Go be Americans

It is becoming clear the left is going to steal this election. Either through fraud (so much fraud), or through their time-honored methods of obfuscating and lying to the population.

Just like Nixon became the greatest crook ever and they preened for years over having brought down this would-be Hitler, they will now for decades shape the narrative to be that President Trump mishandled the virus, and destroyed the economy and therefore deserved to be brought down. And that their savior and spokes- zombie, China-Biden has with the touch of his regal hand, and his harsh and bizarre mandates on who can make a living, and who can’t, and also on no one being able to show their faces to human beings not related to us, saved the nation.

In the mean time, he’ll also save the planet, because of how many people will die of things non-Covidial and probably famine “In these trying times.” “While we’re all in this together.” I mean the fewer people the better, right, since we are after all “a cancer on the planet” and the most important thing, the spokeszombie assures us, is to stop the Earth from “literally baking.”

Yes, I am open to a miracle that will save us, at the last minute. But not hopeful. As far as I can tell, between the media gaslighting the country and the massive fraud they stand ready to deploy, we have not a chance.

It is unfair, unjust, insane, but I’ve studied enough history to think that it needs to make sense, or that vast crowds of people possess some sort of wisdom.

I’ve been very afraid since March, watching the gaslighting and people willingly ceding control of their brains to news stations THEY KNEW WERE KNOWN FOR LYING.

The American people are furious, and as such will lash out. Unfortunately in our times of central federalized power, most of them don’t realize our highly unusual, freedom-loving president did not lock them in; did not slap them with mask mandates; did not make them wear masks in airplanes; did not close their church and make their ministers parrots of min-truth. That was their — mostly democrat, though Lord knows some Republicans are thick as pig shiit as well, particularly in Texas and Ohio — Instead of being angry at their appalling governors, they’re mad at the president. I’ve actually heard people — salt of the Earth, who of course follow the covidiocy with gaping mouths, sure that millions have died in this — say that Trump should not have closed the churches or wonder why Trump won’t let their favorite restaurant open.

Which brings us to…

What next??

And how bad will it get?

Well, one thing is for sure. They believe what failed in Obama’s drive to break us and drive us into socialism was the fact we’re all too rich and comfortable. You see — and this is not strictly true, but it’s what they were told and what they’ve seen in movies, and our would be rulers are not very smart and have the depth of a puddle — in their minds all that stood between them and complete overturning of the American system was enough suffering that the dispossessed masses will “rise up.”

This is not true, but they do not know that. They don’t understand the actual, real mechanics of revolution, nor what happens in them.

Therefore the first thing they’re going to try to do is immiserate the country. No, I mean really immiserate the country.

I’m not afraid of being poor. I grew up being very poor and for various reasons, throughout our lives, we’ve brought ourselves to the brink of utter ruin long enough.

So, this won’t be a big deal. Probably. Though I think we are about to experience this at a level most Americans have never even heard of. (Mostly because most Americans haven’t heard about Cubans peasants (everyone is a peasant but the rulers) having their purses searched for SEAFOOD, which they’re not allowed to have or eat. You know, in a tropical island, surrounded by ocean, laden with food, they keep the peasants starved.)

That’s fine. Yeah, it will probably shorten my life expectancy to 10 years or so, because, you know, that’s the age at which people die in such societies (do not let them tell you that everyone always lived about as long as we do. We’ve almost doubled what people can aspire to living. Mostly through the free market and real, not socialist science.) But then again, as grandma used to say “To a bad life, little time is needed.”

Unfortunately this type of extreme poverty does preclude revolt. Because what we’ve found is that the starved masses don’t rebel. And as we’ve found during 2020 neither do the panicked masses. So as long as our utterly incompetent would-be rulers keep us both starved and panicked, they’ll stay in power.

I’m not sure if they will go for roundups and show trials. I suspect so. I’m seeing rumblings of this, at least. They are positively lustful for reeducation camps, and “truth and reconciliation” commissions. And frankly they’re very angry at us for how long we took to fall. Like the citadel that holds the invaders too long, we are to be destroyed.

I am sure I am on several lists, though it’s entirely possible that I’m small enough potatoes they won’t bother. I’m not sure which I prefer, but my kids assure me they prefer I stay alive. So, who knows?

I believe they will actually not go after their political enemies but after those they hate, which weirdly have very little to do with politics, and mostly with the politics of envy.

If they weren’t about to toss us all in the pot with them, I would laugh, because the darlings of science fiction who sold their souls to Marxism, in an environment that is highly fraught with favoritism and arbitrariness, and therefore filled with envy and malice, think they will be safe and on top, when in face every shrieking little harpy who ever got rejected is just waiting to drag them down and make them confess to privilege, regardless of their color or status as victims.

And it will be like that all over.

Will Lizard Man Zuckerborg and meth addict Dorsey also be dragged from their glittering mansions, their piles of white powder to be hanged in the street? I don’t know. In former times I would say no. I mean, at that level of wealth they can always move to another country and live it up, right?

But what other country? No, seriously. I think most people, American born and bred, have absolutely no clue of what an outsized foot print America has in the world. America falls, the world falls.

More importantly, electing China Joe (and the Ho) will give China control of our nation. While the would be tech lords are convinced their status as prime-vassals entitles them to better treatment and perhaps a sort of vice-roy status, they are dreaming. They should have spent some of the time they spent indulging in interesting mind-altering substances and strange sex acts on reading Chinese history. To begin with, as round eyes, they are de-facto inferior. Second as traitors to their homeland, they will never be trusted.

We might yet see them receive to the hilt what they’ve earned. I wish I could like it more.

In terms of world situation, I beg you to pray for Israel. They’ve seen this coming and they’re a tough people. But they’ll be left friendless and exposed in an hostile world.

What I’m concerned with though is not “mere” survival or even the survival and thriving of my kin. (And part of my fear is that we’re all about to be confined to small areas, and I’m not sure my family will be able to get together, in an area where we can see each other. Because in case you haven’t noticed, over the last 8 months planes became something to look at not ride in — at least not if you can’t endure a mask every day — and they’re about to clamp restrictions and prices through the roof on the oil.) What is acting upon me is deeper and more worrisome: it is the survival of mankind, the survival of the idea of freedom, the survival of enough civilization to allow us to go to the stars.

Yes, I think people should still be marrying and being given in marriage, and having children is perhaps more important than ever, particularly if you’re willing to raise them — really raise them — and inure them against the gaslighting of the mass media. Make them free citizens, able to think for themselves, and perhaps there is a hope for the world. Even if it won’t be easy for them.

It’s going to be hard. It’s going to be really hard. Particularly for those of us who are no longer able to either be any help in a fight or do much of use to society.

Oh, our new self-agrandizing elites (including the ones on the right who are enabling this, and who think they will be a permanent kept “loyal opposition” — and some of them will, but the mask has fallen off and we’re not stupid.) aren’t competent enough to run a brothel with free and ever-renovating beer kegs. But that is actually a plus for their plans.

There is a reason that communist governments only survive when the populace is utterly destroyed, when poverty is rampant, when they can establish a sort of backwards feudalism where everyone is poor save the flea bitten ruler who gets to rule in hell.

They come in on crisis — though if there are historians in the future, they will possibly be amazed at how ably they conjured this one out of nothing — and perpetuate the crisis.

We know they will take the internet down, as soon as possible. Even with it curtailed by their willing lackeys it’s too easy to get around and to communicate with our like.

They need to take us back to the 1950s and the narrative spilling form TV screens 24/7 being the only and the only acceptable history. They have had a taste of how powerful they can be with their gaslighting, and they’re not about to let it go.

Which will of course also mean that all entertainment must be under their control and come from approved voices.

How long do I have? How long does indie publishing have? A year? Two? If we’re very, very lucky.

After that comes control and censorship that will make China look like a playground.

And that’s part of what worries me. When I tell you to build under, build over, build around I am not actually joking. And many of you are qualified and can indeed do it. And are young enough to have kids, and teach them, and send them forward to maintain or re-establish civilization, to carry the banner of freedom into humanity’s future.

Me? What the hell can I do? I can write stories, and I can write blog posts, but both of those are subject to sudden and complete eradication. And have to be paid by trackable means. So–

I don’t know. I’m going to ask you, right now, that those of you who have appreciated this blog copy and save the posts you find most useful. Print them. Print the stories, too, if they amuse you. Perhaps some words will go into the future. Some.

Other than that what can I do?

That is ultimately what is eating at me. It’s come to this: I sit here feeling old and useless.

What good is it to be present at the fall, if I can’t fight it, and can do nothing to prevent it?

All I can do is send those of you who are younger, better educated, stronger.

Go forth. Be not afraid. A just G-d might allow evil to prevail for a time, but He won’t allow it to reign over humanity forever. Be prepared for the fact that it might be a long time, though. (Yes, the scraps of flag will go out. I’ve been stuck in the house, because I don’t do well with cold.) Keep the faith. Stay alive. Do the best you can.

In the time we have left with unprecedented access to knowledge through the internet, buy courses in real stuff, and download them and save them (on CD if you can) or print them. In as long as we have, learn everything you can. If nothing else, it’s knowledge you might pass on, which might be useful in the future.

Build over, build under, build around. Have children and teach them well. Be Americans, even if they take America away from us.

Be not afraid. The worst they can do is kill us, and that’s no final victory.

I might not be able to do much, but one of you might hold the key to the future.

420 thoughts on “Go be Americans

  1. In times of chaos, to seek God for deliverance is totally logical.
    “Seek Jehovah, all you meek ones of the earth,
    Who observe his righteous decrees.
    Seek righteousness, seek meekness.
    Probably you will be concealed on the day of Jehovah’s anger.”

    1. There comes a time when leaving things in God’s hands is not putting the Lord your God to the test.

  2. Sarah, I so sincerely hope you’re being far more pessimistic about what happens, that we don’t get reamed as hard as you’re thinking might happen.

    But I’ve also been wondering something else. You’ve got the firearms community who talk about the “4 boxes” to use.
    Soap box
    Ballot box
    Jury box
    Ammo box

    You have to wonder if they might open that last box if (hypothetically, please whatever deity/deities one believes in, hypothetically) the Dems capture the presidency and a solid majority in both houses (as in, close enough to 60 in the Senate to ram through their wishlists,) and go for it with packing the SC.

    After all, such an action, especially from the Dems, would arguably be a loud and clear announcement that the 3rd box is no longer a viable option to try to prevent the eroding of rights…

    And I so dearly hope we don’t reach that level of dystopia…

    1. Certainly have to consider what can be euphemistically called “Withdrawing the Consent of the Governed.” If we are facing decades of oppression and elimination, then the last option should be on the table.

    2. I read hints here of the same situation. I don’t know what it is like country wide, let alone state wide, but one of the most liberal areas of our state, thanks to the UofO, the access to guns is none. Because shops are selling out as fast as they can get them in. If a gun, regardless of type, is available, Oregon, which has no waiting period, just have to get by the background check system, currently has a wait period because it is taking 15 days to get through the queue for approval. In addition, not only is ammunition limited, the tools needed for self loading is non-existent.

    3. Apropos of nothing in particular, WalMart corporate had directed all of its stores that sell firearms and ammunition to remove them from the floor, put them back in storage. Customers can still buy, but have to request them, and know enough to ask for specific items. Company is betting on real trouble and figures out of sight out of mind might just work.
      Personally, IMHO if you are not already tooled and ammo’d up you are an idiot.

      1. Riiiiight, like looters can’t break into the storerooms. The cops in Philadelphia have already found one van loaded with explosives.

        Here’s an idea — shoot the looters when they break in. Or even before, when it’s clear they’re going to. In a civilized society, looters should be shot on sight. Shooting a few now would save thousands of lives later.
        If you use violence and brutality to bring about social change, your cause will be taken over by violent brutes.

        1. It’s a lot easier to bar the cargo doors than to keep looters from breaking glass to get at a rifle.

          ….tobacco is probably a bigger risk, though.

      2. > remove them from the floor, put them back in storage.

        This is of particular interest, because Wal-Marts don’t *have* storage; incoming shipments go directly to the shelves. And there are BATF regulations as to the proper storage of firearms and ammunition, which Wal-Mart was getting a free pass on already. They could lock everything in the pharmacy, or maybe in the manager’s office.

        The corporate honchos probably haven’t been to an actual store in so long, they have no idea how they operate.

  3. I share your concerns but you must consider an alternative that, like what happened to the Klu Klux Klan after reconstruction was ended and then again after Woodrow Wilson came to power, all these Antifa and BLM groups will be suppressed. The Democratic Party is the party of big money and they might tolerate this to get their globalist agenda back in play but is seems unlikely they’ll let it go on. Like when Hitler killed off (literally) Ernst Rohlm and the SA, they’ll get credit for muzzling their own dog and ending the violence they started.

    1. Antifa and BLM are Commies they are not controlled by the Democrats. They KNOW that Biden will be weak, and Kamila will be on their side or at least weak. They see the coming disaster that the Democrats will bring, they are counting on it to form the BASE for THEIR Revolution. They see the Democrats as the Mensheviks and them selves as the Bolshevists. The Republicans are the Whites – weak, unorganized and powerless.
      History will repeat itself. They do need a Lenin, He has not shown up. He will be obvious when he does..

        1. But Antifa and BLM don’t believe that. They see us as weak and not willing to fight. We haven’t fought them so we will not fight. We are cowards that keep talking but never take action. That is the way they see us.
          Truth doesn’t matter, perception does.

          1. We haven’t fought them so we will not fight

            Until someone does.

            Truth doesn’t matter, perception does.

            Incorrect perception can be deadly. That is what they will learn.

            Where they have been pulling their stunts, they have the backing of authorities. Try it where they don’t? They will find their perception is 100% wrong.

            1. May I submit for consideration Kyle Rittenhouse. Odd how he seems to have dropped out of the news cycle . . .



                Part of the problem is It Has Dropped Out Of the News Cycle …

                They were lucky it hasn’t happened where rooftop defenders are present. OTOH their presence probably keep the idiots peaceful … Springfield is where I’m thinking of. Only reason I know about it (it sure *wasn’t reported on, even locally) is because someone collecting signatures for Herr Katie recall petition (which didn’t make the ballot) lives in the area affected invaded.

                * There was a short small report of a small demonstration in downtown Springfield. Um, Thurstan area off Hwy 126, east of where Beltline comes in, isn’t “downtown Springfield”.

              2. He was extradited to Wisconsin yesterday, reportedly without his attorneys’ knowledge.

                I’m following the lawyers’ Twitters rather than the press, though

            2. One reason for Pearl Harbor was that Japan thought we were weak. We were not samurai, a hard hit would drive us back, and they would have time to consolidate the Western Pacific. They did not understand us.

              The left does not understand us. We must understand them, since they mean to destroy us. President Trump understands them. He had to pay them in order to build in New York. This is our Gettysburg, a meeting engagement where the fate of the union will be decided. No one knows the outcome. Where are our “little roundtops” that will decide the future of the human race?

              If this election is stolen and we know it, when they come for us, it will be Lexington and Concord again, but as a civil war that will smash civilization into a deep dark age. All I can do is pray and vote. We are not Venezuela.

              1. If this election is stolen …

                Wouldn’t it be fun if Trump did to the incoming administration what the Obama administration did to him?

                Bad for the nation, of course. but funny as Hell. Funnier still to pretend to do it without necessarily doing it.

      1. If. perhaps he’ll take the DC metro like Lenin took the trolley.

        The only way to lose is to surrender and there’s no WWI here, I’m not seeing a broken society, COVID was their shot but it hasn’t worked out that way and quite frankly, Russia was an autocracy that collapsed from the top down like all autocracies to be replaced with another autocracy. At that point, did anyone believe in the Tsar?

        We are a free people. Not organized, not “efficient” but hugely resilient and like all free people, we have to withstand the first shock, then we win.

        Best of all, Biden and Harris and the rest of them are grifters not middle class intellectuals like Kerensky or the Girondists. They’re in it for the money. The only thing to fear is that they are owned by China but the funny thing is if they do what we all fear they’ll do, China’s hold on them will vanish and remember that China has its own problems. Greed is a wonderful thing because it makes them predictable. If they were principled, I would truly fear them.

        I don’t want to sound like the dems have for the last four years, but all we have to do to stop it is withdraw our consent and wait for the left to eat each other. it’ll suck, but in the end we win and they lose unless we despair.

          1. I was tempted to suggest replacing Hunter Biden’s name in there with Donald Trump Jr. or his brother Eric … but, really, it could be Baron Trump and it would still be above the fold headlines suitable to declaration of war.

  4. still vasilating over “Trump’s got this” and “I think they’ve got the fraud to cover an otherwise Mondale scale shellacking”
    Not liking this.
    Not. At. All.

        1. Chrome also stopped a Walk Away video midstream today. Claimed the “ad” was using too much resources so it was removed from my browser, but it was a Tweet video and was not anymore of a hog than YT or other Tweets, so who knows, but it took the standard twitter window and links with it. It might well show up as vassal, eventually.

          1. This crap is why in Chrome I install “Youtube Ad Blocker” which is ironically available from the Chrome Add-ons site. Logo is a red ball with YAB in the middle. Install and forget. Lately I have the option of Skip Ads or View Ads, not sure if that’s YAB’s doing. But I no longer suffer from ’em.

            Or use SeaMonkey, which doesn’t understand the ads and therefore usually won’t play them (tho you’ll get a delay as Youtube thinks they’re being delivered), tho it sometimes won’t play the real vid either.

            I got hardassed against Youtube ads when I was presented with a 30 MINUTE unskippable ad before I could see a 5 minute video. And then was presented with a dozen two-minute ads before I could see the next short video. Also when I discovered that if you forget a window open afterward, it will sometimes start continuously playing ads at max bandwidth. Further, when I noted how most of the ads were for near-scams.

            Amusingly, Trump ads usually still play, and more rarely, Biden ads do. (Suspect the blocker can’t tell them apart.)

            And funny thing, there’s a camera shop that produced an ad that’s so good it got over a million views as an independent video. If they were all like that, we wouldn’t mind ’em so much.

            1. This is at work and I’m limited to what I am able to do here. At home I use Opera, Brave, and Slimjet browsers if possible and keep Firefox for DRM stuff (Lucasoil.tv, Amazon Video, and Motor Trend) I log into YT in Opera and Slim (each is a different log in to separate interests), and use Brave for anything I don’t want polluting my recommendations on the other two. Brave and Opera act like they show ads at the beginning of vids but don’t (brave usually shows nothing to me but spoofs YT, Opera it’s just a blank screen) and sometimes Slimjet has a fault page you need to click through, other times it isn’t there, but all three built in ad blocks stop mid video ads and their interruptions. Some stuff here at work, you get 4 ad breaks in a 4 minute video. Really annoying on a vid you know is demonetized from the get go.
              Don’t know if it’s Nuclear Blast or YT who is trolling all the Reactors by popping an ad at the 7 minute or so mark of the Wacken 2013 official live Ghost Love Score. Some get lucky and it’s just a banner. Most often now it is one of those unskippable annoying videos. Just what every song needs, an ad ½ to ⅔ the way through that runs for a minute. If I get a wild hair, I click on those, go to that part (right around the time she shouts “Hey, Hey, Hey” and works the crowd into a higher frenzy” and see if they have to deal with that.

            2. Mrs. TRX was searching for opossum videos and got an ad for an oil change place featuring “Otis the Opossum”, which is hilarious.

    1. Tiny elf.

      Trying to help.

      Is very drunk.

      wishing I could join him, ATM, because I’m already with you. /wry

      (Dang, I am just a GOLDMINE of fumble fingers, I tried to type that /rye ….)

  5. I’ve said before how I think you are mispredicting this, but I’m not going to go through it again here. A lot of the advice you give in this post is good in general.

    Also: I — and anyone else except maybe your immediate family — can’t drag you out of the depressive pit. Even suggesting the particular winch and chain I use for that wouldn’t help as those are highly individual.

    But please leave the door cracked. When we win be ready to be part of the win.

    (Same to herbn if he or his see this)

    1. I’m with you, Ian. This is no time to throw in the towel and moan, “All is lost!” As St. Yogi once said, it ain’t over till it’s over.

      1. Someone on another forum posted Denethor telling everyone to flee, making fun of some of the blackpillers.

        Our hostess to her credit hasn’t done that.

        Still not fun to watch a friend(?) go through this level of despair.

        1. I would never say to flee. Look, I was raised by my dad. You go down with your armor on and still swinging. EVEN if all is lost, There’s no excuse not to fight. Because someone else might pick up that scrap of flag, after you fall.
          I’m just feeling angry at myself that I can’t fight more effectively.

            1. BIngo.

              Let me tell you, I think Jsonaash has it right. 3 million+ will vote with lead ballots IF B-H win and begin trying to implement an arms ban and round up. Ditto on ANY movement of Chinese military/police resources into this country. Ditto on any continued or increased censorship of communications. (Yes, that means I think Zuckerman and Dorsey would be targeted for assassination since FB and Twit are the major offenders; but that doesn’t preclude assaults on any of the MSM companies.)

              Agreed, any revolution is a bloody mess; and if the U.S. goes up this time, it’s going to be even messier.

              However, Trump doesn’t seem that worried. Especially considering they will probably drag him before a bread and circuses tribunal and imprison him if he loses. Equally interesting was the vibe from the GOP community at last night’s town GOP committee meeting. At least in this area, there are a lot of stealth GOP supporters. The drive-by responses to sign waves: overwhelmingly supportive of the Trump & Co. Attendance of Dem vs GOP events; far greater GOP numbers, and without having to bus in Hire-a-Crowds. People donating to the party who have never donated in the past.

              Part of Sarah’s depressing outlook may be the fact that she’s stuck in a deep blue controlled state. I’d probably feel the same way if I lived in California or western Oregon..

              1. She’s locked inside in a deep blue state, too! We’re mostly restricted by places not being open, here, and I’m still going nuts. My KIDS are going nuts, and they’ve got playmates!


                I honestly expect they’ll be killed for being insufficiently useful to someone or other waaaaaaay before that. The right tends to look more at logistics, the left more at figure heads– someone’s server farm set on fire? That sounds more like the right.

                1. So purely as a hypothetical with absolutely nothing other than silly speculative fiction in mind:

                  I have often wondered that, with all the various looting of the armories in Los Angeles back during the Rodney King Riots, none of that reportedly missing heavy hardware has turned up publicly in any self-congratulatory press conference.

                  I seriously doubt that all those mortars with ammo and anti-tank weapons and Uncle Samlight and medium machine guns, to say nothing of all the ‘normal’ rifles and pistols and such, have all been sold over the border to Mexican drug lords – some, sure, but not all, and frankly all any Mexican Drug Lord worth his salt would need to do to get machine guns would be to phone up the local Mexican Army armory staff and ask how much they would cost.

                  It is also possible that there was a major clandestine effort to buy back any and all that was lifted just to get it off the streets, but just for fictions sake, let’s pretend not.

                  So given the Tech Lords homes and offices are generally well known in location, and I’ve never heard of any corner office anywhere that’s been proofed against anything past rifle fire (yes, armored glass offices proof against up to 30-06 for the C-staff is something that I have heard rumored in Silicon Valley), it seems like finding someone aligned with the goal of “making a statement” who has already been trained by Uncle Sam to set up and lay in a mortar could result in 10 or 20 mortar rounds dropping onto the Tech Lords homes or top floor corner offices from far enough away for that mortar team to simply vanish afterward. They could even keep the tube and baseplate if they were sufficiently practiced in breaking it down and skedaddling.

                  1. Per Bryan Suits– back when he was actually doing research instead of having a slap-fight meltdown on air– they do find machine guns and such in some gang raids.

                    They very carefully avoid making a big deal about it, because nobody wants to talk about where they came from, because both “stolen during the riots” and “brought across the southern border” make you look very, very bad, and might trigger stricter enforcement of existing gun laws against the gangs.


                    AntiFa already demonstrated that you don’t need anything more fancy than fireworks to do the “make a statement” via blowing up buildings.

                  2. IIRC, the California Assemblyman that got busted over arms smuggling had an RPG in at least one of the deals that he set up. I don’t think left-over armory loot would be required to obtain such weapons by bad people.

                    1. Leland Yee. They dropped the weapons charges and charged him with racketeering. He did five easy years in Club Fed and was released a few months ago.

                      “Different rules for the privileged…”

                      I expect he’ll regain his seat in the legislature at the next election.

                    2. He ratted out the Chinese mafia. Publicly.

                      Lee’s probably discovered religion and is praying the Mandate of Heaven has been withdrawn so spectacularly that the collapsing government catches their criminal arm, too.

                    3. I doubt he’ll get his seat back. “Selling weapons to foreign terrorists” (MILF was apparently one of his customers) doesn’t play well with the voters, and will make for very good campaign ads.

                  3. Bob Lee Swagger is getting a touch elderly – perhaps you want to write up a novel about somebody going after the Tech Lords. You could possibly title it Cancel Culture.

                  4. > none of that reportedly missing heavy hardware has turned up publicly in any self-congratulatory press conference.

                    The local National Guard armory got looted a couple of times in the late ’60s/early ’70s. I don’t recall any mention of any recovered weapons from there, either.

                    I expect most of those firearms had been missing for a long time, and the quartermaster saw it as a heaven-sent opportunity to clear his books.

                2. True that. Figureheads aren’t the company or the culture, and removing them doesn’t change the system. Recall, when the senators kills Ceaser, all they did was being on the Empire.

                  I’m thinking the questions we need to be asking are, how do we lead the country back to valuing self-governance? And how do we ensure that our public forums are open?

                    1. Server farms would bring down communications, but that’s going to blind everyone, and probably is more, so not sure that is the right thing either.

                    2. No their Server Farms are NOT the net. Not just any – Google, Facebook, Tweeter – THEIR Server Farms.

                3. We spent our summer in the Midwest, where outside Illinois life is pretty normal outside the wearing of face diapers. It makes a real difference.

                  1. I live about 15 miles from Joliet IL and I absolutely refuse to wear the face diaper. If I walk in a store or cafe and they tell me I have to have one on, I turn around and walk ouit loudly telling everyone I;ll never darken their doorstep again. If a Karen starts ragging on me, I tell them to stuff it where the sun don’t shine. One threatened to call the cops and I told him to go right ahead. He pulled out his cell phone and faked calling them, telling me they told him to tell me to put on a mask. I told him “MAKE ME”. Two others in the store pulled off their masks to join me. The Karen then told me the cops are on their way (they were not).

                    How did I know they were not on the way? They never showed up while I was there, and a few days later I was in the store again and I asked the clerk who was there that day. She said the police never showed up. She also told me the Karen said he was going to call the corporate HQ and complain about me too. He was bluffing and I knew it.

              1. While you’re being excessively kind calling it “thinking,” I do remember.

                Any hero _must_ be them, or it’s not —

                That explains why, relatively suddenly, EVERYBODY has to be sex obsessed. To the point of rewriting Sherlock and LotR.

                It would also explain the not-fixing-villains-you-make-heroes, but-tear-down-the-heroes. Generally heroes they didn’t like in the first place.

                  1. Modern day sexual mores as depicted by the media make the prospect of dying a virgin a peaceful, happy fate.

              2. It warms my heart to see that meme and contemplate how much it must make Whedon & Fillion — those Lefties — fume.

            1. But to a leftist “right” means “in agreement with the current Narrative.”

              Hey. they’re the ones who insist on rewriting the dictionary…

          1. Anyone can fight back, the old, the lame, the mobile sick, anyone. It is NOT nice, it is NOT easy, Learn to shoot pistol or rifle. Pick a target YOU deem worth it, plan then execute, try and get away, STFU, Repeat if possible. You KNOW it is almost certainly a one way trip, you hope and plan for more but you have to be realistic. NO ONE wants to be FORCED to do this and unless there is NO OTHER choice this is NOT the path. But once your limit is reached, once you have been forced to make the choice and there is no other path to walk. You can make a difference. NOT in a group, ALL groups have spies. ALONE, maybe with family, YOU can strike a blow if you are willing to pay the price. Only YOU can decide if you can pay it. IT is NOT cowardice to not be able to. It is cowardice to NOT face the question and answer it.

            1. There is one other thing, YOU have to remember. YOU are a LIGHT in the Darkness. As long as YOU can speak out and be heard, YOU will be worth hundreds or even thousands of the rest of us. No matter WHAT continue to speak and teach. Let others face the fire, that will be harder than anything else but YOU must continue to speak for those of us who can’t. You are far more powerful then you think.

            2. First Rule of Armed Revolution: Nobody talks about actual armed revolution. It’s all hypothetical and flights of imagination. Just a verbal RPG. After all, everyone knows that nobody could really successfully revolt against the government, right?

          2. Mrs. Hoyt, know that you motivate others to keep on keeping on, and to fight, not flee.

            That is an absolutely essential part of winning war. Motivation and morale. You are constantly a net plus.

            Don’t doubt it. You are motivating others to do the needful things.

          3. I don’t feel bad about it at all. I was pretty good at fighting at age 20 but now, almost fifty years and more than a few pounds later, my leading hope is I will last long enough give my kids and grandkids a chance to get away.

            I am not a fatalist about it but once I understood the difference between fate and destiny, I also had to accept that someday they will gravely intersect and I will die. I’d certainly prefer that misfortune be many decades and several million miles away but, if it happens next year, then I paid my money and I took my choices.

            BTW, I do not think I have ever seen you so pessimistic.

              1. We know.

                Do you realize how much we had to screw with the timeline to create 2020 and lock in a sequence of events that would change that?

            1. Me approaching 60, with several decades’ worth of wear and tear on knees* and ankles and (a few) extra pounds – I’m not gonna be doing any ‘run and gun’ning, but I can man the redoubt to let yoinger, fitter folk do the fun stuff. At least ’til picked off by a countersniper.

              * At this point in my life, I have a better use for my knees anyhow.

              1. Run? What is the “Run” you speak of?

                Not happening. Not even walk really fast into the wilderness … slow, yes. Fast nope.

    2. If we win, I’m going to spend two days in a fuzzy robe drinking hot chocolate.
      And then post something here, and go sleep for a week.
      After that there will be books to write.
      And G-d Ian, I hope you’re right.

      1. I really have no clue which way this is going to go. If I didn’t expect massive fraud on the part of the democrat party I’d say this is somewhere between a squeaker for Trump and a slightly better Electoral college victory than 2016. But that fraud makes it more of a Heisenberg uncertainty thing, depending on how the observer measures it it tweaks the answer, That said if there is a clear Trump slide like victory I will spend parts of 11/4 evening watching the lefts heads exploding. To quote Conan (Barbarian not the annoying ginger)

        Conan, what is best in life?

        I’m expecting a lot of lamentations across the lefty spectrum. Schadenfreude is not really proper but I only get to indulge in it rarely.

        1. Bah. We already hear enough lamentations from leftist women! I’ll take peace and quiet, with a shot of brandy in my hot cocoa.

        2. OTOH, if I cannot crush my enemies, drive before me, and hear the lamentation of their women then pissing off the people who wish I was dead is a close second.

        1. The aardvark inventories those cellars too, and assures you that there is no way that you will need to save champagne.

          Details of why not are reserved for security reasons.

          1. I guess that would mean a revival of Keeping Up With The Kardashians.

            Of course, if the MSM complained “He’s not presidential!” it would be proof of their racism.

      2. So, new books in December then?

        Sarah, I know how hard it is to fight despair, but you really must. I hope this is your subconscious trying to do so by method of lancing the poison from your mind, but things are NOT that bleak. I will admit that they’re closer than they’ve been since Virginia earlier this year, but even then they’re not that close yet.

        I reply to your “be not afraid” with “be not in despair”. This looks worse than it is because a substantial part of the nation KNOWS they’re being gaslighted, and refuse to talk about it. Look at some of Peter DaDalt’s posts regarding early voting statistics and the Shy Trump Voter (hi!) on Facebook. It’s not nearly so bleak as all that.

        1. Hmmm. Trump wins, and everyone here in a frenzy of relief produces double the requirements for NaNoWriMo, all Dragon award winners, and somehow sweep the Hugos this year, causing massive numbers of Woke to pass out and take to their beds in consternation.

          1. I have three books almost finished:
            Another Rhodes, far future detective space opera
            Winter Prince, Lords in space type space opera
            An A Well Inlaid death.
            And three started: A Fatal Paws, the first orphan kittens Mysteries
            A light Spring War – second after Winter Prince
            AND The Long Purr Goodbye (Greebo.)
            If my mind would just UNFREEZE

    1. Going by little hints that Trump has put out plus the reactions of the DNC, I think something went very very wrong in the fraud by mail plan. The fix might in fact be in. But it is Trump’s anti-fraud fix.

      I don’t know how he does it, but Trump always seems to know exactly where to hit his opponents that will produce maximum damage.

      1. Low hanging fruit.

        Since there isn’t that much effective competition for fighting back, you can get big gains for small effort right off the bat.

        The inverse of this is why I’m worried, but in the “this could suck” way, not “the end is nigh” way.
        Because they burned up their 10%-of-the-effort-for-90%-of-the-gain, and now they’re pouring more and more effort into a smaller and smaller profit.

      2. I’ll also point out that if they do fraud a “win”, Trump will fight. Not only because he is someone who fights, but because the left has made it clear that they mean to destroy him and everyone that was ever associated with him.

        As someone else pointed out, “On death ground, fight.”

        1. Yep.

          Which is why I don’t worry about fraud past a certain point. We have a fighter in a position to do something about it for the first time since I was born.

      3. Fraud by mail will mostly work in states that already vote blue, is my thought. Elsewhere, we’re wise to them. Wouldn’t surprise me if a little subversion is happening that’s mitigating the fraud.

        Doesn’t preclude a massive votes-from-the-air as apparently happened in Montana with Jon Tester’s re-election in 2018, tho. Funny how the two most techy counties had ZERO counted until after the whole rest of the tally was in, then suddenly vomited forth the required margin of uncontestable victory. (To counter the Libertarian monkey wrench, without which Tester probably would have lost.)

          1. No, NC will not keep counting the votes! We proved that in 2016.

            We stopped counting as soon as the Democrat (governor) won.

            In 2020 we* will stop as soon as Biding Harris and Cal “The Prick” Cunningham wi.

            *Sovereign “we” as in “the state of” — personally, I would count all those and only those ballots cast/received by close of polls Election Day. No “found” ballots accepted, any polling official “finding” ballots would be forced to provide cause not to be prosecuted for malfeasance in performance of duties.

      4. Thangs that make one go hmmmmm …

        Millions of mail-in ballots not yet returned in key states
        By Associated Press
        ATLANTA — Just days before the presidential election, millions of mail ballots have yet to be returned in key battleground states and election officials warn that time is running out for voters who want to avoid a polling place on Election Day.

        At least 35 million mail ballots had been returned or accepted as of early Wednesday, according to data collected by The Associated Press. That surpasses the 33.3 million total mail ballots returned during the 2016 election, according to the US Election Assistance Commission.

        Yet an estimated 1.9 million ballots were still outstanding in Florida, along with 962,000 in Nevada, 850,000 in Michigan and 1 million in Pennsylvania. In most states, the deadline for ballots to be received is Election Day. …

        1. Oh. First time older son tried to mail a letter it got returned to us.
          For us it was a wake up call of how the world had changed. He was 14, it was the first time he did this, and he reversed sender and receiver…. He really had no clue.
          I don’t know if his brother HAS ever mailed a letter.

      5. To be fair, they publicize their weaknesses without considering anyone might use them against them

    2. Jeez, Ian, that’s a VIDEO! Of MaligNancy PELOSI! I’m just glad I didn’t click on it, ’cause thar ain’t enough Mental Floss in California to clean that up.
      Why do so many idiots believe that the way to solve our problems is to go on voting for the same shitheads that caused them?

      1. Because too much of the time, those shitheads are the only ones on the ballot, no matter which party they are in.

        How the shitheads get on the ballot… that’s Party business, not something the proletariat have any control over.

  6. In a less dystopian morning, I went out to vote. It generally takes two to four hours. Several times, most of that was spent standing out in the rain. And it was 45 and raining when I headed out…

    Walked in to the “Community Center”, wondered where the long lines were, made it to the voting area, and… there were a handful of people standing at machines, and nobody in line. I handed my voter registration card and concealed carry permit to the election official, who pointed me to a machine. I made my selections, and it spit out a paper ballot, which I then dropped into the scanner by the Out door. Whence the bits went off into electronic limbo, but that’s how e-voting works…

    Interestingly, still no Trump or Biden signs in the ‘hood and none I noticed near the polls. Apparently there’s a hot contest going for some of the alderman seats. I waved at the people at their candidates’ booths and they waved back. Everyone seemed laid back and friendly.

    It was a major difference from the grimness of 2016.

    1. Lots of Trump signs here in rural Will County IL, but they only last a couple or three days before they are stolen. Rumor has it the local unions are paying thugs to steal them.

  7. Never give up. The Epic of Gilgamesh is still with us. The Lord of the Rings, and Sherlock Holmes. The stories of King Arthur, and Lincoln the Great Emancipator, and General George Patton.

    (When Patton received Eisenhower’s message instructing him to bypass Trier because it would take four divisions to capture it, Patton replied, “Have taken Trier with two divisions. What do you want me to do? Give it back?”)

    Stand fast. I know the Black Dog says this is the end, the Battle of Isandlwana. But maybe, just maybe, it’s the Battle of Rorke’s Drift instead.

    1. > The Epic of Gilgamesh is still with us.

      For those who don’t realize how unlikely *that* was, it was another one of those cases of “Oh, really, you can’t expect anyone to believe that” combinations of luck and coincidence. George Smith translated one of the tablets in the British Museum, the Daily Telegraph sponsored an expedition to Nineveh to recover the rest, where they promptly found other tablets containing most of the missing parts… whhaaaattt?

  8. We are Americans.

    Worst case, they try.

    There are already folks commenting about how they’re scared– not because they’re seeing progressives being violent idiots, that is to be expected, but because conservatives aren’t rolling over.

    Usually, all it takes is resistance and they look for easier prey.

    The vast majority of those where they don’t, the escalation is yelling and name-calling to try to summon a mob.

    Very rarely… well, we’re all familiar with why there are very few mass murders in areas that are not gun-free zones. It’s not that they’re not attempted…..

    1. *Nod* They’ll keep pushing, and pushing, and pushing, until they meet resistance. You have to face them, and you have to tell them no, and you have to keep enforcing that no. And be prepared for a long siege, because they get energized by drama and won’t wear out. Ugh.

      On the small scale, I just had a comment on a fanfic over on AO3 ranting about the riots being “both sides”, so I mentioned a few conservative websites they might want to check out, given their information on current events seemed to be… lacking. Who knows? Maybe they’ll even read one.

      (Or not. Said person also seems to think kirisute was a kinder, gentler custom than all the Eeeevil police shootings of today. I also listed some Japanese history authors so they could check their reality. Oy.)

      1. *musing* You know, they are kind of related to kirisute– not just the police shootings, but any of the armed resistance.

        It’s not “fair”– violates their social norms– for the targeted individual to use deadly force in defense; it is their right to issue “whuppins” to those who disrespect them, and failure to allow one’s self to be robbed or failure to allow them to violate laws at will are both forms of disrespect. Because it implies that they are on the same level as everyone else.

    1. That’s YUGE!
      If that poll is at all close to being accurate the fraud necessary to turn the election will be impossible to get away with.

              1. Sisters of Battle from Warhammer 40k. One of the suborders have white hair, and that is what gets shown the most.

                SoB are the Ecclesiarchy’s troops (“Nuns with Guns” / “Bolter Bitches”). After some wacky hijinks the Ecclesiarchy is not allowed to have men under arms.

                So they do not have any men under arms.

                Which is also why WH40K is one of the very few universes to provide a justification for boobplate. Because it makes it very clear that they are not men under arms.

          1. We have *three* weapons against heresy: Fear, surprise, a ruthless efficiency, and a fanatical dedication to the Emperor — We have *four* weapons against heresy . . .

              1. After six months of lockdown the local barbershop was (briefly) open. I got sheared from “Wookkiee” to “USMC”.

                1. Earlier this month I ended up dragging myself to a barber since my hair was going “Mad Science” during a contract I’d been working the last week of September. 😮

                1. He’s good at cutting it himself, it just takes getting around to it! And I haven’t gotten my hair cut in a real hair shop since…. I think I was pregnant with the Duchess…. too thin to get beyond shoulder long.

                  1. Son bought himself a trimmer. Only problem is he needs the 1″ attachment. Largest one is the 1/2″. Can’t find a 1″ one. So far he’s just used the 1/2″. Does it himself w/o help.

                2. We found a local shoop that not only does not require a mask, but refuses to obey the state edicts on the WuFlu. The owner told us one cutter went ballistic over her stand and she fired her immediately. We both have switched to using her place since we found out about it in May.

  9. A couple of centuries from now, we’ll look back at this and laugh.

    OK, my first thought, Sarah’s overreacting.

    But yesterday I was reading that Scotland’s hate crime law allows for jailing folks that speak wrong, in their own house, at their own dinner table.

    But the day before I read how New Zealand considering setting up COVID camps. Your infected? Your removed from your family, sent off to the concentration camp until and unless proven kungflu free.

    But a few weeks ago I read how a pregnant woman in OZ, in Melbourne, was arrested in her own home, handcuffed and hauled away because she dared to make a Facebook post calling for a socially distanced rally against the quarantine.

    So on the other hand, maybe Sarah’s a bit too optimistic, America was the last great hope, as 30 officers are injured in Philly. America was the last great hope as peaceful protest continue night after night, after night, after night. America was the last great hope and then it became a crime to not wear a mask like a bandit. America was the last great hope until the smartest, best, most honorable, most honest the democrats could put up for election is Sleepy Joe and the Camel.

    OK, maybe a couple of millennia from now, we’ll look back and laugh.


      That’s a quarantine.

      It’s stupid, given that we know the kung flu is not, say, Ebola– but that is a quarantine.

      It balances the demands on individual liberty with the public interest in part because the people demanding the quarantine have to pay to feed and house you.

      Vs lockdowns.

      1. You don’t understand, they are locked down ALSO.
        Children have DIED in Australia because they could NOT get PERMISION to cross state lines to get them to the doctors that could save them. The Government said NO and their children DIED!

        1. What part of identifying a quarantine– an actual quarantine as opposed to lockdown– makes you think that I do not understand this medical theater is bunk?

          1. Speaking as an occupant and citizen of New Zealand, there is no country-wide lockdown OR quarantine. There are several quarantine facilities for incoming travellers, for a 14-day isolation period. Not perfect, but good enough for us.
            Regarding the election, our PM and ‘left-wing’ government were re-elected WITH A MAJORITY because a) they did a good job handling the Covid crisis, and b) it REMOVES the need for the Labour party to form a coalition government with the yes, “socialist/communist” Green party. NZ politics tends to change sides (National/Labour) on about a 9 year basis (3 election cycles). Plus, Kiwi’s as a whole tend to be pretty pragmatic and realistic about things.


      They’re not here– Iowa. There was an attempt at it, they broke like four windows down town.
      I think I’ve mentioned before how the cops that work in the area started paying attention, noticing unfamiliar faces showing oddly intense interest in how their buildings were set up, and made a point of during lunch striking up a conversation with said oddly interested out-of-towners. (No, I don’t know how they can tell, but they were able to pick me out as new, too. Maybe it’s the regular influx of activists for politics and I just looked lost. Because I generally am.)

      My folks haven’t heard of any in Spokane– I’m pretty sure Seattle and Portland are still having it, but they have stupid stuff like that pretty often.

      Basically, some Democrat hell-holes where innocent people have been wronged for years are now having the mobs attack in a more obvious manner.

      1. Sitting up here on top of the world, North Pole, Alaska, I don’t personally see any rioting to speak of.

        None the less, as cities, by definition, are civilization, us folks in the hinterlands may well have ringside seats to watch the fall of ̶w̶e̶s̶t̶e̶r̶n̶ ̶ civilization.

        1. The cities won’t be civilization in the future. That was already baked in, this is just acceleration.
          Unless they cancel the future, the cities are increasingly more irrelevant.
          BUT seeing Denver as though it had been destroyed by an enemy in war…. I’m still mourning.

          1. But alas, it takes a city to support an art museum, a zoo, natural history museums, a concert orchestra, a large library complex, a planetarium, a rocket launch site, etc.
            Though I hope your right & in spite of cities begone we find some way to support and maintain all of the above.

        2. Des Moines and Spokane are both cities.

          They’re just not notorious hell-holes with a long history of coddling violent criminals.

          1. It might be my age but I don’t remember Denver, Portland or Seattle being hell-holes when I visited there. Chicago, Philly, NYC I agree with you.

            1. When we lived in the Blob, my husband wouldn’t allow me to walk around either of them without him, because of the bad areas in the touristy zones.

              Not in the theoretically patronizing way, either, but in the “dear God, if you’re going to do something stupid, I am going with you” way.

              My cousin was one of the idiots gassed during the WTO riots because he was going to a job interview for a fairly big company, and that was the winter of 2000/01. (Idiot, because he didn’t realize that when the police are yelling to get out of the area, they mean you, too.)

              Watching the “protests” in Portland during the Thanksgiving visit with Elf’s family was a regular occurrence since at least seven years ago. Can’t remember the first dealership that was smashed up in “protests,” just remember it was and it kinda shocked the fluffy liberal aunt when we weren’t shocked.

              They’ve had antifa for over a decade; here’s a link to the…quality…we’re talking about:

              you can also get a lot of video to get an idea of conditions by searching for stuff on the homeless encampments, or Occupy Wallstreet stuff.

              1. Yep, it is my age. It’s been at least 30 years since I’ve spent any time in Portland or Denver and did any more than just change planes in Seattle at SeaTac.

              2. It sounds like those businesses suing the City of Portland have a reasonable case that the city, by failing to moderate that behaviour, contributed to the business interruption.

                OTOH, the city might be able to mount a defense that those businesses had ample ntice that the city was managed by incompetent [rudeword]wads and thus are unable to claim compensation on the basis of negligence.

                Some might suggest that evading a lawsuit on the grounds “you knew what a [heck]hole the city was when you opened your businesses is a pyrrhic victory but hey, a win is a win.

            2. The Dems took over with the narrowest (fraud) margin in 12, and immediately went “all vote by mail.” So now they don’t fear us, and yes, Denver has become a hellhole these last 3 years.

            3. Portland and Seattle have been for at least a decade and a half now, if not two and a half. I can’t speak directly to Denver, but Seattle and Portland have been lost causes for ages.

          2. Pocatello, ID is a city with three museums, three dinner theaters, and a symphony, with in normal years two classical ballet productions (The Nutcracker and another).

            I don’t think it’s the only small city-70,000ish with Chubbuck-out there with some remaining sanity.

      2. Back in March the Floyd protests around here briefly turned violent.
        Briefly because the instigators were arrested and charged. Yes, there are still frequent protests in the nearby lefty city – but peaceful. No vandalism, no looting, no shutting down highways.
        Most of the U.S. is still the U.S. 24 hour National News from multiple sources from the “If it bleeds, it leads” perspective makes people forget that it’s just a handful of Dem controlled cities that are fouling their own nests. Unfortunately our host’s beloved Denver is one of those. But there are far more places where life (apart from the face diapers) is reasonably normal.


      During the DNC primaries I joked that they were all paid off by Trump and running an ad for him.

      They haven’t stopped running ads for him.

    4. Noted:

      Protests Against Virus Restrictions Become Violent in Europe


      Over the weekend, police used pepper spray against protesters angry over new virus restrictions in Poland. Spanish doctors staged their first national walkout in 25 years on Tuesday to protest poor working conditions.

      In Britain, anger and frustration at the government’s uneven handling of the pandemic has erupted into a political crisis over the issue of hungry children. …

    5. Boston University has “digital health certificates” now, presumably some kind of phone app, required to enter buildings on campus.

      Mandatory radio tracking device that’s also your entry permit to buildings… people of a certain political persuasion would get hot flashes just thinking of it.

      1. Long time lurker, infrequent poster.

        TRX- And would I be speaking to another denizen of the self-proclaimed hub of the universe in the P.R. of Taxachusetts? Totally agree with your comments regarding tracking. I have a lot more I want to say on this topic but can’t/won’t mention on a public forum.

        1. Nope, I’m out on in the western reaches of Dixie in Arkansas. Where it’s approximately 1980, and we view “the future” that leaks in via the media as something we emphatically do. not. want.

    1. Have you watched the Veritas video out of San Antonio????
      ON CAMMERA, vote fraud, illegal acts, in the pay of a Republican that wants vote for him but other votes for Democrats so it will seem more legit.

      1. I don’t THINK it’s a republican. Truly,I don’t. I think she’s a “consultant” — read volunteer — with his campaign to obtain addresses. She has people vote straight dem.

      1. Not surprised. Haven’t several of you who’ve met and known him in person had that strange sense that Jerry was in the room with you?

      2. A week ago I was pretty worried. I shut off my Facebook profile, and I quit watching Television news. I started checking out blogs again, and I realized that Social Media and Network TV is working very hard to only present the anti-liberty point of view as winning, and it really affects our emotions!
        And now, I feel pretty sure we are going to win. Peace is breaking out, the economy is rebounding, and Biden is a worthless basement troll.

        1. I barely do social media. I don’t do TV at all.
          I’m just reading worrisome things in blogs, like oh, the fraud and zucker owning most of the election managers.

  10. A couple of items –

    First, remember the advice that you sometimes quote from the late Jerry Pournelle: “Despair is a sin.” Cling onto the little things that give you hope.

    To add to that, you’ve mentioned frequently that you feel compelled to write and push others to write *right now*. If that’s the case, then the end isn’t here yet. The deluge may be approaching. But it hasn’t arrived quite yet. There’s at least a brief window. Or perhaps the deluge will come… and then rapidly recede. The important thing is that *right now* isn’t too late to write.

    Second, I suspect everyone here is afflicted with an overactive imagination. Yes, that’s a good thing when you’re trying to develop a plot or puzzle your way through figuring out how something works. But it also makes people so very much aware of all the many things that can go wrong. And that’s happening right now, I suspect.

  11. If you’re truly sure Things Will Fall Apart… don’t count on electricity, and certainly not on computers. If information is not in hardcopy, it doesn’t exist.

    Manual typewriters, if you can find one, are valuable. (Ribbons and carbon paper can be made, if one really needs Samizdat.)

    [Printout as final backup is a good policy for your fiction too, given that bits can be eaten by hostile software.]

    1. But you see, constant electricity is a bad thing. It harms the planet, it encourages sloth, it spoils us. We Americans are too accustomed to having everything as we like it – that must be stopped so that we can better appreciate the struggles of the world’s people of color.

      Lights Out (for the Good of the Planet, of Course)
      Many cults demand a degree of performative asceticism and quite a few of them find virtue in the simplicity of a more natural, supposedly prelapsarian past, which, luckily for them, they never had to endure. And while many of those preoccupied by climate change, whether out of genuine scientific concern or cynical self-interest, are perfectly rational (even if the same cannot always be said for their conclusions), some climate warriors exhibit behavioral characteristics more akin to those of medieval flagellants or, in their more light-hearted moments, back-to-nature types in the early 20th century, wearing shorts, eating nuts, and (shudder) “hiking.”

      George Orwell:


      Replace (to the extent it’s necessary) “Socialism” and “Communism” with certain strains of environmentalism, and, well . . .

      Flip over to the Boston Review and check out an article by David McDermott Hughes, Professor of Anthropology at Rutgers University, entitled “To Save the Climate, Give Up the Demand for Constant Electricity” (my emphasis added):

      So just how critical is continuity, then? And critical for whom? The U.S. grid sends 30 percent of its electricity to residences. As of 2017, 63 percent of those were single-unit, detached dwellings. Under Hawken’s plan in Drawdown, these houses will require battery farms and high-tension lines, and until they get them, they will probably draw power from natural gas at night. Thus, each household demanding continuous electricity marginally exacerbates the climate crisis. Perhaps, then, it is critical that we not store energy for these houses. At least, we should not do so in a way that hobbles the transition away from fossil fuels. We ought to consider waiting a few years for storage—enduring much more than six hours of downtime every year—for the sake of transitioning more rapidly away from fossil fuels…

      COVID-19 has forced almost all white-collar workers to telecommute. Thanks to Zoom, meetings have dispersed from the conference room to bedrooms and kitchens. Business continuity now requires uninterrupted electricity in millions of households. For the moment at least, the economy and the family run on the same circuit, and we would seem to need continuity now more than ever. Today’s viral interruption, however, may actually teach us how to live with intermittency…

      We will certainly need to be taught. In 2014 the German grid—6 percent of it working on solar energy—only scraped through an eclipse by drawing on other sources of electricity from neighboring countries.

      “We will certainly need to be taught.”

      The language of authoritarianism and the language of climate-change campaigners overlap just a little too often for comfort.

      Meanwhile, as a reminder, Angela Merkel’s Energiewende, a policy shift away from nuclear energy and towards renewables, driven by political panic and Green pressure has been underway for years, at enormous cost to the consumer and to industry. It hasn’t worked out too well.

      Note also the way that McDermott Hughes refers to the teaching moment that the “viral interruption” can provide. He is, of course, not the only climate warrior to believe that the current regime could be a useful precedent. [SNIP]

      1. Somehow I doubt that the nomenklatura will be suffering through intermittent blackouts.


        By telecommuting rather than driving in to work each day, aren’t ‘we’ already doing our bit to offset the ‘carbon catastrophe’?

        1. unless they have their own damn generators and a protected supply of fuel for them – which for sure and certain they don’t – they’re going to learn to read by candle light. It don’t take much to take out a whole grid if somebody stupid tries to pick and choose who doesn’t get power…

  12. But I don’t WANT to “Go Be American”!

    I want to stay in this country and be American.

  13. Even if Trump wins (as I believe he will) all of us here need to recognize that it will only be ‘the end of the beginning’. We USians have a lot of work to do to restore the Republic.

      1. Poor Sarah sat in the dark thinking of all the horrible names of all the giants and ogres she had ever heard told of in tales, but not one of them had done all these things. She had a feeling that the answer was quite different and that she ought to know it, but she could not think of it. She began to get frightened, and that is bad for thinking. He began to get out of his boat. He flapped into the water and paddled to the bank; Sarah could see his eyes coming towards her. Her tongue seemed to stick in her mouth and she wanted to shout out: “Give me more time! Give me more time!” But all that came out with a sudden squeal was:

        “Time! Time!”

        Chin up Sarah! Don’t let the Biden-Gollum get to you.

        1. Chin up Sarah! Don’t let the Biden-Gollum get to you.

          That’s it! That’s what has been right before my eyes this whole time and I just couldn’t see it! Biden is a golem. It explains so much; the vacant eyes, the garbled expressions, the sniffing of strangers and the imperative of keeping him locked away so much!

  14. They can’t win by fraud-winning California and New York – they have those electoral votes already. They have to fraud-win the swing states, and the swing states have been alerted to things like mail shenanigans by the Dems bleating about mail shenanigans and giving away their game.

    And Gropey Joe is hiding in the basement, and The Ho is no longer doing freeform media because she can’t be trusted to stay on script and not say The Wrong Thing.

    Despair is a sin, and hope, while not being a plan, is real.

    1. Also, as we all know from the Supremes, Money is Speech, and there are close races where small donations will make a difference.

      Imagine the fun if all those Dems who lied through their teeth to get into the House lost and Nancy became minority leader once again.

    2. This is what I’m hoping for. That they can win the popular vote by fraud because CA/NY, etc., including Oregon, dang it. BUT they can’t win the Electoral College with their fraud, despite NC & PA.

    1. And Amy Klobuchar is telling Democratic Minnesota voters to vote in person rather than by mail so the Republicans can’t “take away,” their votes.

  15. Oh lordy. I was just talking with someone about why a Vietnamese boat person of my acquaintance loathes Biden, and this was part of his response: “The truth is the people who were allies in Vietnam were the ones who opposed Ho chi minh’s egalitarian policies. They were the ones who were the privileged class under the French and had hoped to become the privileged class under the Americans but instead lost and were run out of there by what turned out to be a pretty f****** effective government. we need to take their nonsense with a grain of salt and be willing to call them out for distorting the truth and not let them just blend in as POC or refugees when that’s not their real story.”

    He also thinks that Cuban refugees are in the same camp.

    Never mind that he’s discounting the actual lived experience of a minority in favor of his narrative, because of course you’d cross the ocean in a fifteen foot fishing boat because you were afraid of egalitarianism. And no, I didn’t share that with the guy in question, because there would have been a nuclear explosion and I live in the fallout zone.

    1. …did they bake in the “egalitarian means some animals are more equal than others” and deciding that laws applying equally to everyone is “privilege” or something?

      Basically, the whole “that’s awful white of you” thing from century old plus books, where “white” meant “demonstrates the least element of Christian world-view re: human worth”?

    2. Yeah. Like the left in my field saying that I came here because I had a high position in the pre-revolution government. At 11.
      Or that my family had a high position. (Rolls eyes.) I wish we’d had. Those people fell in the soft. The fact that I first came here at 18 as an exchange student AND WENT BACK and that my entire family is still there, apparently makes no never mind.

      1. He was five. His grandmother died on the way—she starved to death to give her descendants a chance. (Rumor has it that she also told them to eat her, but I haven’t confirmed that with him. It’s entirely possible.)

    3. They never actually met anyone who made it out in a boat, obviously.

      Sure the top tier rich South Vietnamese got out either right before or right at the fall, using their resources, but the people who escaped in little boats were not on the roundup lists who were on the whole caught and thrown in reeducation camps – they were just people, who had had all they could handle, so they braved the open ocean, full of rapist pirates, to try and get out.

      I don’t know any Cuban escapees, but I’m betting the same is true there – the rich got out right at the start or got killed; anyone who got out later were very much not upper class.

      1. Exactly this in Portugal. We never got to the point of leaving in anything that floated, but the rich got out first to various cushy places. The middle class suffered hard.

      2. Was talking to one of the boat people who escaped in a small boat a while back. He told me about their navigational aid. It was a fragment of a world map. The entire south china sea was the size of a postage stamp. They sailed with what they had. We need to sail with what we have.

        Remember the Yorktown, May 27, 1942. Bomb damaged from Coral Sea. She limps into Pearl, an estimate of 90 days to repair. Four days later she sails west to her death. Before she died, she sank two of the four Japanese carriers sunk at Midway. Sometimes a welder is what is needed to win. We each are called to a purpose by God. Remember when Peter jumps out of the boat, to walk on water poorly, Jesus does not calm the storm until they are back in the boat.

        We need to remember that the devil will discourage us. That is why despair is a sin. The waves can terrify. The danger is real. My estimate is one chance in 10 we avoid disaster, but that is better odds than we had in 2016. Then it seemed certain that it was the end, with no way out. The supreme court packed with leftists, on the road to Venezuela. Just remember that certain German’s comment about America. There still is a faithful remnant. To quote Yogi: “It ain’t over, til its over.”

        1. Oskarsborg Fortress had guarded the approach to Oslo for centuries. Its weapons were obsolete, and it wasn’t even fully manned. The Kreigsmarine planners dismissed it as irrelevant.

          The Nazi fleet sailed in to take Oslo and support Quisling’s government. And the caretaker crew at Oskarsborg loaded their old 280mm guns, and ” Moses” and “Aaron” sent the shiny-new Blucher to the bottom of Oslofjord and the rest of the fleet fled back to the open sea.

          Oslo fell to the Luftwaffe shortly after, but found the Norwegians weren’t amenable to pacification. It took far too many German troops to keep the occupying bureaucrats safe, troops and supplies desperately needed elsewhere. Norway was a turd in the Reich punchbowl, but the Fuhrer’s “no reteat” directive meant they couldn’t let it go.

          And “Moses” and “Aaron” are still in their casemates at Oskarsborg, ready and waiting.

        2. Youngest son is dating a girl from Wisconsin who is Hmong. She was born in a refugee camp in Thailand to a family whose patriarch fought with the green berets in Laos and had to escape when Laos fell. They lived in the camp for many years before they got to leave and come to the US.

      3. I grew up in the Sacramento area, and South Sac is full of Vietnamese strawberry farms. Basically, San Francisco sent them up the river to where they could be settled, and strawberry farming is about as low-startup-capital a job as you can get, perfect for when you’re willing to work but you have nothing.

        Their kids are dentists. Well-paying jobs with highly portable skill sets. Thus you see refugee trauma in generational form. (The friend in question is an energy scientist.)

        1. We got a bunch of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians in Arkansas; there was a major refugee staging center in Blytheville, and when the relocation program ended they just turned them loose here.

          A few went to other states, or even back to their original country, to be with family. The rest became Americans. There are no ethnic neighborhoods here; other than some stores and restaurants, they’re just another group of brown-skinned people who can’t speak proper Spanish.

          My area also has a *ton* of Koreans; enough to support at least three Korean Baptist churches. The USAF used to (still does?) rotate airmen in fixed patterns; a large percentage of incoming airmen’s previous station was Korea, and lot of them brought Korean wives back; enough to make a noticeable demographic bump.

          1. It would be a surprise to me if many Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians voted Democrat as they should need more than forty-five years to forgive (and far longer to forget) which party abandoned them twice — once when the Commies surged and displaced the government our Democrats no longer allowed us to support, once again when they emulated Cubans by fleeing the butchers in whatever waterborne craft they could contrive.

            It is a shame on our nation that we did not grant succor to more of their fellows (and that we did grant it to some of whom we did.)

        2. They also effectively took over the manicure business in the US (particularly California). Actress Tippi Heddren visited one of the refugee camps, saw the state that the refugees were in, and instructed her personal manicurist to teach the trade to some of the women in the camp so that they’d have a means to support themselves. Things sort of snowballed as it was a good industry for a group of people who were willing to work hard and were polite, but had limited fluency in English.

          1. The Saturday Wall Street Journal had a review of The Donut King a documentary biography of Cambodian refugee Ted Ngoy, who “arrived in California in 1975, a refugee separated from his family.”

            Fleeing the Khmer Rouge’s killing fields, Ngoy,

            sponsored by a Lutheran church in Orange County … at 33 years of age, found a nighttime job pumping gas in La Mirada, a city in southeast Los Angeles County.

            But then, as Ted recounts his own legend, came a pivotal moment. One night around midnight he smelled doughnuts being baked in a doughnut shop near the gas station and went over to try one. It was love at first bite because the humble bun reminded him of a Cambodian cake called nom kong. Taking the next fateful step, he enrolled in a three-month Winchell’s Donut training program. A year later he bought his first doughnut shop while still a Winchell’s employee. By 1979 he owned 25 shops and was on his way to becoming the Cambodian community’s truly legendary Uncle Ted—a benefactor who brought his extended family here, sponsored an additional 100 or so immigrant families, and shaped an entire ethnic community with a doughnut-shop leasing program for Cambodians only. The program, in turn, created so many family-run shops with such low overhead—everyone in the family devoting endless hours to backbreaking work—that nationally established doughnut chains were effectively driven out of the state.

            Cambodian-American now operate “80% of the 5,000 independent fried-dough filling stations in Southern California.”.

            The film is streaming somewhere or other – look it up.

            No link to WSJ review because paywall.

              1. I have read, admittedly some time ago ad (as we now know) Google rules are subject to change without notice, that Google requires news sites to post up non-paywall versions. That means if you search for a story you will be able to access it without charge or limit. As I subscribe to the WSJ I am unable to test this. Try searching for one of the phrases quoted (or a portion thereof.)

                Thanks for the additional review.

    4. You should ask him what it would take to make *him* put his entire family on a tiny boat and try and flee across the ocean to a distant land that he’d never been to before.

  16. This might be handy, considering the arguments for “not suppressing votes”:

    Why Absentee Ballots Arriving after Election Day Represent a Vote-Counting Problem
    Why shouldn’t states allow ballots postmarked before or on Election Day to be counted if they arrive after Election Day?

    A GOP consultant made an illuminating argument to me this week. When the polls close on Election Night, we want election workers to know precisely how many legitimate ballots exist in a voting “universe.” They don’t need to immediately know who won, but they need to know there are, say, 12,345 votes that have been legitimately cast in their jurisdiction. This makes it much easier to catch accidental over-counts or under-counts. If, after counting all the votes (and any ballots where some choices were left blank), if the sum comes up to 12,352, they know a few ballots were counted twice. If the sum comes up to 12,335, they know ten ballots didn’t get counted.

    If a state accepts absentee ballots that arrive later in the week, vote-counters don’t know what their total “voting universe” is, and they’re forced to check their work against a moving target. …


    Voting is a right, but exercising that right requires some responsibility on the part of voters. Voters need to register. Voters need to meet the legal definition of residency where they cast their ballot, and voters must cast only one ballot. (Having homes in more than one state doesn’t mean you get to vote twice.) And voters must act before the deadline.

    In most jurisdictions, ballots are at least required to be postmarked by Election Day or before. But the Pennsylvania supreme court ordered that a ballot with no postmark or an illegible postmark must be regarded as timely if it is received up to three days after Election Day. Whether or not someone thinks election fraud on a scale to tip a close election is probable, this set of rules makes this kind of fraud possible, as some malefactor can determine how many ballots are needed on Election Night to close the gap, spend Wednesday collecting the required number of absentee ballots, and then deliver them within the three-day window and add them to the total. It makes little sense to have one deadline for one set of voters and another deadline for another set of voters.

    1. Pennsylvania Supreme Court needs to be caned, en masse, for gross incompetence. Any lawyer or judge who can’t devise a fail SAFE system needs to be disbarred. And Pa.’s system doesn’t fail safe.

      1. Note that the Pennsylvania case may still be considered by the Supreme Court-just after election day.


        Justice Alito makes a very pithy, and in my view constitutionally correct point, about it being the state LEGISLATURE that sets the rules, and that the decision of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, which basically acknowledges that they are disregarding the law as written by the legislature because “health emergency” usurps the legislatures constitutional role and thus their extension is unconstitutional and invalid. Of course that will need 5 votes, and Roberts is a flake and Gorusch’s decision in the Civil Rights Act case where he redefined the law’s definition to change sex to gender means he could easily flake out on the election cases as well.

            1. Correct, but if both Roberts and Gorusch go sideways and join the three libs, then it is still a 5-4 loss.

                1. The Chaplet of Divine Mercy is probably an acceptable option for most flavors of Christian; it’s usually prayed on a rosary, and with other options I’ll mention after, but this seems pretty universal:
                  For the sake of His sorrowful Passion, have mercy on us and on the whole world. (usually repeated, and following line is in closing)

                  I find it very useful for the panic-attack type moments where you can’t find the words and “heeeeeellllllp!” seems a bit… lacking.


                  With the warning that it’s private revelation — means even Catholics don’t have to accept this– and that it’s written in Catholic, here’s how you’d pray it using a rosary:
                  You say the Our Father, the Hail Mary and the Creed, then say Eternal Father, I offer You the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Your dearly beloved Son, Our Lord Jesus Christ, in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world., the “for the sake of His sorrowful Passion” on the small beads, and say the Holy God one three times in closing.

                  I know many groups get spooked, talking to Jesus’ mom; I figure He’s somewhat fond of her, so no different than asking any holy person to pray for you. The other part that can squick folks is the part about offering Jesus’s body, blood, etc; think of it as in the spirit of…you know how little kids will ask you for money so they can buy you a gift? Like that. It’s 100% you, but they’re trying, and it’s the only way they can even get something near worthy.

                2. *adding, dryly* I am starting to think a LOT of Catholics prayers are aimed at dealing with Spectrum folks (via both releasing control and giving a system) and channeling OCD into harmless directions.

                    1. Let’s just say there is a reason I am thinking of how comforting it is to give control to the One who can legitimately claim it, even as terrible as I am at doing it.

              1. IF they are honestly interpreting the Constitution, then I’m fine with that. Just because someone is conservative, or even a literalist, doesn’t mean they’ll agree, or even be right. At least in those cases, the SCOTUS would be operating as originally intended.

              1. ACB didn’t take part in either the NC or PA election decisions because she hadn’t yet had time to read and consider the case records and as a Justice, not a super-legislator, she won’t vote on feelz.
                If the cases come back to the Court after election (certain if either State’s vote is closer than the number of late set-aside late ballots) she will be involved.

              2. I think it’s usually a matter of protocol. Usually they wait until the start of the court’s next year to avoid the issue of a justice being able to vote on cases that were presented to the court before the new justice had been sworn in. But there’s nothing prohibiting the immediate seating of a justice if circumstances dictate. And the possibility of a 4-4 split on a national election issue is one such reason to immediately swear in the new justice.

      2. “Pennsylvania Supreme Court needs to be caned, en masse, for gross incompetence.”
        Canned as in fired, or caned as in beaten with a stick? 🙂

        I don’t see a fail safe here, but rather a trade-off: Blocking legit votes vs letting through bogus ones. (And I have Heard Stories about absentee ballots from (e.g.) military personnel getting delayed and denied with the goal of hurting the GOP candidate.) Unlike most such trade-offs where “Better to let ten…”, this trade-off of legit vs bogus votes needs to be shaved as close to 1:1 at the margin as possible.

        But yeah, it’s not the judge’s job to do that shaving. As Cardshark pointed out Justice Alito pointing out, that’s the legislature’s job.

        1. Canned as in fired, or caned as in beaten with a stick?

          Embrace the healing power of “And”.

    2. It’s either a deadline or it is not.

      I imagine the Pennsylvania Supreme Court has deadlines. But if they don’t mean anything. why should lawyers or their law clerks bother to get their papers files on time? Fines and judgements have to be paid on time. Warrants have a specific window of action. For that matter, why should judges count on getting their paychecks on a regular schedule? The Treasury will get around to it eventually.

      The PS Supremes are so high up in their ivory tower they’ve forgotten how the system they’re serving works.

  17. Don’t know if this is TMI on religion but I’ve been praying the Rosary and the Divine Mercy Chaplet for our country every day this month.

    1. I’ve been saying the St. Michael invocation, and other calls for protection and aid, daily on a St. Michael chaplet. It helps, I truly believe, and it’s something I’ve been compelled to do for at least a month. Ditto a few other things.

      St. Michael . . . has been turning up a lot in my little world the past two or so weeks. Could be coincidences. Or not.

    2. I’ve been praying hard for our country. I’m not Catholic, more a Baptist who doesn’t admit he’s a Baptist. I’ve been praying for the country and that any fraud (on either side) be exposed and so egregious that the people of America won’t stand for it. God is a God of truth and I don’t believe He will allow lies to stand.

          1. Aaaand now the place where I worship has announced that, per the mayor’s pleading, no small groups for at least two weeks (“to flatten the curve”). At least we can still worship. *angry kitty snarl at the timing*

              1. Well, my local mental hospitals tell me that they don’t have enough beds for my state’s Democrat population. Then I explain my plan to build tent cities in isolated locations, and replace psychiatric nurses with technology. One of them offered /me/ a bed, but I am entirely sane. For some reason, they haven’t been answering my calls or letters any more.

                /just kidding

                I’m not quite that nuts. 😛

              2. But some hospitals have ICU at 80%!

                …at flu season… when they’ve previously been using seasonally adjusted rates, because summer has low ICU use.

                1. That’s why they are getting so nervous here. WuFlu + influenza would be a big problem, and add in a spate of bad motor vehicle accidents [thank you, ice and snow], they’re getting jumpy.

                  1. The resistant bacterial pneumonia is going to kill people in job lots. Especially if they let things slide over the summer, or last spring when it was wuflu and emergency only.

                  2. I’m really hoping the pattern suggested by the ILI visits over the last decade is correct, and it’s hitting the same level as a mid-range bad.

                    Right now, the ILI visits are half of the most mild of the years on the chart on the CDC site, I would *guess* that COVID is entering the ILI field and cannibalizing it, rather than adding to.

                    But the bacterial pneumonia thing has me worried.

              3. Heh.

                My brother recently complained in an e-mail to the rest of the family that he wasn’t seeing anything about SARS2 on Fox (he later stated that he found it; he was just looking in the wrong spot), and this is why conservatives weren’t concerned about the horrible disease that’s filling hospitals, etc…, etc…

                I responded by mentioning the two hospital ships that never got used, along with the various emergency field hospitals that also never got used. And finally, I directed him to the Utah (where he lives) Health Department’s web page where they list the total number of SARS2 patients currently in hospitals in the state, and how many of those patients are currently in the ICU.

              4. Apparently having 30% of beds at the two major hospitals with WuFlu positive patients is a Big Deal. Plus a lot of medical staff are out quarantined, due to a rise in community spread (300+ positive cases/day for the last week or so.) *Shrug* It’s nutso. Don’t get me started on the new city racial and ethnic whatever committee.

                1. That is rather unusual– is there any news on if they were tested, or diagnosed via symptoms? Bringing in hard cases?

                  It jumps out because the Diamond Princess didn’t even hit 20%, including asymptomatic.

        1. Given the utter cowardice of the catholic church here in Illinoisy, we started going to what was a formerly a Southern Baptist church here in Channahon where the pastor is one of the few suing the state over the wuflu restrictions, does not require masks and does not do the useless temperature checking. My southside irish catholic wife is quite taken with him and his courage to stand up to the state.

          There is also a large biker component to this church. One of the associate pastors would pass easily at a Hells Angels gathering.

  18. In the unlikely event of a Biden win, I think the margin of victory will be so small that they know only fraud got them in and that they will go back to quietly undermining society, not trying a brazen takeover.

    Because that just won’t work here. I hear people talking as if they’ll be individually protecting their own, but I think the rebellion will start at the state level, with lots of local support. State police, County Sheriffs, local police questioning orders, ignoring federal decrees . . . They’ll do it if they know the populous is not just behind them, but will stand and fight beside them if it comes to that.

    The Military? I’ll bet on (1) Being called in to assist in riot control and refusing to be sucked into an escalation against the targets the Left wants attacked. (2) Refusal of orders. (3) Removal of the President and call for an election.

    1. If 3rd paragraph, it will have to be abrogation of the policy of Presidential succession. The VP and Speaker would be co-conspirators in this case, and therefore shouldn’t be placed in office pro tem.

  19. I am really new here so, bear with me. this is really a replay of Trump and Clinton. Everyone was SURE that Hillary was the next president. It did not work out that way. I see the same thing here. If anything this reminds me of my parents and their separation/divorce. Both parents were extremely dysfunctional to the point of neglecting their children big time.

    My view
    The states will start to pull away from the federal government. They will question why money is taken from them, and their right, concerns are not taken into consideration. Right leaning and left leaning states will begin to for alliances, working relationships, trade agreements. They might protest giving money to federal government and start holding the taxes back. It will then become love your state or leave. Each state will start to develop its own tax system for visitors. From Texas you have to pay for roads in Maryland when you drive or visit Maryland. Each state will have its own currency, electrical grid, military. The federal government wanting control will then send in troops. The public will show up with moms, dads, kids, at these lockdowns. they will be white, African American, Asian Americans and because the USA is large there will be skirmishes, clashes, conflict zones, high conflict zones, and write your name and SS# on body parts so we can identify you if your body turns up. Those that have guns, friends, skills, land, resources on the land will probably survive. Lots of us will just get by. I have lived in poverty. It isn’t fun, or noble. It will probably be more brutal than I can envision, but I know that I will survive that too.

    What about next week.
    On election night we (a group) will be heading to a local restaurant having dinner, then going to a local bar that is reopening. We will drink. We will go home and I will probably got to bed because I can’t drink. I will wake up the next morning and there will either be the same president, a new president, a we can’t call the election until a month from now. It will go through the courts, congress and in a year or two we might have a president that half the country loves and the other half hates and we do it again in 2024.

    there maybe some riots, food shortages, a small Xmas, lots of cold weather, flu and colds, covid outbreaks here and there and repeat again and again. I can see suicides increasing, mental health issues rising to the surface, kids under educated and at some point a reset button is going to be pushed.The reset is a black swan event, something we could never conceive of, some things will change other events will happen, overshadow current events and we will begin again. There will be lights meaning great and wonderful events happening, and there will be sad times as well. Just keep going.

      1. Good grief, that looks even more unrealistic than “Greenland.” (I wonder if “Greenland ” was ever released). Apparently you can lock everyone into concentration camps and the food just keeps on coming…

  20. I still disagree.

    This time not on my theory of uncertainty.

    I am now largely certain. Today, I got the second of two emails that make me think that the Dems in question have given up, and are now trying to minimize the damage done to their careers by pushing stuff.

    I still have to do the stuff I needed to do anyways. Including, holding my nose to go do something right now.

    1. I suspect the intemperate language from Senate Democrats over the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett has not played well, especially in states where seats are tightly contested. If McConell’s Senate Leadership PAC isn’t running ads featuring a compilation of snarling Chuck Schumer, blithering Dick Blumenthal and other Senate Dems in all Maine, Arizona, Michigan, Colorado, etc. up until Election Day then they don’t deserve to hold their majority.

      Well, they don’t deserve to, but that’s beside the point. The public had an overwhelmingly favorable impression of Justice Barrett and the tag-line — If you think the Senate’s bad off now, just wait ’til these guys get through with it — ought sway every last undecided voting.

      {I wanted to post video but searching on “Chuck Schumer, Republicans Will Rue” turns up too many hits to sift through. It’s like a dagger to the heart of the nation.)

      1. I don’t even want to THINK about how the snottiness over her DARING to have kids and work is playing out.
        “Gosh, think she can share her child-care tips?” and such.
        I actually am concerned about that– but I trust a lady to know her family better than I do, as a stranger whose entire interest is philosophical.

        Has anybody even BREATHED complaints about Roberts becoming chief justice with LITTLE kids?

        I philosophically view moms and dads as different– they, philosophically, reject that. With great violence.
        So why the nasty over a working mom?

        1. The way Roberts sailed through (in comparison) supports the theory that he was a plant – they have kompromat on him and didn’t fight his nom all that hard so they could get an asset onto the court.

        2. “So why the nasty over a working mom?”

          Same reason they get nasty over a gay conservative, or a black conservative….

          They think if they emphasize something that raaaaacist whites / conservatives / Christians are supposed to be horrified by, they’ll push them into open disgust, and remind all the other inhabitants of the plantation that the one going against the narrative isn’t a real whatever.

          1. On the gay thing at the very least, I think there’s more than that– because even when they think I am liberal, calling me homosexual or transexual/intersex is the go-to insult. Usually after trying to call me a slut backfires, spectacularly. (Almost as spectacularly as when they assume I’m male on line, and try the gay attack.)

            *hard to explain theory forms*

            Maybe they’re trying to strike at the thing they assume the target has as a root of their very identity?
            Like how they define “white” as an insanely huge range of cultures– and then declare there is no “white culture”?
            They define “liberated woman” (meaning working and sexually available) and “gay” and “black” as being the essence of a person– and then try to destroy it in those who aren’t “behaving.”

            Like I said, I can’t explain it very well.

            1. “Gay” seems to be one of the go-to insults for people on the left in private settings, but not so much for people on the right. On the one hand, it might indicate that there’s more tolerance on the right. On the other, it might be that people on the right are just far more used to watching what they say due to the political cancel culture that they’ve had to deal with for who knows how long, and prefer not to use a word that might attract the political knives if used as an epithet.

              1. Possibly also a cultural bias in that the kind of junior high twits that are stuck in that age zone are going to go with the over-culture.

              2. Still, SO MUCH FUN to do variations on the discussion:
                “YOU LIKE DICK!”
                “Since my husband and I have a horde of kids, it’s obvious I like something about his anatomy.”

              3. Funny thing about their identity insults.

                Republicans are sexist? We’d crawl over broken glass to vote for a Maggie Thatcher. We’d step gingerly through broken glass to vote for Nikki Haley.

                Republicans are racist? We’d crawl over broken glass to vote for a Clarence Thomas. We’d step gingerly through broken glass to vote for Tim Scott, John James. We’d crawl through broken glass on our bellies to have a Thomas Sowell in office.

                Republicans are homophobic? Ric “the first openly gay person to serve in a U.S. cabinet-level position” Grenell for Senate!!!!.

              4. It also is likely to reflect the insulter’s perceptions of what their target will find hurtful. Conservatives do not call leftists “gay” because we do not expect that to be insulting for them. Leftists hurl it at conservatives because they imagine conservatives, with their homophobia, their phallic inadequacies as expressed through gun culture, and their general insecurities will be extremely offended by the label.

                Of course, conservatives realize that it is the leftists who have parlous held masculinity … and that there is no need to insult homosexual men by suggesting they may be liberal.

                1. Leftists call everyone “gay”. It’s probably the single most common slur used on-line (to the point where it’s not even clear that the people issuing the insult necessarily even mean to say that the person being insulted prefers the same gender over the opposite gender; it appears to just be “what you call someone when you want to insult them”) when talking to someone that you don’t know outside of your brief online encounter with them.

        3. Gosh, think she can share her child-care tips?

          Easy: marry a good man. The kind who starts each day asking, “How can I make your life easier today?”

          1. That’s even worse than having a bunch of kids.

            If the quality of the man matters, then when the kids turn out badly– it’s not the woman’s fault. Then the guy is supposed to act like an adult.

            Then the whole cad culture is wounded.

            So that can’t be it.

            Seriously, you can predict what the left will do with pretty decent accuracy by asking: “what would be preferable for a worthless, using cad of an immature brat?”

            1. As if it were easy to marry a good man — because that requires being a certain kind of woman, don’t it? One who inspires her man to be good, one who is worthy of being loved.

              Because it is a feedback loop – each partner bringing out the best in the other and in turn giving the best of themselves.

              I thought that to obvious to merit mention, and too prone to misunderstanding by those who do not want to face that truth: to enjoy a good partner one must be a good partner.

              1. Sure, making it work is hard– eternal upkeep, though it’s worth it. And it is really easy to not get across right– this entire subject is, even when the confounders aren’t involved.

                But their objection comes in before– to be powerful in their world-view, one must be a cad.

                You (person they’re instructing on how to live) can be a hyper-controlling cad, but the essential not-my-fault and others-are-for-my-pleasure aspects remain.

                If you’re not happy, and you’ve been a cad? It’s someone else’s fault. And “responsibility” is just a funky word for either “your fault” or “you do it.”

                It’s just so sad…..

  21. Uncertainty HURTS. It not only hurts worse than confidence of success, it also hurts worse than knowing that one is Doomed.

    I have to believe that this post is the pain talking.

    The Dems are not certain that they’ll be be able to fraud a win. We shouldn’t be certain either.

    I remember 30 years ago when the pro-gun side was certain that gun rights in the US were doomed, and that we were fighting a forlorn rearguard action to delay the evil day. Then the ‘assault weapon’ ban happened. Then the midterms of 1994 happened. Now we have shall-issue or Constitutional carry in all but a few holdout states.

    Americans are not sheep, despite all the “sheeple!” cries. We’re too much like cattle, too often – but cattle got horns, and “There might be all the difference between an old cow sitting and thoughtfully chewing, and a bull charging; and the change might come suddenly.”


      Go look at my thedonald link upthread. I don’t know what happened, but the Dems know their mail in fraud strategy isn’t going to work.

        1. I certainly don’t know and they don’t either and what we’re seeing is bravado and arrogance colliding with fear. By shutting down all sources of information that conflict with their view they have denied themselves the data they need. I usually don’t answer or I hang up on pollsters but this election I did tell them that I was absolutely voting for the candidate I’m not voting for. As a matter of fact, I’m gonna do the NYC thing and vote early and vote often. Funny that the pollsters thought that funny.

          They’ve been ahead double digits on all the polls but it takes little time to discover that the internals of those polls are “strange”. They also believe in the magic and SCIENCE and haven’t discovered that the 95% confidence level they have in their model doesn’t mean what they think it does. Poll accuracy actually runs from 60-70%, which is not much better than chance.

          I too am terrified of the margin of fraud, but I think that they found out they needed way more of it than they thought they did because they have systematically deceived themselves, exactly as they did last time. I think that realization is what Ian is speaking of and I suspect that Trump has much more accurate information than they do.

          Whatever happens, we have to keep the faith.

          1. I understand that Gallup got out of political polling in 2016, and hasn’t gone back in.

            I’m tempted to say that every poll produced now for public consumption is made by conmen, but that may be going too far.

            I think the question of sound practice for collecting this information, and matching it to forecasting models is decidedly murky. Trump’s info being better would not necessarily mean that his sources are on top of all the fundamental issues involved.

            I can think of almost half a dozen people I’d like to get in contact with, and talk statistics, modeling, and how well my answered my questions might be. I can think of three or four others who might be interested in the topic, but I don’t think I trust them enough to open up to.

            Statistics is an academic topic, so people have thought about these questions before, but how sound are these answers really? I don’t think I can avoid working with statistics in the future, and I would need to study a lot more before I really have the foundation what I should, and should not be doing with them.

            Political polling, and tests for discrimination relate to questions that would have implications if the default assumptions are not correct.

            1. Polls deliver what their customer wants.

              Oddly, given current circumstances, one of the best books on polling and the math, such as it is, behind it is Nate Silver’s Signal and the Noise, which should be followed up by the polling clip from Yes, Minister.

              Essentially, an accurate poll requires that you choose a representative sample, ask an accurate question, and have the person responding tell you the truth. Silver made his reputation by calming the nerves of a bunch of rich TV ladies in the Obama election. they were all a flutter that Romney was going to put them into binders or something. In fairness, most of the claims that were made about Silver didn’t come from him and I’ve found him to be much more honest than the average. He did call 50 of 50 states in the Obama debacle. On the other hand, Real Clear Politics called 49 of 50 by a simple average of polls.

              Silver honestly believes in polls. American polls have tended to be more accurate than most because Americans tended to answer them honestly. UK polls (e.g.) have tended to miss wildly, most recently they missed the Tory wave.

              Overall, they seem to be about 60-70% accurate depending on how you count it. I wouldn’t count heavily one way or the other.

              1. There are two kinds of polls: those desired by the customer eager t get an accurate representation of a confusing playing field and those desired to create an illusion for swaying the public (gaslight). The first is for internal use, the second for external.

                Which kind do you think are being promoted by an MSM desperately burning down their credibility creating a smokescreen obscuring the Hunter Biden story?

  22. I’m still optimistic, even if I’m worried that the children in the E!Democratic Party are going to whine and throw a temper tantrum and try to “find” votes.

    Why? Despair isn’t going to help. I’ve got too much crap on my plate to get my life back in order for the next year. The riots in Pennsylvania might have caused a lot of the “silent majority” to come out and vote on Tuesday. And vote for Trump. How they’re throwing everyone under the bus to keep the Hunter Biden story quiet. When Glenn Greenwald (no Republican there!) leaves the magazine he created because the editorial board wants him to edit and redact a Biden-critical story that he can prove all the details, there’s something wrong there.

    All the public polls say that Minnesota is a lock for Biden. So, why is he putting so much last minute effort there and in Florida?

    Keep fighting until somebody concedes. If we lose, concentrate on local affairs and clean out some of the ground-level people they have working out.

    And…yea, squirrel away things, just in case. Don’t get obsessive or paranoid, but maybe chip in with a few friends for a really large vac sealer and heavy duty plastic for…needs. Yes, needs.


    I think this may be backwards. The dispossessed Americans are us, and I’m thinking, after 125 years, we have had enough of this Marxist STD. You just might see a turning back of the clock to The Founders.

    1. Yes, of course Chris (btw, I’ve missed you a lot.) BUT they see the world backwards and keep thinking they’re speaking truth to power…. when they have all the power.

      1. Sara…”they have all the power.”
        No, Sara, they think they have the power because we deplorables and chumps( to quote them) haven’t YET stopped delivering their groceries, and gasoline, and water, and ELECTRIC POWER, and all of the rest of the stuff that lets them keep their little bubbles inflated. Not to mention we haven’t decided to start blowing holes in those same bubbles (and the occupants of them).

        And just to clear the air, I’ll believe that …”we’re all in this together…” when I see a story about the first .gov employee not getting the regular direct deposit of his paycheck.
        Cris will know, heh, heh

          1. From you maybe, but it ain’t sarcasm/cynicism on all those storefront windows and doorways and the .gov offices, and the yard signs… And remember it was a .gov meme originally.
            And my original point still stands. .

  24. Well, I did not notice this earlier …

    How to Outsmart the Social Media Technolords
    By Sarah Hoyt
    No, this is not about the Big Tech hearings. It’s just something we noticed, in my circles, starting about a week ago.

    To begin with and to obviate tiresome criticisms (yes, they are) let’s talk about why I am on Facebook at all, let alone why I’m still on Facebook.

    Some years ago, my last agent told me to get on Facebook and Twitter, since publishers looked at your number of followers and how much play your social media got before they bought a book. Yes, this was pre-history, when having a publisher buy your book was all-important.

    I was reluctant and dragged my feet for about a year. This is because putting me in something called “social media” when I’m an anti-social writer, who prefers to hermit up with imaginary people, seemed… odd.

    More serious, and the reason I haven’t joined the chat services that my friends and kids have moved to, like Discord, I have a seriously addictive personality.

    What does that mean, precisely?

    Well, while I don’t drink much and don’t like the effects of drugs, I can get addicted to just about anything. I once spent a year addicted to fanfic for a TV series I’d never watched, for instance (and which I could tell from the fanfic, I’d probably hate if I watched).

    Eventually, I got on Facebook and Twitter, but truly disliked Twitter. …

  25. A little chipper news on the day …

    Black voter support for President Trump soars to 31%: Poll
    … a Rasmussen Reports survey released Thursday shows that his strategy may be working.

    The daily tracking poll found 31% of likely Black voters would vote for Mr. Trump if the election were held today, ticking up steadily from 27% on Monday and 30% on Tuesday and Wednesday.

    If that support pans out on Election Day, it would represent a huge improvement for Mr. Trump, who won just 8% of the Black vote in 2016, while Democrat Hillary Clinton took 88%.

    Even if they do not turn out to vote Trump 2020 it seems likely they will not pull the lever for biding Harris, reducing the available universe of Black Votes for the Democrat ticket.

    1. That’s encouraging, but approval of and voting for are not the same. President Trump routinely has over 50% approval in Rasmussen’s polls, but only 46-48% of the vote. OTOH, he has gotten more saying they’ll be voting for him than Biden half this week. On the gripping hand, if third party candidates pull more votes from Biden than Trump…

      1. Approval relates to voting in regard to turnout — people who approve of the president a) tend to be less motivated to get out, stand in line and vote against him, so lower Democrat turnout b) more willing to get out, stand in line and vote for him.

        Polls are not dispositive but they do covey information – if not the information you think it contains.

      1. Sigh. Bleedin’ sticky “n” key! Read that as: “ought have pushed up a picture, not a link!”

        Try for that delightful map again:

                  1. I would not be surprised at the inclusion of ballot propositions 16* and 22** backfiring on them and bringing to the polls a large number of folks who imagine there are some areas of life in which the government need not be involved.

                    More than that, there are some people in Sacramento who are not their friends need to be retired.

                    From Ballotpedia:

                    *Proposition 16 is a constitutional amendment that would repeal Proposition 209, passed in 1996, from the California Constitution. Proposition 209 stated that discrimination and preferential treatment were prohibited in public employment, public education, and public contracting on account of a person’s or group’s race, sex, color, ethnicity, or national origin. Therefore, Proposition 209 banned the use of affirmative action involving race-based or sex-based preferences in California.

                    **Proposition 22 would consider app-based drivers to be independent contractors and not employees or agents. Therefore, the ballot measure would override Assembly Bill 5 (AB 5), signed in September 2019, on the question of whether app-based drivers are employees or independent contractors.

                    1. Don’t forget Proposition 15, latest in the politicians’ perennial attempts to overturn Proposition 13 which limits how much and how fast they can raise property taxes.

                      They screech about how unfair it is that long-time property owners pay less than recent buyers, not that the new owners pay so much. I say, extend Proposition 13 and lower EVERYBODY’S taxes!

                    2. One way that Oregon’s Measure 5, passed ’90, differs from California’s is that the property tax base value doesn’t change when developed home property sells. (Might be wrong on CA).

                      Example. Our property tax this year, taxable base $187,709 (we paid $78k in ’88, the land alone is worth more than this). “Real Market” value (per county) $358, 298. Property Taxes this year $2080.93 (3% discounted $2018.50). IF we were to sell tomorrow, for the full Real Market value, or more, Measure 5 dictates their taxable base is the sane as ours.

                      Can the base be raised? Yes. 1) Adding square footage to the house beyond original foundation. 2) New build. Not rebuild, regardless of the cause, or what is actually built, as long as part of same foundation is used (prevents penalty due to fire or other catastrophic event).

                    3. Here in Kalifornia property tax is calculated from the property’s most recent sale price. If you bought 20 years ago, and prices have doubled since then, you’re not too bad off. If you bought recently, you’re paying a fortune.

                      Leftoids never screech that it’s unfair some people pay TOO MUCH tax, oh, no.
                      If you give politicians money to pay the government’s debts, they will spend it all and borrow more.

              1. The story won’t be the winner-take-all electoral votes from CA – this state is the secured FOB for their assault on the rest of the country – it’ll be the house races. If the wobbler seats where they fooled voters into voting D last time go back even here, elsewhere will be even more so. It will be a tough hill to climb but Nancy’s majority is potentially in trouble – and even if they keep the majority, and by-the-skin-of-their-teeth win will put major internal pressure on Gavin’s Auntie.

                The specials like the one for Congressperson Threesome’s seat down south went R and he’s got a solid shot at keeping it, while the OC race with Michelle Steele running in a district that they only barely flipped in 2018 (it had been +11.7R Romney in 2012 and only went over to Hillachronimiconism by +1.7 in 2016) would be the beneficiary of a don’t-talk-to-pollsters wave.

                There are a few more, not big enough to really push the state over, but it’s all in the optics – if the place where Nancy keeps her Ice Cream can’t be kept solidly frozen, why should all those non-CA Dems keep her on as speaker?

                1. It wasn’t fooling voters into voting D. It was out and out fraud with ballot harvesting delivering just enough votes after the initial tallies to ensure that the Republican candidates lost.

                  A part of me does hope that my state is actually in play at the Presidential level. But to be frank, I’d be happy if we ended up just knocking out the veto-proof super-majorities in the State Assembly and State Senate. And yes, that’s even with Newsome still the governor.

            1. Well, upstate and western NY is heavily Trump country. The wealthy are leaving NYC and those whose neighborhoods were destroyed by rioters who the Dems are protecting may not vote as their Masters elected officials expect them to.
              When the cognitive dissonance becomes this extreme some of the people start believing their lying opening eyes over what they have been told…

            2. With Covid, nobody’s information collection is normal. Everyone is used to flying on info from little bits of contact that have be sharply restricted, and everyone is freaking out slightly from the blindness, even if they have not realized that the lack of information is doing it. Furthermore, no one is sure if 2016 was a one off, or a change in the system.

              So nobody has a filter particularly tuned for a) last minute scams by fundraisers b) early signs of campaign collapse/total failure. You will always have little signals generated at the end stages of the campaign. If you have good sources, are skilled at analysis, are fast, and in the right place, perhaps you could actually profit from the exercise.

              Your choices are already made, or will be locked in by other information you get later. Regardless of how sane or crazy or DOOM someone’s theory of Xanth casting its electoral votes for Jeb is, the question of insanity that is relevant is being fired up over information collection over the next four days. It’d almost be less crazy to stay up reading LNs on kindle, and streaming western shows, for the purpose of writing crossover fanfic.

              Tonight, my thinking seems a mess to /me/. With everything, I’m a little to a lot nuts. I need sleep, I’ve just about got sorted out for bed, if I can just calm down after getting fired up again.

  26. Sarah, I think it’s your having grown up under socialism/communism and the military governments of Portugal that accounts for some of that pessimistic attitude. You KNOW what the result can be, you KNOW how bad it can get. But here’s the thing…born Americans have no idea, as you know. And that works in both directions. Yes, people don’t really understand Marxism/socialism. But, all those people who think Biden is the good guy will not put up with too many restrictions for too long. Deep down, most people have a limit and will fight back. They will ALL know somebody or many somebodies who get in trouble for something they view as innocuous. That will be the trigger point. And I think that will come sooner rather than later should Biden win.

    And, I’m becoming more convinced that Trump does indeed have enough to overcome the margin of fraud.

  27. It’s Afraid.

      1. This. Last time there were signs and portends that the internal polling was not trending well right at the end, but nothing public, especially from the Party of Lockstep. For Party Members In Good Standing like Debbie there to be openly talking about this, it has to be significant and pronounced.

        I see two possibilities – there’s some Very Clever Plan underway where they talk up the DJT vote and then – Turnips! Biden Wins Via The Mail-In Votes From Expats In Kazakhstan! It’s a Come-Back Win! The Millions of Auto Worker Votes Were Just Not Enough! In a Pure Coincidence, Dems Proceed with Banning Gasoline Autos!

        Not so likely I think – Debbie there would have to volunteer to admit publicly after the fixed election that she was wrong, and those autoworker votes count a lot in House elections.

        Alternately, the cliff is behind the Dems, their internal polls are now predicting how hard they hit the ocean and how far they go under, and the rats are leaving the Pelosi-Schumer Plummeting Vehicle.

          1. Oh, I don’t think it’s in the bag – I think it’s emphatically NOT in the bag for China Joe and the Ho, which is at odds with the approved narrative, and why people like Debbie are stepping off The Res.

            And besides, DJT is an extro so he likes the rallies – he gets revved up by the crowds. I don’t want to speculate on what would rev up Gropey Joe.

            1. Likes the crowds, grew up around older political traditions, and helps further establish the theme he is running on wrt Sleepy Joe’s manifest unfitness. Plus, an excuse to stick his thumb in the eye of the Covid Karens without much further risk of it backfiring. May also help reassure Melania, even if he does have it entirely in the bag.

            2. Needs some expansion. Dealing and persuasion is a quite strong drive of his, possibly what he lives for.

              This is possibly one of the two biggest deals of his life.

              He absolutely has to have the discipline to step back from his drives and emotions, and calculate the deal cold bloodedly. /Has to./ But he also enjoys the deal, and if cold blood gives him two equally expedient and rational ways to seal the deal, he will probably pick the one he enjoys better.

              If he can only close the deal by letting the other party go off to think it over, and send him a signed contract, he will do that. But for a big sale, he would rather have the other party there, use special pens, and all that, because he enjoys the social contact with the customer as the deal is finalized.

              In 2016, he sealed a deal so well that he pulled off a lot of blue collar Democrat voters. After everything the activists have done, the prospect of pulling black voters out of the Democrat coalition has got to be very attractive.

              So, it isn’t just extroversion, and liking the experience. Going off my guesses of his personality, it would be surprising if he didn’t do this.

          2. Yeah, I agree with Flying Mike about Trump liking the vibe of a big rally. Also, I think he’s doing some of them to poke at state governments. In MN last night (Thurs), the state tried to shut down the rally by limiting it to 250 inside. So, he went out to the gates to talk to the people who couldn’t get in. Then his entire rally speech poked at the state gov’t for not letting people inside. He enjoys publicizing these things and it lets others see what’s going on in other states.

            1. It should be noted that Keith Ellison has warned that Minnesota may go Trump.

              Not that I would look upward if Ellison said, “I think it’s raining.”

              1. Ehhh, I don’t think that’s rain. No matter what they tell you it is. 😛

                So, definitely, don’t look up.

          3. I saw someone note something interesting about the rallies in a comment in the last day or two. Apparently some of Trump’s rallies have been held in blue districts, in locations that are close to red districts. The proximity to the red districts guarantees that the rallies will get a good turnout. And the fact that they’re actually being held in blue districts both encourages “Trump curious” blue voters to attend the rally, and let’s people in those blue districts know that there is a *lot* of support for Trump from decent people. That helps remove some of the stigma of voting for Trump (particularly since you can always vote for him in the booth, and then deny it later to anyone who asks).

          4. Does Trump seem the kind of guy who’d sit back and wait for it to fall into his lap? I doubt he’d be working this hard if he thought it a lost cause; he’d probably just be doing three rallies daily and doing them in “safe” venues where he’d be guaranteed a friendly crowd.

            Right now don’t nobody know what is going down. If he’s gets 20% (much less 30%) of the Black vote (which seems the way that bloc is breaking) that is a VERY big deal. If 20% of people attending his rallies and cheering him on are as their surveys say) Democrats and never-voteds, that is a big deal.

            And just maybe he knows something about vote fraud that he doesn’t want to tip the Democrats to until they’re fully committed.

            Ya never know, ya just never know.

            1. Further, I do not think I’ve ever read of the kind of “Volunteer Rallies” being held for any other candidate, not in the last fifty years, certainly not with thousands of people self-organizing and turning up. They’re coming out in cars, trucks, boats of all types and without any “push” (or even any appearance) by the candidate.

              Frankly, if this was for a Leftist candidate I’d be worried. This is what Howard Dean attempted to smoke ‘n’ mirrors the MSM on, and I doubt the GOP has what it takes* to run this kind of thing as astroturf.

              Read Byron York and Selena Zito at the Washington Examiner or Miranda Devine at the NY Post. This is not your usual Republican campaign. The animal spirits are active this time.

              -brains, brass, cojones, whatever.

              1. And his appeal directly to the public apparently violates some sanctified rule about ‘populism’ which as all the right people know is one step away from the overturned societal canapé cart of the end of celebrity cruise speaking gigs.

          5. He might be a really good actor… or he might be having fun.

            Von Lipwig, remember?

            Isn’t this exactly the kind of spectacle that Moist would make, if he was in this situation? Because he’s good at this– and like RES says, I’ve never heard of spontaneous parades breaking out. REALLY spontaneous, too.
            Part of it is the city leadership trying to punish Trump parades, while enabling Burn, Loot, Murder– but part of it is the individualists sorta organizing.

            1. I put Trump’s current campaigning down to the Instapundit catch phrase “Don’t get cocky.”

              1. Goes with the von Lipwig– when he’s confident, he usually crashes. When he’s dancing on an avalanche and having a blast, THEN you can win by hard work and keeping on.

        1. I suspect that anyone in Khazakstan will vote for Trump simply due to the fact that Borat is supporting Biden.


    1. After the 2016 election we saw denial and then anger. After the 2020 election we just might see bargaining and depression.

      (Hey, I remember the Cold War. The USSR was going to take us over with very few shots being fired, unless MAD got invoked and we all died. The Berlin Wall was going to be there forever. Then, on November 9, 1989…)

  28. Amy Klobuchar’s telling Democrats to hand-carry their mail-in ballots to the polling place or else to vote in person. So Minnesota is getting “interesting.”

    Anyone else praying they stay healthy until after voting Tuesday?

    1. While the Dems were all-in on mail-in voting at first, for the last month or so they’ve shifted to strongly pushing in-person. I’m not sure what triggered it. I haven’t seen the same strong reaction here in California. But we’ve got ballot harvesting here, so the Dems can pay you a visit on Election Day to ask if you’d like the nice young man at the door to deliver your ballot for you.

  29. I will note that in many blue cities, the libraries are closed due to fear of wuhan and I suspect they will stay closed. Dangerous places,.libraries. apparently they can transmit viruses more than grocery stores, bowling alleys, hairdressers and movie theaters ….

    1. Now, now. As long as you stand on those little dots and follow the one way arrows, you’re safe as houses but never sit down since sitting causes the virus, especially sitting in church, and be sure to always wear your facial prophylactic. It’s magic.

  30. In the Boogening there were the words, and the words were the best words.

    Note that this isn’t me being as down as when I first wrote the line, much less anywhere near close to doomer. I just wanted want to post one of the Fate ‘to the beginning’ vids near by, and figured it’d cheer people more here.

    It’s not going to be Fate Zero. Since it is 2020, I’ll allow for the possibility of Raidou Kuzunoha sword fighting Yasunori Kato on top of a Zeppelin, but it is not going to be Fate Zero.

    1. *muses on if King Arthur could be qualified to be a president if his body was hidden away over here to await England’s Hour of Need*

      1. Technically, yes, but the foreign title might be an issue. Also, whether Avalon, an island occupied by fairies, could count as having become US territory.

        1. *Facepalm* The Good Idea Fairy chirped up that Avalon is Hawaii.

          I was going to make the argument that land across the sea is a good description of the US in general and he’s hiding somewhere in Maine.

          The foreign title would be an issue, although I’d imagine since it’s a former job title, not so much– and I can see a guy who had to seal with all the mess of dark ages England having zero problem with figuring that leading the free world => England is included, or ****ed well will be.

          … AU World Wars. Aaaargh I don’t have enough of ANYTHING To write thsi.

          1. Hawaii wouldn’t work. The Constitutional requirements are “natural born citizen” or “citizen at the time of the adoption of the US Constitution”. So his body would need to be hidden somewhere in the original 13 Colonies. Long Island seems like a good target. The fairies run an office building in Manhattan, and commute to and from work every day.

            1. ….wouldn’t the fairies thus qualify as an Indian tribe?

              At the very least, they could sue to be so recognized…..which would make their members have citizenship. Make an argument based on being subject to US jurisdiction at the time, thus triggering the citizen at the time of adoption, and a tribal membership because even I’ve heard about the legends of what sound like the Good Neighbors, and blue-eyed Indians….

          2. Not Maine. Vermont. There is a reason why the King Arthur Flour Company (now King Arthur Baking) is in Vermont.

      2. Daughter Unit and I were discussing the origins of Kings back in ancient matriarchal days, with their ritual sacrifice to guarantee fertility of the fields … we considered a Constitutional Amendment requiring the ritual slaying of our presidents at the end of their presidencies as a way of ensuring the self-interested would not run for the office.

        Perhaps a vote on whether the president ought be retired or retired would be better, although it seems probable the Left would elect that option more as a matter of course.

        1. Aha! See ‘The Goblin Tower’, ‘The Clocks Of Iraz’ and ‘The Unbeheaded King’ by L. Sprague deCamp.

          In the kingdom of Xylar, the King reigns for five years. At the end of his term, they chop off his head and throw it into the crowd. Whoever catches the head is the next King — for five years. Jorian was just passing through, wandered into a crowd to see what all the fuss was about, and when something came flying at him, he caught it by reflex.

          Jorian never wanted to be King. After the details were explained to him, he DEFINITELY didn’t want to be King. He could abdicate, but they’d still have to chop his head off to pick another King. The primary duty of the Royal Guards is to prevent the King from escaping before his retirement ceremony, and they’re VERY good at it.

          The Crown of Xylar is held on by a chin strap, because there was once a civil war when two different people caught the head and the crown.

        2. Eh, the sacrificed king turns out to be a Victorian myth. Pretty much made up by anti-Christian bigots.

  31. An item for those concerned about how Kamala Harris might treat sensitive information:

    The Solicitor General Should Tell the Supreme Court to Hear Americans for Prosperity Foundation v. Becerra
    The Supreme Court has the chance to decide whether a state can routinely compel nonprofits to disclose their donors. … the defendant is the California Attorney General, and much of the challenged policy was administered by his predecessor, Kamala Harris. (It began a few months before her tenure, under Jerry Brown). And the facts reflect very poorly on Harris.

    The California AG’s office has demanded, since 2010, that 501(c)(3) nonprofits disclose their IRS Schedule B listing their major donors. This is information that previously had been submitted only to the IRS, which treats them as carefully guarded confidential information. California did not. A trial disclosed extensive evidence that the California AG’s office “systematically failed to maintain the confidentiality” of donor lists:

    > 1,778 Schedule Bs had been posted online; in some cases, the AG had known for years of the public disclosures, and not notified the nonprofits. Not all of these were conservative organizations, either; one victim was Planned Parenthood.

    > Evidence showed that the registry of some 350,000 Schedule Bs was “an open door for hackers.”

    > The AG’s office interpreted its rules to allow disclosures to public-record and academic research requests.

    > There was no supervision of third-party vendors who regularly accessed the registry.

    This was a damning indictment of the cavalier attitude towards highly valued, sensitive information crucial to nonprofits, particularly conservative groups that could be targeted for donor harassment in California’s hothouse political climate

    1. Just as I hit POST on that it struck me that if all major news outlets told Biding Harris to go to Hell and ran the story there’d be no threat of being frozen out a) because the Biding Harris administration couldn’t blacklist ALL of them — can’t blacklist the NY Times, Washington Post, NBC, CBS, ABC, CNN … but there’s also b) if they all ran with the story like it was Lewinsky’s blue dress there’d be no Biding Harris administration.

      You cannot hope
      to bribe or twist,
      thank God! the
      British journalist.
      But, seeing what
      the man will do
      unbribed, there’s
      no occasion to.
      — Humbert Wolfe

  32. Now, Greenwald probably belongs on lists of journalists who ought to be killed. His skewed perspective, and the possibility that he should be understood as a long term Russian influence agent, both compromise his testimony here.


    The Intercept is owned by Pierre Omidyar, another big tech guy. Omidyar’s money comes from eBay. His other activities are interesting, but I do not see anything truly damning.

    1. He’s also a major funder of The Bulwark and The Lincoln Project, two NeverTrump strongholds for people like Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol.

        1. I think you misread Steve or me.

          Pierre Omidyar funds the Intercept, the Bulwark, and the Lincoln Project. Greenwald just left The Intercept when they refused to run the anti-Biden bits of his article. At least, per Greenwald’s claims, I suppose that could be disinformation distributed from a Russian asset. 🙂

          There are NeverTrump folks who recognize that the Lincoln Project is a thinly sanitized front group for Democrats.

            1. No worries.

              Greenwald isn’t /American/ left, and doesn’t need to partake in /American/ left cult-think to consider himself of the elect.

              Possibly he is playing the long game, like Tulsi Gabbard. If this has anything to do with his lacking confidence in Biden’s campaign, it isn’t a sudden realization on his part. He had a tweet complaining about Twitter’s censorship of the NY Post article. If it is purely partisan calculation on his part, it is at least a week or two back.

              And Attkisson’s comments are a bit of a dumpster fire that I have an urge to contribute to. 🙂

        2. Rats, implicating the ship wherefrom they fled’s seaworthiness and structural integrity.

          Note the saying was originally “Ships rats can see the future!” rather than “Oh, look, the bilge is flooding” -but any rat, even one as dense as Greenwald, can notice their feet are getting wet.

    2. It ought always be remembered that the True Left doesn’t so much care who wins the election (although they do have a preference) as they want the entire process discredited, delegitimized and dishonored.

      See Screwtape on Patriot or Pacifist

  33. Guess it’s time for this historical quote yet again.


    1. The fact that someone has memed this quote and I’ve seen it multiple places cheers me unduly. I don’t know about how many, but I suspect more than a handful will remember it at need….

    2. Alas, they would simply have moved in more officers from other cities, given them police and/or military backup, and they would dealt with the apartment buildings one at a time. Seal off all exits, turn off the power and water, give orders via bullhorn, and sent in squads to shoot anyone who doesn’t obey promptly. It’s what they did all over Eastern Europe…

      Identifying and attacking individual NKVD at their homes or on their way to the office might have worked, but bunched up in their own homes, they would only have been targets.

    3. There was a picture of the NYPD breaking up a private Jewish prayer meeting that illustrated this quote perfectly.

  34. This just struck me today (after reading about another group of leftists getting caught trying to make fake votes); the left will try to fraud out the election, but will fail, because the US is the autistic savant among the nations.

    In countries that have fake votes, they just straight up have fake votes. The left here is trying to make them look like real registered votes, and that means that despite our absolutely pourus system, they are getting caught in lot batches.

    They cannot fully fake a win because they must be able to believe it was real. That is their doom.

  35. My oh my – isn’t this interesting:

    Pollster Who Correctly Predicted Trump’s Election Win in 2016 Says Trump Is Looking Good for a Repeat in 2020
    Earlier this week Patrick Basham from the Democracy Institute went on with Canadian television CTV.

    Patrick is based in Washington DC, and his polls show something entirely different than the mainstream liberal polling.

    Most polls show Joe Biden is on a straight path to re-election. But Patrick Basham told CTV that his organization correctly predicted President Trump’s victory in 2016 and they are predicting his victory again in 2020.

    Patrick Basham: Trump is very competitive at least and probably going to get reelected. The reason it’s really who we think is going to show up to vote. Most of the polls out there who show Biden well ahead they assume there is going to be an Obama 2008 type turnout with tens of millions of new voters, minority voters. If that’s true Biden would be elected. But we don’t think that’s going to happen. We think it’s going to be an electorate turnout much like 2016 and if that’s the case then Trump is in very good shape.

    It looks like Basham is right.
    Numbers for Trump are skyrocketing in the battleground states this year.

    This was an exceptional interview.

    1. Sigh. HTML corrected version, without link to article but with link to video:

      My oh my – isn’t this interesting:





      It looks like Basham is right.

      Numbers for Trump are skyrocketing in the battleground states this year.

      This was an exceptional interview.

      Wallaby Weview: I think this interviewer is none too happy with what she’s hearing.

      1. Poll: Donald Trump set to win US presidency by electoral college landslide


        The last Democracy Institute/Sunday Express poll gave the US President a two point lead and landed just after he went into hospital with coronavirus.























        Wallaby Weaction: this is not in the bag but buy lots of popcorn for Tuesday Night Wednesday Morning Friday Evening.

        1. Apparently I missed a /B tag early on. I obviously need new fingers new keyboard.

          Observation: an English paper has good reason to put greater value on correct prediction than on attempting to tilt the electorate.

            1. An extra row of keys (or side panel, like the number pad) with preset HTML commands, such as <B or <I or even <BLOCKQUOTE would be convenient. Perhaps in the form of a pair of Begin Formatting and End Formatting keys with an array of format options (Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikethrough, Blockquote, Inset, etc.) below.

  36. I agree with you on many points here. However, I believe that God will show mercy on us and we WILL have another Trump win. There are too many Trump supporters, voters, parades, and people waking up from their Democrat slumber. Many Moderate Democrats are leaving the Democrat party and going to the side of Trump. Too many people are waking up and there will be a Second Civil War before we allow Socialism to take this country down militias are sprouting up EVERYWHERE, gun sales are through the roof, and private citizens will join the fight and! We will NOT give up our freedoms as easily as those tyrants think.

    Yes, many, many people may die. But they won’t take us without a fight and a HELL of a fight at that! Pray it doesn’t come to that. But if we want to save this country, we’ll have to be willing to stand up for it and possibly, even die for it!

    Blessings to you all.

  37. Observations from the ever optimistic caustic Mark Steyn:

    Election Day Minus Two
    ~As I said a few months back, there’s never been a better time to be in the plywood business – especially when the election race transitions to the election brace. The New York Times:

    Boarded-Up Windows and Increased Security: Retailers Brace for the Election

    The San Francisco Chronicle:

    Bay Area Cities, Restaurants Boarding Up — Bracing for Potential Election-Night Unrest


    City Business Across U.S. Brace For Election Day Unrest, Board Up Storefronts

    Just another election day in a two-and-a-third-century long-settled republic. Manhattan celebrities (some of whom you might actually have heard of) have ordered up private armed guards for their luxury apartment houses – because, since they started calling for “defunding the police”, getting someone to pick up at 9-1-l seems to be taking a little longer than it did back in the spring. I suppose it’s conceivable that a few of these celebs and CEOs are so woke they believe their own bullsh*t and genuinely expect mobs of Trump voters to come rampaging through midtown Manhattan and start trashing Chanel and Dior.
    There may be three or four owners of upscale emporia worried that the right-wing haters will show up in their ladies’ wear department before #BLM has finished cleaning it out. But most of these guys surely know all too well exactly who’ll be coming for them:

    #ShutDownDC is organizing groups of protesters to target Republican officials and government buildings during a series of planned election-week demonstrations.

    Gee, it’s almost like they’re expecting to lose. From The Des Moines Register:


    He’s faded to seven points behind – in what’s regarded as the gold standard of Hawkeye polls.

    Ah, but did the Trump surge come too late? Over ninety-one million Americans have already returned their ballots – that’s over two-thirds of the 2016 total. But are the right people voting

    Republicans in Florida’s most populous county, Miami-Dade, are turning out to vote at a somewhat higher percentage than Democrats — causing uneasiness among some Democratic operatives.

    “Uneasiness”: Hmmm… By “somewhat higher” they mean 63 per cent GOP turnout vs 56 per cent Dem.

    Last time round, it was Hillary’s underperforming in Miami-Dade that, round about 9.23pm Eastern, gave me the first heads-up Trump was going to win Florida. This time round, Biden is underperforming Hillary.

    ~It’s a similar story in the Latino precincts of the Lone Star State, where overall the early vote outnumbers the 2016 total. The Kamala-Biden campaign has canceled its Texas bus tour because the bus and its stops attract, like almost all Joe’s events, more Trump supporters than Biden supporters. Even worse, many of these Trumpers arrive not in hybrids or second-hand Toyota Corollas but in some strange menacing form of transportation with the obviously intimidating #MeToo-type name of “pick-up truck”.

    America’s three bestselling vehicles are pick-ups. But fortunately, after four years at journalism school, their owners are entirely eliminated from your social circle.

    Joe Biden is waging a Potemkin campaign backed by a Potemkin press and Potemkin polls. They’re going to need an exponentially greater level of ballot-box malarkey to drag that across the finish line.

    [Concluding comments on passing of Sean Connery and masculine men]

  38. I would like to posit a thought experiment for Hundom Assembled.

    Given that reports have Trump support among Black Americans ranging from twenty to thirty percent …

    Given that many (esp. young) Blacks complain about the Democrat Party taking their votes for granted …

    Given that Maxine Waters has declared “I will never forgive ant Back who votes for Trump …

    What might be the political consequences of a quarter or more of Black voters returning to the Party of Lincoln?

    Questions to be considered:

    Likely Democrat reactions/responses. Will they double down on dependency giving Black folk more [free stuff]?

    Likely GOP reactions/responses. Will they make more of an effort to compete in the Black communities? Will they expand on Opportunity Zones and promote Black empowerment programs?

    What might this mean for the ethnic make-up on the 2024 party tickets? Might we see SC Sen. Tim Scott on the GOP ticket (perhaps as veep to Mike Pence or Ted Cruz)? Will Kamala Harris rule the Democrats?

    Short and long term implications.

    1. I would hesitate at anything beyond joking. My theory of unpredictable non-linearity suggests I should be very cautious. I’ve maybe got my own pain/stress/busy function back down to where joking is possible, but I don’t feel very funny.

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