Glibertarians.com 2019 Archive

Author: Old Man With Candy

  • Saturday Morning Cartoon Show Links

    More irrelevant personal stuff: As we begin SP’s any my penultimate weekend in the northern reaches of Illinois, we have been gifted by Nature with a massive snowstorm. Normally, it’s something I’d welcome, but it’s certainly made lifting and carrying things a challenge. Worse yet, we were planning to break out SP’s World’s Best Fondue (and that’s not an exaggeration) for Swiss, and Swiss was planning to bring pizza to The Wonder Dog, cementing his place as her Favorite Human Ever.  But transport may be an issue… In any case, I gift you with another brilliant Krazy Kat, with a remarkably innovative use of the panel format.

    Normally, I start things out with birthdays, but this time, we do need to acknowledge the anniversary of an important historical event. What was the first Hollywood film lampooning Hitler? Was it Chaplin’s The Great Dictator? Something by Frank Capra? Nope, it was… You Nazty Spy!, a short by the genius trio of Moe, Larry, and Curly, released on this day in 1940.

    Now the birthdays, which today include the original James Watt (not the moron Reagan appointee); loser Robert E. Lee; proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner; writer, poet, and inspiration for my favorite football team, Edgar Allan Poe (and ask Spud about his visit to the Poe House in Baltimore); artery-clogger Paula Deen; the monumental Dolly Parton; one-eyed Katey Sagal; and SP’s favorite artist, Thomas Kinkade (/ducks for cover).

    On to the news, and there’s plenty of that as well.

     

    The amusement from the latest episode of Roadrunner and Coyote continues. And I’ll repeat the same thing I said about Obama, Bush, Clinton, Bush, et al: there’s so many REAL things to get pissed off about, why do people feel the need to make shit up?

     

    And speaking of Roadrunner and Coyote, the latest RBG rumors. Any day now!

     

    “Shutdown” Kabuki continues. There’s hints that Team Blue will be offered more boondoggles in exchange for Team Red’s pet boondoggle. And as usual, inevitably it will be taxpayers getting it up the poop chute. Nice month-long paid vacation for Federal leeches, of course.

     

    Murdering Chicago cop will be back among us in three years. And nothing else happened.

     

    In case you thought nutcase religious conspiracy theories were the exclusive province of Muslims and millennial Christians.

     

    Voter fraud is a made-up thing. Right?

     

    Never apologize. Never apologize. Never apologize. And if you do, at least say, “I am sorry for agreeing with Barack Obama at that time. Christ, what an asshole”

     

    Warty’ latest project. And that may not actually be a joke.

     

    This is supposed to be a joke. And, channeling my Inner Prog, it’s more sad and frightening than funny.

     

    More evidence that (((we))) are as stupid as the goyim.

     

    And speaking of stupid, here’s The Atlantic filling pages with the rantings of a lunatic hypochondriac and taking it Very Seriously.

     

    Oh, here’s more stupid. Perhaps we can have capital punishment for TV talking heads who mispronounce things. That will usher in a new era of racial justice.

     

    There is no escaping Old Guy Music. I’ve previously sung the praises of Lee Barber, an Austin-based singer/songwriter who has perhaps the most expressive voice (both figurative and literal) that I’ve ever heard. This might be my favorite song of his, an incredibly sad and beautiful lament about moving, which encapsulates my current emotions perfectly.

     

  • Sunday Morning Links from the Road

    Day 2 of The Great House Hunt. I’m trying to find one with a gila monster in the back yard that we can name Irving. So far, no success. Day 4 of struggling with this stupid MacBook. It appears to be winning. Fuck it, let’s dive right in.

    First, the customary birthdays. Guy on the $100,000 bill and the only Treasury secretary named after a fish, Salmon P. Chase; bridge specialist and Nobel winner Wilhelm Wien; Airplane! star Robert Stack; brilliant guitarist and incredibly nice guy Joe Pass; master of gimmicks and props Rip Taylor; tall baldie Richard Moll; pencil-neck with one foot out the door Rod Rosenstein; and our best vice president and president ever, Julia Louis-Dreyfus.

    And now the news.

    As we’ve been saying all along, the so-called shutdown is really a free vacation for largely useless tax leeches, since they’ll end up getting paid for the entire duration of not working. Which massively passed congress and which Trump has signed off on.  And unsurprisingly, Thomas Massie and Justin Amash are right there in the tiny group of principled objectors.

     

    Speaking of which, World’s Smallest Violin. Fuck off, slaver.

     

    Fake News is fake news. This might be the most meta story I’ve ever seen.

     

    All we need now is Robespierre and a few guillotines. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.

     

    Castro wants to be our Leader. And be joined by his brother. What could possibly go wrong?

     

    Christians say to Muslims, “Hold my beer!” And at least you know that the Muslims won’t drink any while they’re holding it.

     

    Proof again that petty outrage can direct anywhere. I love the poster on the podium, so very stylistically reminiscent of Chavez, Castro, or Maduro.

     

    Part of being presidential is getting Mazie Hirono, in competition for Dumbest Person in the Senate, to spew her usual stupidities. This is a sign that Tulsi Gabbard might actually be a viable candidate.

     

    This one is for Spudalicious. I love when the phrases “…and then the Internet lost its mind” or “…and then Twitter lost its mind” are used because, well, that starts with an incorrect assumption.

     

    This could certainly cause some flight delays.

     

    There’s a STEVE SMITH joke in here somewhere.

     

    I’m always amazed that bugnuttery seems to follow patterns.

     

     

    Old Guy Music is really old today. I’ll confess to a fascination with Hieronymus Kapsberger, and this piece may explain why. It really sounds remarkably modern despite dating back to the early 1600s.

  • Saturday Morning Desert Links

    My apologies for being mostly AWOL this week- I’m serving as the scouting party in Arizona, trying to find the Child Bride, the Wonder Dog, and me a place to live. And spending a couple days on-site at my new job. Worse yet, they issued me a shiny new laptop which is a MacBook Pro, and using it has been a wrestling match where my opponent is covered in an amazing low-friction substance. I deeply and sincerely hate this thing. But I’ll try to post links anyway. Because there’s some good stuff out there.

    And some auspicious birthdays, including deep political thinker Edmund Burke; classic American writer Jack London; actual Nazi and all-around fun guy Hermann Goering; cowboy and patriarch Tex Ritter; donut and coffee mogul Tim Horton; magician Kreskin, nee George Kresge; living proof that stupidity, malice, and corruption can take you a long way Sheila Jackson Lee; professional gasbag and Team Red flak Rush Limbaugh; professional gasbag and very tall person Howard Stern; and a guy who is about the find out the meaning of “half” Jeff Bezos.

    Coming up next, the news.

    If Trump continues to back off his pledge to stop intervening in the Middle East, there’s a Team Blue candidate for president who might actually get my vote if she ever got nominated. Which she won’t, since Team Blue activists hate her. She spouts all of the Team Blue stupidity, but has ending the wars as her centerpiece. Well, I can always hope for a chance to vote for McAfee.

     

    But the question is, “Are we or aren’t we?”  The story says we are, but quotes a Pentagon flack as saying that no-one has actually left. Fog of war?

     

    “Failure” is a relative term. Some of us would call it “a good start, now let’s broaden it.”

     

    I blame Global Warming.

     

    And yet more Global Warming. Say, whatever happened to that Polar Vortex shit?

     

    Speaking of Exodus, this seems oddly familiar…

     

    The Yellow Vest stuff is amusingly stupid, but like Gabbard, sometimes they have a great idea which more than makes up for the rest.

     

    Trademark battles are often amusing. “We’re not the People’s Front of Judea, we’re the Judean Peoples’ Front!”

     

    We have created a Fourth Wave feminist!

     

    Beer It Forward hits a snag.

     

    We may be able to guess what happened to this lady’s cat.

     

     

    Old Guy Music today features a sentimental favorite of mine, the great Clifford Brown, who sadly, I never got to see live. But at least I saw most of the rest of these guys at various times. The fiery trumpet solo here is just… well… let’s just say they don’t make players like this any more. And as usual Harold Land, Max Roach, and Ritchie Powell do more than just keep up.

     

  • Jewsday Tuesday: A Field Guide to Team Blue Anti-semitism

    Disclaimer: there’s a lot of Israel stuff in here- do NOT take that as meaning I support any sort of US involvement there, but I selfishly admit that it is the only spot on Earth that would accept me as a citizen, other than the US. And it’s absolutely no libertarian paradise, but in the context of the region, it’s Libertopia. So I admit some bias, but I’m an American, not an Israeli.

    I love field guides. I use them for mushroom hunting, and there’s similar ones for birding, rock collecting, and other flavors of nature observation. So it’s well past due to start assembling a guide to spotting anti-semites. And since the world has turned upside down recently, with Leftists now being pro-war McCarthyites, I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that anti-semitism has become much more of a Team Blue phenomenon. So I think there’s a need to help in both identifying species and also warn against false identifications. Like any good field guide, I’ve tried to pack this with photos.

    First, we need to look at the things that can bring down anti-semitism charges that are misidentification. For example, politicians and candidates have suffered accusations of anti-semitism because they attacked Jewish donors to political parties. Call out Sheldon Adelson (who actually is a statist toad) and you’ll hear yelping. Going the other way, attack Tom Steyer or George Soros and ditto. So we need to be careful to see the bullshit here. Likewise, political candidates who portray their Jewish opponents (especially incumbents) clutching tax money can expect a call from the ADL. But grabbing and using taxpayer money or big donations and payoffs ARE legitimate things to attack an opponent about. These anti-semitism accusations are dishonest. So how can we identify the real thing?

    It’s hard because of verbal camouflage. Many Team Blue politicians and activists like to recite the mantra, “I’m not an anti-semite, I just oppose Israel because of their oppression of Palestinians and failure to give them an independent state.” Now, perhaps in some cases, this could be true. In other cases, it’s a nod-and-wink. How can one distinguish this honestly?

    There’s a relatively simple way- if you care about oppression (and I think the idea of Israeli “oppression” is rather arguable, but let’s assume it arguendo), then you’ll be speaking up about Israel, you’ll be speaking up about Turkey, Iraq, and Syria’s oppression of Kurds and failure to give them a state, you’ll be speaking up about China and its oppression of Tibetans and Uighurs and failure to give them a state, you’ll be speaking up about Russia and its oppression of Chechens and failure to give them a state, you’ll be speaking up about Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, and Syria’s oppression of Palestinians and failure to give them a state (both now and pre-June 1967)… and of course, you speak out against the Palestinian Arab policy of capital punishment for selling real estate to Jews (not to mention their capital punishment for converting from Islam or being gay).

    But if the only thing you’re speaking up about is Israel, and you’re silent (or nearly so) on the rest, I think it’s safe to conclude that you’re an anti-semite, and that your pro-Palestinian Arab stances are outrages of convenience. So assume anyone called out in this Guide has been exclusive in their hatred for Israel, and one can reasonably conclude that hatred of Jews is the common factor.

     

    If you use terms like “apartheid,” that’s usually a clue, though it’s possible that you just don’t know what that word means (and choose to ignore the above-mentioned Palestinian Arab policies). If you clearly do and you use it to sell books, you’re an anti-semite.

     

    If you oppose US government loan guarantees and military aid to Israel, believe that the US should not have any military involvement or obligations there that aren’t defense of the US, and that’s part of an overall view that the US shouldn’t be doing those things anywhere, well, if that makes you anti-semitic, then I’m anti-semitic. If on the other hand you oppose these in Israel’s case, but make no mention of the same stupid waste of tax money elsewhere, well, good on ya, Adolph, we know what you are.

     

    If you like to say that US involvement in Middle East wars is at the behest of the Jews, then you’re a poster boy for Stormfront. Well, OK, this is mostly Team Red revanchists. But I had to throw that in to be fair. And a bit of searching would likely come up with Team Blue players promoting those same tropes.

     

    If you attend a church for 20 years where the minister regularly preaches these sort of anti-semitic tropes, call him your mentor, and hang out with virulent Jew-haters, you’re an anti-semite.

     

    If you start riots against Jews leading to actual deaths, you’re probably an anti-semite.

     

    Hank Johnson is an interesting case. He makes anti-Jew pronouncements, but is it because he’s anti-semitic or because he’s profoundly stupid?

    “There has been a steady [stream], almost like termites can get into a residence and eat before you know that you’ve been eaten up and you fall in on yourself.”

    If you ban Jewish symbols from your marches, but Islamic and Christian symbols are A-OK, I think the presumption of anti-semitism is not unreasonable.

     

    If your idea of a fun media event is to blot Israel off the map, yeah, you’re anti-semitic. Add in the age-old “dual loyalty” accusation, while claiming to be a voice for Arabs living in the West Bank and the sighting is confirmed. 


     

     

    Bonus Link: Larry Miller’s extremely witty recent history of Israel. It’s almost two decades old now, but is just as funny and current as it was when it was written.

  • Sunday Morning Links On The Move

     

    SP bitched last night about packing and moving, so I’ll just spare you more kvetching by saying “Ditto!” But be assured that I will take a pause today to watch the Baltimore Ravens beat the quasi-San-Diego Chargers. And cringe when Lamar Jackson gets interviewed- let’s just say that he’s unlikely to follow Tony Romo into the broadcast booth. Well, he’s being paid to be an exciting player, not an articulate spokesman. And damn, he is an exciting player.

    Birthdays of note today include Heinrich Schliemann (who, as I dig though our possessions for packing, has become my spirit animal); proto-cowboy star Tom Mix; a famous physician I’ve never heard of, but who had the delightful cognomen Helmut Poppendick; actor/comedian and true humanitarian Danny Thomas; gassy guru Alan Watts; the guy who taught me that “grampus” means “orca” and that “eria” means “silkworm” Eugene Maleska; banjo god Earl Scruggs; and global warming rationalist Bjorn Lomborg.

     

    On to the news.

     

    They’re baaaaack. And their demands are just as consistent and logical as Occupy Wall Street. But it is a good way to pick up girls, I suppose.

     

    Brexit really needs a better spokesman than this.

     

    Apparently, if I ever get elected to Congress, I’ll be able to wear a yarmulke. And ironically it will be because of deference to Jew-haters. It does strike me as weird that headgear must be religious- would my Baltimore Ravens cap qualify?

     

    Quote of the day: “You like the Vatican, Nancy?”

     

    Team Blue honors the spirit of pointless symbolism. I wonder if Team Red did the same stupid sorts of things, and I’ll guess they did, but the article is silent about that.

     

    Gee, this couldn’t POSSIBLY be a money-grab, right? The ADA is Poppy Bush’s continuing “fuck you” to the US.

     

    If you can’t find something #metoo to be outraged about, you just have to dig deeper. And here’s more appropriate music for that story.

     

    I can’t remember, are Hungarians considered Slavs? Or are Magyars sui generis?

     

    “Hey Rocky, watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!” “That trick never works.” “This time, for sure!”

     

    Not exactly a “man bites dog” story, but close.

     

    This was probably covered while I was gone, but it’s new to ME, at least. I hope Chairman Kaga uses this for a theme ingredient. As someone who has traveled extensively in my career, I have to say that Japan was the only place where the more time I spent there, the less I felt I understood it.

     

    An astonishingly sensible article in the NYT. And it hits all the reasons I still use an iPhone 8 and have no intentions of upgrading. The sort of quantum leap thinking that Jobs could do has been lost on the current generation of management there.

     

    I… just… can’t… even. Is this a thing here in the US as well?

     

    Old Guy music, as expected. We did an Iris DeMent song yesterday, so it’s only appropriate to bookend that with Greg Brown.

     

  • Saturday Morning Links, Fresh From My Mother’s Basement

    Sorry to have been scarce recently- just finished my last few days of work at Megacorp. One consequence of leaving was having to turn in both of my company-issued laptop computers, so for the moment, I have to post from a desktop computer in the basement, and consequently I have become a stereotype. O tempora! O mores!

    This, of course, will not prevent me from posting my usual weekend links, for better or for worse.

    And as is my custom, I’ll start with memorable birthdays on this, the fifth day of January. And those include group theorist Camille Jordan; notorious psychic Jeane Dixon; ubermensch and Tarleton twin George Reeves; the better of the two Reagan wives, Jane Wyman; brilliant actor Robert Duvall; brainless erstwhile hottie Diane Keaton; and one half of Americana power couple Iris DeMent.

    On to today’s news.

     

    Labor participation and unemployment setting more new records. Minorities hardest hit.

     

    The battle between Team Red and Team Blue to see whose boondoggles will prevail continues apace. The Old Man predicts the inevitable compromise: we’ll get both Blue and Red money-pits.

     

    So wait, that whole TSA “strike” panic was Fake News to exaggerate the effects of the government “shutdown”? Of course, it’s hard to judge between two competing lying liars, CNN and TSA management. And either way, I’m unlikely to get my wish of massive cuts at that largely useless agency.

     

    OMG OMG, TRUMP SAID “FUCK” IN A PRIVATE MEETING!!!!!!

     

    Not enough, but it’s a good start, anyway.

     

    From my soon-to-be home state, one of the creepiest things I’ve read about. I think Arizona Man may be giving Florida Man a run for his money.

     

    And let’s not leave Arizona Woman out. To be fair, she WAS from Florida.

     

    Louisiana is still a tough competitor, though. But I’m going with Arizona for the win, with Florida to place, and Louisiana to show.

     

    We’re all familiar with SWATTING, but this may be going a bit far.

     

    Think this is a dodge to try to get out of liability lawsuits? Perish the thought!

     

    Team Red makes a useless gesture.

     

    Team Blue says, “Hold mah beer!” And for whatever reason, people still pay attention to Occasional Cortex’s historically ignorant brain lint. No idea why any of this is taken seriously, but I guess people need a bogeyman.

     

    Oh wait, another useless gesture, complete with “journalist” panic.

     

    And Old Guy Music, featuring birthday girl Iris DeMent, showing more than a bit of her country side. What a voice and what songwriting talent! If more country music sounded like this, I’d listen to more country music.

  • Jewsday Tuesday: Fake New Year

    Because of the serial weekly reading of sedrahs from the Torah, sometimes the timing gets a bit weird. I mean, here we are in the dead of winter, just finishing the goyish New Year’s, and the reading this week is the Moses origin story, which really belongs in springtime when Pesach rolls around. I blame Trump.

    In any case, this week’s sedrah is euphoniously called Parshot Shemot (or Shemos if you’re old-school Ashkenazi). And action-packed it certainly is- this isn’t one of those sedrahs that’s stuffed with arcane legalistics, there’s shit happening. And most of it is Moses’s pre-bugout stuff. It’s the first sedrah in Shemot, aka Exodus, and I will note that “Shemot” means “names.” The Jew names for the books of the Torah are generally taken from the first significant words in the book, which in this case are “v’ayleh shemot.” Now, you might ask, why didn’t we call the book “V’ayleh”? Because that means “and these are…” which isn’t as cool as “names.” Anyway, the referred-to names are the guys from Joseph’s family who came over to Egypt (which we Jews laughingly call “Mitzrayim”) during the good years there: Reuven, Levi, Simeon, Judah, Issachar, Zebulon, Benjamin, Dan, Naftali, Asher, Gad, and Rudolph, who had a BIG red nose and guided his brethren on the right path to get to Egypt.

    Most of the story of Shemot will be familiar to anyone who has seen The Ten Commandments, so rather than rehash the stories of Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner, I’ll point out a couple bits that didn’t make it onto the silver screen. We all know that the Pharaoh died and the new Pharaoh didn’t like Jews very much. Interestingly, his objection (if you believe the Torah) was that the Jews outnumbered the Egyptians. Now unless the Jews were even more prolific than rabbits, this claim seems a bit dubious. But it’s in the Bible, so it has to be true, right? The Pharaoh then did what any good politician would- noting that if you subsidize something, you get more of it, and if you tax something, you get less of it, he levied (pun!) a tax on the Jews, and created the Egyptian version of the IRS as an enforcement mechanism. Apparently, this was insufficient, so the Egyptians enslaved the Jews. You might ask yourself, “How does this make sense? If the Jews outnumbered the Egyptians and were more powerful, how could they be enslaved?” And you’re going to Hell for even asking that question. The answer is not explicitly given, but my hypothesis is that the Egyptian Jews, like American Jews, tended to be strongly progressive. So they succumbed to guilt, totally unable to bring themselves to resist an onslaught from Egyptian shvartzes.

    The Pharisees, of course, did their usual tortured logic to explain things- using some remarkable reasoning, they deduced that every Jew lady had 12 kids. I’m not even going to try to walk through this, it’s as stupid as 9 lawyers in black dresses deciding that raising wheat for your own family falls under the interstate commerce clause of the constitution. I’ll go with my Progressive theory.

    Another bit that didn’t make it into the DeMille epic was Yahweh equipping Moses with miracle stuff to prove he was on a mission from God. Yeah, the movie showed the old staff-into-snake sleight of hand, but in the original, Moses’s miracle was putting his hand into his shirt, then pulling it out to show that he suddenly had a major case of leprosy. Once the gross-out sunk in, he would then put his hand back into the shirt and pull it out, now un-diseased. This was a cool enough trick that Moses was a winner in Penn & Teller’s Fool Me, and got him the Vegas invite.

    Of course, the movie DID have the whole Burning Bush thing, but… really, in the universe of miracles, that was a pretty low grade one.

    Another bit that kind of glided by in the movie was Yahweh’s direction for the Jews to loot Egypt on their way out.

    Each woman shall borrow from her neighbor and from the dweller in her house silver and gold objects and garments, and these you shall put on your sons and on your daughters, and you shall empty out Egypt.

    Reparations! I’m getting a bit more sympathetic to Pharaoh.

    Yahweh, as usual, continues to be an asshole. As Moses and his family head back to Egypt to confront Pharaoh, Yahweh inexplicably tries to kill Moses, apparently because he hadn’t cut off the end of Junior’s wee-wee. Mrs. Moses does so, throws the bloody tip at Yahweh, and that’s the last we ever hear about this unfortunate incident.

    Jews are strange. But you know the rest of the story, lots of heart-hardening and then Plagues. But those come next week.

    I’ll wind this up with a passage from the Haftorah. Reminder: the Haftorah is a reading from the later books that somehow is supposed to relate to the Torah portion. Confusingly, the Sephardic and Ashkenazi Jews have different Haftorah selections each week. This is from the Ashkenazi one:

    Woe is to the crown of the pride of the drunkards of Ephraim and the young fruit of an inferior fig is the position of his glory, which is at the end of a valley of fatness, crushed by wine…These, too, erred because of wine and strayed because of strong wine; priest and prophet erred because of strong wine, they became corrupt because of wine; they went astray because of strong wine, they erred against the seer, they caused justice to stumble.

    For all tables were filled with vomit and ordure, without place.

    Pretty much describes our New Year’s Eve.