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So, TSM has had a Recent Infestation…

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…and as a result, I thought I’d post this bit of humor sent to me by my favorite Merchant-O’Death.

A US Navy cruiser anchored in Mississippi for a week’s shore leave. The first evening, the ship’s Captain received the following note from the wife of a very wealthy and influential plantation owner:

“Dear Captain, Thursday will be my daughter Melinda’s Debutante Ball. I would like you to send four well-mannered, handsome, unmarried officers in their formal dress uniforms to attend the dance.

 They should arrive promptly at 8:00 PM prepared for an evening of polite Southern conversation. They should be excellent dancers, as they will be the escorts of lovely refined young ladies. One last point: No Jews please.”

Sending a written message by his own yeoman, the captain replied:

Madam, thank you for your invitation. In order to present the widest possible knowledge base for polite conversation, I am sending four of my best and most prized officers.

 One is a lieutenant commander and a graduate of Annapolis with an additional Masters degree from MIT in Fluid Dynamics and ship design.

 The second is a Lieutenant, one of our helicopter pilots, and a graduate of Northwestern University in Chicago, with a BS in Aeronautical Engineering. His Masters Degree and PhD In Aeronautical and Mechanical Engineering
are from Texas Tech University and he is also an astronaut candidate.

 The third officer is also a lieutenant, with degrees in both computer systems and information technology from SMU and he is awaiting notification on his Doctoral Dissertation from Cal Tech.

 Finally, the fourth officer, also a lieutenant commander, is our ship’s doctor, with an undergraduate degree from the University of Georgia and his medical degree is from the University of North Carolina. We are very proud
of him, as he is also a senior fellow in Trauma Surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital.


 Upon receiving this letter, Melinda’s mother was quite excited and looked forward to Thursday with pleasure. Her daughter would be escorted by four handsome naval officers without peer (and the other women in her social
circle would be insanely jealous).

 At precisely 8:00 PM on Thursday, Melinda’s mother heard a polite rap at the door which she opened to find, in full dress uniform, four very handsome, smiling Black officers.

 Her mouth fell open, but pulling herself together, she stammered, “There must be some mistake!”

 “No, Madam,” said the first officer. “Captain GOLDBERG doesn’t make mistakes.”

It’s an oldie, but a goodie!

“Civilized” Warfare

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I got a comment tonight on another post from one “Patrick Henry.”  I’ll excerpt the significant portion:

Well, if we weren’t involved in the middle east and had our troops killing everything in sight….

To which I responded:

If our troops were “killing everything in sight,” we’d have been out of there after eighteen months, tops.

This kind of “thinking” really pisses me off.

We’re still in Afghanistan after more than 11 years of war, Iraq for not quite 10.  Why?  Because we decided to go to war as gently as possible, and then pick up the smashed pieces and try to build modern nations where there were none before.

Contrast that to sixty-eight years ago this day when we dropped incendiary bombs on Tokyo, killing over 100,000 people – men, women and children – and burning sixteen square miles of the city to the ground.  THAT’S “killing everything in sight.”  THAT is total war.

Happy Birthday to Me!

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So last year, I was given a Colt Pocket Hammerless Vest Pocket .25.  It was the second-oldest gun in my safe. Now it’s third-oldest.  This year, my father-in-law gave me his original 1917-vintage Colt 1911!

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It’s pretty pitted, and appears to have been reblued some time in the past, but I believe the double-diamond walnut grip panels are original, and I know for a fact that it feeds and shoots hardball just fine. Not bad for a 96 year-old handgun.

Remember that Sultan Knish Piece…

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…The Closing of the Liberal Mind that I took a QotD from on Tuesday? Here’s another:

As a scientist, you formulate a conclusion that will lead to a healthier society, and then you build a hypothesis around it, and then you declare it to be science. Your science, like your journalism, consists of the progressive narrative that proves whatever you want it to prove, whether it’s that capitalism will melt the icebergs, homosexuality is genetically fixed or oil is about to run out. Scientific objectivity has no more meaning to you than it did to the Caliph who torched the Library of Alexandria. If science is worth anything, then it’s progressive. And if it doesn’t, then it’s worthless.

And PowerLine has a recent example of exactly that.

Of course, the whole history of gun control is an example of exactly that, but….

“STOP DIGGING!”

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Reader Phil B., the Brit expat now living in Middle Earth, sent me a link to a wall-o’-text essay,  Reactionary Philosophy In An Enormous, Planet-Sized Nutshell, by one Scott Alexander. Aside from being a tremendous source for Quotes of the Day, it’s an absolutely outstanding piece of work I cannot recommend strongly enough.

But it is, absolutely, an überpost. Get a beverage and a snack before you sit down to savor it. Excerpt:

Reaction isn’t a conspiracy theory; it’s not suggesting there’s a secret campaign for organized repression. To steal an example from the other side of the aisle, it’s positing something more like patriarchy. Patriarchy doesn’t have an actual Patriarch coordinating men in their efforts to keep down women. It’s just that when lots of people share some really strong cultural norms, they manage to self-organize into a kind of immune system for rejecting new ideas. And Western society just happens to have a really strong progressivist immune system ready to gobble you up if you say anything insufficiently progressive.

And so the main difference between modern liberal democracy and older repressive societies is that older societies repressed things you liked, but modern liberal democracies only repress things you don’t like. Having only things you don’t like repressed looks from the inside a lot like there being no repression at all.

The good Catholic in medieval Spain doesn’t feel repressed, even when the Inquisition drags away her neighbor. She feels like decent people have total freedom to worship whichever saint they want, total freedom to go to whatever cathedral they choose, total freedom to debate who the next bishop should be – oh, and thank goodness someone’s around to deal with those crazy people who are trying to damn the rest of us to Hell.

And that’s just for openers. Go. Read.

It Worked for Caleb

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Dunkin’ Donuts worker stops robbery — with hot coffee

When a man tried to rob a Dunkin’ Donuts in Connecticut on Saturday night, an employee acted quickly and stopped him with the closest weapon available — hot coffee.

The attempted robbery happened shortly after 11 p.m. at a Dunkin’ Donuts in West Haven, when a man pulled up to the drive-through and asked the clerk for change for a $100 bill, according to Sgt. David Tammaro, of the West Haven Police Department.

When the clerk refused to make the change, the man said this was a robbery and tried to climb through the drive-through window, police said.That is when the clerk threw hot coffee in man’s face, police said.

The man fled the area in a newer model white Ford Explorer without stealing anything, according to a news release from police.

When a man tried to mug Caleb a few years ago, he got a hot cup of Starbucks in his face, with the same result.

Which resulted in this coffee mug:

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