Now, I literally just cut and pasted the following from a DuckDuckGo search of "amen etymology":
Amen - WikipediaFrom there it went through Greek and Latin to Old English, and thence to modern English as we speak it today.
[Search domain en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amen
Etymology. The usage of amen, meaning "so be it" (as found in the early scriptures of the Bible), is a word of Biblical Hebrew origin. The word originated in the Hebrew Scriptures, as a confirmatory response; it is found in Deuteronomy as a confirmatory response made by the people.
It does not refer to human males.
"Awomen" is nonsense. Ending his prayer with "IDI AMIN!" would have made just as much sense, FFS. Of course, to the left, it was a daring and brave attempt at inclusion, but for everyone to the right of George Bush it was Yet Another Exercise in liberal stupidity.
Still, I'm reminded of an old joke--I may have read it in Playboy or something back in my benighted youth--which posed the following:
Q: What's the difference between a pastor and a homosexual?
A: The pastor says "Amen", but the homosexual says, "Ah! Men!"
So maybe this guy wasn't a "reverend" but, well, something else, if he's saying "Ah-men, and Ah-women!" Maybe bisexual? I don't know. The Clown World is a confusing place.
* * *
So, let's go back out to the fringe, and work our way back in--though it's hard to tell whether or not it's actually "fringe" when the guy is otherwise leaving himself open to being sued for libel and/or slander.
When I read his assertions carefully, though, I see that he begins with "I believe" which is how you weasel out of being sued for making false accusations. He's not saying, "Justice Roberts is being blackmailed for raping and murdering a child on video," but that he believes this to be the case.
Let me add here for clarity's sake that I was merely quoting a hypothetical statement there, and not myself accusing anybody of doing anything. I have no idea how Justice Roberts comports himself in his private life and I am not privy to any information about him at all, other than the fact that he's on the Supreme Court and he voted for some really crappy rulings that screwed the little people of the United States, but good. I have many reasons to dislike him intensely but that does not extend to accusing him of things which are not a matter of record, and for which I have no proof. Or anything, for that matter. My opinion is that Roberts is not entirely his own man, but the only thing I can base that on is the fact that he was touted as a conservative yet has consistently ruled in favor of Democrats.
Anyway, Lin Wood is also not making a flat assertion about that; he's saying, "I believe Justice Roberts" blah blah blah etcetera. Next, he says this:
Blackmail targets are approached with a gun, a child, & a camera. The target is ordered to rape the child on video. The target is then ordered to shoot the child on video. The target is then owned & controlled by the blackmailers until blackmail evidence loses its value.He says "blackmail targets" and doesn't name names.
He then goes on, "Jeffrey Epstein used this same blackmail scheme of child rape & child murder," but Jeffrey Epstein is officially dead, and therefore immune from injury due to slander or libel. (Might be interesting if Epstein is actually alive, as Woods attested the other day; if Epstein did not actually include murder in his "information collecting," he might be able to sue Woods. Though if Epstein actually did that kind of thing as Woods attests here, then Woods is telling the truth, and it's not libel or slander.)
* * *
TO make things more entertaining? "White House planning to refer Brad Raffensperger WaPo leak to Secret Service for investigation under national security grounds of the Espionage Act." President calls governor of Georgia, tells him the phone call is designated "secret" and should not be divulged to outside parties, and then has what is supposed to be a private chat with him. Governor of Georgia then leaks the call to the press. President then has Secret Service go remind governor of Georgia that the call was designated "secret".
The President has rather broad powers when it comes to deciding what is classified information and what is not. Okay, General Leslie Groves, fresh back from a trip to Tau Ceti on a flying saucer full of greys, could tell Trump that UFOs are real and Eisenhower said it had to be secret and no President has ever disagreed, so it must be kept top secret...and Trump could say, "No, to hell with that, I'm telling the public!" Go on the news that evening, flanked by greys, from the Space Force cruiser C-57D, USS Aldrin, currently in orbit around Mars, and really blow everyone's wig. You know?
Less extreme, though: the President could get news that China has mined certain US cities with hydrogen bombs, news which is designated so secret that you'd explode if you breathed one syllable of it, and could declare it too vital to be classified, declassify it, and have a press conference announcing it. (It would not be a smart thing to do, mind you, for half a million reasons, but he could do it.)
Less extreme than that: the President could receive classified information that Obama ordered that his campaign be spied upon by FBI CIA NSA ETC...and Trump could declassify it and have it included in his latest press release. Even though it would upset apple carts and rice bowls throughout the D.C. establishment and cause untold chaos.
Secrets are kept at the President's discretion, and anything he says is secret is secret. So if the President calls you, tells you that this call is to be considered classified information and you shouldn't record it--and you record it anyway, and then release it--you can go to jail for that.
...and Trump was giving the governor of Georgia, a fellow Republican, one last chance to do the honorable thing...and I've got a fiver that means that Raffensperger's political career is about to take a rather abrupt nose-dive.
* * *
And why do I say that? This is rather abrupt, isn't it? If Georgia's elections were free and fair and above-board?
And take a look at this shit: "Now the Georgia government is accusing Trump of leaking the call."
...Raffensperger is on video saying that he released the call, but now they're trying to spin that because this whole thing has apparently backfired.
* * *
And on what the possible--probable--results are, of all this nonsense? "There has never, in all of recorded human history, been a situation where the Rulers giving the Ruled the Finger worked out well for the Ruled,..." except maybe temporarily. And if you think the Democrat party did not give "flyover country" the finger, it's because you're one yourself, and believe everything you read in the New York Times.
I have been prepping for "mild dislocations" for over ten years. I gave careful consideration to my plans for "what if" and decided on a measured approach. If nothing happens, I'm good. If things get mildly stupid, I'm good. If we have power and gas but no Internet and the area is locked down, I won't starve for a good long time and I've got enough books (both to read and write) that I won't be bored, to say nothing of all the anime I could re-watch. Without gas, I'm good for a while. Without electricity...well, it becomes challenging, but not impossible, and in the absolute worst case I can rig up a lawn mower engine with an alternator and charge batteries to run stuff through inverters salvaged from the UPSes, and put pots on the exhaust pipe to boil water and stuff.
If there are roving gangs--Vandals, Visigoths, Huns, what-have-you--I am probably screwed, but so are most of my neighbors; I have not made allowances for the complete breakdown of civil society because I am not expecting to survive such. That's the "Mad Max" scenario, and surviving that is a young man's game, or at least a game for a man who is fit and can see farther than eight inches in front of his face without his glasses. Not someone who's got severe nearsightedness and chronic hypoglycemia. In that scenario, men my age are either enslaved or shot by the bad guys. Either way, not really a preferred risk, if you know what I mean.
In the event of civil war, though? Look: most of the country only heard about the last one through the grapevine. There are strategic assets within 30 miles of the bunker but no one is going to be lobbing nuclear weapons around--unless someone is seriously cracked--and the circumstances do not favor a protracted stand-up fight, regardless of who's on which side of it. I figure that the worst case is that there will be a short, intense stand-up fight, followed by a long stalemate peppered with skirmishes, including a long insurgency, where the regular supply of goods and services will be periodically interrupted for days at a time. The rebels of the 21st century will not make the same mistakes that the ones in the 19th century did; and in any case they won't be composed of states so much as revolutionary fronts (militias) who melt into the countryside when a big opfor is about. The bad guys will execute civilians as reprisals against the good guys (when they make an effective attack) and the good guys will not stop attacking the bad guys just because they murder civilians.
In that case, I hunker down, lock the doors, speak to no one, and mind my own business with malice aforethought. Do my own thing, don't make waves, have contact with no one at all outside my household, and I say that again because you don't know who's on what side and it's best just to avoid everyone.
* * *
You see, leftists regard the failures of communism the same way they regard burning toast. Well, whoops, I had the selector turned up too high and, gee, a hundred and ten million people died. Damn it! Just have to try harder, I guess!
* * *
There is one problem with this. That girl, that the Nazis hanged? She yelled this before they pulled the lever: "Long live the Communist Party, and partisans!"
She was a freaking communist.
I actually suspected that was the case, because almost all the "resistance" to the nazis in Europe were communists. For example, antifa was a communist organization. It wasn't so much a principled stand against national socialism as it was simply the natural communist desire to be the ones in charge. If the "resistance" had been successful, and threw out the nazis, the whole of Germany would have looked like the Soviet Union. Prior to Hitler and the NASDP seizing power, antifa and the communists were trying to take over the country.
Whichever one won, the outcome would have been the same. Except that instead of a mere six million dead in the Holocaust, it would have been more like twelve, or eighteen, or twenty-four million.
If you get a time machine, and you go back in time and kill Hitler? The only thing that really changes is that the swastika stops being an evil symbol. The hammer and sickle rises over Germany, America never goes to war against them, and the entirety of Europe turns communist.
Killing Hitler would only prevent WW2 in the sense that the socialist takeover of Europe would happen a lot faster and a lot more finally.
* * *
Here's a real shocker of a headline: "Over 70% Of Republican Voters Want Their Lawmakers To Be More Like Trump". No kidding. We'd love it if the rest of the GOP were composed of vertebrate life forms, you know?
* * *
About half of American health care workers are refusing the vaccine, because they don't trust it. My wife wants me to take it when it's available. Me, who won't take a flu shot, because the preventative is worse than the disease.
*sigh*
* * *
You've got to read a bit before you understand what Larry Correia is saying here, but it's worth it. Because snark on that level can only be produced by someone who makes a killing on writing novels.
Basically, he starts out talking about all the ways and reasons that a business can and will be audited, and why it happens...and then he starts to talk about one case where audits are declared completely unnecessary.
* * *
Even if the first female Doctor is no longer playing the part, going forward the Doctor will still be female. Also black and lesbian. Because that's what cutting-edge science fiction is about, don't you know, black lesbians traveling through time and space and licking cooch in new dimensions....
* * *
All right, that might have been a little too sarcastic. What can I say? I'm no Larry Correia!
* * *
So, several months ago, we bought this dishwasher, see. And I took the 11% rebate form, and filled it out, and sent it in, and got a merchandise credit for $51 and change, right?
Tonight I went to Menards with that gift card in hand, and I bought three O-scale railroad cars, and a couple 9" straight sections of track.
...the covered hopper that I bought the other day won't fit on two 9" sections of track when it's hooked to the tank car, so I need to figure out something else. Argh etc. But I got a box car, a flat car with a bus on it, and a coal hopper with simulated load.
What I need to do is set the train set up (I ran out of time to do it before the holidays) with the big 30" straight sections too, and run the new expanded train around for a while. I am amassing quite a fleet of O-scale railroad cars, here; besides the original set, I've got a passenger car, a flatcar, a tank car, a covered hopper, another flatcar, a coal car, a box car, and it feels like I'm forgetting one!
It may actually be getting close to the time to buy a few turnouts and some other track sections, and build a permanent layout in the basement.
A couple days before Christmas I was in a hobby store; I saw a track expansion set for Bachmann N-scale train sets. It was $105 and it would turn the basic circle into an oval with a couple of sidings. I demurred, though, which is probably just as well.
Trains! I got trains!
* * *
Today it was foggy the entire day. It was cold enough that the foliage was frosted white. On the plus side it's not supposed to snow nearly as much as they said it would last night.
Well, winter; what do you expect?