If They Want To Have An ONT, Let It Begin Here

Howdy folks! Thursday night. Maybe it's time for a little history?

I'm Not Sure If We Nuked Them Too Much Or Not Enough

I suppose the Japanese can be excused from knowing much about America in 1861, but how do they explain this?

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Don't understand? Oh, well, I'll let the incomparable @DreadnoughtHoliday explain: Join us as we travel back to the Sino-Russian war, and listen spellbound to the saga of the Russian First and Second Pacific Fleets

BTW, @DreadnoughtHoliday is one of the best accounts on Twitter. Funny as hell, and interesting, if you like naval stuff.

Jesus Dies For This?

Easter in Florence: Rocket Doves & Exploding Carts

On Easter Sunday, after the services in the gorgeous Duomo are complete, a wooden tower covered in firecrackers is lit, producing a fountain of fireworks and sparks. It’s called the “Scoppio del Carro,” or the “Explosion of the Cart,” and it’s a custom that has its origins the 11th century. But let me back up a bit. During the First Crusade in 1097, a Florentine soldier was rewarded for his service with three flints from the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. He brought them back to his home city, and during Easter it became traditional to light torches with these flints to be paraded through Florence. Later, the torches were replaced with a large candle lit with that “holy fire” carried on a cart through the city. Today, those same flints are used to light coals carried on the cart.

Loved Italy when we were there a few years back. We only did Rome, I want to go back and see the rest. If you get a chance, the BBC series James May: Our Man In Italy is excellent (as is the earlier Our Man In Japan)

Hit Me

In The Left’s Game Of High-Stakes Blackjack, It’s Time For The Right To Double Down

How then can conservatives respond? To begin, the right needs to increase its menu of political options. Instead of staying on every 17, the right must prepare to double down on occasion, especially when the left least expects it. It must develop a bigger political bankroll, represented by the ability to utilize power at the local, state, and federal levels, as well as greater political capabilities, including peaceful protest and community organizing.  The right must stop treating each political battle as a tabula rasa, unaffected by what happened before or what happens after. When the right is on a hot streak, it should keep pushing.   Finally, the right should stop allowing the left to escalate without political cost. When leftists take to the streets, engage in legal extortion, commit economic blackmail, or otherwise disregard the boundaries of respectable civil politics, the right should not reward it in any way. Make it clear to the leftists that they have hit the table limit. 

Sounds good, but the problem as always is that the GOPe doesn't want to win anything. They'd be pleased as punch to be crotch sniffers of a leftist communist dictatorship, as long as they were allowed to be in DC to sniff.

Less Popular Than A Prostitute With The Pox

Bud Light: you can't GIVE it away

OutKick founder Clay Travis did a bit of a social experiment at an event in Tennessee, and the results were hilarious. What, he wondered, would happen if you provided free beer to people and gave them a choice between 3 different brands, including Bud Light? The results were not good for Anheuser-Bush. Free beer. What red-blooded TN partygoer turns down free beer? Apparent every single one of them if they have to be seen with Dylan Mulvaney’s favorite brew. Nobody wants to touch the stuff, at least if others can see the can.

I spent last weekend at our annual gathering of friends, about 90 of us, who get together each year to turn money into noise. After a long day of shooting everything from select fire ARs to short barrel semi-auto shotguns (that was fun for everything except my shoulder) to pistols of all types to .50cal Barretts, much beer is consumed. Everyone brings beer and dumps it into community coolers. Nobody, and I mean NOBODY brought any Bud Light. There were a couple of orphan cans left over at the venue, and that's it. I had one in a moment of questioning my masculinity for not putting more than a dozen rounds through the shot gun. Fun, but man did it kick.

Hey Diogenes, I Got One!

Cook County prosecutor quits after 20 years

And yet, I’m leaving. Why could that be? The simple fact is that this State and County have set themselves on a course to disaster. And the worst part is that the agency for whom I work has backed literally every policy change that had the predicable, and predicted, outcome of more crime and more people getting hurt.

Bond reform designed to make sure no one stays in jail while their cases are pending with no safety net to handle more criminals on the streets, shorter parole periods, lower sentences for repeat offenders, the malicious and unnecessary prosecution of law enforcement officers, overuse of diversion programs, intentionally not pursuing prosecutions for crimes lawfully on the books after being passed by our legislature and signed by a governor, all of these so-called reforms have had a direct negative impact, with consequences that will last for a generation.
…

The current people in charge of this state, including the [State’s Attorney’s Office] suffer from a fundamental misunderstanding…we live in a society with adversarial court and criminal justice processes. Defense attorneys, legal aid clinics, Public Defenders, defendant advocate groups…they fight like hell to protect the rights of criminal defendants. And they should. Their work is as noble as our’s. But we have an obligation to fight like hell on behalf of the People. It should go without saying that this must be done ethically and evenhandedly. When both sides vigorously defend their positions, a balance is reached between protecting rights while preserving some sort of order and safety. Once we start doing too much of the defense’s job, once we pull our punches, once we decide that it’s worth risking citizens’ lives to have a little social experiment, that balance is lost. The unavoidable consequences are what we are witnessing in real time, an increase in crime of all kinds, businesses and families pulling up stakes, and the bodies piling up; the whole time with a State’s Attorney who insists that there is nothing to see here, and if there is it must be someone else’s fault. And then they wonder why they cannot retain experienced prosecutors or even hire new ones…it’s because any true prosecutor recognizes the importance of this balance, and that they will not be permitted to be a prosecutor under this administration.

I will not raise my son here. I am fortunate enough to have the means to escape, so my entire family is leaving the State of Illinois. I grew up here, my family and friends are here, and yet my own employer has turned it into a place from which I am no longer proud to be, and in which my son is not safe.

Related:

But boy, those so-called “urban food deserts” sure are a mystery, right? Must be racism.

Running A Company Into The Ground

Magic: The Gathering Fan Allegedly Set Upon by Pinkertons for Unreleased Cards

This is not a fandom that I'm a part of, so I likely don't know the entire story, but I've seen enough outrage at Wizards of the Coast lately to know it should be concerning to the company. WOTC owns brands like D&D and Magic:The Gathering. Lately they have been downright hositile to their fanbase, from changing many of the open world rules that D&D has long cherished, to inserting all kinds of woke bullshit into their games to this.

Over the past week or so, a YouTuber known as oldschoolmtg has been uploading videos of himself opening packs of the new, unreleased Magic: The Gathering set: March of the Machine: The Aftermath. He uploaded three videos, which were widely shared on Reddit and MTG communities, even making headlines on IGN and other sites. He alleged to have 22 boxes, and uploaded multiple videos last week. It’s estimated that oldschoolmtg leaked about 75% of the entire set, or about 36 of the set’s 50 cards. The set is scheduled to be released in just a few weeks on May 12, with “official” reveals set to begin at the start of the month.

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According to his YouTube video, the Pinkertons allegedly asked oldschoolmtg to turn over the “stolen product”—which is, in this case, Magic cards. They collected the cards, the boxes they came in, and even foil that the booster sets are wrapped in. He stated that the agents counted the cards to make sure they retrieved all of them. In the video, oldschoolmtg said that the agents also mentioned “jail time” while they were speaking to him and his wife. The agents gave oldschoolmtg a name and number at Wizards of the Coast, allegedly told him to delete the videos he posted onto YouTube, and left.

So this guy bought a box of cards, and was mistakenly given the new set, which hadn't been released yet. Since he's a fan, he made YouTube videos excitedly reviewing the new cards. He'd done nothing wrong, but WOTC...sicced the Pinks on him. They're going to alienate their entire fan base at this rate.

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posted by WeirdDave at 10:00 PM

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