Month: March 2018

Make Shooters Nicer, Saner, Add More Guns,

Saturday Rate of Exchange:
Trump Thumped

from Raymond

This week’s exchange happens off campus.

Vladimir Putin announces development of a new nuclear über-missile. He exhibits crude video, borrowed from earlier decades, that implicitly threatens the United States.

President Trump responds, the next morning on Twitter, with an angry attack on … a television comedian.

Alec bumps Trump:

Then stomps:

In all fairness, credit should be given to Dick Cavett a few weeks ago:

Have a safe, peaceful, non-nuclear weekend.

Trumped Out, Robbery Ain’t Burglary, and Willie the Dishwasher

found online by Raymond

 
From Bill Formby at MadMikesAmerica:

Look, I know that everyone in this country is not a cop or a criminal justice junkie but there are certain people who do certain things, that they should understand certain things. For example. if you lay your phone down at a fast food restaurant while you go get a refill on your drink and you come back and it is gone, well, yes you are stupid, but that’s not my point. My point is that you don’t call the police and tell them you have just been robbed. Why? Because there was no damned robbery.

See it is like this. Terminology in the world of cops and robbers is really important. Robbery must involve either force or a threat of force which actually makes it a violent crime as much as it is a property crime. Police tend to react somewhat differently to your complaint of “I have just been robbed” then they would if you called them and said I was an idiot and left my phone on the table and someone stole it.

Granted, it seems to be the same to you, but not to a police officer. To the police officer, someone has just forcefully taken your phone from you or threatened to do you serious bodily harm if you did not give them your phone.

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Liar of Unknown Origin

found online by Raymond

 
From driftglass:

As of this writing, “thots-n-prayers” is the undisputed king of hollow virtue-signaling about the predictable atrocities that mass-murder their way into the headlines every week. But coming in a strong second in the media’s lexicon of platitudinous synonyms for “We need to feign concern for [insert tragedy here] even though were damn sure never going to do a damn thing about it” are the inevitable calls for various “National Conversations” (from the NYT in 2016):

The term has become the sad equivalent of the jolly drinking axiom: It’s always national-conversation time somewhere. Whenever the mood around an issue ought to change — guns, policing, marriage, the Oscars — somebody will say we need to talk about it. We should be sitting around and figuring this thing out. We need to have “real,” “substantive,” “difficult” exchanges — about our personal biases, about our bad policies — that reach far and go deep. “It’s time for a national conversation” about mental health, retirement savings, drones.

Well thanks to Donald Trump and Republican Party, we are now having … something. It’s not a national conversation exactly, but you and I have been given front row seats to the collapse of the Republican Party. And in the wild fratricidal light of the death throes of the Party of Trump, if you look carefully, you will find the keys to understanding the media’s radical avoidance of any national conversation about anything of substance.

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GOP Candidate’s Brother Donated to Tammy Baldwin

found online by Raymond

 
From Wisconsin conservative James Wigderson:

The Hill is reporting U.S. Senate candidate Kevin Nicholson’s brother Scott has donated to the campaign of U.S. Senator Tammy Baldwin, the Democrat who is running for re-election. Kevin Nicholson is hoping to win the Republican nomination in the August primary to take on Baldwin in the November election.

“Nicholson’s brother Scott donated the maximum $2,700 for the primary to Baldwin’s campaign on Dec. 31, according to Federal Elections Commission documents,” The Hill reported Monday. “Scott Nicholson was a registered Democrat in New York in 2016, according to voter registration data. He did not return a request for comment.”

This is the second donation to Baldwin by Nicholson’s family since he declared his candidacy

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On Pa-troll

found online by Raymond

 
From Infidel753:

What I’ve learned from experience is that trying to reason with psychos does not work. Trying to debate them does not work. Telling them to go away and leave you alone does not work. Their whole purpose is to get a rise out of you. If you give them any sort of reaction at all, especially if you’re spending substantial time and energy on them and/or getting angry and frustrated, you’re feeding them. And they will not go away.

So I give them nothing. I delete their comments in moderation, I don’t reply to them, I don’t answer their e-mails, I don’t write cryptic-sounding posts obliquely referring to them, I don’t give them any response at all. Once I get their schtick, I don’t even bother to read their comments before deleting. Eventually, un-fed, they go away.

I’ve seen what happens on other blogs when bloggers don’t get this.

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The Bravest President


 
—
There is no way Teddy should have come out alive.

San Juan Hill has become almost cartoonish in our historical imagination. The invasion itself is jeered at as a template for international imperialism, a model for every instance of American intervention. Theodore Roosevelt himself is sometimes portrayed as a borderline comedic figure.

None of that matters.

Military figures, those who actually serve on the battlefield, are regarded with a sort of awe by the rest of us, those of us who, because of circumstance, or luck, or connivance, have never seen combat.

It was by a strange combination of coincidences that a future President survived.

A nearby brigade was commanded by 4 senior officers within 10 minutes, as one after another was killed or carried away with life-threatening wounds.

Four commanding officers in 10 minutes.

American troops fully expected to meet an overwhelming force of thousands of Spanish troops as they charged toward the top of San Juan Hill. They had no way of knowing that 10,000 Spanish troops had been diverted, stationed as reserves in the city of Santiago de Cuba about a mile away. Nobody knows why General Arsenio Linares ordered them held back, away from battle.

So, instead of 10,000 enemy troops, Americans encountered fewer than 800. Most of those turned out to be inexperienced conscripts, newly drafted into battle.

American troops expected heavy fire from the big guns behind concealed Spanish fortresses. They had no way of knowing that those fixed fortifications were not laid out according to any military strategy. Instead, they were aligned in whatever direction geography made convenient. So heavy artillery could not be directed at the oncoming, completely vulnerable, Americans.

The central role of thousands of African American soldiers, and the loss of hundreds in battle, was nearly lost to history. And the point at which Roosevelt went from Kettle Hill to San Juan Heights is still uncertain.

What we do know for sure is that Colonel Theodore Roosevelt led troops into what they had to have thought was near certain death.

Quite a fellow, that Teddy Roosevelt.

Nobody knows what fueled the inner fire that led Roosevelt to physical bravery. The popular speculation was that he lived his life reacting to, and overcoming, the limitations of a sickly childhood. He had been stricken with such severe asthma that it had not been certain he would even survive into adulthood. He found his condition intolerable, and he overcame it with a combination of strenuous exertion and sheer willpower.

He was brave and powerful because he knew no other way to lead a life that he could tolerate.

Some have attempted to peer into the psyche of John F. Kennedy, speculating about what could have driven him into wartime danger. Like Roosevelt, it may have been a childhood of frailty. He was born pounds below a safe and healthy weight. He was stricken with one serious illness after another. At age three, deadly scarlet fever nearly killed him. A grim family joke came to be. If a mosquito bit young Jack, the mosquito would die.
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