Memento Quod

From the AP, via Yahoo, comes a feature-length obit of John Glenn.

From a Tall-NH who may or may not be a Trump supporter but is certainly deplorable none-the-less comes today’s DWP:

Johnathan Winterlock reclined back from the ancient oaken table, lit by thirteen red candles. His chair creaked softly as he sank into its warm, cracked leather. The rich, lustrous velvet of his robe enveloped and swaddled his body.  He tented his fingers and sat silently, counting his breaths in and out. After the 45th one he finally spoke.

“Brethren,” his voice was fluttery and paper-thin but the other 12 members of the Innermost Circle knew the will and mind behind it were both strong and inexhaustible. “We have done it. We have crafted the space ship,” Winterlock arched his eyebrows, although the waggish expression did not escape the dark shadows that draped across his face. “We have staged the photos, faked the audio messages and propagated our biggest deception ever. Once again, we are triumphal.”

There was no movement whatsoever from the other great masters seated around the table. But without any cue they all in unison intoned, “quamdiu sumus in magno”.

“Yes, yes, ‘long shall we be great’ indeed.” Winterlock’s small voice became suddenly sharp as jagged ice. “It would, however, be easier to do so if, oh, I don’t know. If perhaps Brother Phillip Rotterman hadn’t irrevocably lost our Space Hoax position paper which clearly outlined why we decided to do this in the first place.” Now all but one of the brethren turned the cowled heads to face a single, guilty brother, who globbed out, as though it were a wad of phlegm, a flimsy, face-saving guess.

“It had to be the aliens thing, right? Scare the people into thinking aliens are threatening the planets, use that as a pretext to take over the global economy. Or maybe convince them that God is dead. Something along those lines, surely.”

One by one 12 of the great masters each extinguished the candleflame in front of them with the tips of their left thumb and forefinger. Winterlock was the last of the 12 and when only Rotterman’s candle was left, the other extinguished both it and him.

Ants Scurry Two By Two

The Washington Post has a cursory review of why so many conservatives in this nation are unable to tell the difference between a real tragedy like the Sandy Hook shooting and made-up nonsense like HRC’s Comet Ping Pong pedo-ring.

Today’s DWP, written by Gregorio Feo, is a case in point mixture of bravado, schadenfreude and willful ignorance:

Ants scurried frantically out of their hive as the smoke billowed through the tunnels they had spent years constructing. The Queen was dead, one final chemical command relayed to them before the toxic air choked her: SURFACE!

The poured out by the hundreds.The crawled over and between stalks of grass as a swollen crowd of isolated units;  scared, disoriented, lonely and desperate. They crawled and wrenched themselves across the earth, maimed and half dead and half paralyzed but still alive and blindly angry. And heading towards the house of the man who poisoned their home.

Troll Hunting

Well, WorldNetDaily has decided to boycott Kellogg’s. In a heartening sign, the very first comment asks the important question, “was Kellogg’s even advertising on WND to begin with?”

In a less-heartening sign comes today’s word-soup DWP from RJLigier:

Kevin Wills slammed the tip of his index finger down on the period key and then, with equal strength, the enter key. His message, a purposefully bizarre mixture of portmanteaus, leetspeak, punctuation marks and references to long dead, generally forgotten historical figures and discredited pseudo-scientific concepts, appeared almost instantaneously. Kevin expected to feel accomplished, if not proud, of serving BeausMama84, who had for some mysterious reason wanted to share both an apple pie recipe and hatred for Communists in response to an article about declining birthrates in Japan, a little bit of her own medicine.

But he didn’t.

(Post-script: I don’t normally do this since I think my stories are shallow and obvious enough to speak for themselves, but just in case the subtext here isn’t clear, I probably won’t be maintaining this blog for much longer. FYI).

They Know How To Fight

Hat tip to @TruthTables for hipping me to this article from The Guardian about an unfaithful elector.

Slow, sad, head shake to Gabriel55 for providing me this DWP:

The Gradsons are a large family that fill up, and spill out of, several small, dirty houses on several small, dirt-lined streets up and down town. They do not know how to study and so are not, by and large, well educated. Maybe one in 10 has progressed as far as an associate’s degree. They do not know how to follow routines and so they are not, by and large, fully employed. Maybe one or two in four hold steady jobs. They do not know how to compromise and so they do not, by and large, maintain fulfilling relationships. Maybe two in five have found themselves, on the whole, more often in healthy relationships than toxic ones.

But what the Gradsons do know how to do was fight. And they fight constantly. They fight amongst themselves. Children fight their parents. Parents fight each other. Cousins snipe at nieces who argue with uncles who berate sisters. Grandparents and grandchildren don’t fight each other much as they tend to have a common enemy but with that exception the Gradsons love to fight each other almost as much as they love to fight outsiders.

They fight the courts who revoke their licenses. They fight bosses who send them home without pay. They fight teachers and politicians and bankers who promise them opportunities that never materialize or can’t be taken advantage of.

They fight neighbors for being standoffish with their noses in the air. Or they fight neighbors for being busybodies with their noses everywhere but in the air. They fight strangers for being strange and children for being loud and the elderly for being slow.

They get naught for their fighting but bruises and trouble and they know it. They don’t know much but fighting but they are not dumb. They know the risks and punishment their fightings engender and they willingly pay the price. Because if they are going to be torn down, ripped asunder and thrown away, and they most certainly are, they are going to be the ones doing the tearing down, the ripping asunder and the throwing away, thank you very much. They fight because if they don’t do those things to themselves then progress, which has no use or place for people who don’t know how to study, follow routines or compromise, will do it for them.

The Real Threat

USA Today is running an article about a deplorable who, instead of liberating Hillary Clinton’s underaged sex-slaves, actually committed a felony.

Of course, as today’s DWP reminds us, the problem isn’t tragically dumb lunatics chasing down every internet rumor with the business end of an assault rifle (and I say “assault rifle” specifically because the fastest way to determine if someone is a deplorable is to mention any shooting and see if their response is, “you know, ‘assault rifle’ isn’t even a thing.”). No, the real problem is that everyone is just so darn sensitive and love rape.

Clifford wrapped his hands around the cold bars of the jail cell door and a thin-lipped smile stretched across his face. The corners of his eyes tightened as did his grasp on the bars. Everyone was so scared of him. So scared because of a couple measly letters and phone calls and all the stuff in the van. No one was worried about the zombies.

What’s the worst Clifford could have done? Accidentally blown up a family? Hell, he had already done that. Cindy was off in, Missouri, maybe? He thought he had heard that through the grapevine. It was hard to say. And little Mark was living with Cindy’s folks out in Grand Forks. Trap had run off, who knew where that mutt had got to.

The point was, families stop being families but come on. That’s life.

Zombies though. Damn. Zombies are the end right there. One zombie, just one and soon every city starts looking like Detroit or, or, Dubai or where-the-hell-ever.

But no one wanted to talk about that. No one wanted to talk about how Clifford was doing his part, as an involved citizen, to wipe out a potential zombie Voodoo ritual-ground. On, all anyone cared about was that his van and all the stuff in it was found parked just down the street from that shyster lawyer who that got Mark taken away from him. That stupid lawyer who wouldn’t even have been at any risk whatsoever if he had just taken Clifford’s advice, and Lord knows he sent enough letters and left enough voicemails, to get the hell out of town before it was too late.

Because, and Clifford was absolutely sure of this, that bottom-feeding lawyer’s backyard was right on top of some Indian cemetery business. And what kind of person would Clifford be if he didn’t do anything about it? Well, he reckoned that would make him the kind of person who was more worried about voice mails and vans than about one or, possibly, potentially two, broken families.

The US Department of Duh

The Atlantic has an article about how President-elect Trump is so dumb that he’s already moved the Doomsday Clock up a minute. They didn’t phrase it quite like that, but I’m just trying to save everyone a little time here.

Today’s DWP comes from The Snorkeler, who thinks there’s a good chance that this is all part of some master plan Trump has cooked up. Spoiler: It isn’t.

“So,” Saraphina drummed her well-manicured nails on the surface of her compressed hardwood desk. “Last time you let him back in he took your car and you haven’t seen it since. The time before that he told your 17 year old daughter that she, and this is a quote from the incident report, ‘had an ass worth memorializing’. And it looks like you won’t be able to qualify for a line of credit until you’ve paid off the debts he accumulated over the past eight years he’s been mooching off you.” The client looked at her with steely eyes.

“He’s a good man though, you just have to know him like I do.”

Saraphina could feel a tiny little piece of her soul die and a vein in her neck throb. “Nope. That’s not true.”

The client stood up, uttered what sounded like a curse under her breath and huffed out of Saraphina’s office, throwing the door open before slamming it shut. In the two seconds between when the door was opened and closed again Saraphina saw a waiting room filled with clients. She put her head in her hands.

What good was any of it? People came in once a year for their mandated “good advice counseling session” and listened through gritted teeth to officials like Saraphina who told them the painfully, stupidly obvious until they couldn’t take it anymore and stormed out. She could have told Health & Human Services what a waste of tax-payer time and money this was, but like her clients, they just wouldn’t listen.

Preach It Down

The American Conservative (started in part by Jerry Fallwell and one-time employer of Richard “Roman Salute” Spencer) recently published an almost willfully obtuse, and bizarrely anti-conservative article about the concept of normalizing (my take away, The American Conservative wants to embiggen government by criminalizing a lot of things that don’t need to, and shouldn’t, be criminalized)

And then there’s commenter maybe another time whose DWP suggests that maybe this whole article is a great opportunity to talk about how passive-aggressive government employees are:

Pastor Terry white-knuckled the lectern. He swept his eyes over the 13 attending members of the congregation. Today’s turnout was impressive. “And that’s why, hard as it maybe to accept, that those of us who live our beliefs, live our convictions, will surely perish from this Earth.” Sweat dribbled down his left cheek and he felt light-headed. “We will not sit quietly in the face of oppression. We will not just silently cheer on people who stand up. We will stand up! We will yell and scream and lash out at bigotry, at prejudice, at inequality wherever we find it. We will break our arms throwing them out wide enough to embrace everyone as a brother so long as they too stand for integrity and honesty and refuse to scrape their knees in subservience to power that is corrupt and corrupting!”

The Johnsons stood up and left through the sanctuary’s wide double door.

“If we are to truly live in Jesus’ spirit then we must be alive to the fact that there is no goodness to be found in accepting things the way they are. There is no value to quietly tolerating what is patently intolerable. There is no love in allowing demagogues to arouse passions and anger against our neighbors, whoever they are! And so I submit to you that to truly earn the title “Christian” we must put ourselves out there in a radical way. And if you aren’t willing to do that, you aren’t ready to sit in these pews.” Pastor Terry let go of the lectern, stepped back and wiped his forehead down with a linen cloth.

“It’s time, now, to collect today’s offering.” Pastor Terry looked to his left, ready to nod to Gladys and give her the okay to take the small tin plate around, only to find that she wasn’t there. Pastor Terry looked back at the 11 attendees.

“Please come back next week for my sermon: It’s cool. Maybe just don’t buy from a puppy mill, okay?” He laughed nervously because he wasn’t yet sure if it was a joke or not.

I Put Away Childish Things

Here are two facts which share a correlation but no actual causation: 1) Brandon Dixon, who plays Aaron Burr in Broadway’s Hamilton addressed Vice President-elect Mike Pence two weeks ago from the stage and 2) Hamilton just grossed a record-setting amount of money.

But oh, how The Daily Caller wishes desperately the one caused the other. They don’t explain why they think those two things should have a causal relationship or how it would have happened. Thankfully the comment section is full of ideas. Including this DWP from the adorably delusional DatBus:

“As a child, I loved Grandpa and Grandpa’s house. I remember being small enough to hide behind the books with titles like “The Globalists Next Door” and “It Happened There, It Will Happen Here: The New Bolshevism”stacked precariously on the floor.

When it was just Grandpa and me he would go undo the locks on the cellar door and we’d go downstairs together. I would marvel at all his guns and found the racks and racks of toilet paper uproariously funny. Then we’d go back upstairs to the den to snack on the sweets and fizzy sodas he had found among the cases of canned tomatoes. While we ate he’d play cassette tapes of old radio dramas, none of which I can remember now because he would always talk over actors, complaining about how terrible TV was and how corrupting it’s influence was on America.

And when I stayed overnight he would pull the Murphy bed out of the wall in his study-room, which was a treat itself, then tuck me in, ruffle my hair and tell me stories of how one day it would just be him and me, making a go of it in a new world, fighting the forces of the UN and trying to wake up the people mentally enchained to it’s liberal heresies.”

“Have you seen your grandpa recently?”

“No. At a certain point I stopped going over to see him. I don’t know. I kind of grew up and he kind of didn’t.”

Running

From the sometimes-words-have-consequences file comes the story of a Trump supporter who enthused all over a plane full of people and consequently will no longer be allowed to fly the friendly skies.

WorldNetDaily, the website which once banned one of my Disqus profiles for being insufficiently pro-Trump (sample quote: As a captain of industry Trump is clearly very sharp. But I don’t think he’s very smart as a candidate or political thinker) is apparently okay with Leonidas‘ DWP:

He ran. He ran because the torment was coming. Even running he could still hear it; could still hear the torment’s awful chants and howls carried to him on the wind at his back. The torment was aggressive and would rip him apart if it ever caught him.

He ran. He ran because standing still created the torment in the first place. His complacency, his contentedness, his naivety-born sedentariness spawned the thing that now threatened to overrun and erase him for the sheer, shocking joy of violence against a the grey background of his life.

He ran. He ran because it was the only way to overcome the torment. The torment was despicable and brutal and cruel above all else. But it was also stupid. It saw him run and imagined that he was running from it. The torment never considered, could physically and emotionally not consider, that he was running for strength. Running towards safety was a kinetic act of freedom and freedom was a fuel that burned longer and brighter than the bile that powered, and in turn would itself consume, the torment.

A Celebration Of Form

WorldNetDaily is worried that America’s beauty pageants are aren’t sufficiently Murican anymore what with your Muslims and your burkini’s and your whathaveyous.

ImNotPC asks the immortal question, “this is pretty much like what we did to the Native Americans but worse, right?” I mean, he didn’t come write out and say it (see what I did there) but that’s the crux of today’s DWP:

(I don’t know if it matters, but there’s a fair amount of cursing in this one)

“Ugh! This stuff is the worst to work with.” The knife slipped between Dell’s fingers and nicked a knuckle. “Damn it!” None of the other cooks paid him any attention; they were used to his bitching. Instead they kept their eyes down, focusing on the slop in front of them, a weird mixture of Earth vegetables, fish and several unidentifiable ingredients from beyond the stars. The recipes they were given were long, complicated and grueling to follow. The resulting dishes tasted foul but were nutritious enough for both humans and their newly-installed interstellar overlords.

Dell walked away from his station and began cleaning his cut in a sink. He wrapped a bandage around his finger and, while heading back to the pots simmering on his stove, stopped to turn up the volume on the small TV in the upper corner of the cramped, make-shift kitchen. “Look at that,” Dell said, forgetting about the pain. “Beauty pageant. God bless!”

Dell returned to sauteing and caramelizing, all the while maintaining a running monologue. “Here’s what I don’t get: those bastards take away our houses and make us live in these communal dorms. They destroy our churches, our schools. Damn it all to hell, we can’t even speak American when they’re around. It’s all ssshhhplok, hauck, xxxkah!” Dell exaggerated the string of silibant ‘s’s, bursts of hard consonants and wet, phlemgy hacks that characterized the human/invader pidgin language.

“We can’t even eat any real food anymore!” Dell looked at the black and roiling slop water that was spilling out of one of his pans, sighed, turned off the stovetop and dumped the mess into the waste bin. “But they leave our TV alone. We can watch anything we want. Hell, there’s less censorship now then ever. Tits and everything, right there in prime time! What gives?”

Dell finally shut up for a moment as he bent down to get a new pan. He retrieved it, set it on the stove and looked back up at the TV. “Seriously, look at that talent, man! I ain’t never seen pageant girls wear anything that skimpy before the invasion!” Dell took in the waving, smiling girls left to right stopping suddenly and glowering. “Jesus Christ! Will you look at that?” Amidst the human contenders was one of them, one of the invaders. It stood there, clad in its de rigueur black hood and cloak which bulged where it would have flown freely on a human and pinching in where it would otherwise have filled out. “What a crock o’ shit. No way. No way! This is too much, just too much!” None of the other cooks bothered to look.

“They took everything, everything else. And now they’re even taking away this. God damn it. Like, they’re saying it’s not okay to even look human. We have to learn to eat their foods, speak their language and look like them. Shit. And I bet it ain’t even going to show a bit of tentacle. Nope, not even a little peak.”

The other cooks cast a fair amount of side-eye at that.