Gun Free Zone

And that includes fireworks.

Today’s visual safety brief. ZONK!! pic.twitter.com/Tua6Tuv1pk

— Knot the Agency Guy (@knot_agency) August 14, 2020

From the New York Post:

‘Blazing Saddles’ debuts on HBO Max with a new racism warning

HBO Max has added yet another informative introduction to one of its titles. When “Blazing Saddles” hit the network’s new platform on July 28, the Mel Brooks film kicks off not with its opening sequence, but rather an introduction by University of Chicago professor and TCM host Jacqueline Stewart.

“This movie is an overt and audacious spoof on classic Westerns,” Stewart says in the newly added intro. “It’s as provocative today as it was when it premiered back in 1974.”

This is a God dammed shame.

There should only be one introduction to this movie.

“Blazing Saddles is THE funniest movie ever made.  Mel Brooks is a comic genius without equal.  This movie has entertained millions for decades without a trigger warning. If this movie offensive you, your parents failed you and you need therapy. If you get the urge to cancel someone because of this movie, do society a favor and wash your mouth out with a shotgun.”

The person who decided that Blazing Saddles needs a trigger warning can get fucked with a Sawzall.

If anyone tries to cancel Mel Brooks or insult the memory of Gene Wilder I will be happy to personally feed them feet first into a wood chipper.

If Hollywood ever goes so far as to memory hole this movie I will Killdozer down Hollywood Boulevard until it’s restored.

I swear to God, this is the shit that will drive me to Boogaloo, not being able to show my son Blazing Saddles.

This is too insane not to be real for 2020.

Good Humor is “calling on ALL drivers to STOP playing ‘Turkey in the Straw’ immediately" because of its association with minstrel shows in the 1800s.

But Good Humor has good news! They have an idea for a new song https://t.co/BeLAppQcTb

— Los Angeles Times (@latimes) August 13, 2020

I, like countless kids learned the Sharon Lois and Bram lyrics.  We knew. Nothing of minstrel shows.  My association with that song is ice cream trucks and learning to sing folk songs in elementary school music class.

No child today hears that song and thinks “this is a song of black oppression because my ancestors had to sing it while they danced for their dinner before racist white people.”

If they do it’s because their woke parents told them that, which really is child abuse.  There is no reason to make a little kid miserable, shouldering them with a history of racism they don’t have the higher thought capability to emotionally process.

So what did they replace Turkey in the Straw with?

A song by Wu-Tang.

The rap band from the 1990s that used the n-word liberally, sang songs about the criminal life style, abusing women, and drugs. They embodied the gangster rap lifestyle so much, one original member Ol’ Dirty Bastard was murdered.

But sure, letting one of these guys create a new ice cream truck song is less problematic that an old folk song, the lyrics nobody knows, because the popular version was created by some hippie Canadian kid’s music folk singers.

This is such bullshit.

I always hear the chant whenever somebody has an issue with their PC or Windows system. Why I don’t buy Apple? Besides old history with a distributor/seller way back in the dark ages, it simply does not make fiduciary sense: You don’t use a Bugatti Chiron to go to Walmart for groceries or load it with sacks of cement from Home Depot for the patio rebuild you are doping this weekend. I just need a basic computer that allows me to surf the web, play World of Tanks and write this blog, I need the equivalent of a “previously used” F-150 and nothing else.

I just captured this from their respective websites:

Basically I can buy 4.5 Dells Inspirons for the price of the cheapest desktop Mac. My computers usually last me 3-4 years easily which means at the Apple price I have computer coverage for over a decade, less if I decided to get  bigger monitors rather than keep using the ones I already have.

Mind you, Macs do amazing work if you are in the Audio Visual business. I have a buddy who is a recording engineer (with a Grammy under his belt) and does all his work with Apple, but his regular human use is done on PC because it does not make sense to risk expensive tooling for anything else.

In gun terms, it makes more sense to spend the same money and  buy an used Glock 19, 2 spare mags, ammo and take a class than buying a top of the line HK USP 45 and nothing else.

Who are the Romney Brigade, you may be asking yourselves. Answer is easy and you may know an specimen or two: Any so-called republican that feels we need to engage the Democrats and the Left  with a high level of politeness and fairness it was a tea party at Martha’s Vineyard (with classical music being played in the background). That the enemy is having us in a knife fight in a public bathroom and tries to cheat at every possible occasion because they want to win does not even compute in their brains. And, of course, the Romney Brigade is and has been fully #NeverTrump as he is too crass, too noveu rich and has had the ball to move to their beach neighborhood or West Palm Beach.  President Trump is their Al Czervik making a mess of their pristine golf course and overall being more successful that they could ever hope to be.

The Romney Brigade had the vapors almost immediately after Harris’s VP slot was announced and the jokes began to flow: From kneepad innuendos to full fledged slogans like “Legs Up, Don’t Come” to “She has the Black Vote all locked up. In prison.” The Brigadists have gone out of the way to inform you we are supposed to be better and that you are an impolite, reprehensible uncouth for point out that she advanced  her career on her back and knees. That such comments will actually draw votes away from the good folks of the Republican party and that we always are supposed to conduct ourselves with the utmost class and behavior which makes a sure way to win.

Unfortunately, that “sure way” has been proven wrong: First with Romney as candidate losing the elections and bringing us 8 years of Obama and then the brash and unapologetic behavior of president Trump got him elected when everybody else gave Hillary a 96% chance of winning the election.

And we need to win. We cannot afford to lose “with grace” or we are gonna get in full socialist mode in this country. Imagine the Antifa experiment of Seattle and Portland in your hometown and with the full backing (official or otherwise) of the federal government. Is that scary enough for you? Or you need me to recite all the Socialist goals the Left Branch of the Democratic Party wants to impose on you, your family and your income?

So, if calling Kamala a whore works, double it down. I am here for the win, not for the so-called moral victory. Many people died in prisons because they waved burning sage in the face of the enemy rather than flinging a lead pipe against it.

 ‘The fight has commenced, get to fighting or get away.”
Wyatt Earp.

Defense One is an online magazine that focuses on the topic of military defense and national security.

John Nagl is a retired Army officer and is Head of School at The Haverford School.  Paul Yingling is a retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel.  Both are radical partisan Leftists.

They collaborated on this article for Defense One:

“. . . All Enemies, Foreign and Domestic”: An Open Letter to Gen. Milley
If the commander in chief attempts to ignore the election’s results, you will face a choice.

Prepare for some crazy paranoid bullshit fanaticizing.

As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you are well aware of your duties in ordinary times: to serve as principal military advisor to the president of the United States, and to transmit the lawful orders of the president and Secretary of Defense to combatant commanders. In ordinary times, these duties are entirely consistent with your oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic…”

We do not live in ordinary times. The president of the United States is actively subverting our electoral system, threatening to remain in office in defiance of our Constitution. In a few months’ time, you may have to choose between defying a lawless president or betraying your Constitutional oath. We write to assist you in thinking clearly about that choice. If Donald Trump refuses to leave office at the expiration of his constitutional term, the United States military must remove him by force, and you must give that order.

That’s not actually the military’s job.

Also, let’s say that “Donald Trump refuses to leave office” what does that look like?  Nothing.  It looks like nothing.  Biden would be sworn in.  That would be it.  It’s not like the President is just the guy who hits behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.  Trump would have no Constitutional authority to do anything and would get escorted out of the building by White House security.

The idea that he could just stay in the White House and give orders that anybody would be obligated to follow is do detached from reality that it’s shocking anyone would believe it.  Except that these two college-educated Army officers believe it.

But I digress…

Due to a dangerous confluence of circumstances, the once-unthinkable scenario of authoritarian rule in the United States is now a very real possibility.

No, no it’s not.  At least not from Trump it’s not.

Mr. Trump is assembling a private army capable of thwarting not only the will of the electorate but also the capacities of ordinary law enforcement. When these forces collide on January 20, 2021, the U.S. military will be the only institution capable of upholding our Constitutional order.

A private army?  Really?  Where?  How is this happening under our noses and nobody is noticing?  How does someone get in on that action and get an M249 or M240?  Asking for a friend.

Given this dizzying array of threats not merely to his political prospects, but also his liberty and wealth, Mr. Trump is following the playbook of dictators throughout history: he is building a private army answerable only to him. When Caesar faced the prospect of a trial in Rome, he did not return to face his day in court. He unleashed an army personally loyal to him alone on the Roman government. No student of history, Mr. Trump nevertheless appears to be following Caesar’s example. The president’s use of militarized Homeland Security agents against domestic political demonstrations constitutes the creation of a paramilitary force unaccountable to the public. The members of this private army, often lacking police insignia or other identification, exist not to enforce the law but to intimidate the president’s political opponents.

This is bullshit.  The US Marshall Service, INS, and BORTAC, are not Trump’s private army.  They are federal law enforcement agencies that were tasked – within the limitations of their duties – to enforce federal law and protect federal property from destruction.  They were not going door to door shooting or disappearing innocent people just for indicating that they were not going to vote for Trump.

A private army would be an army that Trump funds with his own money, like Blackwater or Executive Outcomes.  Not sworn federal officers who graduated from FLETC and collect US government paychecks.

Also, they did not lack police insignia.  They lacked name tapes to prevent them from being doxxed.  They wore badges and police ID.

This is paranoid insanity that has nothing to do with reality.

Mr. Trump may refuse to leave office. He would likely offer as a fig leaf of legitimacy the shopworn lies about election fraud. Mr. Trump’s acolytes in right-wing media will certainly rush to repeat and amplify these lies, manufacturing sufficient evidence to provide a pretext of plausibility. America’s greatest Constitutional crisis since the Civil War will come about by a president who simply refuses to leave office.

No, it really won’t.  The winner of the electoral college will be sworn in at 12:01 on January 20th, 2021.  It’s that simple.

The Democrat-led House of Representatives will certify the Electoral College results, which Mr. Trump will dismiss as fake news. The courts, flooded with cases from both Democrats and Mr. Trump’s legal team, will take months working through the docket, producing reasoned rulings that Trump will alternately appeal and ignore.

The Supreme Court will make a decision before then.  If for some reason they can’t the Presidency will automatically revert to the Speaker of the House who would be sworn in on January 3rd.

Then the clock will strike 12:01 PM, January 20, 2021, and Donald Trump will be sitting in the Oval Office. The street protests will inevitably swell outside the White House, and the ranks of Trump’s private army will grow inside its grounds. The speaker of the House will declare the Trump presidency at an end, and direct the Secret Service and Federal Marshals to remove Trump from the premises. These agents will realize that they are outmanned and outgunned by Trump’s private army, and the moment of decision will arrive.

This is the point where this turns dark.  You can just hear the salivation at the idea of the US military being unleashed to murder the fuck out of Trump supporters.

Sure, these same people pissed and moaned about rioters who were attacking federal officers and destroying federal property hit with rubber bullets and tear gas.  But when it comes time to open fire with live ammo on Trump supporters they cannot control their hardons.

U.S. military forces escort the former president from the White House grounds. Trump’s little green men, so intimidating to lightly armed federal law enforcement agents, step aside and fade away, realizing they would not constitute a good morning’s work for a brigade of the 82nd Airborne.

These two guys are masturbating to the fantasy of the 82nd killing US citizens.  Just taking turns sucking each other off while the other dirty-talks a Tiananmen Square like massacre of guys in MAGA.

As the senior military officer of the United States, the choice between these two options lies with you. In the Constitutional crisis described above, your duty is to give unambiguous orders directing U.S. military forces to support the Constitutional transfer of power. Should you remain silent, you will be complicit in a coup d’état.

If at 12:02, the US military isn’t ending in the SEALs to get Trump like they did Osama Bin Laden and having the 82nd Airborne gun down MAGA hats, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is a traitor.

You were rightly criticized for your prior active complicity in the president’s use of force against peaceful protesters in Lafayette Square. Your passive complicity in an extralegal seizure of political power would be far worse.

Peaceful protesters who burned a church and threatened the White House.

Notice the double standard.  Tear gassing Leftist rioters is bad.  Shooting MAGA hats is good.

The fate of our Republic may well depend upon your adherence to this oath.  [Defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.]

Respectfully yours,

John Nagl and Paul Yingling

Trump and his supporters are domestic enemies  Their minds are already made up.

These two guys attached their names to this shit.  If they were just asshole pundits for MSNBC it would be one thing, but these guys are both retired US Army officers.  If they exist you know there are more in the military that believe this too.

We literally have US Army officers who get excited at the idea of staging a tactical operation against a US President and his supporters.

You know that given the opportunity they would jump at this.

The mask has come off.  There are members of the US military brass who are partisan hacks who consider their fellow citizens to be enemy combatants.

This should scare the shit out of you.