The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

In The Mailbox: 08.22.23

Posted on | August 23, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.22.23

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Back home on the mountain. Normal blogging will resume, with a double-scoop Rule 5 Sunday coming up this weekend. 

Silicon Valley delenda est.

How I started

OVER THE TRANSOM
EBL: Elon Musk should apologize to James Woods, Pope St. Pius X, Hurricane Hillary Dumps Heavy Rain On California and Nevada, How Would Walt Disney have responded to the new Snow White?, and Astrophysicist Brian May Loves Large Gravitational Bodies
Twitchy: Climate Scientist Explains How She’s Dealing With Extreme Climate Grief, “We Are DONE!”, and Gene Wu Stands Up For Fired Elementary School TeacherGroomer
Louder With Crowder: TikTok doesn’t want your kids to see this little man fixing cars and being productive
Vox Popoli: Smoking Their Own Supply, Cyberpunk: The Revival, The Opening of the African Front, Don’t Make it Harder, A Giant of the Internet is Gone, and Republicans for Human Sacrifice
Gab News: Charting A Course For A Christian Counteroffensive, 
Stoic Observations: Deadly Curiosity,

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
American Conservative: Biden’s ‘Equity’ at the Border, Nixon Now, and Fearful Worship of a Climate Idol
American Greatness: Report: Hunter Biden Secretly Traveled on Air Force Two to Foreign Countries at Least Eight Times While Joe was V.P., New Memos Debunk Democrats’ Biden-Ukraine Narrative, House Freedom Caucus Threatens Another Government Shutdown Over Border Crisis, and A Letter to Our Betters
American Thinker: The Decline and Fall of a Once Great Company, Barack Obama’s Gay Fantasies and the Gay Men in his Life, and Can Democrats Constitutionally End Trump’s Campaign?
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday, also, Animal’s Daily Urban Meltdown News
Babalu Blog: Cuban dictatorship’s sock puppet president to address the UN, Cuban government store distributing worm-infested rotten ham, Cuba reports 1.49 million tourists in 2023: 42% from Canada, 6% from USA, 5.8% from Russia, and The truth about communism
Baldilocks: Social Media Games Still Being Played, Memories Of The First Life (Part 3), 
BattleSwarm: Another Day, Another Criminal Out On Bond Shooting Cops, LinkSwarm For August 18, and Just How Does An IRS Agent Get Killed At A Federal Shooting Range?
Behind The Black: Russian engineers pinpoint approximate crash site of Luna-25, Space Force awards multi-satellite contracts to Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman, Proposed Las Vegas spaceport signs deal with launch startup, The very tip of a thousand-mile-long crack on Mars, Russia launches Progress freighter to ISS, and I will NOT wear a mask, part two
Cafe Hayek: A Powerful Weapon to Suppress China’s Military Might, also, Steven Koonin on Uncommon Knowledge
CDR Salamander: Keeping An Eye On The Long Game, Part XCVIII, Progress In WESTPAC, Just In Time, 
Chicago Boyz: The Unfortunate Balance, also, The Trans-National Pollution of Anti-Free-Speech Policies
Da Tech Guy: Five Under the Fedora Truths, The Easiest Way for Any Christian To Gain Admission to Hell Without Realizing It, Vivek Ramaswamy was absolutely correct when he spoke out against the tyranny of the minority, and Five Things to Consider if you want to run a Dynasty League
Dana Loesch: Sam Bankman-Fried Is Back In Jail, Part One – Will The Real Vivek Please Stand Up? and  Part Two – Will The Real Vivek Please Stand Up?
Don Surber: Listless? We Have A List, Ron, also, Ukraine Is Destroying Us
First Street Journal: Kendra Brooks fouls up, Killadelphia: We knew all along whom the Usual Suspects would blame!, and Kendra Brooks just can’t handle the truth!
Gates Of Vienna: The Claimed Muslim ‘Right to Rape’, Flemish Lives Matter, and “Twenty Years of Bad Policy”
The Geller Report:  WATCH: Joe Biden Falls Dead Asleep at Meeting With Devastated Victims of Maui Fires, also, “I Almost Lost My Cat”
Glenn Reynolds: Neurosis & The Curley Effect,
Hogewash: A Clue to the Origin of Magnetars, Living With What They Voted For, Team Kimberlin Post of the Day, and Near the Lunar South Pole
Hollywood In Toto: The X-Files: Fight the Future Captured Epic Series to Perfection, FundMyComic.com Offers Haven for Indie Comic Creators, Woke Mob Cancels Edinburgh Festival Fringe Comedy Event, and Carlos Mencia: ‘Your Feelings Are Not Protected in the Constitution’
The Lid: Raising Children To Kill—Then And Now, Whistleblower Puts DOJ On Blast After Biden Investigation Reporting, and It’s Up To Congress To Enforce The 14th Amendment
Legal Insurrection: Interactive Voyeurism, Feds Claim Key Mar-a-Lago Obstruction Witness Has Flipped On Trump, Biden Claims He Knows How Maui Fire Victims Feel by Talking About a Minor Fire at His House, Racially Discriminatory Youth Programs At Six Private NY Medical Schools Challenged by Equal Protection Project, U. Minnesota Offers Health Certificate Program for ‘Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children and Adolescents’, and Israel: Netanyahu Says Current Terror Wave Funded and Directed by Iran
Nebraska Energy Observer: Eleventh Sunday after Trinity, Vivek Ramaswamy; First Impression, and Because
Outkick: ‘College Football Is Ruined!’ Says CFB Legend Lou Holtz On OutKick Hot Mic, Now Yet Another MLB Team Is Threatening To Move Cities As White Sox Are Latest To Make Noise, Cris Collinsworth Says NBC Would Love To Have Every Dallas Cowboys Game On ‘Sunday Night Football’, Former Houston Basketball Player Dead At 23, Hailey Van Lith Officially Arrives At LSU After Giving Life To God During Baptism, Making Defenders Disappear In Quebec, and Nobody Has Looked Cooler Hitting An Inside The Park Homer Than Bryce Harper Against The Giants
Power Line: On Energy, Finally Some Good News, Biden afflicts the afflicted, and The Daily Chart: Supplying Racism
Shark Tank: Salazar Accuses Biden Of Allowing Cuba To Evade Sanctions
Shot In The Dark: Let Them Eat Paint, Settled Science, and Woke Defined
The Political Hat: Light Posting This Week
This Ain’t Hell: Veterans should keep military retirement pay and VA disability compensation, VA doctors prescribing marijuana?, The Bullying of America, Military Abortions? How many/who uses them, $ spent – no one knows, and Chicago community group requests that gangs refrain from shooting during the daytime
Transterrestrial Musings: The Empathy Of Joe BIden, Garland’s Theater Of The Absurd, and Merging Lanes
Victory Girls: Portland Schools: “Equitable Grading” Means No Failure Or Success, Republican Debate Drinking Game: The “Too Early For This” Edition, and Tucker and the Ukraine War Interview
Volokh Conspiracy: Excluding Farmer’s Market Vendor for Refusing to Host Same-Sex Weddings on Its Land Violates Free Exercise Clause
Watts Up With That: Bloomberg Finances and Coopts State Attorneys General, A Return to the Age of Sailing Ships: Nostalgia or Nonsense?, Bernie Sanders: Confronting Chinese Tyranny is Undermining Climate Cooperation, and California Tried but Failed to Have an Extreme Weather Disaster
The Federalist: How Racial And Sexual Ideology Rapidly Infiltrated Southern Methodist University, Hunter Biden Special Counsel Appointment Is A Blatant Act Of Corruption, Teach Your Daughter To Love Her Womanhood With These Body Literacy Resources, Thought Indicting Trump Was The Only Way The DOJ Interferes In Elections? Think Again, and Child Actors’ Shocking Confessions Should Be A Warning To Vlog-Obsessed Parents Profiting Off Their Kids
Mark Steyn: Live Around the Planet, Time for Love: Judy Garland, Vincente Minnelli and The Clock, Try to Remember, and The Voters vs the Party

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Category: Linkagery

A Smoking Gun, Next to a Bloody Corpse: Joe Biden Is Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

Posted on | August 22, 2023 | Comments Off on A Smoking Gun, Next to a Bloody Corpse: Joe Biden Is Guilty! Guilty! Guilty!

You know it’s bad for Joe Biden when (a) even Washington Post “fact-checkers” admit he’s lying and (b) CNN can’t ignore it anymore:

CNN host Jake Tapper admitted that former President Donald Trump “was right” during the 2020 presidential debates when he accused then-presidential candidate Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden of accepting large amounts of foreign money.

Now my buddy Matt Margolis at PJMedia is talking about the latest “smoking gun” confirming the quid pro quo of bribes from Burisma being the reason Joe Biden got a Ukraine prosecutor fired. Whenever I see that phrase now, I’m like “smoking gun”? How many more smoking guns do we need? We’ve already a giant pile of smoking guns, all of them covered with Joe Biden’s fingerprints. This is an open-and-shut case.

What Biden did — Joe Biden, not Hunter — was corrupt as hell, and every journalist in Washington knows he’s guilty. They’ve known it all along, but even now, with the evidence piled sky-high in broad daylight, they’re pretending that the story is about Republicans “pouncing” or “seizing,” i.e., their concern that Biden’s corruption could hurt Democrats.

The partisan double-standard in the media is the only thing keeping Biden in the White House at this point. Remember, Nancy Pelosi impeached Trump for making a telephone call asking Ukraine to investigate the Biden-Burisma connection — Trump’s impeachment was a cover-up of Biden’s corruption! Jake Tapper is not too stupid to understand this, which is obvious to anyone with two eyes and a functional brain. And yet, because he’s a partisan hack working for a dishonest network, Tapper has to pretend he doesn’t know it.

State Department Memos Disprove
the Cover Story Biden and the Democrats
Have Been Telling
About Ukraine’s Corruption

That’s Ace of Spades on the “smoking gun” story, but notice the word “disprove.” Everybody already knew Democrats were lying. Joe Biden openly bragged about getting the Ukraine prosecutor fired, and once we knew that Hunter had worked a deal with Burism, it was obvious why Joe intervened to protect Burisma. However, because Joe denied this — and made up a story bout the prosecutor being corrupt — the media played along, because Democrats always get the benefit of the doubt.

THE MEDIA ARE PART OF THE CORRUPTION!

America’s most prestigious journalistic organizations — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Associated Press, etc. — are so in the tank for Democrats that they didn’t even try to find the truth about Hunter Biden’s dealings in Ukraine, China and elsewhere. It wasn’t any of those big establishment outfits that found the “smoking gun,” it was John Solomon of Just the News, a mere website with a fraction of the news-gathering resources available to the New York Times or NBC News, etc.

Remember how those same media establishment outfits parroted the Biden campaign line that “The Laptop From Hell” was “Russian disinformation”? The media played an active role in the cover-up, and they’re still doing it! So for Jake Tapper to sit there and say, “Hey, you know something? Trump was right about Hunter Biden” just annoys the hell out of me, because JAKE ALWAYS KNEW TRUMP WAS RIGHT.

From the moment the New York Post broke the laptop story, there was never any reason to doubt its authenticity, and the only reason Tapper or anyone else in the media ever pretended otherwise is because they are “Democratic operatives with bylines.” They are fundamentally dishonest, producing partisan propaganda and pretending that it’s objective “news.”

And as for Joe Biden, he is GUILTY! GUILTY! GUILTY!



 

Category: CNN, Joe Biden

THEY’RE CANCELLING BIG BUTTS?

Posted on | August 22, 2023 | Comments Off on THEY’RE CANCELLING BIG BUTTS?

‘Ain’t no beauty queens in this locality …’

Great minds think alike, and so when word got out that “Fat Bottomed Girls” is omitted from an updated version of Queen’s Greatest Hits, Ed Driscoll asked if “Sir-Mix-a-Lot [will] be able to escape the PC police?”

I like big butts and I cannot lie.
You other brothers can’t deny,
When a girl walks in
With an itty-bitty waist
And a round thing in your face . . .

Yeah, you know what I mean. “My homeboys tried to warn me,” etc. When the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, most conservatives made fun of Bill Clinton for hitting on a fat girl, but I was like, “Hmmm.” As a fellow Southerner, I could relate. Down home, some of us ol’ boys don’t mind a little cushion for the pushin’, IYKWIMAITYD.

You can keep your gaunt European supermodels, give me a gal who looks like she knows how to cook some biscuits and gravy. So what’s wrong with these “woke” corporate types taking over the music business and cancelling one of the most fun songs from the classic rock era?

Are you gonna take me home tonight?
Oh, down beside that red firelight?
Are you gonna let it all hang out?
Fat bottomed girls,
You make the rocking world go ’round!

It makes no sense, when the same “woke” brigades are trying to push feminist “body positivity” messages, that they’d cancel “Fat Bottomed Girls.” I reckon the idea is that, anything that men enjoy is inherently wrong, so that a song featuring men celebrating the “greatest treasure” of corpulent women must be bad. Well, honey, don’t you worry about it. Just have another plate of biscuits and gravy . . .



 

Category: Rule 5

In The Mailbox: 08.21.23 (Lost Weekend Edition)

Posted on | August 21, 2023 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 08.21.23 (Lost Weekend Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Finally out of the VA hospital, where I spent a long weekend having my legs bandaged/unbandaged/rebandaged while having intravenous antibiotics pumped into me. Staying the night in Vegas before heading home tomorrow morning.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: PG&E Says All Your Batteries Are Belong To Us, also, Woman Kills Sex Offender Invading Her Home
EBL: You’re Off To See The Wizard, Sorry Maui ?, Biden and the Democrats Are Just Not That Into You, The Misfits, and Russian Lunar Lander Crashed: Ceased Operation
Twitchy: Biden Tells Hawaiians How His First Wife & Daughter Died, Adam Kinzinger Calls Tucker Carlson “Traitor To The U.S.”, “Praise Allah!”, and Biden’s Reception On Maui Explains Why WH Was Hesitant To Go
Louder With Crowder: “Egg producer” Megyn Kelly under fire for Rachel Levine attack but not backing down, Kid Rock busted crushing a Bud Light after he started the boycott, Bradley Cooper target of social media outrage over prosthetic nose he wears in Leonard Bernstein biopic, and Canceled! Queen classic “Fat Bottomed Girls” gets removed from new music app (Updated)
Vox Popoli: Stop Playing Stupid, No, They Haven’t Always Died, Professionally Anti-Trump, Then They Came for Wranglerstar, The US Housing Crash Cometh, and Reality Defeats the NATO Narrative
Gab News: Gab Responds To NZ’s Censorship Demand, 

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Baldilocks: Memories Of The First Life Part II, The Two Death Penalties, and That Time I Was Confronted By An Asian

CDR Salamander: Fullbore Friday, also, The Road To The Fall Of Kabul
Don Surber: Oops, They Truthed Themselves

Amazon Warehouse Deals




Category: Linkagery

How Am I Related to Pocahontas?

Posted on | August 21, 2023 | Comments Off on How Am I Related to Pocahontas?

My ancestor Colonel Robert Bolling

Having traced the ancestry of my paternal grandmother Perlonia McCain (née Bolt) all the way back to Rollo the Viking — seriously, that’s what the Internet says — my son Jefferson also took a look at the ancestry of my maternal grandfather, Hermit Eiland Kirby, whose father was William Thomas Kirby. His father, William Terry Kirby, was born in 1810 in Union County, South Carolina. His father, James Ransom Kirby, was born in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, in 1785; he lived past age 100 and died in Troup County, Georgia. James Ransom Kirby’s grandfather was John Kirby, born in Virginia in 1735. John Kirby married Jemima Bolling, whose great-grandfather was Colonel Robert Bolling, an early Virginia colonist prominent enough to have his own Wikipedia page.

Colonel Bolling’s first wife was Jane Rolfe, whose father, Thomas Rolfe, was the only child of John Rolfe and Pocahontas. If I were dishonest — like certain Democratic politicians — I might tell you I was a descendant of Pocahontas, but this is not the case. Jane Rolfe Bolling died in 1676 after giving birth to the couple’s only child, John Bolling. Colonel Bolling later remarried, this time to Anne Stith, who gave birth to seven children, including Stith Bolling, whose son Alexander Bolling was the father of Jemima Bolling Kirby. So while my ancestor was once married to the granddaughter of Pocahontas, I am not descended from her.

Nevertheless, the descendants of Pocahontas, through Colonel Bolling’s son John, are my cousins, a branch of the family known to genealogists as “the Red Bollings,” a lineage that includes Woodrow Wilson’s second wife Edith. My own branch, known as the “White Bollings,” includes Robert E. Lee’s wife, who was the great-granddaughter of Stith Bolling’s older brother, Robert Bolling Jr. All of this is pretty cool, but then I learned that another descendant of Colonel Robert Bolling is this guy . . .

Ain’t it a small world, cousin? Not kidding at all.

When I related these findings to my youngest daughter Reagan, she was indignant: “We’re cousins of both John McCain and George Bush? We’re getting nothing out of it! This nepotism thing isn’t working for us.”

No, but we’re still more Native American than Elizabeth Warren.



 

Category: Family, History

Music Cue: ‘Immigrant Song’

Posted on | August 20, 2023 | Comments Off on Music Cue: ‘Immigrant Song’

My ancestor, Rollo the Viking

Genealogy is fun, although I’m not entirely sure that online sources are reliable. At any rate, my son Jefferson texted me today about some of the research I’d done. It seems his girlfriend’s family can trace their ancestry to William the Conqueror, and here I’d gotten no further back than the Revolutionary War. But I conveyed to Jefferson some of what I had, and he got to work, tracing the ancestry of my grandmother Perlonia McCain (née Bolt) through the Eastwood line through the Thorpe family to the Robbins family of New Jersey and thus to the Potter family of Connecticut. Go back several generations in the Potter line in England and (according to the online records, at least) when you reach the 12th century, the family name is actually Poitiers. Could it be true that my distant ancestors were Norman crusaders who became rulers of Antioch?

That’s what the online genealogy says, anyway, and from these Norman crusaders the Poitiers, the line traces all the way back to Rollo (Hrólfr in Old Norse), the Viking warrior who conquered Normandy. And . . .

Wait a minute, William the Conqueror was also a descendant of Rollo, which means that my son’s girlfriend is a distant cousin! Forget “Immigrant Song.” This is more like “Dueling Banjos,” IYKWIMAITYD.



 

Category: Family, History

21st-Century Digital Stalinism

Posted on | August 19, 2023 | Comments Off on 21st-Century Digital Stalinism

BEFORE: Josef Stalin and Nikolai Yezhov, 1937

AFTER: Nikolai who?

Of all the sinister aspects of the Soviet Union — secret police, famine, mass murders — perhaps nothing was ultimately more frightening than the way the Communists literally erased history. After Trotsky was purged, Soviet propagandists began airbrushing the former Bolshevik leader from historic photographs, so that his role in the Russian revolution, and his leadership of the Red Army during the ensuing civil war, was made to disappear. It was this aspect of Stalinism — the absolute control of information, including the rewriting of history to suit the needs of the Communist leadership — that George Orwell depicted so memorably in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which envisioned a Soviet-style future in England. Our own Stalinist regime is now in charge:

A new report revealed Wikipedia’s permissive role in the concerted effort to protect President Joe Biden by blocking Americans from reading politically-negative information tied to his embattled son. According to data entries reviewed by independent journalist Lee Fang, Wikipedia allowed special consultants “hired” by Hunter Biden to manipulate the “Hunter Biden” page with “stealth edits.” Wikipedia, a site funded by leftist billionaire George Soros, seemingly stood idly by as entries tying Hunter to damning bribery scandals were edited “without any fingerprints.”
As reported by Fang, Hunter ordered FTI Consulting, a crisis management public relations firm, in 2014 to help him and his dad save face by keeping Americans from accessing the Bidens’ ties to shady business dealings on Wikipedia. In one email, Hunter advised Ryan Toohey, then an advisor at FTI, that Eric Schwerin, a business partner of the Bidens, would be making “additional edits.” According to Fang, “Toohey, emails from Hunter’s laptop show, confirmed that his company would get to work.”
According to Fang, Hunter also inexplicably pushed to delete the ties between the CIA and the National Endowment for Democracy, a company he worked for, highlighting instead his board memberships at non-profits. Shortly thereafter, countless anonymous users in Wikipedia followed suit and proceeded to “airbrush” negative references on Hunter’s page.

(Hat-tip: Ed Driscoll at Instapundit.) Even though I use Wikipedia frequently, I’ve noticed how the editors nowadays add “wokeness” wherever possible. Just the other day, for instance, I noticed that the biography of Zelda Fitzgerald — the Jazz Age socialite who married F. Scott Fitzgerald — has been updated to include all kinds of stuff about her father’s role in upholding white supremacy in Alabama. Given the place and time, and the fact that her father was a justice on the state Supreme Court, this isn’t very remarkable, but I suppose the Wikipedia editors want to “cancel” Zelda (for whom a road in Montgomery is named), the way Albany, N.Y., has canceled Philip Schuyler.

The Left’s rewriting of the past, however, is not confined to defaming the dead, but also in altering more recent facts, such as trying to erase the facts about Hunter Biden’s corrupt foreign dealings. It’s very Soviet-like — whatever the Party says is true, must become true, and if any fact should contradict the Party line, well, it will soon cease to be a fact.



 

Category: Joe Biden

On ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’

Posted on | August 19, 2023 | Comments Off on On ‘Rich Men North of Richmond’

After 10 days of reading endless commentary about Oliver Anthony’s viral hit “Rich Men North of Richmond,” I finally decided to watch the YouTube video and see for myself: Red-bearded young man with a muscular voice picking a Gretsch dobro and singing the blues about “what the world’s gotten to,” and how it feels to be “livin’ in the new world with an old soul.” Brother, don’t I know! Been feeling it all my life, but it’s my choice to play the clown, to act as if I’m undamaged and undaunted by the evil directed against me: “Never let ’em see you sweat.”

My four sons have each had their share of struggles, but you won’t find them complaining about it, because that’s not who we are. Victory requires no apology. Be a winner, and make it look easy, leaving others so mystified by your success as to make them envious. They weren’t even awake when you were burning the midnight oil, nor have they heard of your many failures — because you didn’t complain about them — and so they’re like Ferris Bueller’s sister: “What makes him so g–damn special? … Why does he get to ditch, when everyone else has to go?”

There’s a certain Stoic quality to this approach, which I consider an effective rebellion against a world in which everybody seems to be competing constantly in the Oppression Olympics. The victimhood mentality has so infused our culture that we consider people admirable only insofar as they have suffered, which is why Elizabeth Warren had to invent a fictitious “Native American” biography to justify her tenure at Harvard. Well, how about this: Fuck Harvard.

Fuck the entire Ivy League and everything it symbolizes, including its endless sermonizing about the glories of “diversity.”

When I first heard that the singer of “Rich Men North of Richmond” (whose real name is Christopher Anthony Lunsford) was from Farmville, Virginia, my eyes lit up in recognition. The town is about two-thirds of the way from Petersburg to Appomattox, and it was 10 miles east of Farmville, at the Battle of Sailor’s Creek, that Grant’s army pounced on two corps of Lee’s army, with nearly 8,000 Confederates killed, wounded or captured in a single stroke, just three days before the final surrender.

That bit of military history must be well-known to locals, and I’d bet money that Lunsford is, like me, a descendant of Confederate soldiers, conscious of his ancestry, and conflicted as to what duty requires in a world that has no sense of what duty even means — “livin’ in the new world with an old soul,” indeed. Just try to live an honest life, stay out of trouble, do the best you can for your family, and don’t lose your soul trying to keep up with the Joneses. We’re winning, baby.

His unexpected good fortune — more than 20 million YouTube views and a place atop all the music download sites — has not spoiled Lunsford. He wrote a long Facebook post explaining he’s turned down multimillion-dollar offers from the music industry because he doesn’t aspire to that kind of life. Because the Left has been trying to attack him personally — to sabotage his blue-collar reputation — Lunsford felt the need to explain how it is he owns acreage in Dinwiddie County: “In 2019, I paid $97,500 for the property and still owe about $60,000 on it. I am living in a 27′ camper with a tarp on the roof that I got off of craigslist for $750.” So there you go, lefties — satisfied now? In point of fact, Lunford’s status as a property owner is testimony to the continued vitality of the American Dream. A high-school dropout, by working blue-collar jobs and living a thrifty life, was able to become a land owner when he was only 27, an age at which a lot of college-educated kids are still living in crappy apartments and complaining about their student loan debts. How it must burn them up, all those sociology majors, to see this redneck boy catapulted to the top of the Spotify charts, and yet financially self-sufficient enough that he can say, “No, thanks,” to the record companies trying to sign him to multimillion-dollar deals. Winning, baby.

“Always mystify, mislead, and surprise the enemy, if possible; and when you strike and overcome him, never let up in the pursuit so long as your men have strength to follow; for an army routed, if hotly pursued, becomes panic-stricken, and can then be destroyed by half their number. The other rule is, never fight against heavy odds, if by any possible maneuvering you can hurl your own force on only a part, and that the weakest part, of your enemy and crush it. Such tactics will win every time, and a small army may thus destroy a large one in detail, and repeated victory will make it invincible.”
— Stonewall Jackson

How do we apply this tactical advice to our current situation? That’s the question we must ponder, as old souls living in the new world.



 

Category: Music
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