The going theory is that the "deep state" leadership wants to get Trump any way they can, even if they have to sacrifice the Clintons and a chunk of the old guard. Clearly the feds want Epstein to sing like a canary for a better chance at not being put in the general prison population, where his life expectancy would be considerably shorter than his eyes are. (See what I did there?)
At that latter link there is an excellent point made:
Look, there is no doubt that the President knew Epstein as both moved in the same circles. But, there is zero evidence to indicate Trump actively and willingly participated in having sex with child sex slaves or this would have come out in October of 2016 or even earlier. The Democrat-Left-Media Complex is playing with fire because in their zeal to get Trump, there is no way they can avoid seriously exposing a lot of Democrat-Left politicians and celebrities quite possibly as co-conspirators in child rape. At the very top of that list is Bill Clinton, who has now publicly moved to distance himself from his teeny-bopper procurer and by extension Hillary. Maybe the anti-Clinton faction in the Democrat Party is engineering this to purge whatever influence they have left and clear the path (Shining or otherwise) for them to wrest control. Meh, maybe that's a fringe benefit or part of the calculus as a tradeoff to get Trump. For me, it smacks of desperation. They threw almost the entire apparatus of the Federal law enforcement and intelligence community at him along with almost every major and minor media outlet in the country and failed miserably, to the point that a clear majority of Americans now distrust the media and Congress more than ever, as the President's approval numbers hit record highs along with the economy his policies ignited. Pass the popcorn.So let's go to Vox Day: Trump saw, and did not go back. "Only someone who knew perfectly well what was going on behind the scenes would have the confidence, and the determination, to do what he is doing."
Meanwhile someone edited the Wikipedia page on Epstein to remove references to his ties to Democrats because of course the last thing the left cares about is the truth when it's damaging to their side.
This is why they're doing this. Trump's name appears in Jeffrey Epstein's "little black book", along with a panoply of celebrities and politicians, most of them (but not all!) leftists. They want Trump, and will take down whoever they need to in order to get him.
That latter post contains an interesting theory about how Epstein managed to make his fortune, too.
...but it seems that Trump didn't take the bait. Which, as was said earlier, is why this didn't come out in 2015 or 2016. (Of course, in 2016 they were confident they'd win. All the polls said so.)
* * *
But speaking of pedophiles WHAT THE SHIT is going on at the Pentagon?
Hundreds of government employees were implicated as part of ICE's 2006 "Operation Flicker"--which identified over 5,000 individuals who had used credit cards or PayPal to buy child porn, or subscribe to websites that offered the material. Of those, ICE identified 264 DoD employees or contractors who had purchased child pornography online....five thousand people buying pedo-pron? have they been fired, at least? Or has the government workers' union prevented that?
Nine of them had "Top Secret Sensitive Compartmentalized Information" security clearances, while 76 of them held clearances of Secret or higher.
Oh, no:
Here's the kicker: Of those 264 DoD suspects, just 52 were investigated by the Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Service (DCIS), meaning the Bush administration willfully ignored over 200 suspected pedophiles working for the Defense Department.It gets even worse than that, though. It gets lots worse, and fast:
The National Criminal Justice Training Center, one of the groups that has thrown its weight behind the bill, reported in 2018 that DOD's network was ranked 19th out of almost 3,000 nationwide networks on the amount of peer-to-peer child pornography sharing."Perhaps instead Congress could divert some of its Russiagate energy to investigating the 200+ individuals who were given a pass nearly 20 years ago? Then again, that might not help anyone win the 2020 election."
*rolleyes*
* * *
"...just a bunch of uncivilized horrible people." We don't really see what sets off this sterling example of civilized behavior but the douche in the red T-shirt and topknot screaming, "I don't give a fuck, bitch!" in the woman's face is certainly not able to control himself in the face of provocation. She then spits in his face, which prompts him to start getting violent, approximately in the mode of a teenage girl--slapping at her--at which point the woman's friend/babby-daddy/husband gets involved, and now it's him and her attacking topknot guy, but no one gets a serious blow on anyone else. Then a couple more women get involved, though there isn't any indication if they are bystanders or if they know these...people.
Anyway, that turns into a free-for-all. Suddenly there's a "Mobility scooter" in the middle of the fight, and just when the original combatants have calmed down enough that their slap-fest ends, the second wave that came in start to fight and the woman who abandoned her mobility scooter gets knocked down. After that topknot douche comes back for more, and it goes on, more slapping and screaming.
3.5 minutes after the fight starts, security shows up.
Now imagine if one of those fucking idiots had a gun and had started shooting. Security was 3.5 minutes away. What kind of body count do you get in that situation?
And hell no if I see something like that going on, I just walk away from it. I don't stay to watch or film; I don't get involved. I clear the area in case it turns viral, you know, or someone has a gun.
* * *
Kimba the White Lion came first and just because Osamu Tezuka didn't sue doesn't mean Disney is in the right.
* * *
This would be a worthwhile test, all right. The US womens' soccer team that won the womens' world cup is now all "equal pay for equal play!" because they're not paid as much as male soccer players are.
The thing is, the womens' soccer matches aren't as big a draw. The teams simply don't make the same kind of money that mens' teams do. That's why the women players are paid less.
But to eemphasize the point I think it'd be an excellent idea to have this world champion womens' team play a serious game against the mens' soccer equivalent of bush league baseball, and see how they do.
See how the women manage to do against male pro soccer players who are paid about the same as they are.
Hint: the men would annihilate the women.
* * *
The dickhead who said that the federal government could nuke gun owners who don't comply with confiscation has quit the race for President. So that's one less nimrod in the Democrat lineup.
19 to go.
My wife says she heard that Oprah Winfrey was going to run for President. That would be entertaining; while there are a lot of people out there who would vote for her based solely on her popularity, I don't think she could handle being in a seriously contested race. Besides which, it would represent an enormous pay cut for her, and she couldn't run her media empire while also serving as President. SHe'd get a lot of votes and might even get the Democrat nomination, but ultimately I don't think she could win the general election.
Maybe against a Romney or a Dole or a McCain. Not against Trump.
* * *
The depression continues. It started no later than 2008; a convincing case could be made for it starting in 2000--but regardless of when it began, it hasn't ended. We're still facing the same problems that we faced in 2009. Nothing has been fixed.
* * *
It's still not surprising. Young people becoming less comfortable with LBGTSYBBQDDT people.
Imagine if instead of "drag queen story hour" it was "gimp suit story hour" or "Elsa She-Wolf of the SS Dominatrix story hour" or "coprophiliac story hour." These could of course all be completely straight people. But parents would go nope-nope-nope-nope and run the other way and not too many people would blame them...but if they dislike the idea of grown men not just dressing weird, but dressing weird in a sexually weird way, interacting with their kids, they are called names and made to feel like they're bad parents.And the pendulum is swinging the other way.
The Stonewall riot was 50 years ago. "You've come a long way, baby." Pity it's not enough for them.
* * *
If there is no cash, the government owns you. In a cashless society your ability to buy goods and services can be shut off very easily.
Now, look at the banks that are refusing to do business with firearm-related businesses. Same theory.
* * *
$10,000 bail for spraying paint on that godawful chrome blob in Millennium Park. An 18-year-old carrying an illegal firearm got released on recognizance, a guy who beat up a cop got a $3,000 bond, a woman who spit blood into a cop's mouth got a $1,000 bond--but some shithead splashes paint on a piece of junk and that deserves a $10,000 bond? Really?
All of these came from the same arraigning judge. It's apples-to-apples, here.
$5 says this same judge complains that there are too many guns on the streets.
* * *
Japan does not allow muslims to live there. Visit, yes, but not dwell. That's why Tokyo doesn't have a problem with islamic terrorism.
* * *
I hope NASA doesn't get those tapes back. I hope someone else gets them.
...I'd like it because if a third party got those tapes and revealed what was on them, we could finally put the whole "faked moon landings" horseshit to rest. If NASA gets them back and releases them to the public, it won't dissuade anyone.
Of course the die-hard nutballs will still insist they're fake, that NASA planted those tapes blah-blah-blah etcetera. Oh well.
* * *
Absolutely class-A sarcasm. Yes, if you hate America so much, let's see you burn your welfare check in protest of it. I'll wait.
* * *
Let's go back to that bit about the shiny turd for a moment. The second link in that vignette talks about five arraignments, two on gun charges. One guy was let go on his own recognizance; the other was assigned a bail of $1,000. These were for men who were illegally carrying loaded firearms on their persons without a permit.
Now the Chicago Machine is blaming "repeat gun offenders" as a reason for all the violent crime in the city. And they raise the usual leftist shibboleths:
Lightfoot also called for "common sense background checks" and federal legislation to stop people from purchasing "unlimited quantities" of "military-grade weapons" across the state line Indiana.There is already federal and state laws which prohibit that. If I want to buy a "miltary-grade weapon" like an AR-15--well, I'm stopped from doing that because I don't have a FOID card. But if my wife decided to buy one from a store in Indiana, we'd have to fill out forms and pay fees to have the gun transferred to a gun store in Illinois, where she could then go to pick it up.
What we cannot do, legally, is to drive over to Indiana, buy a gun, and drive back to Illinois with it.
..but there's that pesky qualifier there, helpfully isolated by itself between two commas: legally.
Let's say that I'm hell-bent on killing someone. Let's say that instead of the nerdy compu-geek SF guy that I am, I'm a guy with a criminal background and there's someone I want to kill. Let's call him BILLY BILLYBOY. Billy Billyboy has made me so angry at him that I want to kill him, and I'm gonna do it one way or another, but I decide I'm gonna get me a gun and shoot him. Okay?
I go to the gun store and am turned away because I don't have a FOID card. So I find a guy in Indiana who has an AR-15, and he asks to look at some ID before he sells to me. Seeing that I have an IL drivers' license, he asks to see my FOID card. I tell him I left it at home and he tells me to go get it. I leave and don't go back. Ditto for the various gun stores I try; none of them sell to me. Even if they were to sell to me, the legal way to handle the transaction would be to go to a gun store in Indiana and pay to do the transfer into Illinois as outlined above.
Finally I find a guy who doesn't check my ID or anything, just takes my word for it, and who sells me the gun for cash on hand, and I've got my weapon! I take it across state lines illegally, into a state where I am not allowed to own a gun (because I lack the FOID card) and I go put some new holes in Billy Billyboy's hide.
Besides murder and attempted murder, I've got a passel of gun charges for doing all this. But when you come right down to it, I'm looking at 20-to-life for the murder charge alone; the gun charges aren't anything compared to that.
There are people who argue against the death penalty, saying, "It's not a deterrent!" Those same people, however, insist that we make guns as illegal as possible, on the theory that doing so will keep people from buying them.
* * *
The left loses its shit when anyone supports Trump. Trump Derangement Syndrome has hard-wired the left to "racist/sexist/bigot" even though Trump is on record doing beneficial things for minorities and minority groups. They've decided he's a nazi, and anyone who supports him is by association also a nazi.
They're fucking nuts, of course.
* * *
Accurately describing islam is islamophobia precisely because the description is accurate.
* * *
Tried to watch Flying Witch--torrent download--on the laptop I fixed, but each file is on the order of a gigabyte and that old laptop (vintage 2009) couldn't play the files without the sound dropping out periodically. Not from SD card, not from the internal SSD. Argh etc. It's just not fast enough.
Ended up watching the first three eps of True Tears. Can't find it on my hard drives, ended up running a torrent of it to get it again. So far, excellent, perhaps even better than it was the first time I saw it.
I want to build a box to watch anime on, one that can sit in the family room and always be on and connected to the TV. I'm wondering if a Raspberry Pi 4 would do the trick.... The main point is that the computer has to be relatively inexpensive but powerful enough to decode videos that are made with the latest-and-greatest codecs. Obviously the 10-year-old laptop isn't enough for that, not even with a SSD in it.
I'm to the point now that I don't want to fuck with it, you know? I just want to sit in my rocking chair and watch the anime I've downloaded without having to recode or burn to DVD or do anything. The Blu-Ray player can play some videos, but doesn't support all the codecs. Ditto for the PS4. I'd rather build a computer and plug USB dongles containing video files into its ports to watch them. Run the K-Lite Codec pack so there's no problem with codecs, and have something like an i3 or a low-end Ryzen processor with at least 8 GB of RAM so there's no performance problems.
A low-end Ryzen probably does that handily. Probably would not even need a high-zoot video card; but Floristica's original video card would be plenty powerful enough for a video box.
* * *
So it was cool on Sunday and Monday nights. With things configured to push cold air into the bedroom, Monday and Tuesday I woke up in a warm bedroom, because the days are still between 80 and 90, but it's pretty dry out there (dew point 63).
Anyway ran the AC during work hours yesterday--shut it off around 7 PM. Don't think I'll do that today, though. Too warm out there for that. Cooling off, yes, but not cool enough. Maybe later. Weather web site says 88, the thermometer on my patio says 82. I believe the latter.
The pool is now crystal clear; the flocculant did the job. Needs a shot of algaecide to make sure it stays clear.
* * *
It's Tuesday. Whee.