant tasks or life phases.
Americans used to better understand this link between hate, perseverance and getting stuff done. Over the centuries, countless people in the US and abroad have done plenty of very hard work to sustain themselves and their families. In order to do so, they needed to internalize some risk and bring some toughness to bear.
For example, my grandfather and countless others of his generation deep-mined coal. Many were killed in mine accidents. Many more, like my grandfather, at 47, died from black lung disease. Other men worked in steel mills. In the first half of the 1900s, 9% of steelworkers died on the job from, e.g., having heavy beams land, or molten steel poured, on them. Similarly, millions have planted, cultivated or harvested crops all day in scorching hot fields. Before those fields were used to grow crops, they needed to be cleared. Imagine cutting thick, massive trees with two-man handsaws all day in very hot summers. Many humans did such work for years, for little or no pay.
Despite being subjected to much greater threats than people were from Coronavirus exposure, coal, steel and agricultural laborers pressed on because they needed income and because everyone needed coal, steel, lumber and food and fiber to build and heat houses, schools and businesses, to eat and wear clothes and to travel. Those who provided these commodities were the original “essential workers.” On balance, far more lives were lengthened and improved—not shortened and worsened—because laborers tolerated serious risk and did exhausting and dangerous work.
In the latter half of the Twentieth Century, workplaces were made safer and hard work was increasingly done by machines and/or outsourced abroad. But as this occurred, many Americans lost their mental toughness and sense of history. As a society, we overshot the safety mark. This was never clearer than in the past three years of Coronamania, during which bizarre, ineffective public safety measures were substituted for sane risk/reward analysis and the general welfare.
Many contemporary people have never done physically challenging labor. Over the past fifty-plus years, increasing numbers of workers sit in front of screens and do some oddly-titled job, the process or purpose of which can be hard to explain or understand. Modernity, occupational and otherwise, has pacified people and lessened their ability to recognize true adversity, or to assess risk. Additionally, excessive exposure to the media and academia have fostered the false, yet prevailing belief that the world is always in crisis and that only “Science(!)” and the government can save us.
Having been disconnected from hard physical work, and having become dependent upon smartphones, anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds and abundant “recreational” herb, many Twenty-First Century Americans have become emotionally soft, psychologically frail and cognitively challenged. Even though 7,600 Americans died daily before Coronamania, during the past three years, many thought, or at least pretended, that no one should get sick or die, no matter how old or overweight. They feared things, like coronaviruses, that aren’t fearsome.
Manifesting extreme safety-ism, they staunchly but naively supported ridiculous measures that they thought might “just save one life.” In so doing, they ignored the obvious, major downsides to such plainly unhelpful interventions.
The important thing in present-day America is to be nice, or to act like you are. Mostly, neo-niceness means favoring politically correct groups of people, hating the politically incorrect, studiously using PC buzzwords, hewing to PC narratives, up-talking to connote deference to others and uncertainty about even the plainest facts, and giving pedestrians the right of way while driving a Prius. Such symbolic steps require no serious effort but allow the neo-nice to feel good about themselves.
Obeying, and demanding that others obey, the Covid “mitigation” measures exacted little or no cost from the laptop class. Their incomes were undiminished. They got to “work from home” or were paid not to work at all. Many laptoppers even profited from Coronamania via various CARES Act subsidies, running various Covid-boosted businesses or Med/Pharma shareholding. The nice laptoppers’ support for Covid mitigation was passive, performative “kindness” run amok.
Yet, isolating people from each other wasn’t kind or nice, or helpful. Nor was stealing irreplaceable time from those, especially kids, who need human interaction. Nor was making others wear silly masks or take harmful, lethal shots. It also wasn’t nice to widen the gap between the rich and the working poor; the government caused major inflation by giving away trillions of contrived CovidBucks for nothing of value.
Our culture’s debilitating shift toward neo-niceness began several decades ago. From young ages, kids have increasingly been given many unnecessary toys, clothes and experiences. Young people have also been shielded from physical challenges. For example, most boys have given up football for soccer. They don’t even wrestle in gym class; it’s considered too rough. Sitting alone in front of screens—on social media—and playing video games is far more common. Few young Americans have done hard work even in their teens or twenties. Instead, they get corporate or non-profit internships, often unpaid, as their parents subsidize them.
During Coronamania, politicians, the media and laptop-class liberals opportunistically feigned outrage over the passing of already ill septuagenarians, octogenarians and nonagenarians, or the obese. Our forebearers would have dismissed those who deemed such deaths unexpected or tragic. They had faced much bigger risks and challenges. And there were far fewer old or obese people then.
Our ancestors wouldn’t have sacrificed normal life, an economy and a young generation so that they could work in sweatpants and their party could win elections. Instead, they would have seen the costs of extreme safety-ism, scoffed at the idea of locking down a society over a respiratory virus and understood that the human toll of doing so far exceeded any insincerely-proffered, and ultimately unrealized, benefits.
Thank you for sharing this excellent essay.
Well done.
Well done.
Bravo.
soft times begat soft people
soft people ain’t worth a fuk
It is okay to hate, especially to hate what is evil, and neo-niceness adherents are actually supporting evil under the guise of inclusion.
“…neo-niceness….”
I’ve long thought that those who display those “Be Kind” messages on their cars or t-shirts are nothing more than passive-aggressive leftists who have managed to contain their inner Karen’s.
I seem to a recall a once-best-selling Bildungsroman which contained the the fateful words, “Slowly I began to hate Them.”
He then proceeded to over-egg the pudding and generally fuck things up for everybody.
And that, Dear Friends, is why you’re not permitted Righteous Hatred by your present Masters. Which fact will be our collective doom. Because there is no robust Natural Law or Muh Founding Principles argument against Somalis living next door to you. Visceral Digust and Hatred IS the only winning argument. True you cannot build a thriving civilization upon a foundation of pure hatred. You need more positive ideals and virtues. But without the leavening (sic) of Hatred, Forgeddaboudit.
Yet slowly I begin to hate anyway.
Did you know this?
I did not.
Quote:
“The AR-15 and M4 are both designed to fire a .223 round that
tumbles upon hitting flesh and rips thru the human body. A single round is capable
of severing the upper body from the lower body, or decapitation.”
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ssSvFxcpQEgo9b0DJZhU2vptOYgTTsaQ/view
https://www.captainsjournal.com/2023/02/12/colonel-tucker-usmc-ret-testifies-a-single-round-from-an-ar-15-can-sever-the-upper-body-from-the-lower-body/
Wonder how much the state of CA had to pay him to denigrate semi-auto rifles in general, versus automatic rifles, i.e. machine guns, and the .223/5.56 round specifically. I note he did not work into his blather that if the rifle is black, it’s even more dangerous than if it was pink, or rainbow flagged.
Little more diggin’.
He compromised hisself.
It’s always sumfink. lol
OCEANSIDE, Calif. — A colonel in charge of a training group in California has been relieved for having an “inappropriate relationship” with a female captain, according to a Marine Corps spokesman.
https://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?24282-Colonel-relieved-for-%E2%80%98inappropriate-relationship%E2%80%99
Look like he be fukn more than jus the legal gun owners of ‘Merica.
Where can I get that AyeArR that cuts ppl in 2? I’m fine with a rainbow colored one if it gets me past the legislature/alphabets.
One shot and it’ll separate your body.
Dunno what happens to anyone hit by the bullet.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/a6/66/1c/a6661c54f298b0146a8b74d45825631b.jpg
That crib in the background is begging for a white tin roof, and maybe a little more gingerbread.
Yep. Knew that despite being more of a knowitall than firearms guy.
The Rules of War requiring full metal jacketed bullets to prevent fragmentation doesn’t forbid workarounds. The boat tail on these projectiles is there precisely to induce yaw and tumbling inside body cavities.
Similar to large caliber sniper rounds being ostensibly ‘anti-materiel’ and the fig-leaf claim that White Phosphorous is used for defoliation or illumination. Both are mainly anti-personnel but would be classed as inhumane if this use explicitly stated.
Its not a game for Gentlemen.
TINN sed: “Its not a game for Gentlemen.”
========
Always police your brass.
Someone else can use it at a crime scene, with your fingerprints on it.
I did not know that the 5.56×45 55grn military round was ‘designed’ as described by ghost. But I have viewed combat wounds caused by the 5.56×45 mil round in medical books with photos of combat wounds. Very damaging round indeed. Just the velocity of the projectile is sufficient to sever human limbs. No bullet expansion necessary to inflict hideous wounds.
But, if you research the 5.45×39 Russian round you will read that the bullet was designed to yaw in flesh and create a massive wound channel. I saw this demonstrated by a spetsnaz Russian using ballistic gelatin. The 5.45×39 projectile has a wicked aspect ratio. The bullet cannot drill straight into flesh but has to yaw and turn and tumble. The Soviet AK-74 (not AK-47) was the first weapon so designed for this cartridge I believe.
Speaking of Russian special operators, I truly believe they are as tough as it gets. Could be the Israeli spl. people are up to the same level of hell. It could be our people are as well, but the “others” do not depend on any air support. I have nothing but the very highest respect for our guys. I wish I could have been good enough to be one of “our” guys. My brother Tim was one of our guy’s. He returned back home with a very poor disposition. He did not (and still does not) tolerate anyone who claims to be an “authority”. God is the only Authority over any free human being.
Sorry for the rant-
We had a recent visual example with that Kyle Rittenhouse vaporizing a guy’s bicep from point-blank range. If he’d hit the shoulder or elbow joint instead, the poor unfortunate antifa-adjacent Grosskreutz would probably have lost a lot more use of his arm. Would it have severed the arm at the joint? Hmm, possibly, connective tendons, ligaments and bone are tougher than muscle.
A point-blank shot is not quite the same thing as being hit past 100 yards. A 55-grain M193 at 100 yds carries 80% of muzzle energy, 60% at 200 yards. Those ballistic guys talk about “hydrostatic shock”, which only happens for high-energy bullets. But some others dispute the details.
But a single shot to the torso? No, I don’t think so. You’ll need a MG-42 for that.
GS – may not be your ‘fault’, but can you cleanup on aisle TINN and Terry below
which seem to be accepting the link you posted as “your explanation” ?
I saw that, thanks.
Doods, that wasn’t MY opinion, it was a quote from someone else, an asshole.
I was an all-American boy. We played Cowboys and Indians. We built dirt forts and threw fistfuls of dirt clods at each other, and it was oh-so-glorious to score a direct hit on the other guys and see the clod shatter into a cloud of dust. We had cap guns of all kinds, little derringers to big revolvers. One year I got a Johnny Seven OMA for Christmas and wore it clean out. I nailed my sister in the eye with one of the grenades it threw. I got in big trouble for that, but I didn’t care. We had bb guns and shot into ant holes. We had those stupid fake bb guns that only shot out some air, so we packed dirt into the muzzle and got a poof of dirt for every trigger pull. We were smart enough to not shoot bb’s directly at another boy, only targets. We knew if we hit a person or damaged property there would be holy hell to pay, so we didn’t do it.
Lots of guys talk about how they did stuff with their dad and grampa. That was not the way for us. Grampa was far away, and Dad was always busy with his work, providing for the family.
We graduated to bigger and louder. We had Cox gas-powered control-line airplanes that we flew in our cul-de-sac. All of us boys knew the sound of those little Cox engines winding up somewhere in the neighborhood, and we’d all bicycle and walk over to see what was going on. The sound of “thrupp”, “thrupp”, “thrupzzzreeee”, the smell of glow-plug fuel splashing onto the pavement, it was the sights and sounds of summer. I think I destroyed three of those Cox PT-19 trainers, held together by rubber bands until they augered into the pavement. I was just too aggressive on my maneuvers, couldn’t just let it go round and round, no, I had to go high, then dive for the pavement intending to pull out at the last minute and skim the ground at high speed.
Then I got into model rockets. Oh yeah, the smell of black powder, glue, balsa filler, hot fuel-proof dope, plastic cement, enamel and lacquer paint. We’d spend days building them, then bicycling over to the big vacant lot down at the end of the neighborhood. The little A6-3 mouse-fart motors were not for us. No, we used the mighty C6-7’s. It was bragging rights to launch a rocket so high you never saw it again. The next step down was to have to run for it as the rocket, oh so high popped its now microscopic chute and drifted on the winds far away,
We got tired of store-bought models and started making our own designs. We tore apart motors and lit the black-powder slugs on the cul-de sac and watched it madly spin around and burn up in a flash of smoke. We’d go down to the local Hobby Shop and peruse the hobby chemicals they sold there, and read up on pyrotechnic formulas. We’d always ask the guy behind the counter for sodium nitrate, which they never had, so we used potassium nitrate. The guys at the counter I realize now knew exactly why we wanted sodium nitrate and sulfur, but they kept up the fiction and said no, we’re out, they never asked and we never said as to why and what for. I crafted a simple cheap rocket, nothing more than a motor, fins, nose cone and pyrotechnic powder, and launched it right from our backyard. I got a shower of sparks out of that. I never did it again. I wonder what one of our neighbors thought when they found the exploded remains in their yard.
Well, it wasn’t enough. Soon we were sneaking shotgun shells from Dad’s supplies, disassembling them and lighting the loose powder piles. I put an empty shell in a vise in the workshop, pointed the open end towards the open door, and struck the primer. I just had to know.
The end of my pyro days came soon enough. I made a molotov cocktail, a coke bottle, a rag, a little gas from the gas can in the shed. Man was I stupid that day, but I just had to do it. I walked out to the alley with a box of matches and the bottle. No one was around. It was a hot summer day. I stood there and thought about it. And finally the dread got to me, that this was a step too far, that if I lit and threw it my life would be changed forever. Years before my oldest brother got in trouble for playing with matches in the alley and lighting the weeds on fire next to the wood fence, with my mom having to quickly get the garden hose and put it out. One day the cops caught me flicking matches into the dirt of the vacant lot as I walked home from school and gave me a stern talking to as I shook from head to toe.
Nope, that moment of paralyzing dread cured me of pyromania and explosives. Some of my friends went farther. One said he’d made, or almost made, a little nitroglycerine during high school chemistry lab, making it while the teacher wasn’t looking. He said he almost lost control of the reaction, it has to be kept cool with ice or it will go unstable. In those days the Anarchist Cookbook was available at certain bookstores, if you knew where to look. After that molotov cocktail incident, I had lost my taste for those kind of risks. I went on to other things, stories for another time.
The past is another country, and the country of our youth is gone. We don’t seem to let our children have that kind of freedom anymore. And we seem to deny them the experience of finding their own way to wisdom. “Good judgement comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgement.” Their lives are programed, school and sports, extra classes, summer school, Junior Lifeguards in the summer; sport, school, Church and Scout camps. We don’t allow them to just fafo, while they are still small and can’t do much damage. I think the reason I didn’t keep going is because I was on my own in those days: no wise grandpa, no Dad, no wise older brother to show me the way. I had to limit myself. We learned from the stories of our brothers, all our friends and the experiences they had with their friends and family. Sure, with all that freedom came extra danger, but also lots more stories. You could learn fast in those days, everybody had a brother who did something stupid. What stories can the children of today tell each other?
Funny how similar our childhoods were. The models, the control line planes (I built the planes from scratch), the BB guns, etc. Where we split though was with the pyrotechnics. I never got burned (though I should have) and eventually became a demolition specialist in the army. A long time has passed since then and the idea, now, of such things are terrifying. I got old, or rather, I lost my absence of fear. Consequences matter.
I replied earlier, what happened to it?
Ha ha. Love it. Well, John, you’re the kind of guy (or the youthful pyro guy in this story is) who is needed when the SHTF. One time we had a post of artillerymen with their binoculars up their asses, and they couldn’t call or adjust fire very well. I was forced to end my range day by expending a couple of palettes of 81mm and 4 deuce mortar rounds as fast as possible. That, my friends, was the 4th of July. It was known in my era as a “Mad Minute”.
Oh… what a wonderful way to start the day! Thank you for the good read! This is the way we will keep Gerard’s place alive and well. Even DH enjoyed your well-told tale.
Re: “We don’t allow them to just fafo”
Anymore, any parent that did so would likely end up in jail for “child abuse”. I always figured warn the kid once about touching a hot stove, maybe twice. Third time, let him.
Ann has something to say about them balloons.
“The balloons are Washington’s.”
https://www.barnhardt.biz/2023/02/13/the-balloons-are-washingtons-they-are-for-tracking-vehicles-and-movements-of-citizens-probably-in-anticipation-of-banning-vehicles-and-environmental-lockdowns/
Yeah, I saw the articles on Patriot spying several days ago, and call me Scepticus Americanus, but I did run the numbers on that in my head. IOW, I am ruling out, logically, whomst is not sending balloons, and who izst sending them. Airstream highway: not space aliens. Close to Russia/motive: suspect Russia. Xhina fingered by the pentagon/Xhina motive: suspect Xhina. I undertsand that the US ended the balloon internal spying because they didn’t get the results from the testing they wanted. Not out of any altruism. That the CIA/DNI want to balloon spy Americans is a big shit sandwich and makes me mad as hell. But, idk about shooting your own foot repeatedly just to exonerate Biden. That is far fetched to me. I am noting that they had 3 sho ot down days in a row, and then the SuperBowl began and they shot down the last one that morning. It’s a nugget of information and it does make you think.
With all respect to Ann’s idea, I believe that the gubmint uses both real and fabricated information to gaslight us. Just because the gubmint is saying it doesn’t mean it’s a lie – it just means it’s weaponized against you, whatever it is. Logic, my friends. If the first big white balloon is Chineez, then the subsequent ones floating on air likely are the same origin. But, my mind is wide open.
While I’m pontificating, I continue to complain that DC has sent pentagon spokespeople to tell us one shitty item of data a day, and Biden has not addressed the nation. Do you feel unified or rallied against this “attack”? I doubt it. Biden is a joke/ fuck him.
Even little pissy balloons with metallized mylar or kapton have military value. An “octagonal” or “cylindrical” balloon with a simple radio payload and a known radar cross section can test your adversary’s ability to detect, track, and intercept. A simple payload could be built that just repeats back any radar pulse above a certain power level, which could explain that the pilots reported the balloon interfering with their air-to-air sensors. A Raspberry Pi and and radio is more than enough.
And today the USG Woke Department of Military Idiots (WDoMI), reported that maybe the balloons were commercial not military. I say bull! There isn’t any commercial activity allowed to launch an uncontrolled balloon above a certain size into navigable airspace without full knowledge of the aviation authorities. There’s a group of high-school students in Bishop, CA who regularly launch scientific balloons to the stratosphere at 100,000 ft. . Go ask them, they will tell you about the coordination required.
It’s fun to guess that we are being gaslit hard and stray-voltaged by the psychopaths that infest the federal government. It looks to me like its more likely that they are just following the brain-dead leadership of the Commander and being stumble-bums. Where the best response is to do nothing, and if forced then do something, anything to excess. The Soviet Union stumbled on for quite a few years with their gerontocracy at the top before it all went smash. It looks like we are on the way.
A little bit of truth is the best way to tell a lie
“the balloons are for tracking vehicles ”
There are already private companies with license plate readers, all over the country; ostensibly to keep tabs on leased or financed cars where the drivers may be behind on payments. Also, most new cars have some type of connectivity, probably hackable, which allows them to be hacked & tracked. All available to law enforcement through back channels, so there’s no need for balloons to track people.
This may be a repeat, the first time the post disappeared. Those three mysterious balloons are also spy devices, made to test our air defense radars. Send out fleets of metallized mylar or kapton balloons of unique sized and shapes, e.g. cylindrical or octagon, for which they know the radar cross section. Hang simple radios off the balloon that phone home regularly. With a Raspberry Pi and a radio somebody could create a repeat jammer, if hit with a radar pulse above a certain power level, just repeat it back. As was reported by the pilots on the Northern Alaska balloon, the balloon interfered with their air-to-air radar, a very curious admission in the public literature as everybody in the military knows that your own susceptibilities are never to be discussed in the open and are automatically classified.
If I were Xhina, I’d be sending these things all the time. They would watch what we do. And we are supposed to try to do nothing and say nothing lest we give away the secrets of our capabilities or lack thereof. And now, with these four acts, they know.
So now the Woke Department of Military Intelligence (WDoMI) is gaslighting and lying to us, throwing out stray voltage, by now reporting that these balloons are commercial operations. I call bull! What a pathetic and flimsy cover story. Any commercial operator of balloons operating in navigable airspace must obtain permits and licenses and coordinate with the aviation authorities. There is a group of students in Bishop, CA that regularly launch scientific payloads to the stratosphere up to 100,000 ft. Ask them about the coordination required for their launches.
This whole thing is a cf, fubar, and snafu. It’s a leadership failure. It’s a bread and circus trick, take the people’s attention away from the real damage being done and the sheer incompetence on display. We are like the old Soviet Union in the 1970s, with people at the top a feeble gerontocracy as the apparatchiks below them just went through the motions. Where have you gone Casey Stengel, do we have anybody left who can play this game? Well, with the proggros willing and able to elect dolts, psychopaths, cretins, and feeble old men and women, we will follow in the path of the Soviets. We will go smash slowly, and then all at once.
Then again it could be tradecraft wheels within wheels. They know they are spying. We know they are spying. They know (maybe, maybe not) that we know they are spying. We know (maybe, maybe not) that they know (maybe, maybe not) that we know they are spying. And yet they keep spying, it only takes one or two screwups and our capabilities are exposed.
And the American people know nothing, are kept in the dark. Sit down peasants, shut up, and watch the squirrels go by.
Because Gerard always added something of beauty for us to consider. I offer this for your review tonight while have a glass of refreshment.
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2023/feb/12/vermeer-rijksmuseum-amsterdam-review-one-of-the-most-thrilling-exhibitions-ever-conceived?fbclid=IwAR2t8RrMa93y8qJmV7bcgc_UijnsdfRcV_grJCRUWtCCR8hqyIghiYtvIlg
Is there an easier way to post an internet link?
Thanks Anne.
Luvly, innit?
Anyone can throw pigments at the wall but only a master can make them land just right.
What sentient creature could stand before such a thing and not marvel?
I get caught up in the details of the thing.
To know, that every single mark on “The Little Street” was specifically placed where it is.
I am in awe.
See a BIG version here:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2b/Johannes_Vermeer_-_Gezicht_op_huizen_in_Delft%2C_bekend_als_%27Het_straatje%27_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
I guess I’ve only seen 2 little Vermeer paintings, in person. They’re all little, but the treatment of tones has a spiritual measure to it. He da man.
Now that the pentagon has cast shade on the theories about the 2-4th balloons being Xhinese, I am trying to recalibrate my thinking on the matter. I have to give the gubmint credit for their very evil cunning at metering out little data nuggets one or two at a time. Their information discipline is something to marvel at. They suck ass like no other entity on earth, and haven’t won my approval for their egregious behavior. Since Biden has not addressed the nation, I can only surmise that he has admitted defeat on the matter. He did not shoot down the Xhina Balloon Pacific-Alaska-Canada-Montana-South Carolina, and he’s doubtless the worst president on the world stage ever. Banana Republic ersatz Castros in olive drab outpace him. If Montana Man hadn’t rocked the boat, we’d all be in happy ignorance and balloons ‘d be traversing the continent unmolested and doing malign deeds like free birds. Hundreds have traversed our airspace without detection or molestation. Until: Montana Man.
My current feeling is that Montana Man (who saw the first balloon) is everyman, and we need to call Biden, et al, on every tiny thing they do. If Biden sneezes, we need to ask why he’s a sicko and demand his resignation. If he wakes up in office tomorrow I want to know why. The shoot downs are nothing more than CYA for Biden’s mismanagement of the first balloon, Afghanistan, and the Mechican border crisis. He’s hands down the worst guy we could have, and I can’t make up a worse guy no matter how hard I imagine one.
The pentagon spokesmenz must go to bed nightly on valium to deal with how cukd they look. In my day, that shit would get called out, and they’d be embarrassed publicly for this kind of shit. Space aliens?? Unidentified Objects? Couldn’t shoot it down for days?? Fuck you are stupid shits. Idiots. (I’m talking to the DC elites here)
Tomorrow another little poop nugget of balloon info will float out from DC, and if any of the reporters in DC have stonnage onboard them, they’ll blurt out: “isn’t Biden a complete and total incompetent and why is he still in charge of this shitshow?”
OK. Taking a breath.
Not surprised this one went down the filter hole.
Well, that was rather unkind of me, wasn’t it? Let’s just say I got frustrated at trying to piece the balloon event together by listening to the news. Consider me: gaslit.
Events are happening and the nonsense factor is paramount. Summary: the administration lost face because a citizen called them out about spy balloons, and now the entire USAF and ANG are playing Keystone Cops with weather balloons to save face for Biden. That’s my suspicion.
Carry on.
A distraction from the Apocalypse Now event in eastern Ohio.
Once again, the gov’t failing supremely.
These fuknutz are gonna get us all killed.
Ohio is a lever and a hammer. Look at the chem cloud…bang on your head!
What is more corrupted than the EPA and our current Dept. of Transportation, which is led by a Rear Admiral?
I’ve had plenty of the environment to last me another couple of lifetimes, thanks. I don’t dig nature. You can’t trust it.
Thank you for the larger version–glad you enjoyed it!
What a wonderful thread! So glad I checked in to have a look. Made my day. Thanks to you all.