A new report shows that the DNC has spent more money than it’s raised this year.
That’s not a news story – that’s a Democratic Party platform plank.
*.*
Those fabulous Jewish Comedians
My wife and I went to a hotel where we got a waterbed. My wife called it the Dead Sea .
She was at the beauty shop for two hours.
That was only for the estimate.
The Doctor called Mrs. Cohen saying, "Mrs. Cohen, your check
came back.”
Mrs. Cohen answered, "So did my arthritis!"
Doctor: "You'll live to be 60!"
Patient: "I am 60!"…
Doctor: "See! What did I tell you?"
Why do Jewish mothers make great parole officers?
They never let anyone finish a sentence!
*.*
A new report says 49% of Americans under 35 have a "side hustle"-a second job on top of their regular job. I'm shocked: only ONE extra job?
Researchers say they have identified maximum human exertion. To no one's surprise, they weren't looking at me.
The captain of a tourist boat that crashed in Hungary was also involved in a collision in the Netherlands. That explains the word "consistent" on his resume.
Justin Bieber has challenged Tom Cruise to an MMA fight. I don't know who to root against.
16,000 people in Los Angeles now live in their cars, trucks, vans or SUVs. And that's just those on the freeways!
Listen to these Father's Day numbers - $467 million is going to be spent on gifts. $140 million spent on food and drink and $52 million on cards and wraps. And THAT'S just the Kardashians.
A study says snoring may make people age faster. Well, that explains why I look 196.
O.J. Simpson says his life has entered a "no negative" zone. Which I'm taking to meaning that whatever was negative in his life, he killed it.
A new study says having a life purpose is linked to a longer life... if you do it on purpose.
A protective glass layer on the Skydeck ledge at the Willis Tower in Chicago cracked under visitors' feet. No one was hurt, but there was some serious pants damage.
*.*
An airplane is in mid-flight over the ocean when suddenly the cockpit door burst open to reveal an armed, masked hijacker to a startled pilot, co-pilot, navigator, and a stewardess.
He held a gun to the pilot's head and said, "Take this plane to Iraq or I'm gonna spill your brains all over the place. The pilot calmly reached up, pushed the gun aside and says, "Look buddy, if you shoot me this plane will crash right into the sea and you'll die along with the rest of us."
The hijacker thought about it, then held the gun to the co-pilot's head and said, "Take this plane to Iraq or I'm gonna spill HIS brains all over the place."
The co-pilot also calmly reached up, pushed the gun aside and said, "Listen to me. The pilot's got a bad heart and he could keel over at the shock of my being killed. So if you shoot me, this plane will still crash right into the sea and you'll die along with the rest of us."
The hijacker thought about it for a moment and then held the gun to the navigator's head and repeated, "Take this plane to Iraq or I'm gonna spill HIS brains all over the place."
The navigator calmly reached up, pushed the gun aside and said, "I wouldn't do that if I were you. Those two guys have no sense of direction. Without me they couldn't find their way out of a paper bag much less get this plane to Iraq. So if you shoot me, this plane will still crash right into the sea and you'll die along with the rest of us."
The hijacker thought some more, shrugged and this time held the gun to the stewardess' head and demanded, "Take this plane to Iraq or I'm gonna spill HER brains all over the place."
But the stewardess leaned over and whispered something into the hijacker's ear. He turned beet red, dropped his gun, and ran out of the cockpit in a panic.
The crew tracked down the hijacker, who was found cowering in a lavatory, and tied him up.
The pilot then asked the flight attendant what she said that terrified the man so.
"I told him, sir, that if he killed me, he'd be the one who'd have to give you guys your blowjobs."
*.*
Three members of a weekly female bridge quartet were duly impressed when the fourth arrived wearing a gorgeous new mink coat.
"That's a lovely garment Dottie," purred one woman "It must have cost you a fortune!"
"But it didn't," said Dottie, "just a single piece of ass."
"You mean," continued the admirer of the coat, "One that you gave your husband?"
"No," smiled the coat wearer, "One that he got from the maid."
Quote of the Times;
“The urge to denigrate is an attempt to establish your own superiority by imposing humiliation on someone else - as well as a naked admission that you have no other way to demonstrate your personal merit.” - Tracinski,
Link of the Times;
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2019/06/what_will_it_look_like_when_we_lose_our_civilization.html
Issue of the Times;
Hate Crime Hoaxes Are More Common Than You Think by Jason L. Riley
A political scientist found that fewer than 1 in 3 of 346 such allegations was genuine.
When I asked Wilfred Reilly about last week’s appointment of a special prosecutor in Chicago to take up the Jussie Smollett case, he was cautiously optimistic. Mr. Reilly is author of a new book, “Hate Crime Hoax,” in which he details how the initial publicity for supposed hate crimes tends all but to disappear if the allegations are exposed as fake.
So does the sustained press coverage of Mr. Smollett—the television actor who was accused of staging an attack on himself back in January, only to have all 16 felony counts against him abruptly dropped for reasons that prosecutors have never made clear—represent progress of sorts?
“It’s the archetype of a hate crime hoax. It’s one of the most flamboyant examples of the genre,” said Mr. Reilly, himself a Second City native. An openly gay black man residing in one of the country’s most liberal and diverse metropolises is set upon by two white Donald Trump supporters who brandish bleach and a noose while shouting racial and antigay slurs? “It was a situation so extreme and bizarre that I think we would have had to look at how much racial progress the U.S. had actually made had it really occurred.” The appointment of a special prosecutor, and the possibility of bringing new charges against Mr. Smollett, is a good sign, Mr. Reilly added, “but will we see the same amount of coverage when the hoax involves a less famous person?”
Mr. Reilly is a professor of political science at Kentucky State University, and his interest in hate crimes dates to his graduate-school days, when he became aware of several widely reported incidents in the vicinity of his hometown that turned out to be fake. In 2012 a popular gay bar in suburban Chicago was destroyed by fire, and the owner cited homophobia as the reason. The same year, black students at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside reported death threats from hate groups and found a noose hanging from a dorm room door. Ultimately, the owner of the bar pleaded guilty to arson and insurance fraud. And a black student at the university fessed up to sending racist threats and planting a noose.
More incidents followed, and Mr. Reilly’s skepticism grew. “This phenomenon of fake hate crimes did not appear to be small-scale or regionally based,” he writes. A gay pastor in Texas accused a Whole Foods store of selling him a cake with a slur written in icing. The store produced video evidence that the pastor was lying. A white woman in Oregon disfigured her own face with acid and claimed a black man had attacked her. Later, she admitted fabricating the entire story. After signs that read “blacks only” and “whites only” were found at bathroom entrances on the University at Buffalo campus in upstate New York, a black graduate student confessed to posting them.
Mr. Reilly eventually compiled a database of 346 hate-crime allegations and determined that less than a third were genuine. Turning his attention to the hoaxes, he put together a data set of more than 400 confirmed cases of fake allegations that were reported to authorities between 2010 and 2017. He allows that the exact number of false reports is probably unknowable, but what can be said “with absolute confidence is that the actual number of hate crime hoaxes is indisputably large,” he writes. “We are not speaking here of just a few bad apples.”
The author’s bigger concern, and rightly so, is the growing politicization of hate crimes, especially when they are directed at underrepresented groups and regardless of whether they in fact happened. The sad reality is that there is no shortage of individuals and entities with a vested interest in exaggerating racial tensions in the U.S.—from civil-rights organizations to corporate diversity officers to professors of race and gender studies.
These alleged incidents are invariably seized upon by politicians and activists looking to feed a sacrosanct belief among liberals that discrimination and oppression are the main drivers of inequality. “In the mainstream media we hear almost constant talk about scary new forms of racism: ‘white privilege,’ ‘cultural appropriation,’ and ‘subtle bigotry,’ ” Mr. Reilly writes, yet “a huge percentage of the horrific hate crimes cited as evidence of contemporary bigotry are fakes.”
If “Hate Crime Hoax” merely offered examples to illustrate the extent of this phenomenon—and the book offers nearly 100—it would be providing a much-needed public service. But Mr. Reilly has a larger point to make. The Smollett case isn’t an outlier. Increasingly, it’s the norm. And the media’s relative lack of interest in exposing hoaxes that don’t involve famous figures is a big part of the problem.
Hoaxes?
Dislike?
The owner of a golf course was confused about paying a bill, so he asked his secretary for some mathematical help.
"If I were to give you $20,000, minus 14%, how much would you take off?" he asked her.
The secretary replied, "Everything but my earrings."
*.*
Critics are saying the new Godzilla movie is just absurd. How could a film about a giant radioactive oversized lizard be absurd?
NBA referee Ron Garretson was arrested in Arizona for extreme DUI after crashing his car into a tree. Yes, the tree's feet were planted.
Saw this on the sign of an auto shop: "Stop here for a free brake inspection" and I'm thinking, "You know, if I was having trouble with my brakes, how am I supposed to stop?"
Saw this on a church: "Tweet others as you would like to be tweeted."
Televangelist Kenneth Copeland says he needs three private jets because commercial jets are "tubes with demons." Someone's apparently flown on United... .
A Florida man is facing domestic battery charges after he covered his girlfriend with ketchup while she slept. She woke up to a scene like in the Godfather, except this one would have gone great with fries.
A new book says the way to improve life is by learning to say no. I was going to buy the book, but just said, "No" and after doing that, I figured I didn't need it.
Lori Loughlin says she’s “exasperated” that her college admissions scandal case is taking so long. Well, she could always try to speed things up by slipping the judge a hun or two.
*.*
A son asks his father, "Dad, how many kinds of boobies are there?"
The father answers, "Well, there are three kinds of breasts. In her twenties, a woman's breasts are like melons, round and firm. In her thirties to forties, they are like pears, still nice but hanging a bit. After fifty, they are like onions."
"Onions?"
"Yes, you see them and they make you cry."
His infuriated wife said, "And how many kinds of 'willies' are there? A man goes through three phases. In his twenties, his willy is like an oak tree, mighty and hard. In his thirties and forties, it is a birch, flexible but reliable. After his fifties, it is like a Christmas tree."
"A Christmas tree?" asked the boy.
"Yes," said the mother, "Dead from the root up and the balls are for decoration only."
*.*
The kids filed into class Monday morning. They were very excited. Their weekend assignment was to sell something, then give a talk on productive salesmanship.
Little Sally led off, "I sold Girl Scout cookies and I made $30." She said proudly, "My sales approach was to appeal to the customer's civic spirit and I credit that approach for my obvious success."
"Very good," said the teacher.
Little Jenny was next, "I sold magazines," she said, "I made $45 and I explained to everyone that magazines would keep them up on current events."
"Very good, Jenny," said the teacher.
Eventually, it was Little Johnny's turn. The teacher held her breath. Little Johnny walked to the front of the classroom and dumped a box full of cash on the teacher's desk. "$2,467," he said.
"$2,467!" cried the teacher, "What in the world were you selling?"
"Toothbrushes," said Little Johnny.
"Toothbrushes," echoed the teacher, "How could you possibly sell enough tooth brushes to make that much money?"
"I found the busiest corner in town," said Little Johnny, "I set up a dip and chip stand. I gave everybody who walked by a sample. They all said the same thing, "Hey, this tastes like crap!" Then I would say, "It is crap. Wanna buy a toothbrush?"
*.*
A husband and wife were sharing a bottle of wine when the husband said, "I bet you can't tell me something that will make me feel happy and sad at the same time."
The wife thought for a few moments, then said, "Your penis is bigger than your brother's."
Quote of the Times;
All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Habits are compound interest. – Clear
Link of the Times;
http://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/19/planned-parenthood-kept-aborted-babies-alive-to-ha
Issue of the Times;
The 630 Year-Old Reason Eastern Europeans Dislike Islam by Raymond Ibrahim
Why Eastern Europeans are much more reluctant to accept Muslim migrants than their Western counterparts can be traced back to circumstances surrounding a pivotal battle, that of Kosovo, which took place today, June 15, exactly 630 years ago today in 1389. It pitted Muslim invaders against Eastern European defenders, or the ancestors of those many Eastern Europeans today who are resistant to Islam.
Because the jihad is as old as Islam, it has been championed by diverse peoples throughout the centuries — Arabs in the Middle East, Moors (Berbers and Africans) in Spain and Western Europe, etc. Islam's successful entry into Eastern Europe was spearheaded by the Turks, specifically that tribe centered in westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor) and thus nearest to Europe, the Ottoman Turks, so-named after their founder, Osman Bey. As he lay dying in 1323, his parting words to his son and successor, Orhan, were for him "to propagate Islam by your arms."
This his son certainly did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in Bursa, observed that although the jihadi had captured some one hundred Byzantine fortresses, "he had never stayed for a whole month in any one town," because he "fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege." Christian cities fell like dominoes: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest Anatolia was under Turkic control. By now and to quote a European contemporary, "the foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were] separated from Constantinople by a channel of three or four miles."
By 1354, the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan's son, Suleiman, managed to cross over the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli, thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: "Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques," writes an Ottoman chronicler. "Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins."
Cleansed of all Christian "filth," Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, "the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation — that chokes and destroys the Christians." From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God's work. "They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil," explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, "and not only do they commit these crimes, but even — what an aberration — they believe that God approves them!"
After Orhan's death in 1360 and under his son Murad I — the first of his line to adopt the title "Sultan" — the westward jihad into the Balkans began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371, he had annexed portions of Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed Constantinople that "a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking outside the city gates."
Unsurprisingly, then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad's invading forces in 1387, "there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe."
Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo. There, a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian contingents — twelve thousand men under the leadership of Lazar — fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad's elder son Bayezid, reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued for hours.
On the night before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah "for the favour of dying for the true faith, the martyr's death." Sometime near the end of battle, his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilic, a Serbian knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself. They brought him before Murad and, after Miloš knelt in false submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim warlord's stomach (other sources say "with two thrusts which came out at his back"). The sultan's otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a smile on the dying martyr's face.
Murad's son Bayezid instantly took charge: "His first act as Sultan, over his father's dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his troops." Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last Christian — but even more of his own men in the process.
So many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that posterity remembered Kosovo as the "Field of Blackbirds." Though essentially a draw — or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans — the Serbs, with fewer men and resources to start with in comparison to the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.
In the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the Muslims — after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453 — and they remained under Ottoman rule for centuries.
The collective memory of Eastern Europeans' not too distant experiences with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why they are significantly more wary of — if not downright hostile to — Islam and its migrants compared to their Western liberal counterparts.
As Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán once explained:
We don't want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don't want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see[.] ... I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.
And those years — 1541 to 1699, when the Islamic Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary — are replete with the massacre, enslavement, and rape of Hungarians.
Note: The above account and its quotes were excerpted from the Raymond Ibrahim's recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
"If I were to give you $20,000, minus 14%, how much would you take off?" he asked her.
The secretary replied, "Everything but my earrings."
*.*
Critics are saying the new Godzilla movie is just absurd. How could a film about a giant radioactive oversized lizard be absurd?
NBA referee Ron Garretson was arrested in Arizona for extreme DUI after crashing his car into a tree. Yes, the tree's feet were planted.
Saw this on the sign of an auto shop: "Stop here for a free brake inspection" and I'm thinking, "You know, if I was having trouble with my brakes, how am I supposed to stop?"
Saw this on a church: "Tweet others as you would like to be tweeted."
Televangelist Kenneth Copeland says he needs three private jets because commercial jets are "tubes with demons." Someone's apparently flown on United... .
A Florida man is facing domestic battery charges after he covered his girlfriend with ketchup while she slept. She woke up to a scene like in the Godfather, except this one would have gone great with fries.
A new book says the way to improve life is by learning to say no. I was going to buy the book, but just said, "No" and after doing that, I figured I didn't need it.
Lori Loughlin says she’s “exasperated” that her college admissions scandal case is taking so long. Well, she could always try to speed things up by slipping the judge a hun or two.
*.*
A son asks his father, "Dad, how many kinds of boobies are there?"
The father answers, "Well, there are three kinds of breasts. In her twenties, a woman's breasts are like melons, round and firm. In her thirties to forties, they are like pears, still nice but hanging a bit. After fifty, they are like onions."
"Onions?"
"Yes, you see them and they make you cry."
His infuriated wife said, "And how many kinds of 'willies' are there? A man goes through three phases. In his twenties, his willy is like an oak tree, mighty and hard. In his thirties and forties, it is a birch, flexible but reliable. After his fifties, it is like a Christmas tree."
"A Christmas tree?" asked the boy.
"Yes," said the mother, "Dead from the root up and the balls are for decoration only."
*.*
The kids filed into class Monday morning. They were very excited. Their weekend assignment was to sell something, then give a talk on productive salesmanship.
Little Sally led off, "I sold Girl Scout cookies and I made $30." She said proudly, "My sales approach was to appeal to the customer's civic spirit and I credit that approach for my obvious success."
"Very good," said the teacher.
Little Jenny was next, "I sold magazines," she said, "I made $45 and I explained to everyone that magazines would keep them up on current events."
"Very good, Jenny," said the teacher.
Eventually, it was Little Johnny's turn. The teacher held her breath. Little Johnny walked to the front of the classroom and dumped a box full of cash on the teacher's desk. "$2,467," he said.
"$2,467!" cried the teacher, "What in the world were you selling?"
"Toothbrushes," said Little Johnny.
"Toothbrushes," echoed the teacher, "How could you possibly sell enough tooth brushes to make that much money?"
"I found the busiest corner in town," said Little Johnny, "I set up a dip and chip stand. I gave everybody who walked by a sample. They all said the same thing, "Hey, this tastes like crap!" Then I would say, "It is crap. Wanna buy a toothbrush?"
*.*
A husband and wife were sharing a bottle of wine when the husband said, "I bet you can't tell me something that will make me feel happy and sad at the same time."
The wife thought for a few moments, then said, "Your penis is bigger than your brother's."
Quote of the Times;
All behavior is driven by the desire to solve a problem. Habits are compound interest. – Clear
Link of the Times;
http://amp.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/aug/19/planned-parenthood-kept-aborted-babies-alive-to-ha
Issue of the Times;
The 630 Year-Old Reason Eastern Europeans Dislike Islam by Raymond Ibrahim
Why Eastern Europeans are much more reluctant to accept Muslim migrants than their Western counterparts can be traced back to circumstances surrounding a pivotal battle, that of Kosovo, which took place today, June 15, exactly 630 years ago today in 1389. It pitted Muslim invaders against Eastern European defenders, or the ancestors of those many Eastern Europeans today who are resistant to Islam.
Because the jihad is as old as Islam, it has been championed by diverse peoples throughout the centuries — Arabs in the Middle East, Moors (Berbers and Africans) in Spain and Western Europe, etc. Islam's successful entry into Eastern Europe was spearheaded by the Turks, specifically that tribe centered in westernmost Anatolia (or Asia Minor) and thus nearest to Europe, the Ottoman Turks, so-named after their founder, Osman Bey. As he lay dying in 1323, his parting words to his son and successor, Orhan, were for him "to propagate Islam by your arms."
This his son certainly did; the traveler Ibn Batutua, who once met Orhan in Bursa, observed that although the jihadi had captured some one hundred Byzantine fortresses, "he had never stayed for a whole month in any one town," because he "fights with the infidels continually and keeps them under siege." Christian cities fell like dominoes: Smyrna in 1329, Nicaea in 1331, and Nicomedia in 1337. By 1340, the whole of northwest Anatolia was under Turkic control. By now and to quote a European contemporary, "the foes of the cross, and the killers of the Christian people, that is, the Turks, [were] separated from Constantinople by a channel of three or four miles."
By 1354, the Ottoman Turks, under Orhan's son, Suleiman, managed to cross over the Dardanelles and into the abandoned fortress town of Gallipoli, thereby establishing their first foothold in Europe: "Where there were churches he destroyed them or converted them to mosques," writes an Ottoman chronicler. "Where there were bells, Suleiman broke them up and cast them into fires. Thus, in place of bells there were now muezzins."
Cleansed of all Christian "filth," Gallipoli became, as a later Ottoman bey boasted, "the Muslim throat that gulps down every Christian nation — that chokes and destroys the Christians." From this dilapidated but strategically situated fortress town, the Ottomans launched a campaign of terror throughout the countryside, always convinced they were doing God's work. "They live by the bow, the sword, and debauchery, finding pleasure in taking slaves, devoting themselves to murder, pillage, spoil," explained Gregory Palamas, an Orthodox metropolitan who was taken captive in Gallipoli, adding, "and not only do they commit these crimes, but even — what an aberration — they believe that God approves them!"
After Orhan's death in 1360 and under his son Murad I — the first of his line to adopt the title "Sultan" — the westward jihad into the Balkans began in earnest and was unstoppable. By 1371, he had annexed portions of Bulgaria and Macedonia to his sultanate, which now so engulfed Constantinople that "a citizen could leave the empire simply by walking outside the city gates."
Unsurprisingly, then, when Prince Lazar of Serbia (b. 1330) defeated Murad's invading forces in 1387, "there was wild rejoicing among the Slavs of the Balkans. Serbians, Bosnians, Albanians, Bulgarians, Wallachians, and Hungarians from the frontier provinces all rallied around Lazar as never before, in a determination to drive the Turks out of Europe."
Murad responded to this effrontery on June 15, 1389, in Kosovo. There, a Serbian-majority coalition augmented by Hungarian, Polish, and Romanian contingents — twelve thousand men under the leadership of Lazar — fought thirty thousand Ottomans under the leadership of the sultan himself. Despite the initial downpour of Turkic arrows, the Serbian heavy cavalry plummeted through the Ottoman frontlines and broke the left wing; the Ottoman right, under Murad's elder son Bayezid, reeled around and engulfed the Christians. The chaotic clash continued for hours.
On the night before battle, Murad had beseeched Allah "for the favour of dying for the true faith, the martyr's death." Sometime near the end of battle, his prayer was granted. According to tradition, Miloš Obilic, a Serbian knight, offered to defect to the Ottomans on condition that, in view of his own high rank, he be permitted to submit before the sultan himself. They brought him before Murad and, after Miloš knelt in false submission, he lunged at and plunged a dagger deep into the Muslim warlord's stomach (other sources say "with two thrusts which came out at his back"). The sultan's otherwise slow guards responded by hacking the Serb to pieces. Drenched in and spluttering out blood, Murad lived long enough to see his archenemy, the by now captured Lazar, brought before him, tortured, and beheaded. A small conciliation, it may have put a smile on the dying martyr's face.
Murad's son Bayezid instantly took charge: "His first act as Sultan, over his father's dead body, was to order the death, by strangulation with a bowstring, of his brother. This was Yaqub, his fellow-commander in the battle, who had won distinction in the field and popularity with his troops." Next Bayezid brought the battle to a decisive end; he threw everything he had at the enemy, leading to the slaughter of every last Christian — but even more of his own men in the process.
So many birds flocked to and feasted on the vast field of carrion that posterity remembered Kosovo as the "Field of Blackbirds." Though essentially a draw — or at best a Pyrrhic victory for the Ottomans — the Serbs, with fewer men and resources to start with in comparison to the ascendant Muslim empire, felt the sting more.
In the years following the battle of Kosovo, the Ottoman war machine became unstoppable: the nations of the Balkans were conquered by the Muslims — after withstanding a millennium of jihads, Constantinople itself permanently fell to Islam in 1453 — and they remained under Ottoman rule for centuries.
The collective memory of Eastern Europeans' not too distant experiences with and under Islam should never be underestimated when considering why they are significantly more wary of — if not downright hostile to — Islam and its migrants compared to their Western liberal counterparts.
As Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán once explained:
We don't want to criticize France, Belgium, any other country, but we think all countries have a right to decide whether they want to have a large number of Muslims in their countries. If they want to live together with them, they can. We don't want to and I think we have a right to decide that we do not want a large number of Muslim people in our country. We do not like the consequences of having a large number of Muslim communities that we see in other countries, and I do not see any reason for anyone else to force us to create ways of living together in Hungary that we do not want to see[.] ... I have to say that when it comes to living together with Muslim communities, we are the only ones who have experience because we had the possibility to go through that experience for 150 years.
And those years — 1541 to 1699, when the Islamic Ottoman Empire occupied Hungary — are replete with the massacre, enslavement, and rape of Hungarians.
Note: The above account and its quotes were excerpted from the Raymond Ibrahim's recent book, Sword and Scimitar: Fourteen Centuries of War between Islam and the West.
Dumb?
Our guide in Africa warned us that he had just spotted a leopard.
I told him to quit clowning around, that leopards are spotted at birth.
Three hundred stitches later, I realized the magnitude of my error.
*.*
Amazing Histories Behind Common Words
10. Hazard
Have you ever played a game of dice? Maybe bet a couple of dollars on a game of bunco or a family game of Yahtzee? Most of us know that little rush of adrenaline when you let go of the small cubes, hoping that they will roll in your favor. Usually, playing with dice isn’t dangerous—unless you’ve bet your entire fortune or have a sore loser in the family.
Nonetheless, “a game of dice” has long been one of the principal meanings of the word “hazard.” It was derived from the Old French word hasard, a word for all sorts of dice games. Hasard came from the Spanish azar (“an unfortunate throw of dice”).
Lexicographers are those who compile dictionaries, and they are responsible for cutting off the bloodlines of “hazard” with the Spanish. A theory that azaroriginated from the Arabic word az-zahr (“the die”) has been on the table. But since zahr doesn’t appear in any classic Arabic dictionaries, the rest of the history of “hazard” is unknown.
When the English came along, the word “hazard” suddenly meant that you were in immediate danger—and not being invited to a friendly game of dice.
9. Disaster
Today, there are few of us who blame the stars when something goes wrong. Instead of cursing at the sky, we drunkenly rant about our bosses or yell “Bad dog! Bad dog!” until we get the strength to clean up that pile of poop.
The old Italians probably also complained about the crap that they received from dogs and bosses, but they had one major excuse when things were going south: If you were born under certain stars, you were prone to bad luck and misfortune. From that belief came the word disastrato (“born under an ill star“).
So the next time it feels like everything is going wrong, you can do one of two things: Either blame the stars, or cheer yourself up by imagining an old Italian man screaming “Bad star! Bad star!” at the sky.
8. Robot
Do you ever overheat your computer or phone and feel really bad about it? So bad that you plug the charger in, give the device a few gentle strokes, and put it away in a quiet corner? We are working our machines as slaves—and really, why shouldn’t we? They don’t feel fatigue or hunger, and they can’t complain about lousy work conditions.
Maybe that’s what went through Karel Capek’s head in 1920 when he gave the name “robots” to the emotionless, mass-produced workers in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots. The Czech word robotnik means “slave,” as does the Old Slavicrobu and rabota.
Next time your computer dies, be sure to remind it that it serves you and not the other way around. Let’s just remember that when the robot uprising comes, we can all blame Karel Capek for their slavery.
7. Avocado
Some people like avocados when they’re turned into guacamole and used as a dip. Others see this fruit as God’s gift to mankind. They put it on their sandwiches, in their smoothies, basically anywhere that they can. However, for this green thing to make its way into our kitchen, it had to go through a variety of odd names.
The word “avocado” originates from the Nahuatlan word
ahuacatl, which was used interchangeably for describing the fruit and describing . . . well, testicles. To be honest, an avocado does sort of resemble a testicle. (Still feel like putting that in your smoothie?)
After being compared to a testicle for God knows how long, the word ahuacatlunderwent a series of misinterpretations. The Spanish changed ahuacatl to “aguacate,” which was then changed by the English to avogato in the 1600s.
“That sounds strangely similar to advocate,” you might think. Well, so did the rest of the 17th-century world, and suddenly, planet Earth was riddled by “advocate-pears.” And if that wasn’t enough, the Englishmen misinterpreted their own word. For a while, avocados were known as “alligator pears.”
So, what would you like to have in your salad today—a testicle, a lawyer, or a reptile?
6. Whiskey
Countless are those who have drowned their sorrows in a bottle of Scotch and those who have condemned the golden fluid. Did you know that whiskey is called “whiskey” in countries that have an “e” in their name, like Ireland, and “whisky” in countries without an “e,” such as Scotland?
Anyone who has been to Scotland or Ireland knows that the whiskey there flows almost like water. The Gaelic were well aware of this and named their favorite beverage uiscebeathadh (“water of life“). This was shortened to uisce (“water”). Try saying uisce out loud, and you’ll find that it sounds quite similar to our “whiskey.”
Maybe your liver would be happier if you drank some actual water. But if someone gets in your face about the “death in a bottle,” you have actual proof that the water of life is served on the rocks.
5. Pants
The mystery of the plural “pants” has fascinated us all at some point. Why more than one pant? What is a pant? Little did we know that the word actually has a fascinating background.
Some people already know that “pants” is an abbreviation of “pantaloons.” But as usual, we have to look further to find the true origin of the word. You see, the type of tight trousers that used to be called “pantaloons” were named after a famous character, much like celebrities get fashion items named after them today.
Pantaleone was his name, and this wasn’t any old trouser-wearing man. He was a well-known character in 16th-century Italian comedies. Due to his thin legs, he wore full-length tights instead of the popular knee breeches. From that came the origin of “pantaloons,” later shortened to “pants.”
But wait, there’s more! Pantaleone represented the stereotype of Venetians onstage, and he was named after a Venetian saint. The name “Pantaleone” is of ancient Greek origin, and as you might suspect, it has something to do with lions. Loosely translated, it mean “entirely lion,” which is an awesome origin for something we use to cover our legs.
4. Poison
It’s a gloomy afternoon. A weary guy in a leather jacket lets out a deep sigh as he sits down at an empty bar. Out of nowhere, an attractive woman leans forward and asks, “What’s your poison?”
“Whiskey,” he says. “Apparently, it’s the water of life.”
The woman gestures to a man cleaning glasses: “Two whiskeys please, on the rocks.”
In general, we do not drink poison. The word itself wakes up some primal instinct inside of us, shouting “Bad! Bad! Bad!” Considering those facts, the scenario above might seem stupid. But even if we ignore the obvious metaphor where “poison” means “drug,” we can make some sense out of it.
“Poison” is directly borrowed from the French, who rewrote the Latin wordpotionem. The Latin word first and foremost meant “a drink.” But it gathered more ominous meanings such as “magical potion” and “medicinal potion” before finally translating into “poisoned drink.”
3. Influenza
Most of us just call it “flu”—or simply curse over the blasted thing—but the full-length word “influenza” actually carries some history on its back. It was originally Italian, where it means “influence.”
The name refers to the cause of the disease rather than the illness itself, as the old Italians had the same explanation for illnesses as for disasters. They blamed both on unfortunate astrological constellations.
Later, as medical science evolved, the meaning of the word changed from “influence of the stars” to a general term for diseases with flu-like symptoms. The Englishmen borrowed it, and as time went by, it became the name of a specific, really annoying illness.
So the next time you have a clogged nose and sore throat, you can try blaming the stars or the Italians. Neither will make the flu go away, but it might lift your spirits a little.
2. Spirit
Speaking of spirits, is there anything worse than being forced to stand close to someone who has bad breath? Believe it or not, these two have a connection. By that, we mean that the words “spirit” and “breath” have common roots.
The English “spirit” comes from the Latin “spiritus,” which can mean “breath,” “breathing,” or “soul.” Regardless, the word is derived from spirare, which has “to breathe” as its lone translation (apart from “death”). We can even take it one step further: Spirare has its origins in an Indo-European word that means “to blow.”
So if you’re frowning at someone with bad breath and they ask what you’re staring at, just look disgusted and say, “You have a bad spirit.” It’s a perfect low-key insult. You might also gain some wizard points.
1. OK
“Okay” has one of the most complicated word origins to track down. Although there are dozens of theories, nobody’s sure which one is correct. Here are some of the best suggestions:
Omnis Korrecta—Latin for “all correct.” This was used by teachers who were grading papers long before the modern grading scales were devised.
Och Aye or O Qu’oui—Scottish and French, respectively, for “Ah, yes.” It seems that the Scots and the French do have something in common after all.
“Oll Korrect”—a common misspelling of “all correct” back in the 1800s. This is a terrific example of how even great men make mistakes. Two men famous for this popular theory are Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president, and John Jacob Astor, a wealthy businessman and the first of many great John Jacob Astors. The fourth one was immortalized when he went down with the Titanic.
“Old Kinderhook”—a form of local patriotism for a presidential candidate in the 1840s. Martin Van Buren decided to use his birthplace, Kinderhook, in his presidential campaign. This earned him the nickname “Old Kinderhook,” which was shortened to “OK.” His rivals had some fun with it, though. Soon, misinterpretations like “Out of Kash” and “Orful Kalamity” were making the rounds.
Hogfor—Old English for “seaworthy.” There are many suggestions far more believable than this one, but they’re not half as much fun. You see, this word was abbreviated to “HG,” which was snapped up by Norwegian and Danish sailors. With Nordic pronunciation, it sounds similar to “hah gay.” Now try saying that out loud a few times.
*.*
Pete: "The last time I was out hunting, I stepped off a high cliff, and would you believe it, while I was falling every fool deed I'd ever done came into my mind."
Bob: "Must have been a pretty high mountain you fell from."
*.*
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a move to make purchasing congressmen easier and faster for lobbyists, Congress voted to approve a new measure that calls for congressmen to wear barcodes on their foreheads so lobbyists, activists, and corporations can simply scan them and self-checkout.
Self-checkout machines will be installed at all exits of the Capitol Building, so once they've added congressmen to their cart, lobbyists can pay right on the way out.
Purchasing congressmen used to be a time-consuming, expensive process, said a Planned Parenthood representative. Now, we can simply walk through Congress, scan all the congressmen that are for sale, and checkout without having to interact with any humans.
We hate humans - like, a lot, the Planned Parenthood rep added.
One major military-industrial complex lobby group, Americans For Bigger Bombs, said they are also in support of the new move.
When you need to make a quick pit stop at our nation's legislative body to purchase a few congressmen to start a new war, you need to do it fast, said one AFBB lawyer. An attack on Iran can't wait while you wheel and deal, wine and dine, and negotiate endlessly. Now, I can just scan and go.
*.*
After the failure of our birth control method and my girlfriend's subsequent pregnancy, the absurdity of it all hit me:
Why do white people even try to use the rhythm method?
Quote of the Times;
The worst thing about taxes isn’t the fact that you lose money, it’s the fact that your money is used to fund a welfare state of people who hate you.
Link of the Times;
https://www.chaostrophic.com/anthony-hopkins-whats-the-meaning-of-life/
Issue of the Times;
Advice Columnist Tells Father to Evict Daughter from His House for Owning a Gun
Amy Dickinson is an advice columnist who, according to the company that syndicates her work, “combines storytelling with advice that is rooted with honesty and trust.” “Ask Amy” appears in newspapers that include The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Lost Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. She is also billed as an “expert on relationships.”
Dickinson may be good at telling stories, but she is hardly honest, trustworthy, or expert in matters of firearms, which she nevertheless feels free to opine on, including in an article published this week that encourages an overwrought father to evict his adult daughter for owning a pistol.
A man identified only as “DUMBFOUNDED FATHER” (who we’ll refer to as “DUMB” for short) wrote Amy to breathlessly report:
This week I discovered that my intelligent, hard-working, responsible 24-year-old daughter (who lives with me) is a gun owner! And it’s not a normal gun either — it is a .40-caliber semi-automatic, and she has hollow point bullets to go with it.
DUMB believes the handgun to be “the kind of weapon a criminal would possess!” He dismisses his daughter’s choice to keep the gun “for emergencies,” arguing that there have been “only two” home invasions in their neighborhood during the last 11 years.
DUMB goes on to tell Amy that he has ordered his daughter to relinquish the gun or move out of his house in three weeks. He admits, “I love my daughter and would be so sad for her to move into a place that she would hardly be able to afford,” but insists, “I have to lock my bedroom door at night because I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
DUMB complains that his daughter now says he doesn’t trust her and will barely speak to him, “How,” he asks Amy, “can I convince her to stop endangering us?”
Needless to say, DUMB’s question embodies a number of false assumptions, as well as a remarkably condescending attitude toward women and firearms.
First, there is nothing “not … normal” about a .40 cal. semi-automatic handgun. Semi-automatic handguns are in fact the most popular category of firearm in America today.
The .40 caliber S&W cartridge, meanwhile, was developed specifically for law enforcement use, following the FBI’s determination in the mid-1980s to replace their standard-issue .38 special revolvers with semi-automatic pistols.
Pistols chambered in the round went on to become a popular choice with law enforcement agencies across the United States, with civilians adopting them in large numbers during the Clinton “assault weapon” ban in effect from 1994 to 2004, which also imposed limits on magazine capacity.
Putting aside the technicalities, however, there is no evidence that the round – which is somewhat more expensive than other common handgun rounds – is especially popular with criminals.
Moreover, DUMB provides no information that would justify his need to lock himself into his bedroom at night to protect himself from his daughter or her firearm. That seems like a gross overreaction to a daughter he says he loves possessing a lawful and constitutionally protected firearm for emergency use. Indeed, in the event such an emergency arises, DUMB’s daughter will likely be the one protecting him.
Finally, DUMB is so irrationally fearful and controlling that he threatens to evict his daughter in three weeks unless she gets rid of the firearm, including by giving it to him. Why he thinks he is any safer with it than her is not explained, especially given his evident unfamiliarity with handguns.
DUMB’s letter is so over-the-top, in fact, that it comes across more like a parody of a narrow-minded, irrational, gun-phobic control freak than a serious question from a concerned parent.
Amy, however, not only takes the letter at face value, she ups the ante with additional misinformation and emotionalism of her own.
The very first sentence of her reply states, “According to my research, possessing hollow point bullets is illegal in 11 states; is it legal in your state to own this sort of exploding ammunition?”
Actually, only one state – New Jersey – and one city – San Francisco – bans the possession of hollow point ammunition. Amy’s “research” is completely erroneous.
And, needless to say, hollow point bullets do not “explode.” Rather, they are designed to stay intact and expand upon impact, which actually protects the safety and property of bystanders by reducing the tendency of the round to penetrate through the intended target and hit something else.
If anything, Amy’s faulty statistic would still suggest an 78% probability that the ammunition DUMB’s daughter possesses is legal. But is Amy suggesting that DUMB should solve his “problem” by seeking to have his own daughter arrested?
Next, Amy cites additional “research” which she claims shows that since 1980, the number of guns has risen in America, while the percentage of households with a firearm has fallen, concentrating the guns into fewer homes. “Why,” she asks irrelevantly, “must your household be one of them?”
Amy then starts casting aspersions on the daughter. “Where did your daughter get this weapon and ammunition?” she asks. “Is she perhaps engaged in another activity outside of your household that exposes her to increased risks and makes her believe she needs to have a weapon?”
Rather than chide DUMB for overreacting to the common, presumptively lawful, and constitutionally protected conduct of his daughter, Amy tries to terrify him even further with a single, non-representative anecdote. “I have news for you,” she warns. “A locked bedroom door is no match for this weaponry; as I write this, just five days ago a father in South Carolina tragically shot and killed his own 23-year-old daughter through a closed door — when he mistook her for an intruder.”
Of course, family members have also been known to tragically back over each other with their cars.
But those highly unusual and infrequent events do not suggest an intelligent and responsible 24-year-old woman cannot handle a firearm (or automobile) safely.
Ultimately, Amy encourages DUMB to enforce his “ultimatum,’ adding, “I also weep that there is yet another (likely unsafe) gun owner in this country.”
Again, DUMB’s letter provides absolutely no reason to suggest his daughter is an unsafe gun owner. Like DUMB himself, Amy apparently just assumes that a young woman – even an intelligent and responsible one – is incompetent to handle a firearm.
For an “expert” on relationships, Amy also seems unusually quick to suggest a father throw a beloved daughter out of his home for taking the responsible, adult step of seeing to her own protection. Worse, she advocates this potentially life-altering course of action based on poor research, false assumptions, and faulty reasoning.
Indeed, the advice Amy gives to DUMB is startlingly at odds with the advice she typically gives to family members who disagree with their relatives’ lifestyle and choices; more often she counsels empathy and tolerance, rather than condemnation and alienation.
The irony here is that bad advice delivered by an incompetent researcher with no appreciation of her own ignorance or bias is the only real danger in this situation.
But we’re told DUMB’s daughter is intelligent, hardworking, responsible … and well-armed.
Something tells us she’ll do just fine on her own.
I told him to quit clowning around, that leopards are spotted at birth.
Three hundred stitches later, I realized the magnitude of my error.
*.*
Amazing Histories Behind Common Words
10. Hazard
Have you ever played a game of dice? Maybe bet a couple of dollars on a game of bunco or a family game of Yahtzee? Most of us know that little rush of adrenaline when you let go of the small cubes, hoping that they will roll in your favor. Usually, playing with dice isn’t dangerous—unless you’ve bet your entire fortune or have a sore loser in the family.
Nonetheless, “a game of dice” has long been one of the principal meanings of the word “hazard.” It was derived from the Old French word hasard, a word for all sorts of dice games. Hasard came from the Spanish azar (“an unfortunate throw of dice”).
Lexicographers are those who compile dictionaries, and they are responsible for cutting off the bloodlines of “hazard” with the Spanish. A theory that azaroriginated from the Arabic word az-zahr (“the die”) has been on the table. But since zahr doesn’t appear in any classic Arabic dictionaries, the rest of the history of “hazard” is unknown.
When the English came along, the word “hazard” suddenly meant that you were in immediate danger—and not being invited to a friendly game of dice.
9. Disaster
Today, there are few of us who blame the stars when something goes wrong. Instead of cursing at the sky, we drunkenly rant about our bosses or yell “Bad dog! Bad dog!” until we get the strength to clean up that pile of poop.
The old Italians probably also complained about the crap that they received from dogs and bosses, but they had one major excuse when things were going south: If you were born under certain stars, you were prone to bad luck and misfortune. From that belief came the word disastrato (“born under an ill star“).
So the next time it feels like everything is going wrong, you can do one of two things: Either blame the stars, or cheer yourself up by imagining an old Italian man screaming “Bad star! Bad star!” at the sky.
8. Robot
Do you ever overheat your computer or phone and feel really bad about it? So bad that you plug the charger in, give the device a few gentle strokes, and put it away in a quiet corner? We are working our machines as slaves—and really, why shouldn’t we? They don’t feel fatigue or hunger, and they can’t complain about lousy work conditions.
Maybe that’s what went through Karel Capek’s head in 1920 when he gave the name “robots” to the emotionless, mass-produced workers in his play Rossum’s Universal Robots. The Czech word robotnik means “slave,” as does the Old Slavicrobu and rabota.
Next time your computer dies, be sure to remind it that it serves you and not the other way around. Let’s just remember that when the robot uprising comes, we can all blame Karel Capek for their slavery.
7. Avocado
Some people like avocados when they’re turned into guacamole and used as a dip. Others see this fruit as God’s gift to mankind. They put it on their sandwiches, in their smoothies, basically anywhere that they can. However, for this green thing to make its way into our kitchen, it had to go through a variety of odd names.
The word “avocado” originates from the Nahuatlan word
ahuacatl, which was used interchangeably for describing the fruit and describing . . . well, testicles. To be honest, an avocado does sort of resemble a testicle. (Still feel like putting that in your smoothie?)
After being compared to a testicle for God knows how long, the word ahuacatlunderwent a series of misinterpretations. The Spanish changed ahuacatl to “aguacate,” which was then changed by the English to avogato in the 1600s.
“That sounds strangely similar to advocate,” you might think. Well, so did the rest of the 17th-century world, and suddenly, planet Earth was riddled by “advocate-pears.” And if that wasn’t enough, the Englishmen misinterpreted their own word. For a while, avocados were known as “alligator pears.”
So, what would you like to have in your salad today—a testicle, a lawyer, or a reptile?
6. Whiskey
Countless are those who have drowned their sorrows in a bottle of Scotch and those who have condemned the golden fluid. Did you know that whiskey is called “whiskey” in countries that have an “e” in their name, like Ireland, and “whisky” in countries without an “e,” such as Scotland?
Anyone who has been to Scotland or Ireland knows that the whiskey there flows almost like water. The Gaelic were well aware of this and named their favorite beverage uiscebeathadh (“water of life“). This was shortened to uisce (“water”). Try saying uisce out loud, and you’ll find that it sounds quite similar to our “whiskey.”
Maybe your liver would be happier if you drank some actual water. But if someone gets in your face about the “death in a bottle,” you have actual proof that the water of life is served on the rocks.
5. Pants
The mystery of the plural “pants” has fascinated us all at some point. Why more than one pant? What is a pant? Little did we know that the word actually has a fascinating background.
Some people already know that “pants” is an abbreviation of “pantaloons.” But as usual, we have to look further to find the true origin of the word. You see, the type of tight trousers that used to be called “pantaloons” were named after a famous character, much like celebrities get fashion items named after them today.
Pantaleone was his name, and this wasn’t any old trouser-wearing man. He was a well-known character in 16th-century Italian comedies. Due to his thin legs, he wore full-length tights instead of the popular knee breeches. From that came the origin of “pantaloons,” later shortened to “pants.”
But wait, there’s more! Pantaleone represented the stereotype of Venetians onstage, and he was named after a Venetian saint. The name “Pantaleone” is of ancient Greek origin, and as you might suspect, it has something to do with lions. Loosely translated, it mean “entirely lion,” which is an awesome origin for something we use to cover our legs.
4. Poison
It’s a gloomy afternoon. A weary guy in a leather jacket lets out a deep sigh as he sits down at an empty bar. Out of nowhere, an attractive woman leans forward and asks, “What’s your poison?”
“Whiskey,” he says. “Apparently, it’s the water of life.”
The woman gestures to a man cleaning glasses: “Two whiskeys please, on the rocks.”
In general, we do not drink poison. The word itself wakes up some primal instinct inside of us, shouting “Bad! Bad! Bad!” Considering those facts, the scenario above might seem stupid. But even if we ignore the obvious metaphor where “poison” means “drug,” we can make some sense out of it.
“Poison” is directly borrowed from the French, who rewrote the Latin wordpotionem. The Latin word first and foremost meant “a drink.” But it gathered more ominous meanings such as “magical potion” and “medicinal potion” before finally translating into “poisoned drink.”
3. Influenza
Most of us just call it “flu”—or simply curse over the blasted thing—but the full-length word “influenza” actually carries some history on its back. It was originally Italian, where it means “influence.”
The name refers to the cause of the disease rather than the illness itself, as the old Italians had the same explanation for illnesses as for disasters. They blamed both on unfortunate astrological constellations.
Later, as medical science evolved, the meaning of the word changed from “influence of the stars” to a general term for diseases with flu-like symptoms. The Englishmen borrowed it, and as time went by, it became the name of a specific, really annoying illness.
So the next time you have a clogged nose and sore throat, you can try blaming the stars or the Italians. Neither will make the flu go away, but it might lift your spirits a little.
2. Spirit
Speaking of spirits, is there anything worse than being forced to stand close to someone who has bad breath? Believe it or not, these two have a connection. By that, we mean that the words “spirit” and “breath” have common roots.
The English “spirit” comes from the Latin “spiritus,” which can mean “breath,” “breathing,” or “soul.” Regardless, the word is derived from spirare, which has “to breathe” as its lone translation (apart from “death”). We can even take it one step further: Spirare has its origins in an Indo-European word that means “to blow.”
So if you’re frowning at someone with bad breath and they ask what you’re staring at, just look disgusted and say, “You have a bad spirit.” It’s a perfect low-key insult. You might also gain some wizard points.
1. OK
“Okay” has one of the most complicated word origins to track down. Although there are dozens of theories, nobody’s sure which one is correct. Here are some of the best suggestions:
Omnis Korrecta—Latin for “all correct.” This was used by teachers who were grading papers long before the modern grading scales were devised.
Och Aye or O Qu’oui—Scottish and French, respectively, for “Ah, yes.” It seems that the Scots and the French do have something in common after all.
“Oll Korrect”—a common misspelling of “all correct” back in the 1800s. This is a terrific example of how even great men make mistakes. Two men famous for this popular theory are Andrew Jackson, the seventh US president, and John Jacob Astor, a wealthy businessman and the first of many great John Jacob Astors. The fourth one was immortalized when he went down with the Titanic.
“Old Kinderhook”—a form of local patriotism for a presidential candidate in the 1840s. Martin Van Buren decided to use his birthplace, Kinderhook, in his presidential campaign. This earned him the nickname “Old Kinderhook,” which was shortened to “OK.” His rivals had some fun with it, though. Soon, misinterpretations like “Out of Kash” and “Orful Kalamity” were making the rounds.
Hogfor—Old English for “seaworthy.” There are many suggestions far more believable than this one, but they’re not half as much fun. You see, this word was abbreviated to “HG,” which was snapped up by Norwegian and Danish sailors. With Nordic pronunciation, it sounds similar to “hah gay.” Now try saying that out loud a few times.
*.*
Pete: "The last time I was out hunting, I stepped off a high cliff, and would you believe it, while I was falling every fool deed I'd ever done came into my mind."
Bob: "Must have been a pretty high mountain you fell from."
*.*
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a move to make purchasing congressmen easier and faster for lobbyists, Congress voted to approve a new measure that calls for congressmen to wear barcodes on their foreheads so lobbyists, activists, and corporations can simply scan them and self-checkout.
Self-checkout machines will be installed at all exits of the Capitol Building, so once they've added congressmen to their cart, lobbyists can pay right on the way out.
Purchasing congressmen used to be a time-consuming, expensive process, said a Planned Parenthood representative. Now, we can simply walk through Congress, scan all the congressmen that are for sale, and checkout without having to interact with any humans.
We hate humans - like, a lot, the Planned Parenthood rep added.
One major military-industrial complex lobby group, Americans For Bigger Bombs, said they are also in support of the new move.
When you need to make a quick pit stop at our nation's legislative body to purchase a few congressmen to start a new war, you need to do it fast, said one AFBB lawyer. An attack on Iran can't wait while you wheel and deal, wine and dine, and negotiate endlessly. Now, I can just scan and go.
*.*
After the failure of our birth control method and my girlfriend's subsequent pregnancy, the absurdity of it all hit me:
Why do white people even try to use the rhythm method?
Quote of the Times;
The worst thing about taxes isn’t the fact that you lose money, it’s the fact that your money is used to fund a welfare state of people who hate you.
Link of the Times;
https://www.chaostrophic.com/anthony-hopkins-whats-the-meaning-of-life/
Issue of the Times;
Advice Columnist Tells Father to Evict Daughter from His House for Owning a Gun
Amy Dickinson is an advice columnist who, according to the company that syndicates her work, “combines storytelling with advice that is rooted with honesty and trust.” “Ask Amy” appears in newspapers that include The Baltimore Sun, The Chicago Tribune, The Lost Angeles Times, and The Washington Post. She is also billed as an “expert on relationships.”
Dickinson may be good at telling stories, but she is hardly honest, trustworthy, or expert in matters of firearms, which she nevertheless feels free to opine on, including in an article published this week that encourages an overwrought father to evict his adult daughter for owning a pistol.
A man identified only as “DUMBFOUNDED FATHER” (who we’ll refer to as “DUMB” for short) wrote Amy to breathlessly report:
This week I discovered that my intelligent, hard-working, responsible 24-year-old daughter (who lives with me) is a gun owner! And it’s not a normal gun either — it is a .40-caliber semi-automatic, and she has hollow point bullets to go with it.
DUMB believes the handgun to be “the kind of weapon a criminal would possess!” He dismisses his daughter’s choice to keep the gun “for emergencies,” arguing that there have been “only two” home invasions in their neighborhood during the last 11 years.
DUMB goes on to tell Amy that he has ordered his daughter to relinquish the gun or move out of his house in three weeks. He admits, “I love my daughter and would be so sad for her to move into a place that she would hardly be able to afford,” but insists, “I have to lock my bedroom door at night because I don’t know what she’s going to do.”
DUMB complains that his daughter now says he doesn’t trust her and will barely speak to him, “How,” he asks Amy, “can I convince her to stop endangering us?”
Needless to say, DUMB’s question embodies a number of false assumptions, as well as a remarkably condescending attitude toward women and firearms.
First, there is nothing “not … normal” about a .40 cal. semi-automatic handgun. Semi-automatic handguns are in fact the most popular category of firearm in America today.
The .40 caliber S&W cartridge, meanwhile, was developed specifically for law enforcement use, following the FBI’s determination in the mid-1980s to replace their standard-issue .38 special revolvers with semi-automatic pistols.
Pistols chambered in the round went on to become a popular choice with law enforcement agencies across the United States, with civilians adopting them in large numbers during the Clinton “assault weapon” ban in effect from 1994 to 2004, which also imposed limits on magazine capacity.
Putting aside the technicalities, however, there is no evidence that the round – which is somewhat more expensive than other common handgun rounds – is especially popular with criminals.
Moreover, DUMB provides no information that would justify his need to lock himself into his bedroom at night to protect himself from his daughter or her firearm. That seems like a gross overreaction to a daughter he says he loves possessing a lawful and constitutionally protected firearm for emergency use. Indeed, in the event such an emergency arises, DUMB’s daughter will likely be the one protecting him.
Finally, DUMB is so irrationally fearful and controlling that he threatens to evict his daughter in three weeks unless she gets rid of the firearm, including by giving it to him. Why he thinks he is any safer with it than her is not explained, especially given his evident unfamiliarity with handguns.
DUMB’s letter is so over-the-top, in fact, that it comes across more like a parody of a narrow-minded, irrational, gun-phobic control freak than a serious question from a concerned parent.
Amy, however, not only takes the letter at face value, she ups the ante with additional misinformation and emotionalism of her own.
The very first sentence of her reply states, “According to my research, possessing hollow point bullets is illegal in 11 states; is it legal in your state to own this sort of exploding ammunition?”
Actually, only one state – New Jersey – and one city – San Francisco – bans the possession of hollow point ammunition. Amy’s “research” is completely erroneous.
And, needless to say, hollow point bullets do not “explode.” Rather, they are designed to stay intact and expand upon impact, which actually protects the safety and property of bystanders by reducing the tendency of the round to penetrate through the intended target and hit something else.
If anything, Amy’s faulty statistic would still suggest an 78% probability that the ammunition DUMB’s daughter possesses is legal. But is Amy suggesting that DUMB should solve his “problem” by seeking to have his own daughter arrested?
Next, Amy cites additional “research” which she claims shows that since 1980, the number of guns has risen in America, while the percentage of households with a firearm has fallen, concentrating the guns into fewer homes. “Why,” she asks irrelevantly, “must your household be one of them?”
Amy then starts casting aspersions on the daughter. “Where did your daughter get this weapon and ammunition?” she asks. “Is she perhaps engaged in another activity outside of your household that exposes her to increased risks and makes her believe she needs to have a weapon?”
Rather than chide DUMB for overreacting to the common, presumptively lawful, and constitutionally protected conduct of his daughter, Amy tries to terrify him even further with a single, non-representative anecdote. “I have news for you,” she warns. “A locked bedroom door is no match for this weaponry; as I write this, just five days ago a father in South Carolina tragically shot and killed his own 23-year-old daughter through a closed door — when he mistook her for an intruder.”
Of course, family members have also been known to tragically back over each other with their cars.
But those highly unusual and infrequent events do not suggest an intelligent and responsible 24-year-old woman cannot handle a firearm (or automobile) safely.
Ultimately, Amy encourages DUMB to enforce his “ultimatum,’ adding, “I also weep that there is yet another (likely unsafe) gun owner in this country.”
Again, DUMB’s letter provides absolutely no reason to suggest his daughter is an unsafe gun owner. Like DUMB himself, Amy apparently just assumes that a young woman – even an intelligent and responsible one – is incompetent to handle a firearm.
For an “expert” on relationships, Amy also seems unusually quick to suggest a father throw a beloved daughter out of his home for taking the responsible, adult step of seeing to her own protection. Worse, she advocates this potentially life-altering course of action based on poor research, false assumptions, and faulty reasoning.
Indeed, the advice Amy gives to DUMB is startlingly at odds with the advice she typically gives to family members who disagree with their relatives’ lifestyle and choices; more often she counsels empathy and tolerance, rather than condemnation and alienation.
The irony here is that bad advice delivered by an incompetent researcher with no appreciation of her own ignorance or bias is the only real danger in this situation.
But we’re told DUMB’s daughter is intelligent, hardworking, responsible … and well-armed.
Something tells us she’ll do just fine on her own.
Normality?
Why did the woman leave her husband after he spent all their money on a penis enlarger?
She just couldn’t take it any longer.
*.*
A boy is waiting for the school bus and decides to push over the outhouse.
When he gets home his father is waiting for him, belt in hand. He says, "Son, did you push over the outhouse?"
The son replies, "Well, Dad, we learned about George Washington in school today and like him I cannot tell a lie. Yes, I pushed over the outhouse."
The father says, "You do realize you're going to be punished now, right?"
The son protests, "But Dad, when George Washington told the truth about cutting down the cherry tree, he didn't get punished!"
His father replies, "Well, George Washington's father wasn't IN the cherry tree."
*.*
I have a “dry clean only” sweater that is about to learn some harsh truths about living with me.
In France, a 102-year-old woman living in a retirement home is accused of murdering her 92-year-old neighbor. The big question-where were the parents?
The U.S. is seeing its biggest slump in tourism in four years. Well, if you don't include the ones that don't leave.
A study says smarter people listen mostly to instrumental music. Well, yeah. They don't have to waste any space in their brain remembering lyrics.
It has been 10,000 days since the Detroit Lions' last playoff win... .not that they're counting.
Two people were injured when a garbage truck crashed into Gloria Estefan's recording studio in Florida. And she was worried the rhythm was going to get her.
Officials are warning about a high fire danger this summer. They recommend trimming back high-growing grass, removing any loose debris near building, and seriously cutting back Sam Elliott's mustache.
Somehow, I just know it's all going to work out. Like an uncooked lobster on the Titanic... just gotta believe.
*.*
After hearing a shot, Hank ran next door and found his friend Tony crying.
"Say, what's wrong?" Hank asked.
Tony sobbed, "I had to shoot my dog."
Hank said, "My God! Was he mad?"
Tony replied, "Well, he wasn't exactly overjoyed."
*.*
How did the electrician lose all the power in his home?
He got married.
Quote of the Times;
For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,000 F-16s, or 17x more than were ever built. If you don't understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it's not capable of taking on 200 at a time.
Link of the Times;
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/a-new-form-of-matter-scientists-create-the-first-supersolid
Issue of the Times;
When Normality Became Abnormal by Victor Davis
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.
Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.
No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.
Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.
Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.
Rich NATO allies either could not or would not pay their promised defense commitments to the alliance. To embarrass them into doing so was seen as heretical. No more.
Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets. The private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies.
China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing the Other. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes and universities in which to invest.
The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees. The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now.
The Palestinians for the last 50 years were always about as much refugees as the East Prussian Germans or the Egyptian Jews and Greeks that were cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East in the same period of turbulence as the birth of Israel. “Occupied” land more likely conjures up Tibet and Cyprus not the West Bank, and persecuted Muslims are not found in Israel, but in China.
Suddenly Redeemable
An aging population, the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables, clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At best, a middle-aged deplorable was supposed to learn to code or relocate to the Texas fracking fields. Perhaps not now.
In the last 30 months, the question of the Rust Belt has been reframed to why, with a great workforce, cheap energy, good administrative talent, and a business-friendly administration, cannot the United States make more of what it needs? Why, if trade deficits are irrelevant, do Germany, China, Japan, and Mexico find them so unpleasant? If unfettered trade is so essential, why do so many of our enemies and friends insist that we almost alone trade “fairly,” while they trade freely and unfairly? Why do not Germany and China argue that their vast global account surpluses are largely irrelevant?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years. Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that our port cities would soon be underwater. Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not now.
Three million more barrels of American oil are being produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but perhaps its largest exporter as well.
Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly fossilized and irrelevant. Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills were a very minor nuisance.
Changing Roles
Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a number of political agendas.
Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured objection. Not so much now. Few any longer claim that the southern border is not being overrun, much less that allowing a non-diverse million illegal aliens in six months to flood into the United States without audit is proof that “diversity is our strength.”
The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged agenda was proof of tough resistance.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.
On one side in 2020 is socialism, “Medicare for All,” wealth taxes, top income tax rates of 70 or 80 or 90 percent, a desire for a Supreme Court full of “wise Latinas” like Sonia Sotomayor, insidious curtailment of the First and Second Amendments, open borders, blanket amnesties, reparations, judges as progressive legislators, permissible infanticide, abolition of student debt, elimination of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau and the Electoral College, voting rights for 16-year-olds and felons, and free college tuition.
On the other side is free-market capitalism but within a framework of fair rather than unfettered international trade, a smaller administrative state, less taxation and regulation, constitutionalist judges, more gas and oil, record low unemployment, 3-4 percent economic growth, and pressure on colleges to honor the Bill of Rights.
The New, New Normal
The choices are at least starker now. The strategy is not, as in 2008 and 2012, to offer a moderate slow-down of progressivism, but rather a complete repudiation of it.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards. But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.
Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.
Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.
Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.
She just couldn’t take it any longer.
*.*
A boy is waiting for the school bus and decides to push over the outhouse.
When he gets home his father is waiting for him, belt in hand. He says, "Son, did you push over the outhouse?"
The son replies, "Well, Dad, we learned about George Washington in school today and like him I cannot tell a lie. Yes, I pushed over the outhouse."
The father says, "You do realize you're going to be punished now, right?"
The son protests, "But Dad, when George Washington told the truth about cutting down the cherry tree, he didn't get punished!"
His father replies, "Well, George Washington's father wasn't IN the cherry tree."
*.*
I have a “dry clean only” sweater that is about to learn some harsh truths about living with me.
In France, a 102-year-old woman living in a retirement home is accused of murdering her 92-year-old neighbor. The big question-where were the parents?
The U.S. is seeing its biggest slump in tourism in four years. Well, if you don't include the ones that don't leave.
A study says smarter people listen mostly to instrumental music. Well, yeah. They don't have to waste any space in their brain remembering lyrics.
It has been 10,000 days since the Detroit Lions' last playoff win... .not that they're counting.
Two people were injured when a garbage truck crashed into Gloria Estefan's recording studio in Florida. And she was worried the rhythm was going to get her.
Officials are warning about a high fire danger this summer. They recommend trimming back high-growing grass, removing any loose debris near building, and seriously cutting back Sam Elliott's mustache.
Somehow, I just know it's all going to work out. Like an uncooked lobster on the Titanic... just gotta believe.
*.*
After hearing a shot, Hank ran next door and found his friend Tony crying.
"Say, what's wrong?" Hank asked.
Tony sobbed, "I had to shoot my dog."
Hank said, "My God! Was he mad?"
Tony replied, "Well, he wasn't exactly overjoyed."
*.*
How did the electrician lose all the power in his home?
He got married.
Quote of the Times;
For the price of the F-35, the USA could have built 79,000 F-16s, or 17x more than were ever built. If you don't understand why the USA is going to lose its next major war, look up the kill rate between German Panthers and US Shermans or between Tigers and T-34s. One F-35 might be better than one F-16, but it's not capable of taking on 200 at a time.
Link of the Times;
https://cosmosmagazine.com/physics/a-new-form-of-matter-scientists-create-the-first-supersolid
Issue of the Times;
When Normality Became Abnormal by Victor Davis
Donald Trump is many things. But one thing he is not is a defender of the 2009-2016 status quo and accepted progressive convention. Since 2017, everything has been in flux. Lots of past conventional assumptions of the Obama-Clinton-Romney-Bush generation were as unquestioned as they were suspect. No longer.
Everyone knew the Iran deal was a way for the mullahs to buy time and hoard their oil profits, to purchase or steal nuclear technology, to feign moderation, and to trade some hostages for millions in terrorist-seeding cash, and then in a few years spring an announcement that it had the bomb.
No one wished to say that. Trump did. He canceled the flawed deal without a second thought.
Iran is furious, but in a far weaker—and eroding—strategic position with no serious means of escaping devastating sanctions, general impoverishment, and social unrest. So a desperate Tehran knows that it must make some show of defiance. Yet it accepts that if it were to launch a missile at a U.S. ship, hijack an American boat, or shoot down an American plane, the ensuing tit-for-tat retaliation might target the point of Iranian origin (the port that launched the ship, the airbase from which the plane took off, the silo from which the missile was launched) rather than the mere point of contact—and signal a serial stand-off 10-1 disproportionate response to every Iranian attack without ever causing a Persian Gulf war.
Everyone realized the Paris Climate Accord was a way for elites to virtue signal their green bona fides while making no adjustments in their global managerial lifestyles—at best. At worst, it was a shake-down both to transfer assets from the industrialized West to the “developing world” and to dull Western competitiveness with ascending rivals like India and China. Not now. Trump withdrew from the agreement, met or exceeded the carbon emissions reductions of the deal anyway, and has never looked back at the flawed convention. The remaining signatories have little response to the U.S. departure, and none at all to de facto American compliance to their own targeted goals.
Rich NATO allies either could not or would not pay their promised defense commitments to the alliance. To embarrass them into doing so was seen as heretical. No more.
Trump jawboned and ranted about the asymmetries. And more nations are increasing rather than decreasing their defense budgets. The private consensus is that the NATO allies knew all along that they were exactly what Barack Obama once called “free riders” and justified that subsidization by ankle-biting the foreign policies of the United States—as if an uncouth America was lucky to underwrite such principled members. Again, no more fantasies.
China was fated to rule the world. Period. Whining about its systematic commercial cheating was supposedly merely delaying the inevitable or would have bad repercussions later on. Progressives knew the Communists put tens of thousands of people in camps, rounded up Muslims, and destroyed civil liberties, and yet in “woke” fashion tip-toed around criticizing the Other. Trump then destroyed the mirage of China as a Westernizing aspirant to the family of nations. In a protracted tariff struggle, there are lots of countries in Asia that could produce cheap goods as readily as China, but far fewer countries like the United States that have money to be siphoned off in mercantilist trade deals, or the technology to steal, or the preferred homes and universities in which to invest.
The Palestinians were canonized as permanent refugees. The U.S. embassy could never safely move to the Israeli capital in Jerusalem. The Golan Heights were Syrian. Only a two-state solution requiring Israel to give back all the strategic border land it inherited when its defeated enemies sought to destroy it in five prior losing wars would bring peace. Not now.
The Palestinians for the last 50 years were always about as much refugees as the East Prussian Germans or the Egyptian Jews and Greeks that were cleansed from their ancestral homelands in the Middle East in the same period of turbulence as the birth of Israel. “Occupied” land more likely conjures up Tibet and Cyprus not the West Bank, and persecuted Muslims are not found in Israel, but in China.
Suddenly Redeemable
An aging population, the veritable end to U.S. manufacturing and heavy industry, and an opioid epidemic meant that America needed to get used to stagnant 1 percent growth, a declining standard of living, a permanent large pool of the unemployed, an annual increasing labor non-participation rate, and a lasting rust belt of deplorables, irredeemables, clingers and “crazies” who needed to be analyzed by Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. At best, a middle-aged deplorable was supposed to learn to code or relocate to the Texas fracking fields. Perhaps not now.
In the last 30 months, the question of the Rust Belt has been reframed to why, with a great workforce, cheap energy, good administrative talent, and a business-friendly administration, cannot the United States make more of what it needs? Why, if trade deficits are irrelevant, do Germany, China, Japan, and Mexico find them so unpleasant? If unfettered trade is so essential, why do so many of our enemies and friends insist that we almost alone trade “fairly,” while they trade freely and unfairly? Why do not Germany and China argue that their vast global account surpluses are largely irrelevant?
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) assured us that the world would be suffocating under greenhouse gases within 12 years. Doom-and-gloom prophecies of “peak” oil warned us that our oil reserves would dry up by the early 21st century. Former Vice President Al Gore warned us that our port cities would soon be underwater. Economists claimed Saudi Arabia or Russia would one day control the world by opening and closing their oil spigots. Not now.
Three million more barrels of American oil are being produced per day just since Trump took office. New pipelines will ensure that the United States is not just the world’s greatest producer of natural gas but perhaps its largest exporter as well.
Trump blew up those prognostications and replaced them with an optimistic agenda that the working- and middle classes deserve affordable energy, that the United States could produce fossil fuels more cleanly, wisely, and efficiently than the Middle East, and that ensuring increased energy could revive places in the United States that were supposedly fossilized and irrelevant. Normal is utilizing to the fullest extent a resource that can discourage military adventurism in the Middle East, provide jobs to the unemployed, and reduce the cost of living for the middle class; abnormal is listening to the progressive elite for whom spiking gasoline and power bills were a very minor nuisance.
Changing Roles
Open borders were our unspoken future. The best of the Chamber of Commerce Republicans felt that millions of illegal aliens might eventually break faith with the progressive party of entitlements; the worst of the open borders lot argued that cheap labor was more important than sovereignty and certainly more in their interests than any worry over the poor working classes of their own country. And so Republicans for the last 40 years joined progressives in ensuring that illegal immigration was mostly not measured, meritocratic, diverse, or lawful, but instead a means to serve a number of political agendas.
Most Americans demurred, but kept silent given the barrage of “racist,” “xenophobe,” and “nativist” cries that met any measured objection. Not so much now. Few any longer claim that the southern border is not being overrun, much less that allowing a non-diverse million illegal aliens in six months to flood into the United States without audit is proof that “diversity is our strength.”
The Republican Party’s prior role was to slow down the inevitable trajectory to European socialism, the end of American exceptionalism, and homogenized globalized culture. Losing nobly in national elections was one way of keeping one’s dignity, weepy wounded-fawn style, while the progressive historical arc kept bending to our collective future. Rolling one’s eyes on Sunday talk shows as a progressive outlined the next unhinged agenda was proof of tough resistance.
Like it or not, now lines are drawn. Trump so unhinged the Left that it finally tore off its occasional veneer of moderation, and showed us what progressives had in store for America.
On one side in 2020 is socialism, “Medicare for All,” wealth taxes, top income tax rates of 70 or 80 or 90 percent, a desire for a Supreme Court full of “wise Latinas” like Sonia Sotomayor, insidious curtailment of the First and Second Amendments, open borders, blanket amnesties, reparations, judges as progressive legislators, permissible infanticide, abolition of student debt, elimination of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement bureau and the Electoral College, voting rights for 16-year-olds and felons, and free college tuition.
On the other side is free-market capitalism but within a framework of fair rather than unfettered international trade, a smaller administrative state, less taxation and regulation, constitutionalist judges, more gas and oil, record low unemployment, 3-4 percent economic growth, and pressure on colleges to honor the Bill of Rights.
The New, New Normal
The choices are at least starker now. The strategy is not, as in 2008 and 2012, to offer a moderate slow-down of progressivism, but rather a complete repudiation of it.
One way is to see this as a collision between Trump, the proverbial bull, and the administrative state as a targeted precious china shop—with all the inevitable nihilistic mix-up of horns, hooves, and flying porcelain shards. But quite another is to conclude that what we recently used to think was abjectly abnormal twenty years ago had become not just “normal,” but so orthodoxly normal that even suggesting it was not was judged to be heretical and deserving of censure and worse.
The current normal correctives were denounced as abnormal—as if living in a sovereign state with secure borders, assuming that the law was enforced equally among all Americans, demanding that citizenship was something more than mere residence, and remembering that successful Americans, not their government, built their own businesses and lives is now somehow aberrant or perverse.
Trump’s political problem, then, may be that the accelerating aberration of 2009-2016 was of such magnitude that normalcy is now seen as sacrilege.
Weaponizing the IRS, unleashing the FBI to spy on political enemies and to plot the removal of an elected president, politicizing the CIA to help to warp U.S. politics, allying the Justice Department with the Democratic National Committee, and reducing FISA courts to rubber stamps for pursuing administration enemies became the new normal. Calling all that a near coup was abnormal.
Let us hope that most Americans still prefer the abnormal remedy to the normal pathology.
Unmasked?
Statistically, a gun is much less likely to be used in a crime than a senator.
*.*
Skorath the bloody, champion of the arena and chosen warrior of the Gygax empire was restless.
He paced around his chambers, his frost bear cloak swirling behind him, 9 foot of muscles and scar tissues wearing a furrow in the carpet with every lap.
His next opponent was the 'Florida man' of Earth, a tiny planet from the other side of the system, and it was completely unknown. Not capable of interstellar travel yet selected based on their exceptional levels of violence and propensity for war. At first Skorath had laughed, he, veteran a hundred fights, slayer of the beast of Xenor and wielder of the fabled prism hammer. He would sweep this earth man off the map....but now he was... Anxious.
His data tech perched on the edge of his seat, tablet in hand and typing furiously, but every answer his research of the earth internet brought up only worried Skorath more.
'what is an alligator tech?, and why would Florida man bringing it into a k-mart be of interest?'
'its a predator sir.... Responsible for over 9000 human deaths... Genetically it is almost perfect... No evolution in almost 100 million years'
'And he carried it with him to purchase beer?'
'yes sir, beer is very popular on earth sir, its a recreational poison that humans consume before doing dangerous activities, see here, 3 earth days later "Florida man drinks 14 pints of beer and then supplexes a theme park mascot"'
'they poison themselves to gain power???'
The tech typed a few more times then stopped his complexion pale..
'sir... I've just done the time conversion... Florida man... There are entries every day of each earth year.... In the last cycle alone he has been drunk 63 times, being arrested 90 times, shot 43 times, been involved with an alligator, snake or bear 27 times and screamed Murica a staggering 300 times'
Skorath sat down and his head dropped, for the first time in his life, he truly knew fear.
*.*
Coast Guard Mostly Saves Very Stupid People, Study Finds
WASHINGTON, DC — Nearly 83 percent of mariner rescues since 1960 involved unrelentingly stupid behaviors and/or people, according to a recent study by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Though the service treats all search and rescue situations equally, most on-scene commanders will privately admit that a majority of the time “it was just some dumb bastard with no concern for personal safety,” according to the study’s authors.
“These statistics are unthinkable,” said Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Carla Willmington. “Our service prides itself on response time, SAR organization, and comprehensive rescue pattern analysis. But it’s tough to stay on task when the bulk of these cases involve people paralyzed from the neck up. ”
The U. S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue report examined nearly all cases handled on inland and offshore waters from 1960 through 2018. Following the Federal Boating Act of 1971, increases in cases by “fucking idiots” and “goddamn morons” have been staggering, and very challenging to the service as it struggles to operate under a minimal budget.
Between 2010 and 2018, the most recent years studied, incidents involving “total assholery” increased from 10,687 to 98,335.
“I joined the Coast Guard because it seemed like we were the only military service operating even when we weren’t fighting in some war,” said Operations Spc. Bill Horvath, of Sector Humboldt Bay. “But then you realize we are at war, against an army of dipshits with boats.”
“I’ve seen some pretty stupid shit in my time,” said Willmington. “Why would a boater decide it’s a good idea to sail balls-first into a hurricane with zero lifejackets, zero flares, and apparently zero fucks? Why even make an effort for these people? I’m all for a Darwinian Search and Rescue Plan, if you follow me.”
*.*
Why do bananas need sunscreen?
Because they peel.
ba-dum-ch
*.*
It takes a sense of humor to work at a funeral home.
Once, two different families complained that their loved one had on the wrong suit.
Nobody ever realized I'd switched their heads.
Quote of the Times;
Culture war winners freely crack jokes. – Dinh
Link of the Times;
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapitated-worms-regrow-old-memories-along-with-new-heads-9497048/
Issue of the Times;
Pearl Harbor Unmasked by J. Alfred Powel
A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinson published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.
Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages of closely detailed reference notes. This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an “eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940 … by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.” Of course, it is unlikely that McCollum drafted it on his own initiative, but this is where Stinnett’s paper trail starts. “Its eight actions call for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region….” [p. 6-8; the memorandum is reproduced on 261-267]:
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Complete embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
As the plan unfolded its development was closely monitored through decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and naval radio communications. “McCollum oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941 and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw. The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports…. Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators…. Few people in America’s government or military knew as much about Japan’s activities and intentions as McCollum.”[8] Knowledge of the plan was closely held, limited to 13 Roosevelt administration members and chief military officers and 21 members of Naval Intelligence and related operations [listed in Appendix E 307-308]. Item C was already US policy when McCollum wrote his memo. Item F was set in motion on October 8, Items A, B and G on October 16, 1940, Item D and E by November 12, 1940. [Chap. 1 n. 8 p. 311-312; 120 ff. etc.].
Meanwhile, also in the fall of 1940, campaigning for a third term in Boston on October 30, President Roosevelt said: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1 in Brooklyn he said “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” At Rochester on the 2nd he said “Your national government … is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.” The same day in Buffalo he asserted “Your President says this country is not going to war,” and in Cleveland on the next he declared “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.” [William Henry Chamberlin, “How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton, 1953), Chapter Eight, p. 485-491].
Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, opposed Roosevelt’s orders [Item F] to station the fleet at Pearl Harbor as putting the fleet at risk, so he was replaced with Admiral Kimmel, with Admiral Anderson of ONI as Kimmel’s third in command at Pearl Harbor, to supervise the radio intercept operation there, unbeknownst to Kimmel. [10-14; 33-34] “Anderson was sent to Hawaii as an intelligence gatekeeper”[36]. When he arrived he established his personal housing well away from Pearl Harbor, out of range of the coming attack. Though he was commander of the seven battleships which bore the brunt of the attack with the loss of over two thousand lives, Admiral Anderson was safe at home on the other side of the mountain when the attack came. [36-37; 244, 247] Meanwhile, the commanders in Hawaii, “Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to the risks entailed in Roosevelt’s policy, but they obeyed his direct order of November 27 and 28, 1941: ‘The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.'” [6-8] Afterward, they were scape-goated.
In early January 1941 the Japanese decided that in the event of hostilities with the US they would commence with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of this plan on January 27 [30-32]. On July 21, 1941 Lieutenant Commander McCollum’s Item H lit the fuse. Up through late November the White House continued to block concerted attempts by Japanese diplomats to discuss an accommodation. [On this diplomatic history see Charles Beard , American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948); Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War (1951); and Charles Tansill, Back Door To War (1952).]
Beginning November 16, 1941, radio intercepts revealed the formation of the Japanese fleet near the Kurile Islands north of Japan and from November 26 through the first week of December tracked it across the Pacific to Hawaii [41-59 etc.]. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark (one of the 34 informed participants) ordered Kimmel to dispatch his aircraft carriers with a large escort fleet to deliver planes to Wake and Midway Islands. “On orders from Washington, Kimmel left his oldest vessels inside Pearl Harbor and sent twenty-one modern warships, including his two aircraft carriers, west toward Wake and Midway… With their departure the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly 27-year-old relics of World War I.” That is, the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor with their crews were employed as decoys [152-154]. On 22 November 1941, a week after the Japanese fleet began to assemble and four days before it sailed for Oahu, Admiral Ingersoll issued a “Vacant Sea” order that cleared its path of all shipping and on 25 November he ordered Kimmel to withdraw his ships patrolling the area from which the aerial attack would be staged [144-145]. FDR kept close tabs on the plot’s final unfolding while radio intercepts continued to track its voyage toward Hawaii [161-176].
Stinnett comments: “Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and its old dilapidated warships presented a mouth-watering target. But it was a major strategic mistake for the Empire. Japan’s 360 warplanes should have concentrated on Pearl Harbor’s massive oil stores … and destroyed the industrial capacity of the Navy’s dry docks, machine shops, and repair facilities”[249]. Six months later, at the battles of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and Midway (June 4-7), the warships of the Pacific Fleet which were at sea when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred permanently destroyed the offensive capacity of the Japanese Navy to operate in the eastern Pacific and permanently crippled its defensive capacity in the western Pacific. Thereafter, as informed observers understood, a Japanese attack or invasion of the West Coast of America was a total logistical impossibility. Nevertheless, two months later, the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens began in August 1942.
The Pearl Harbor coverup began immediately afterward with the court marshals of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, continued through eight Congressional investigations during and after the war, with the purging and withholding of documents and false testimony by participants and others [253-260 & passim; 309-310] and persisted through the Congressional hearings chaired by Strom Thurmond in 1995 [257-258]. At the date of publication (2000) numerous documents were still withheld from Stinnett or released in extensively censored form. But his case is conclusively proven on the basis of the evidence he presents, as any fair-minded reader can see. The only way to refute or debunk it would be to establish that his documentary evidence is forged, and prove it. In face of the character of this evidence, the idea is nonsensical.
A key break for Stinnett’s research was his discovery of duplicate copies of reports of Japanese naval code transmissions from the Pearl Harbor radio-intercept station routed after the war to the Belmont (California) National Archives, and still there long after the copies in the Washington, D.C. archive files had been disappeared. Recent writers pretending to debunk Stinnett’s evidence have resurrected claims that the Japanese naval codes had not been deciphered and that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence — claims that have been refuted repeatedly for decades. Famously, the radio operator of the American liner Mariposa intercepted repeated signals from the Japanese fleet steaming toward Hawaii and relayed its progressive bearings to the Navy. This was well-known during the war to American seamen of the Pacific merchant marine and is mentioned in published accounts.
The pretense that the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes had not been deciphered was first refuted in a federal court in Chicago in 1943. As her biographer Ralph G. Martin recounts, Cissy Patterson, managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald on December 7, 1941 (and for decades before and after) was opposed to American intervention in another world war — like over 80% of her fellow Americans, including her brother Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York News, and her cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Serving in France as a battlefield officer, Robert was wounded, twice gassed, and decorated for valor. His Chicago Tribune, like his cousins’ newspapers and numerous others, especially off the east coast, was vocally anti-interventionist — until Pearl Harbor.
In Cissy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979) Martin writes: “As the news of the disaster [at Pearl Harbor] kept coming in [to the Times-Herald’s newsroom], Cissy bitterly asked [her Sunday Editor] Roberts about Roosevelt, ‘Do you suppose he arranged this?’ Later when she learned that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, she was convinced that Roosevelt had known in advance that the Japanese intended to attack”[418]. “The Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and two dozen other papers later printed an article by a Tribune war correspondent which indicated that the United States had prevailed [at Midway] because the Japanese codes had been broken…. The Department of Justice decided to file charges that the Tribune and the Times-Herald had betrayed U.S. military secrets…. Attorney General Francis Biddle felt the disclosure of this breakthrough had been tantamount to treason because it gave the Japanese the chance to change their codes. Waldrop [Times-Herald editor] was called to Chicago to testify before a grand jury… In the middle of the testimony, the Navy disclosed that a Navy censor had passed the Tribune article. Forced to drop the case, Biddle said he ‘felt like a fool.'” [431-432] He wasn’t the only one.
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York, Free Press, 2000)
*.*
Skorath the bloody, champion of the arena and chosen warrior of the Gygax empire was restless.
He paced around his chambers, his frost bear cloak swirling behind him, 9 foot of muscles and scar tissues wearing a furrow in the carpet with every lap.
His next opponent was the 'Florida man' of Earth, a tiny planet from the other side of the system, and it was completely unknown. Not capable of interstellar travel yet selected based on their exceptional levels of violence and propensity for war. At first Skorath had laughed, he, veteran a hundred fights, slayer of the beast of Xenor and wielder of the fabled prism hammer. He would sweep this earth man off the map....but now he was... Anxious.
His data tech perched on the edge of his seat, tablet in hand and typing furiously, but every answer his research of the earth internet brought up only worried Skorath more.
'what is an alligator tech?, and why would Florida man bringing it into a k-mart be of interest?'
'its a predator sir.... Responsible for over 9000 human deaths... Genetically it is almost perfect... No evolution in almost 100 million years'
'And he carried it with him to purchase beer?'
'yes sir, beer is very popular on earth sir, its a recreational poison that humans consume before doing dangerous activities, see here, 3 earth days later "Florida man drinks 14 pints of beer and then supplexes a theme park mascot"'
'they poison themselves to gain power???'
The tech typed a few more times then stopped his complexion pale..
'sir... I've just done the time conversion... Florida man... There are entries every day of each earth year.... In the last cycle alone he has been drunk 63 times, being arrested 90 times, shot 43 times, been involved with an alligator, snake or bear 27 times and screamed Murica a staggering 300 times'
Skorath sat down and his head dropped, for the first time in his life, he truly knew fear.
*.*
Coast Guard Mostly Saves Very Stupid People, Study Finds
WASHINGTON, DC — Nearly 83 percent of mariner rescues since 1960 involved unrelentingly stupid behaviors and/or people, according to a recent study by the U.S. Coast Guard.
Though the service treats all search and rescue situations equally, most on-scene commanders will privately admit that a majority of the time “it was just some dumb bastard with no concern for personal safety,” according to the study’s authors.
“These statistics are unthinkable,” said Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Carla Willmington. “Our service prides itself on response time, SAR organization, and comprehensive rescue pattern analysis. But it’s tough to stay on task when the bulk of these cases involve people paralyzed from the neck up. ”
The U. S. Coast Guard Office of Search and Rescue report examined nearly all cases handled on inland and offshore waters from 1960 through 2018. Following the Federal Boating Act of 1971, increases in cases by “fucking idiots” and “goddamn morons” have been staggering, and very challenging to the service as it struggles to operate under a minimal budget.
Between 2010 and 2018, the most recent years studied, incidents involving “total assholery” increased from 10,687 to 98,335.
“I joined the Coast Guard because it seemed like we were the only military service operating even when we weren’t fighting in some war,” said Operations Spc. Bill Horvath, of Sector Humboldt Bay. “But then you realize we are at war, against an army of dipshits with boats.”
“I’ve seen some pretty stupid shit in my time,” said Willmington. “Why would a boater decide it’s a good idea to sail balls-first into a hurricane with zero lifejackets, zero flares, and apparently zero fucks? Why even make an effort for these people? I’m all for a Darwinian Search and Rescue Plan, if you follow me.”
*.*
Why do bananas need sunscreen?
Because they peel.
ba-dum-ch
*.*
It takes a sense of humor to work at a funeral home.
Once, two different families complained that their loved one had on the wrong suit.
Nobody ever realized I'd switched their heads.
Quote of the Times;
Culture war winners freely crack jokes. – Dinh
Link of the Times;
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/these-decapitated-worms-regrow-old-memories-along-with-new-heads-9497048/
Issue of the Times;
Pearl Harbor Unmasked by J. Alfred Powel
A Second World War Navy radioman turned journalist, Robert Stinnett was in the National Archives in Belmont, California, researching a campaign-year picture book on George Bush’s South Pacific wartime navy career in aerial reconnaissance — George Bush: His World War II Years (Washington, D.C., Brassey’s, 1992) — and encountered unindexed duplicate copies of Pearl Harbor radio intercept records of Japanese Navy code transmissions — documentary evidence of what actually happened at Pearl Harbor and how it came about. After eight years of further research and a prolonged case at law under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain partial release of these materials, Stinson published Day of Deceit (2000). A Japanese translation appeared within a year, understandably.
Stinnett demonstrates, on the basis of extensive incontrovertible factual evidence and self-evidently accurate analysis that President Roosevelt oversaw the contrivance and deployment of a closely-guarded secret plan to goad the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor and monitor them while they did it. Stinnett hypothesizes that Roosevelt did this in order to precipitate an unwilling American public into supporting intervention in the Second World War, but whatever the motives or purposes, the facts are now abundantly clear. Stinnett establishes and proves his case with voluminous documentary evidence, including forty-seven pages of Appendices presenting photographic reproductions of key official records, as well as numerous others reproduced in the body of the text, and 65 pages of closely detailed reference notes. This evidence proves Stinnett’s factual assertions, arguments and conclusions. His research files and notes are deposited at the Hoover Institute library at Stanford. Day of Deceit is exemplary documentary historiography. It presents the material testimony on which its analysis and conclusions are based. Its validity will be clear to any fair-minded reader. Stinnett’s book settles and resolves rational, candid, honest, fact-based discussion and debate about the background of the attack on Pearl Harbor.
As Stinnett shows, the plan that eventuated in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor was set in motion in early October 1940 based on an “eight-action memo, dated October 7, 1940 … by Lieutenant Commander Arthur H. McCollum, head of the Far East desk of the Office of Navy Intelligence.” Of course, it is unlikely that McCollum drafted it on his own initiative, but this is where Stinnett’s paper trail starts. “Its eight actions call for virtually inciting a Japanese attack on American ground, air, and naval forces in Hawaii, as well as on British and Dutch colonial outposts in the Pacific region….” [p. 6-8; the memorandum is reproduced on 261-267]:
A. Make an arrangement with Britain for use of British bases in the Pacific, particularly Singapore.
B. Make an arrangement with Holland for the use of base facilities and acquisition of supplies in the Dutch East Indies [now Indonesia].
C. Give all possible aid to the Chinese government of Chiang Kai-shek.
D. Send a division of long-range heavy cruisers to the Orient, Philippines, or Singapore.
E. Send two divisions of submarines to the Orient.
F. Keep the main strength of the US Fleet, now in the Pacific, in the vicinity of the Hawaiian islands.
G. Insist that the Dutch refuse to grant Japanese demands for undue economic concessions, particularly oil.
H. Complete embargo all trade with Japan, in collaboration with a similar embargo imposed by the British Empire.
As the plan unfolded its development was closely monitored through decoded intercepts of Japanese diplomatic and naval radio communications. “McCollum oversaw the routing of communications intelligence to FDR from early 1940 to December 7, 1941 and provided the President with intelligence reports on Japanese military and diplomatic strategy. Every intercepted and decoded Japanese military and diplomatic report destined for the White House went through the Far East Asia section of ONI, which he oversaw. The section served as a clearinghouse for all categories of intelligence reports…. Each report prepared by McCollum for the President was based on radio intercepts gathered and decoded by a worldwide network of American military cryptographers and radio intercept operators…. Few people in America’s government or military knew as much about Japan’s activities and intentions as McCollum.”[8] Knowledge of the plan was closely held, limited to 13 Roosevelt administration members and chief military officers and 21 members of Naval Intelligence and related operations [listed in Appendix E 307-308]. Item C was already US policy when McCollum wrote his memo. Item F was set in motion on October 8, Items A, B and G on October 16, 1940, Item D and E by November 12, 1940. [Chap. 1 n. 8 p. 311-312; 120 ff. etc.].
Meanwhile, also in the fall of 1940, campaigning for a third term in Boston on October 30, President Roosevelt said: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” On November 1 in Brooklyn he said “I am fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.” At Rochester on the 2nd he said “Your national government … is equally a government of peace — a government that intends to retain peace for the American people.” The same day in Buffalo he asserted “Your President says this country is not going to war,” and in Cleveland on the next he declared “The first purpose of our foreign policy is to keep our country out of war.” [William Henry Chamberlin, “How Franklin Roosevelt Lied America Into War,” in Harry Elmer Barnes, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace (Caldwell, Idaho, Caxton, 1953), Chapter Eight, p. 485-491].
Admiral Richardson, commander of the Pacific Fleet, opposed Roosevelt’s orders [Item F] to station the fleet at Pearl Harbor as putting the fleet at risk, so he was replaced with Admiral Kimmel, with Admiral Anderson of ONI as Kimmel’s third in command at Pearl Harbor, to supervise the radio intercept operation there, unbeknownst to Kimmel. [10-14; 33-34] “Anderson was sent to Hawaii as an intelligence gatekeeper”[36]. When he arrived he established his personal housing well away from Pearl Harbor, out of range of the coming attack. Though he was commander of the seven battleships which bore the brunt of the attack with the loss of over two thousand lives, Admiral Anderson was safe at home on the other side of the mountain when the attack came. [36-37; 244, 247] Meanwhile, the commanders in Hawaii, “Admiral Husband Kimmel and Lieutenant General Walter Short, were deprived of intelligence that might have made them more alert to the risks entailed in Roosevelt’s policy, but they obeyed his direct order of November 27 and 28, 1941: ‘The United States desires that Japan commit the first overt act.'” [6-8] Afterward, they were scape-goated.
In early January 1941 the Japanese decided that in the event of hostilities with the US they would commence with a surprise attack on Pearl Harbor. American intelligence learned of this plan on January 27 [30-32]. On July 21, 1941 Lieutenant Commander McCollum’s Item H lit the fuse. Up through late November the White House continued to block concerted attempts by Japanese diplomats to discuss an accommodation. [On this diplomatic history see Charles Beard , American Foreign Policy in the Making (1946) and President Roosevelt and the Coming of the War (1948); Frederic Rockwell Sanborn, Design For War (1951); and Charles Tansill, Back Door To War (1952).]
Beginning November 16, 1941, radio intercepts revealed the formation of the Japanese fleet near the Kurile Islands north of Japan and from November 26 through the first week of December tracked it across the Pacific to Hawaii [41-59 etc.]. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Stark (one of the 34 informed participants) ordered Kimmel to dispatch his aircraft carriers with a large escort fleet to deliver planes to Wake and Midway Islands. “On orders from Washington, Kimmel left his oldest vessels inside Pearl Harbor and sent twenty-one modern warships, including his two aircraft carriers, west toward Wake and Midway… With their departure the warships remaining in Pearl Harbor were mostly 27-year-old relics of World War I.” That is, the battleships sunk at Pearl Harbor with their crews were employed as decoys [152-154]. On 22 November 1941, a week after the Japanese fleet began to assemble and four days before it sailed for Oahu, Admiral Ingersoll issued a “Vacant Sea” order that cleared its path of all shipping and on 25 November he ordered Kimmel to withdraw his ships patrolling the area from which the aerial attack would be staged [144-145]. FDR kept close tabs on the plot’s final unfolding while radio intercepts continued to track its voyage toward Hawaii [161-176].
Stinnett comments: “Pearl Harbor’s Battleship Row and its old dilapidated warships presented a mouth-watering target. But it was a major strategic mistake for the Empire. Japan’s 360 warplanes should have concentrated on Pearl Harbor’s massive oil stores … and destroyed the industrial capacity of the Navy’s dry docks, machine shops, and repair facilities”[249]. Six months later, at the battles of Coral Sea (May 4-8, 1942) and Midway (June 4-7), the warships of the Pacific Fleet which were at sea when the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred permanently destroyed the offensive capacity of the Japanese Navy to operate in the eastern Pacific and permanently crippled its defensive capacity in the western Pacific. Thereafter, as informed observers understood, a Japanese attack or invasion of the West Coast of America was a total logistical impossibility. Nevertheless, two months later, the internment of West Coast Japanese American citizens began in August 1942.
The Pearl Harbor coverup began immediately afterward with the court marshals of Admiral Kimmel and General Short, continued through eight Congressional investigations during and after the war, with the purging and withholding of documents and false testimony by participants and others [253-260 & passim; 309-310] and persisted through the Congressional hearings chaired by Strom Thurmond in 1995 [257-258]. At the date of publication (2000) numerous documents were still withheld from Stinnett or released in extensively censored form. But his case is conclusively proven on the basis of the evidence he presents, as any fair-minded reader can see. The only way to refute or debunk it would be to establish that his documentary evidence is forged, and prove it. In face of the character of this evidence, the idea is nonsensical.
A key break for Stinnett’s research was his discovery of duplicate copies of reports of Japanese naval code transmissions from the Pearl Harbor radio-intercept station routed after the war to the Belmont (California) National Archives, and still there long after the copies in the Washington, D.C. archive files had been disappeared. Recent writers pretending to debunk Stinnett’s evidence have resurrected claims that the Japanese naval codes had not been deciphered and that the Japanese fleet maintained radio silence — claims that have been refuted repeatedly for decades. Famously, the radio operator of the American liner Mariposa intercepted repeated signals from the Japanese fleet steaming toward Hawaii and relayed its progressive bearings to the Navy. This was well-known during the war to American seamen of the Pacific merchant marine and is mentioned in published accounts.
The pretense that the Japanese naval and diplomatic codes had not been deciphered was first refuted in a federal court in Chicago in 1943. As her biographer Ralph G. Martin recounts, Cissy Patterson, managing editor of the Washington Times-Herald on December 7, 1941 (and for decades before and after) was opposed to American intervention in another world war — like over 80% of her fellow Americans, including her brother Joe Patterson, publisher of the New York News, and her cousin Robert McCormick, publisher of the Chicago Tribune. Serving in France as a battlefield officer, Robert was wounded, twice gassed, and decorated for valor. His Chicago Tribune, like his cousins’ newspapers and numerous others, especially off the east coast, was vocally anti-interventionist — until Pearl Harbor.
In Cissy (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1979) Martin writes: “As the news of the disaster [at Pearl Harbor] kept coming in [to the Times-Herald’s newsroom], Cissy bitterly asked [her Sunday Editor] Roberts about Roosevelt, ‘Do you suppose he arranged this?’ Later when she learned that American cryptographers had broken the Japanese codes before Pearl Harbor, she was convinced that Roosevelt had known in advance that the Japanese intended to attack”[418]. “The Chicago Tribune, the Times-Herald, and two dozen other papers later printed an article by a Tribune war correspondent which indicated that the United States had prevailed [at Midway] because the Japanese codes had been broken…. The Department of Justice decided to file charges that the Tribune and the Times-Herald had betrayed U.S. military secrets…. Attorney General Francis Biddle felt the disclosure of this breakthrough had been tantamount to treason because it gave the Japanese the chance to change their codes. Waldrop [Times-Herald editor] was called to Chicago to testify before a grand jury… In the middle of the testimony, the Navy disclosed that a Navy censor had passed the Tribune article. Forced to drop the case, Biddle said he ‘felt like a fool.'” [431-432] He wasn’t the only one.
Robert B. Stinnett, Day of Deceit: The Truth about FDR and Pearl Harbor (New York, Free Press, 2000)
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.