Red One, and other red ones
Hey, Welcome to all the new faces, and welcome back to the rest of you reprobates. The booze is on the counter next to the microwave, and up in the corner cabinet, the beer and soda are out on the pie shelf, Smoked salmon will be ready in a little bit, lets chat.
Oh, and as always, please notice the cup at the tip jar Where we restock the bar. While you can do a paid subscription here at Sub stack, and it’s a welcome donation, Stripe (the folks that handle the money for sub stack) get a BIG cut. The Tip jar money all goes straight to me.
Look, I’m as tired of talking about politics as you probably are of listening to it, so, while I won’t promise not to mention it at all, let’s start with something more fun.
Not going to lie, I was a little dubious of the whole Red One thing, when my Son in Law, and several of my Brothers in service and in heart were all gaga over it. Dwayne Johnson is alright, but he’s not exactly Clint Eastwood, or Kurt Russell, you know? And he doesn’t have the comedic chops of Tim Allen either.
Well, I’m a big enough man to admit when I’m wrong.
I was wrong.
Think Artemis Fowl meets The Santa Claus as done by the writers of In Like Flint and you’ll be pretty close. (By the way, if you’re too young to remember any of those movies, get yourself to the screen and look them up, you’re delinquent.)
Without any real spoilers, it seems that all the legends are real: The good ones (Santa, probably the Tooth Fairy, etc…) The bad ones (Krampus, Gryla (the Witch of Christmas from Iceland), the Headless Horseman Etc…) And the folks that keep everyone playing nice is the Mythological Oversight and Restoration Authority (MORA) With Lucy Liu where you would expect Samuel L Jackson if this were SHIELD.
The acting is tight, the plot doesn’t wander much, and the F/X are amazing. (Loved the Reindeer, which are reimaged as some sort of cross between a moose and a Clydesdale with glowing horns to give them flying ability.) The party at Krampus’ place is pretty awesome too, the characters of all the various monsters are formed enough to give belief that each character got his or her own designer. They didn’t just have cardboard cutouts for the crowd.
I hope that we see the further adventures of MORA, there’s a lot more that could be done in this universe. The movie doesn’t take itself too seriously, it’s just FUN, and that’s what movies are supposed to be. Especially Christmas movies. I give it five rounds from a six-gun.
While we’re talking about Red One, let’s talk about some other red ones, as in Communists.
Google, you know, “First, Do Know Evil?” Well, in an attempt to try and become an actual news organization again, (yes, it’s probably too late, but hey at least they’re trying) the NYT just ran an article on how the folks of Google have been trying to conceal their behavior and motives from both competitors and government regulators for the last fifteen years. google-antitrust-employee-messages.
“The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications. It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded.”
This sort of thing would not protect intellectual property from being stolen, it would ONLY protect Google from government trials. If Google was a governmental office, this would be illegal as HELL. Even as a private entity it can be considered illegal if Google knew or suspected that they were about to be subject to a lawsuit or trial. (Here’s a hint, they’ve been subject to lawsuits and trials continuously for the last fifteen years.)
Google of course, claims they did nothing wrong, and that “the DOJ failed to prove that the deleted conversations were crucial to their case.”
The DELETED conversations. Which of course DOJ couldn’t see, because they were???
DELETED! Very good recruit, you get a silver star.
The start of this year, the FTC made it emphatically clear that “Slack, Google Chats, and other Collaborative Messaging Platforms Have Always Been and Will Continue to be Subject to Document Requests” in this memo: enforcement/competition-matters/2024/01/slack-google-chats-other-collaborative-messaging-platforms-have-always-been-will-continue-be-subject
Destruction of evidence has always been a crime, unless of course your name is Clinton, or Obama, or Biden.
There’s an article in Politico (yes, they’re leftist apologists for everything Biden, so when you go read it, remember that.) about the Las Vegas mass casualty shooting by Stephen Paddock. /conspiracy-theory-las-vegas-shooting-dangerous- The article brings up a more and more famous conspiracy theory on this shooting, only to discredit it and call it “dangerous and nuts.” Now the theory proposes to tie BLM, Antifa, ISIS, and the FBI together as part of the shooting or willing participants in the coverup.
Yeah, it’s a bit out there. That said, the idea that a single mentally ill individual with no previous violent outbursts or training, would manage to pull off a crime involving twenty four (plus) weapons, and thousands of rounds of ammo, a car full of explosives, and a total of 473 casualties (60 dead) sort of fails the sniff test too. And the fact that either there wasn’t a “manifesto” or it’s somehow gotten buried and never saw the light of day? That doesn’t exactly match the profile of mass shooters. It makes one wonder.
From that shooting, we’re going to move on to another mass shooting, but this one is not just “ok” it’s federally ordered. Back in 1990, a bird called the Northern Spotted Owl (NSO) was made an endangered species, and the blame for this listing was laid at the feet of the timber industry. As a result the timber industry was decimated here in the PNW. Companies went out of business, whole towns dried up and blew away, all in an effort to save this “most vital bird, a bellwether for the entire ecology.” See we were told by “THE SCIENCE ™” that these birds could only nest in old growth timber, and only far from humans. I guess they were shy about having sex or something.
Well, here we are, thirty years later and that bird is even further along, making smaller and smaller circles around the drain. The first revelation was that, well, actually, the NSO do nest in second growth, and newer trees, but far from removing the protection for Old Growth, due to this “new SCIENCE™” that means that we need to protect second growth trees TOO! That happened back around 2000. Here we are in 2024 and the bird is even further endangered, and now the real truth has come out.
The NSO is just straight up being “Out Owled.” The NSO seems is just not as good of an owl as the Barred Owl. So now, the Federal Government in it’s continuing effort to freeze time based on an imaginary “perfect era” has hired a bunch of “Scientists” to take shotguns out and kill as many Barred Owls as they can, to the tune of a half million over the next three decades.
I’m not a fan of the government picking winners and losers in the market, or in industries, and I’m even more not a fan of them deciding to get rid of one species from an area, because they’re more successful than a species that the government has been using as a tool to destroy an industry.
Oh, BTW? Fun fact: the two damn birds can interbreed, and the hybrid is fertile.
This is like the game we have up here in the upper left corner of the nation, of pretending that the salmon that swim up this stream are a completely different species from identical salmon that swim up a stream five miles down the road.
Imagine if you were told that the Golden Retriever was a different species than a Yellow Labrador Retriever, or a left-handed Black man was a different species than a right handed Caucasian. Oh, wait, we did that last one, and then we fought a war over it, and continued to have problems with it until about uh… TODAY!
Funny thing though, a lot of the people that find themselves on one side of the argument when it’s humans, find themselves on the other side when it’s fish or fowl… If it, they, them, can fuck it and the kids come out able to sire kids of their own, it’s the same species. Might be different tribes, or different breeds, but it’s the same critter.
Oh, another fun thing about this, the Barred Owl that the federales are killing? Yeah, it’s protected by the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, which is supposed to make killing them illegal.
This isn’t about the birds.
It never was.
While we’re talking about things that aren’t what they claim to be, we have the two state cases against President Elect Trump. New York wants to “stay” their case until 2029, because they understand that they can’t jail a sitting president, but they still want to “get” him. Don’t we have some sort of amendment to the constitution about speedy trials and cruel and unusual punishment?
Oh Yeah, the Sixth and Eighth amendment! Both of which, according to the fourteenth amendment, cover the states too. Seriously we’re going to hold all motions and decisions until after Trump leaves office? WTF? Needless to say, Trump’s lawyers want the case dismissed, in light of Trump V. United States (2024) NY is going to try to drag this on for as long as they can, it seems, strictly out of bitter revenge.
Meanwhile, the Georgia court of appeals canceled oral arguments scheduled for next month on the appeal of a lower court ruling allowing Fani Willis to continue to prosecute an election interference case she has brought against Trump for the 2020 election. If you don’t remember, this case was in question because of a lot of shenanigans by Willis and her lover Nathan Wade, who she hired as a “special Prosecutor” in spite of being woefully unqualified. Trump tried to get her removed, Justice McAfee ruled against him, but granted a request to seek an appeal. The appellate court agreed to hear the appeal, and now has canceled the hearing.
What does this mean? Hell if I know, sure seems fishy though.
It’s not about the alleged crimes.
It never was.
If you go though the backlog of posts, you’ll find one /wars-hot-cold-and-political where I discussed the attempted illegal entrance of Quantico by two illegal immigrants from Jordan, who claimed to be Amazon delivery guys, and were, according to ICE at the time, on the terrorist watch list.
In September prosecutors claimed that neither one was on any watch list, and ICE gave out bad data. Now they’re saying this was just a misunderstanding due to the language barrier and have dropped all charges! /feds-dismiss-charges-jordanians-trespassed- (bear in mind this is from the Washington times, so it’s heavily tilted, for example the illegal nature of their entrance into the country is glossed over.)
The House Homeland Security Chairman has been asking WTF? In a loud and shrill voice, and has been getting stonewalled. The “Center for Immigration Studies” has been blown off too. The US attorney’s office has been mum. ICE took custody, but were ordered to release them on an “immigration bond.”
People, I’ve seen enough shit in my careers to know the stink of black ops and spook shit when I smell it. This reeks.
The Bayou Renaissance man made a brilliant post about the sudden “discovery” of all the sexual inuendo and scandal around Trump’s cabinet picks, https://bayourenaissanceman.blogspot.com/2024/11/this-exactly-this.html I recommend you go have a look, unlike me, he’s brief.
It seems that the people of Haiti are getting sick of the games the gangs are playing, according to the A.P. haiti-gang-attack-petionville Residents took up arms alongside the cops and shot the shit out of the “Viv Ansanm” group, lead by a former “elite police officer” who had posted their planned attack in a video on social media. At least 28 gangbangers killed, and hundreds of weapons seized. Well, it’s a start. To the gun grabbers that drifted in, THIS is why we have a second amendment. It’s not about shooting Bambi.
The deep state is back at it, /whistleblower warns FBI can't be trusted on background checks/ it seems “Section D” or SecD has decided to fail and or slow roll any security background checks on Trump appointees that the Democrats don’t like.
In a follow up to the Oprah pay to endorse story, it seems that original numbers were lowballed. Harpo Productions (shouldn’t that be Hippo?) wasn’t paid one million as previously reported. How about 2.5 mil? Yup. That’s the cost of “you should vote for this loser, if you don’t, you’re an idiot.” These days.
International cables are being cut to Sweden, Finland, and Lithuania, as Putin seeks to find out how much he can get away with, before the new sheriff hits town.
Sal has advice on how to get the Navy back in the game, at how-to-get-the-navys-groove-back
And finally, we’ve got the shenanigans going on in Formerly Great Britain. Tom hits on the Kafka Trap of “Non-Crime Hate Incidents” at this-is-the-future-they-want Go see him, he’s not only a good guy, he’s wise beyond measure. And the Daily Mail (UK newspaper) covers the new war on farmers in Protest-farmers-London-Governments-inheritance-tax. Which will require farmers to pay massive Inheritance taxes (20% of total value) on farms, bankrupting most farms within a single generation.
Now I try to stay out of other countries’ politics, because I expect and demand they stay out of mine. That said, farms are not a high profit operation. Several countries over the years have tried to remove the farmers and plug in politically acceptable individuals to operate the farms instead. Places like Mozambique (now Zimbabwe Land) The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, Cuba, Laos, Cambodia, and South Africa come to mind. They all started as food exporters. They all ended up with famines. If you insist on this self-inflicted wound, don’t come begging for food from us! Oh we’ll sell it to you, but it’ll be costly!
Hey, Britain, leave them farms alone! All in all, you’re just going to get lined up against the wall.
Good luck trying to eat your meat, it’s not there, and you can’t get any pudding. You can’t have any pudding if you don’t get any meat.
QOTD "At the moment, there is no way to assess the cause of the cable break, but such breaks without external impact do not happen in these waters." CEO of a Finish cable company who’s cables have been cut, Russia or China suspected.
Yours in Service,
William Lehman