In The Mailbox: 10.12.21 (Evening Edition)

Posted on | October 13, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.12.21 (Evening Edition)

As you may have noticed, we’ve added counterjihad site Gates of Vienna to our list of blogs, and Jeff Goldstein has picked up the gauntlet again at Protein Wisdom after getting the boot from Twitter.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Ereshkigal from Fate/Grand Carnival as shown in Newtype magazine.

OVER THE TRANSOM
357 Magnum: The Rise Of The Australian Police State
Red Pilled Jew: Creating A Preference Tsunami
EBL: It’s “Saint” Matthew Shepard Day
Twitchy: CNN – American & Southwest Airlines Say Biden’s Vaccine Mandate Supersedes Conflicting Texas Order
Louder With Crowder: 11-Year Old King Shoots Home Intruder, Mocks Him For Crying After Being Shot
Vox Popoli: Never Listen To The Elite, Superhomo, and Dead Pilots In Flight
Gab News: Gab’s Response To The ADL

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: The Enemy In Our Midst, also, Coming Out Trad Day
American Conservative: Take-Off Time For Solidarity, also, Social Media Profits Off Conservatives
American Greatness: Southwest Airlines CEO Says No Employees Will Be Fired Over Jab Mandate, also, Our Representatives, Not The J6 Protesters, Defile The “Sacred” U.S. Capitol
American Power: What Happens When The Last Jew Leaves Afghanistan, also, Remarkable Shape-Shifting On The Left’s CRT Takeover
American Thinker: The Benefits Of Blue State Bankruptcy, also, Mahan & The Problem Of China
Animal Magnetism: Animal’s Daily Border Crisis News
Babalu Blog: Cuban Food In Miami, Tampa, & New York, also, Lucy – The Computer Application That Aims To Revitalize Totalitarianism In Cuba
BattleSwarm: Are Biden’s Jab Mandates About To Destroy The Airline Industry?, also, Supply Chain Disruption Update
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted American, Michael Knowles – Celebrating Columbus, and Starship/Superheavy Update
Cafe Hayek: A Current Ill-Consequence Of Deficit Financing, also, The (Il)logic Of Vaccine Mandates
CDR Salamander: Drydocks Matter
Da Tech Guy: Is This A Bug Or A Feature? COVID Edition, Report From Louisiana – On Newspapers, and Help Wanted!
Don Surber: Officer Cleared In Shooting Of Attempted Kidnapper/Rapist, Bigger Social Security Checks Mean More Trouble Ahead, and Reindeer Shut Down Windmills
First Street Journal: Bullets Flying In The Bluegrass State, also, The Patricians Really, Really Don’t Like The Plebeians!
Gates Of Vienna: Giorgia Meloni’s Speech In Madrid, Taharrush In Tarragona, and Come Join The Hive!
The Geller Report: Virginia Father Arrested At School Board Meeting After His Teen Daughter Was Raped & Forcibly Sodomized By Trans Student In Public School, also, Poll – Majority Of American Voters Believe Cheating Tainted Biden’s 2020 Victory
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, also, Discovering North America In Space
Hollywood In Toto: From Dusk Til Dawn Isn’t Worthy Of Its Cult Following, also, How The Media Make Cancel Culture Worse
The Lid: Kamala Harris Space Video Uses Child Actors Instead Of Regular Kids
Legal Insurrection: Providence RI Schools Move To Terminate CRT Whistleblower Teacher, Mass. Teacher Fired For Opposing CRT/LGBTQWTFBBQ Agenda In Schools, and Loudoun County Dad Accuses School Board Of Covering Up His Daughter’s Rape By Trans Student
Nebraska Energy Observer: Weak Men Produce Hard Times, also, It’s A Matter Of Trust
Outkick: Gruden Drama Comes Down To Words Vs. Actions, Gruden Resigns As LV Raiders Coach After More Email Leaks, and Gruden Gone While Rappers & Deshaun Watson Continue to Represent The NFL
Power Line: South By Southwest, also, Woke Mob Fails to Cancel Geophysicist’s Lecture Despite MIT’s Cowardice
Protein Wisdom: The Arrogance Of Ignorance, I Question The Timing Part 67889456, and The Cure IS The Virus
Shark Tank: Government Buses Potentially Filled With Illegals Enter Florida
Shot In The Dark: Build Bull Blocker, also, Well That’s a Big Slip-Up!
The Political Hat: University of San Diego To Prospective Faculty – DIE Or Else!
This Ain’t Hell: Navy Nuke Engineer Charged With Trying To Pass Secrets, Taliban Claims U.S. Will Provide Humanitarian Aid To Afghanistan, and There Are More Odd Things Going On
Transterrestrial Musings: Breezewood, also, Laughing Wolf
Victory Girls: If It Weren’t For Columbus, We Wouldn’t Be Here, also, Sinema Leaves Protesters Out In The Cold, Skips Race
Volokh Conspiracy: Does A Medieval English Statute Supersede The Second Amendment?
Weasel Zippers: McAuliffe – Saying Critical Race Theory Exists Is Racist, Homeland Security Orders ICE To Stop Raiding Illegals’ Workplaces, and Pelosi Thinks Press Isn’t Selling Biden’s Build Back Better Plan Hard Enough
The Federalist: The 2020 Election Wasn’t Stolen – It Was Bought By Mark Zuckerberg, also, Mom Reports School To Police For Promoting Gay Porn To Kids
Mark Steyn: Happy Holidays!, The Stampede To Stupid, and Blaming The Weather

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Category: Linkagery

MBD’s Trump Problem, and Mine

Posted on | October 13, 2021 | Comments Off on MBD’s Trump Problem, and Mine

Michael Brendan Dougherty (left) with Tucker Carlson in 2019.

Let me start by saying that I like Michael Brendan Dougherty, and I’ve always liked him. He is a serious thinker and his paleoconservative leanings are so obvious that it’s a miracle he hasn’t already been purged from National Review, like John Derbyshire, Peter Brimelow, et al. His 2007 article “The Castaway,” about the late, great paleoconservative intellectual Sam Francis, stopped short of a full-on endorsement of Sam’s ideas, but you could see that Dougherty’s interest was tinged with a certain amount of admiration:

The question for Sam Francis was, How might a conservative elite rise up to challenge the managerial elite? Conservatives would have to attach themselves to a broad social base. In his 1982 essay, “Message from MARS: The Social Politics of the New Right,” Francis combined his Burnhamite analysis of elites with Donald Warren’s sociological work on “Middle American Radicals” or MARs.

Dougherty here locates the hard kernel of insight that made Sam nearly unique — a disciple of James Burnham, he saw politics not so much as a “war of ideas” (the Goldwater/Reagan analysis) but as a matter of class interests. How else to explain the phenomenon of rich liberals? They are members of a social class — the “managerial elite,” in Burnham’s phrase — and as a result are hostile to the interests of rival groups, whose resistance to elite governance takes the form of populism. The Republican Party has always attracted its vital support from small business owners, who exemplify in many ways both the “rugged individualism” of frontier America and also what Max Weber called “The Protestant Ethic.” Within their own communities, these people are treated with respect, but in the great centers of cultural and political power (D.C., New York, L.A., etc.), they are viewed with contempt — a lot of provincial bourgeois Babbitts, too unsophisticated to be taken seriously. This is the real conflict in American politics, a conflict deliberately obscured by the national media establishment which, of course, is affiliated with and does the bidding of the elite.

Having distilled in a single paragraph a thumbnail sketch of Sam’s ideas about “Middle American Radicals,” I won’t bother to explain or defend how, during the 1990s, his intellectual trajectory led to him being labeled a “white supremacist.” After the past five years, I think most conservatives have become so accustomed to this label that we shrug it off, but in the mid-1990s, such an accusation still had devastating power, which is how Sam became, as Dougherty calls him, “The Castaway.”

After having profiled Sam Francis in 2007, Dougherty revisited the theme after Trump’s shocking 2016 upset of Hillary Clinton, hailing Sam as the prophet of Trump’s populist war against “globalism.” Let me clue you in here: Whether or not Donald Trump ever heard of Sam Francis, I can guarantee you that Trump’s adviser Stephen Miller is familiar with Francis’s work, just as Miller is familiar with other notorious Thought Criminals, including Brimelow, Charles Murray, Steve Sailer and Jared Taylor. Given the crisis conditions of the conservative movement circa 2006-2015, any intelligent person (and Miller is frighteningly intelligent) would have been looking around for some inspiration outside the narrow limits of Conservatism, Inc. Everyone can now see, looking back, that the time for a populist uprising on the Right was long overdue, and Trump just happened to be the figure around whom this uprising rallied.

On Monday, Dougherty published a column criticizing Roger Kimball’s limited defense of the January 6 Capitol riot, and I suppose many of my friends will be angry at Dougherty for this. Be that as it may, here is the real core of Dougherty’s argument:

Nearly everything Kimball says about the ongoing resistance to Trump is true. It was meretricious, hysterical, and dangerous. Even before Trump won the election, I predicted the unprecedented subterfuge that would probably be aimed at him if he won the presidency. We saw the deep state as it really is: an ongoing class warfare against the democratic peoples and their representatives whose disruptions provide accountability. . . .
Some of us have spent the better part of the past two decades or longer arguing that conservatives should be more open to a populist and working-class core of voters, the losers of globalization. We have been arguing for putting “the forgotten man” at the heart of conservatism’s concerns. We’ve argued for reexamining the effect of our trade relationships on the American people themselves. We denounced the democracy project in the Middle East and Afghanistan as a waste of blood and treasure. We argued for getting control of our immigration system, and for immigration limits and moratoriums in order to make America cohere again. It was thankless work. And if we had known it was all to set the stage for opportunists and recent converts to make their riches and fly their freak flags, perhaps we wouldn’t have done it.

You can read the whole thing. I don’t know who else Dougherty means to include as “some of us,” nor does he specify the targets of his criticism of “opportunists and recent converts.” Because he is not stepping on my toes (I was smeared as a “white supremacist” before it was cool), I could have just ignored this as another circular firing squad exercise on the Right, but I thought I’d address the subject directly because it matters.

The subject amounts to a simple question: “What’s wrong with Trump?”

Dougherty focuses on Trump’s apparent belief that all Vice President Mike Pence had to do was to reject the certified Electoral College votes of Georgia, Arizona, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin and — abracadabra! — Trump would stay in the White House. Of course, that’s not how it works, and even if you believe that the election was stolen (a belief shared by tens of millions of Americans), the problem was that, within the constitutional framework, there was no simple remedy.

This gets very close to being an answer to the question of what’s wrong with Trump: He doesn’t read books. He doesn’t read much of anything, really. He couldn’t even be bothered to read intelligence briefings as president, so that White House aides resorted to creating Powerpoint slideshows to try to at least get him to absorb the basic points. Trump seems to get his ideas about politics and policy from watching Fox News, which is why he was always tweeting out reactions to whatever it was they were talking about on Hannity or Fox and Friends.

Watching TV is no substitute for reading, because TV can never convey ideas faster than human speech (i.e., about 150 words per minute), whereas a collegiate-level reader can absorb the written word much faster. This blog post is about 1,600 words. It would take 10-12 minutes to read it aloud, but you’ll probably reach the end much quicker. Also, the written word has a permanence that the spoken word does not. To absorb complex ideas, and to commit them to memory, the written word is superior. So Trump’s habitual aversion to reading . . . Well, that’s a real problem, and one which explains a lot of his other problems.

All that said, democracy means that our leaders are chosen collectively, and the GOP primary voters in 2016 chose Trump. So those of us who did not want Hillary to become president had no other choice but to accept the circumstances thrust upon us, and make the best of them. I believe that none of Trump’s rivals for the 2016 GOP nomination could have beaten Hillary. I think Trump was uniquely able to attract support from voters who would not have voted for Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio, et al. And I think he threw the Democrats off their game. In my first American Spectator column about his campaign (“How Trump Has Changed the Game,” Sept. 14, 2015), I compared Trump to the great scrambling NFL quarterback Fran Tarkenton:

Watching Republican establishment types trying to stop Donald Trump’s presidential campaign is like watching a highlight film of Fran Tarkenton’s NFL career. Tarkenton’s legendary ability as a scrambling quarterback was every football coach’s worst nightmare. Never mind what play Tarkenton called in the huddle, or what scheme the defense deployed against him. Once he started scrambling, the playbook ceased to matter. He’d run all over the backfield, eluding the defensive linemen who tried to tackle him, until he found a receiver open downfield. Tarkenton’s improvisational style was unique and unpredictable, and he led the Minnesota Vikings to three Super Bowls by defying the norms of what an NFL quarterback should be.
What Tarkenton did to NFL defenses, Donald Trump is doing to the Republican Party. The bombastic billionaire routinely says things that, for any other candidate, would be campaign-destroying gaffes. With his larger-than-life celebrity persona, however, Trump keeps winning. . . .

That was four months before National Review blazoned “Against Trump” on its cover and, having lashed themselves to the mast, they went down with the #NeverTrump ship. This was their choice, and not mine, and therefore I am not responsible for the consequences. It’s like the Capitol riot — nobody in the Proud Boys or Oath Keepers came to me and asked, “Hey, Stacy, do you think it’s a good idea to have a riot?” Certainly, I would have advised against it, but no one sought my advice. Similarly, nobody at National Review asked me if it was a good idea for them to declare war on the GOP primary voters who wanted Trump.

Wisdom is what we ought to gain from our mistakes, but you’re never going to become wise if you refuse to recognize your mistakes. It may be that both Trump and his #NeverTrump adversaries suffer equally from this problem. Unless and until National Review publishes a cover story with the headline, “We Blew It,” their credibility is damaged.

Let Michael Brendan Dougherty make of this what he will. I still like him, but wish he’d follow his populist inclinations far enough to get himself purged from National Review — a fine tradition to uphold!

Category: Conservatism 101, Donald Trump, Intellectuals

In The Mailbox: 10.12.21 (Afternoon Edition)

Posted on | October 12, 2021 | Comments Off on In The Mailbox: 10.12.21 (Afternoon Edition)

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Silicon Valley delenda est.

Remember, despair is a sin.

OVER THE TRANSOM
Red Pilled Jew: Quick Takes
357 Magnum: The Passing Of A Hero – JStark
EBL: Fun History – Che Guevara Becomes A Good Commie
Twitchy: Terry McAuliffe Bringing In Stacey Abrams, Obama & Jill Biden To Help His Stumbling, Crumbling Campaign For Va. Gov
Louder With Crowder: F*** Joe Biden Week 6 In College Football And Elsewhere – Now We’re Renting Planes
Vox Popoli: “Reunification Must be Realized”, The Monks Of The Next Dark Age, and Programming Is Not Communication

RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
Adam Piggott: Taiwan & Data Point Analysis, also, Pushing Rubber Podcast Returns
American Conservative: Red China Is Not Yesterday’s Enemies
American Greatness: An SWA Pilot Explains What Happened Over The Weekend, also, Merrick Garland Just Tipped Over The Dominos
American Power: When Fourth-Graders Can’t Read, also, 69% Of Hispanics Don’t Like Biden’s Handling Of Immigration
American Thinker: Premature Premonitions Of Civil War? also, Green Policies Return The World To Coal
Animal Magnetism: Goodbye, Blue Monday
Babalu Blog: Death Of An Evil Doofus, also, The Victims Of Che Guevara
BattleSwarm: LinkSwarm For October 9, also,
Behind The Black: Today’s Blacklisted Americans, Washington Post Slams Blue Origin, and SpaceX Now Valued At $100 Billion, The World’s Second Most Valuable Private Company
Cafe Hayek: Quotation Of The Day
CDR Salamander: October NatSec Free-For-All – On Midrats, also, Sea Power Is American Power, And We’re Throwing It Away
Da Tech Guy: Has The Military Become A Cult?, Some Data From The Present & A Prediction For The Future, and The Answer To Durbin’s Favorite Question For SCOTUS Nominees Is In
Don Surber: CNN Reports On Red Chinese Torture As The Rest of The Media Looks Away, Jacksonville Shutdown Shows The Rebellion Has Begun, and Lose The War, Lose The Presidency
First Street Journal: Oh, It Sends A Message, All Right!, #TransActivism & Freedom Of Speech, and Killadelphia
Gates Of Vienna: Swedish Politician Convicted Of Wrongthink, also, Compulsory Vax In France?
The Geller Report: SWA Pilots Walk Out Because Of Jab Mandates, Over 1000 Flights Cancelled, also, Massive Crowds Lined Up For Trump’s Iowa Rally Two Hours Before Its Start
Hogewash: Team Kimberlin Post of The Day, Everything Is Proceeding As I Have Foreseen, and Wokeness Vs. Economics
Hollywood In Toto: It’s Official – Woke Marketing Broke Bond, Why The Atrocious Shout Couldn’t Derail John Travolta’s Career, and Sorry, Jon Stewart, Cancel Culture Is Definitely Not A Myth
The Lid: NYT Gets It Wrong Again, also, Capitol Police Whistleblower Says Leadership Botched 1/6 & Lied To Congress About It
Legal Insurrection: Creeping Authoritarianism Week In Higher Education, Oklahoma State Student Journalist Fired By Newspaper For Column Opposing Mask Mandates, and Two School Board Associations Denounce NSBA, Reject Garland’s Threats Against Parents
Nebraska Energy Observer: Random Observations, also, Random Music
Outkick: “I’m A College Football Freak, Especially Because I Hate The NFL”, Texas A&M Shocks The World, and SEC Fines Texas A&M $100,000 For Storming Kyle Field After Alabama Upset
Power Line: Happy Indigenous Peoples’ Day?, Taiwan – How Red China Would Attack, and The Claremont Statement
Protein Wisdom: Arsehole Technica, Acquired Robust Immunity Is No Defense…, and VAERS-Extrapolated Death Rate Seven Times Higher Than Maine’s Monthly COVID Death Rate
Shark Tank: Crist Unveils “Justice For All” Reform Agenda
Shot In The Dark: They Told Me…, A Little Good News, and Vibrant
The Political Hat: Attorney General Garland Mobilizes To Protect Wokeness
This Ain’t Hell: Stupid People Of The Week, LTC Mansir Relieved Of Command, and Coast Guard Vaccine Woes
Transterrestrial Musings: A Long Reflection, Atlas Is Starting To Shrug, and “Moms Like Me”
Victory Girls: Fifth Circuit Reinstates Texas Heartbeat Law, also, RIP General Odierno
Volokh Conspiracy: MIT “Could Not Tolerate That A Scientist Be Permitted To Speak About His Uncontroversial Research”
Weasel Zippers: Shortages Of Essential Food Items Across NJ Prompts Skyrocketing Prices, Google Blocking Ads Skeptical Of Climate Change, Vaccines, and Border Czar Kamala Skips Meeting With Mexican President On Cartels To Visit NJ Bakery
The Federalist: Pushing Gender Dysphoria On Kids Is Child Abuse, Twelve Pro-Life Truths To Counter Every Abortion Myth, and After Keystone Pipeline Cancellation, Oil Begins To Flow Through New Route On Line 3
Mark Steyn: Chock Full O’Nuts – Preston Sturges & Easy Living, They All Laughed, and A Blaize of Excitement

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Category: Linkagery

‘Let’s Go Brandon!’

Posted on | October 12, 2021 | Comments Off on ‘Let’s Go Brandon!’

Everybody knows what it means:

Supporters of former President Trump and Americans dissatisfied with Joe Biden have turned the chant “Let’s Go Brandon!” into a massive social media viral trend that has shown up at sporting events, airports, memes, all the way to the former president’s Saturday rally in Iowa.
It started as a profane anti-Biden chant at college football games but went to a new level last Saturday when NBC reporter Kelli Stavast interviewed NASCAR Xfinity Series driver Brandon Brown after he captured his first race victory at Alabama’s Talladega Superspeedway.
During the interview, Trump supporters and Biden critics took a page out of the book of other sports fans across the country by chanting “F*** Joe Biden” which could clearly be heard by NBC’s cameras.
Stavast, in an apparent attempt to steer the interview away from politics, reported that the crowd was really chanting, “Let’s Go Brandon!”
At that moment, the new viral sensation was born.

Not to be pedantic, but the F-word is not “profane,” it’s obscene.

Anyway, click here to order your “Let’s Go Brandon!” T-shirt.

Category: Joe Biden

Terry Wary
Sig is Scary
Next Month’s Vote
Might Not Carry

Posted on | October 11, 2021 | Comments Off on Terry Wary
Sig is Scary
Next Month’s Vote
Might Not Carry

by Smitty

Only Pat Herrity stood firm. The rest of the Fairfax County Board of Brandons and Karens voted to assume the position, and request that the box be stuffed next month for the gubernatorial election. And if anyone is equipped, it’s Greasy Terry:

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is asking Gov. Ralph Northam to waive the witness signature requirement for absentee ballots cast by mail in this fall’s election.
The board voted 9-1 for the proposal by Chair Jeffrey McKay to send a letter to Northam, with Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity, the board’s only Republican, casting the only vote against the motion.
McKay said that waiving the witness signature requirement – as was done during the 2020 election – is necessary due to the continued threat of COVID-19. He said several Fairfax residents had shared concerns with him about obtaining witness signatures – arguing they could be exposed to COVID-19 in the process.

No one believes you, Demsheviks. With every day, with ever liberty that you brutally devour like it was some fat-dripping slice of baked flatbread smothered in toppings, your butt just gets bigger. The good nature of Americans has been stressed the last twenty months by the “two weeks to flatten the curve”. However, a line as been crossed when parental input into what is taught in schools is casually rejected:

In [his] last debate with Youngkin, however, McAuliffe opined that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach their children. This statement may have shifted the race in Youngkin’s favor, and I no longer assume McAuliffe will win.
Last night two smart, politically knowledgeable Virginia residents told me they believe Youngkin will win. I’m on the fence, but find it interesting that McAuliffe is now complaining that Joe Biden is dragging him down. He’s probably right, but it occurs to me that candidates who think they will win don’t start blaming their party’s president for their woes.

There is no way that any rational, well-informed, patriotic voter would ever cast a ballot for the godless Commies that the Demsheviks have degenerated into. The willingness of the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors to sacrifice election security to allow stuffing the ballot box seems a tacit recognition of this reality.
Virginia conservatives broke my heart when they were too lame to support Ken Cuccinelli eight years ago. The more GOPe Ed Gillespie had no joy in 2017. So, despite the fact that Glenn Youngkin is running a smart campaign against a buffoonish candidate with President Potted Plant for a backdrop, it’s best to focus on getting everyone voting and keep the hopes in check.

via Red State

Category: Virginia

The Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

Posted on | October 11, 2021 | Comments Off on The Annual Admiral Of The Ocean Sea Appreciation Post

— compiled by Wombat-socho

As usual, the senile fool in the Oval Office tried to have it both ways, issuing proclamations celebrating both Columbus Day (yay) and Indigenous Peoples Day (F*** Joe Biden) and inevitably annoying just about everybody.
Silicon Valley delenda est.

Makes you think.

Meanwhile at Instapundit, the Blogfather links to and quotes from Rear Admiral Samuel Eliot Morison’s epic biography of Columbus, Admiral of the Ocean Sea, which sadly is not available on Kindle – but you should really get the dead tree edition anyway, because the maps are a lot easier to read that way. To satisfy the people who are always yapping about that loser short-timer Leif Ericsson, I also recommend Morison’s The European Discovery Of America: The Northern Voyages 500-1600 A.D., which is a delightful book that includes not only accounts of the aforementioned Norseman’s voyages but also Henry Hudson, Amerigo Vespucci, and dozens of others. But wait! There’s more! As if that wasn’t enough, Morison also includes chapters on apocryphal/mythical voyages by St. Brendan and Prince Madoc of Wales, the Kensington Runestone, and imaginary islands of the Atlantic that appeared on many maps during the Age of Exploration and in some cases persisted into the 20th century.

In addition to his discovery of ~~India~~New Spain, Columbus and his Spanish employers also gave rise to one of the wilder and most memorable episodes of history, to say nothing of dozens of movies and novels – the infamous Pirates of the Caribbean, which people have come to associate more with Johnny Depp’s rum-addled Captain jack Sparrow than, say, Sabatini’s Captain Blood, so memorably portrayed on film by Errol Flynn. But list now – what if I were to advert to you that there existed a book that told all the wild tales of buccaneering rolled into one with music by Korngold, villains more villainous than anything Sabatini or Farnol could have dreamed of, bodacious babes (some of them in quite fetching leopard-skin tracksuits) and insane acts of bravery all turned up to 11? Who, you ask, could possibly have the chops to carry off something so incredibly larger than life? None other than the creator of Harry Flashman himself, George Macdonald Fraser! The Pyrates is a ripping yarn, full of sly digs at English society (17th and 20th century), Hollywood, trade unions, and the whole genre of pirate tales & movies as well. If this book can’t cheer you up, consult a physician to see if you are already dead.

It’s been a long time since I read Jack Campbell’s Lost Fleet series, so I downloaded Dauntless and Fearless this weekend and got stuck in. En route to a peace conference in Syndic space, an Alliance fleet finds a survival pod holding an officer thought dead for a century – Commander John Geary, whose sacrifice in an early battle led to his being posthumously promoted to Captain and turned into a legend – “Black Jack Geary”. While Geary slept, the war has eroded the Alliance fleet and its members – tactics and skills have been forgotten, ships built cheaply and quickly out of desperation, morals abandoned – and he finds himself very much out of place and very disturbed that everyone seems to regard him as a legendary savior. It’s not Geary’s fate to be allowed to adapt in his own good time, though – before departing for the peace conference, the fleet’s admiral puts Geary in charge in case something goes awry. Needless to say, it does – the conference was a trap, and the Admiral is shot down in cold blood, as the Syndics expect a decapitating strike will paralyze the Alliance fleet. Not with “Black Jack” in charge, though. The series recounts Geary’s journey back to Alliance space with his fleet, evading superior numbers of Syndic warships while wreaking havoc in their rear areas and bringing his subordinates and education in tactics and strategy to match their unquestionable (if occasionally excessive) courage. High-quality space opera with solid characters. Highly recommended.

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Category: Books

Patriots Win Ugly

Posted on | October 11, 2021 | Comments Off on Patriots Win Ugly

When the New England Patriots drafted Alabama quarterback Mac Jones, they also drafted me as a fan — Go Patriots, because Roll Tide! So I was pleased that the team came away with a victory Sunday over the Houston Texans. It was an ugly win, but a win is a win, and after the previous week’s heartbreaking loss to the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, I’m sure the Patriots are happy to have it. Being 2-3 is better than being 1-4, and New England was playing with an offensive line devastated by injuries and COVID-19 protocols. Apparently, two of their linemen haven’t been vaccinated, and I suppose liberals will blame Trump for that. One of the backup linemen brought in as a replacement has a familiar name, Ted Karras III. His father was an NFL lineman, as was his grandfather, and two of his grandfather’s brothers, including the famous Alex Karras, who starred in Blazing Saddles. Meanwhile . . .

Mac Jones completed 23 of 30 passes for 231 yards, with one touchdown and one interception as he “delivered his first comeback victory,” leading two fourth-quarter scoring drives in the 25-22 Patriots win. His fellow Alabama rookie, defensive lineman Christian Barmore, also contributed to the win by drawing two holding penalties against the Texans. Another former Tide star, running back Damien Harris, was almost the scapegoat, after a goal-line fumble on what would have been New England’s second TD drive. As it was, Harris finished with 58 yards and a touchdown on 14 carries before leaving the game early in the fourth quarter with an injury to his ribs. After winning on the road against Houston, the Patriots return home next Sunday against the Dallas Cowboys, who at 4-1 are the leaders of the NFC East. Thanks to their ugly win Sunday, New England is now in second place in the AFC East behind the Buffalo Bills.

Category: Football

Rule 5 Sunday: Carol Cleveland

Posted on | October 11, 2021 | Comments Off on Rule 5 Sunday: Carol Cleveland

— compiled by Wombat-socho

Carol Cleveland was a comedy actress before getting involved with the guys who invented Monty Python’s Flying Circus, but most of us remember her as the smashing blonde on the show, and in fact she was worried that it might keep her from getting other work. Guess not. Here’s a shot of her from 1965.
Ceterum autem censeo Silicon Valley esse delendam.