Quotulatiousness

February 16, 2017

The handshake

Filed under: Cancon, Humour, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Victor sent me this. I had to share:

Justin Trudeau is prepared for this. He has spent hours of watching videos of foreign dignitaries having their knucks busted by Diamond Donnie. He and a crack team of advisors have been studying them and analyzing every move. He has been overclocking it at the gym to get his forearms swole. Anytime he is off camera he is clenching and unclenching a gripmaster. He is endlessly clenching and unclenching his anus to build focus. Shaking hands with Donald Trump is really a contest of wills and Justin Trudeau will not fail. He is an aristocrat and he was bred by his father in all the fine arts of modern statecraft like clasping claws with thugs. Donald Trump is a trumped up peasant and Justin Trudeau is the heir and defender of the North American dream. This was the only thing discussed in that motorcade to the White House. Forget softwood lumber and dairy supply management and the attempt to leverage Ivanka for a roundtable on women in the workplace that sounds like a summit they would have held back in the silent era of film.

The whole trip was all handshake game plan. Every possible move, every possible contingency, from proper foot stance to recognizing Trump’s sloppy attempts at any one of 32 possible Masonic hand ciphers.

The car door opens. This is it. It’s go time. Trudeau steps out of the car and glides into Trump’s outstretched hand. He quickly braces himself on the president’s shoulder, establishing an indomitable centre of gravity. He is going fucking Super Saiyan on this handshake. But Trump will not be deterred. He ratchets up the pressure and tries to pull this punk kid in. There is a tug of war. Trudeau is not moving. His hand is too strong. Their forearms are jerking around with electrical power and neither of them were ready for this to happen.

He can barely believe it himself and he has to look down at his own hands to make sure that this is really happening that, yes, he is not broken. He raises his head again to meet Trump’s gaze with blazing eyes that scream SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS but also AINSI TOUJOURS AUX TYRANS because bilingualism. Utterly destroyed but wanting to be cool about it, Trump gestures at the cameras before leading Justin into his den of lies. He cannot hide the look of absolute mystification on his face.

Words & Numbers: The Customer is Always Taxed

Filed under: Business, Economics, Politics, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

Published on 15 Feb 2017

We’re really excited to present the first episode of what will be an on-going video podcast featuring Dr. Antony Davies, Professor of Economics of Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, and Dr. James R. Harrigan, Senior Research Fellow at Strata, in Logan, Utah.

Each Wednesday we’ll be sharing a new short video featuring Antony and James talking about the economics and political science of current events. We hope you enjoy the show and look forward to your input on what topics Antony and James should cover in the future.

Today’s episode is about everybody’s favorite subject: Taxes!

“Secretive Army Special Mission Unit Offers Support to Leftist Overthrow of Trump Administration”

Filed under: Humour, Military — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Whoa! Shit just got real!*

In recent months, ill-informed Leftists who have spent the last 8 years repeatedly telling the public that they do not “need” guns and have no reason to fear the Federal Government (except of course for the police) have discovered that they are totally unprepared to carry out the violent overthrow of the Trump Administration and the revolution that they feel our country so desperately needs.

Those pleas for a military-led coup had gone unanswered (and largely laughed at) by members of the Armed Forces until yesterday, when a little known Army Special Mission Unit responded to left-wing demands for a military removal of the Commander-in-Chief.

Known only as the “E4 Mafia,” this unit appears nowhere in U.S. Army organizational charts but reportedly acts as a major influence in every single Army organization operating across the globe. Because no one in our organization ever served in the military, and because it serves our political agenda (and our research is limited to Wikipedia), it can only be assumed that the E4 Mafia is one of numerous Army Special Mission Units such as Delta Force and SEAL Team Sixty.

The support of “E4M” does not come cheap, however. The following list of demands was passed to Article 107 News in an effort to ensure widest dissemination to sympathetic revolutionaries (Editor’s Note: This message received A LOT of editing for both spelling/grammar and content prior to re-publication here).

H/T to John Ringo, who commented:

You forgot to add ‘top secret’ Army unit. ‘So top secret it appears in no FOIA requests and is officially disavowed by all military sources. A Pentagon spokesman when asked about them responded with a string of obscenities before being led away crying…’

60163 Tornado Settle to Carlisle 14th Feb 2017

Filed under: Britain, Railways — Tags: — Nicholas @ 02:00

Published on 14 Feb 2017

BBC News report on 60163 Tornado’s run on the Settle to Carlisle line this morning, the first Steam Loco to do the service run in nearly 50 years.

H/T to Jim Guthrie for the link.

QotD: The imperfectability of man

Filed under: Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

And then you get to things like City or some of the Heinlein juveniles, where you’re assured that the UN brought rationality to the world, one world government is wonderful and, as superabundance set in, humans shed religion as unneeded, and went forward to be perfect angels.

I’m not sure what caused this blindness that affected smart men in the fifties and sixties, and still affects academics, idiots and Marxists today, but I read that and I think “Okay, I can see how you thought this was plausible if what you looked at was the intellectual portions of middle America where religion was a social thing, and where the whole “brotherhood of man” was a believed fable. But can you imagine making Islam just “wither away” without major persecution, war and executions? Oh, heck, even Catholicism in the more traditional regions.

[…]

And then there’s tribalism. Perhaps the EU has made the Portuguese and the Spanish live in peace with each other (I think they’re biding their time, but that’s something else) what about the myriad little tribes in Africa, or even racial/tribal minorities in Asia.

How could they think the nature of man would pass away so completely?

I attribute it to lack of contact with other lands. I mean, the US is a huge country, and back then the industrial-news complex had absolute primacy. You really only got the other countries filtered through the lens of your colleagues in the media. And you only got even other segments of your own country filtered that way.

This was not malice, either. I’m here to tell you that understanding another culture — or even understanding that another culture really exists, and they’re not just sort of playing at it — is REALLY hard. Humans are very good at absorbing the conditions they’re born into and internalizing them as THE conditions, i.e. the only true ones, and then thinking of everything else as a bizarre variation.

Sarah A. Hoyt, “Time Zones”, According to Hoyt, 2015-06-23.

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