19 million and counting

In case you’re ever feeling down, the Realtime Baby Boomer Death Clock should put a little spring in your step. By the end of today, there will be more than 4,500 fewer Boomers infesting the planet.

19 million down, only 66 million to go.

Yesterday, a Boomer complained that the Boomer Hate was tiresome. Yeah, so about that… it isn’t anywhere nearly as tiresome as being forced to endure generationally narcissistic morons droning on and on and on and on about themselves for more than forty freaking years.

NEVER TRUST ANYONE OVER 30! 40 IS THE NEW 20! 50 IS THE NEW 30! SEXY AT 70!

And they wonder that we’re relieved the end is finally in sight?

Boomers had better get used to the Boomer Hate, because their generational reputation is only going to get worse as more and more Millennials gradually wake up to how the Boomers screwed them over by gleefully abandoning their familial and societal responsibilities.

Why conservatives can’t win

Because they never had a coherent political philosophy, let alone a consistent one:

Just what is it that conservatives want to conserve? One answer that’s often given is “freedom” – by which is usually meant “individual freedom.”

Well, if individual freedom is really important, those who call themselves conservative should be very pleased with the trajectory of the past century, because Americans today generally have more freedom and “rights” than those of earlier generations.

Consider life in 1930, for example – when nearly all Americans still regarded the US as a “great” country.

For one thing, employment and job opportunities were generally segregated and restricted by sex and race. Employment notices in newspapers appeared in separate sections, one for Men and another for Women. Women were effectively barred from a wide range of jobs.

There were no “gay rights.” Homosexual behavior was punished as a crime. Any suggestion that a woman might have the “right” to marry another woman, or a man another man, would have been regarded as offensive and absurd.

By law and custom, people of European ancestry could not marry persons of other races. In most states marriage between whites and blacks was a felony.

Abortion was not a “right”; it was a crime.

Americans could not buy groceries, tools or clothes on a Sunday. Stores across the country were closed on Sundays as an expression of respect for the Christian heritage and Christian sensibilities.

No one could legally order a glass of beer or enjoy a bottle of wine with a meal in a restaurant. The sale of alcoholic beverages was prohibited throughout the country.

How many Americans today who call themselves conservative would prefer life in the “great” America of 1930 to life in the “liberal” USA of our era? Is “freedom” really the most important thing that conservatives want to conserve?

Conservatism was always doomed from the very beginning because it has never been anything more than an attitude and a defensive posture. And you cannot win any contest without ever even seeking to go on the offensive or possessing a reasonable understanding of your ultimate objectives.

“I don’t want things to change faster than makes me feel uncomfortable” is neither a strategy nor an objective. And that is why conservatism has completely failed to conserve anything, from the churches to the Constitution.

This is the key line from a long article very much worth reading: In keeping with their distaste for confrontation and discord, conservatives have long tolerated the promotion of seemingly noble sentiments that have unpleasant long term consequences.

Not the last audiobook

As you may or may not know, Jeremy Daw has finished recording A THRONE OF BONES. It is going to be an absolutely massive audiobook over 30 hours long. If you want to get in the mood for it, you might like to consider listening to THE LAST WITCHKING & OTHER STORIES, which consists of five novellas and short stories set in the epic fantasy world of Selenoth.

– The Last Witchking
– The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro
– Opera Vita Aeterna
– The Wardog’s Coin
– Qalabi Dawn

The audiobook+ is 7 hours, 13 minutes, and includes both The Last Witchking and The Wardog’s Coin ebooks in EPUB and Kindle formats. It is available for $14.99 at Arkhaven.

As for the other Selenoth shorts, A Magic Broken is available as a separate audiobook+, while Master of Cats and Birth of an Order will be included with the Summa Elvetica audiobook+ when it is eventually produced. We will be continuing to announce the availability of new audiobooks daily as we continue the migration from Audible exclusivity to the Arkhaven store.

In answer to a question, the reason some Castalia House audiobooks are not sold as audiobooks+ is because Castalia does not have the right to sell the ebook directly. In some cases, such as Jordanetics, that is because the ebook is still in Amazon’s Kindle Select system. In others, such as The Irrational Atheist, it is because Ben Bella publishes the print and ebook editions.

Busting Ben Shapiro

The Littlest Chickenhawk’s anti-American racism is about to backfire on him:

CJ Pearson
We’re getting new submissions every 30 seconds. Every member of the media who defamed, slandered, and doxxed the #CovingtonBoys on Twitter will be served. Each and every tweet will be archived and turned over to the students’ legal counsel.

The fact that literally racist Neo-Palestinian supremacists like Ben Shapiro and Bill Kristol attempt to position themselves as moral voices of any kind is both risible and ridiculous. I hope the families of the boys who have been slandered and libeled by these media whores do follow through and actually file suit against them.

A predilection for name-calling and a complete lack of accountability is the only reason these ludicrous people have any status. It’s time to ensure that they are held accountable for their hateful words and actions.

UPDATE: Ace of Spades is confused about the nature of the so-called “conservative media”.

I don’t understand the “conservative media’s” belief that they can wage actual war on actual conservatives, attacking them and joining and justifying lynchmobs against them, and think they’re going to continue getting paid by these very same conservatives.

They aren’t conservatives and they aren’t paid by conservatives. They are Fake Right media actors paid by billionaires and lobbyists to play the role of the Authorized Opposition.

Cucks gonna cuck

It’s what they do. The one thing they always counsel avoiding is triggering the Left. Because then, of course, you might be called racist.

Ross Douthat
Good rules for life:
Don’t let your Catholic school’s students wear MAGA hats on a field trip for the March for Life.
Don’t *immediately* make a teenager a symbol of everything you hate about…

James Taranto
You think wearing a political hat at a political rally is morally equivalent to participating on a social-media mob directed at minors?James Taranto added,

Bansi Sharma
I am touched by how fair and generous @DouthatNYT is:

a) The Right must ensure their teenagers never express themselves in ways that offend the Left’s sensibilities.

b) In return, liberal media Leftists should wait for a day before doxxing anyone who violates the previous rule.

At this point, I just completely ignore anyone and everyone who makes a point to virtue-signal their self-proclaimed non-racissness. If you do that, you’re just totally irrelevant because you might as well be wearing a three-foot-tall blinking light that says “WILL CUCK WHEN ATTACKED”.

I don’t blame people who live in fear of being attacked by the Left. I pity them, because it is a legitimate fear and the coward dies a thousand deaths. But I don’t have any use for them either. Give me the 300 of Gideon and Leonidas every single time.

The Syrian swamp

The Neo-Palestinians are desperate to keep the US military in Syria:

#Breaking: Just in – At least 5 #US troops are killed in new attack in #Syria. #Rojava sources say that attack is most likely carried-out by #Turkey backed Ahrar al-Sharqiya terrorists.

Well, that would appear to be an exaggeration:

#Update: Confirmed! Suicide Attack on Kurdish-US convoy! 5 #Syrian army defence fighters were killed and 2 #US soldiers wounded in the attack near 47 bridge, northeastern #Syria! 

Not our national interest, not our problem. Bring the troops home. And not just from Syria either.

The audio blitz continues

The 4th Generation Warfare Handbook audiobook+ is now available for $11.99 from Arkhaven.

Written by the author of the Maneuver Warfare Handbook and an active-duty USMC officer with experience in Iraq, 4th Generation Warfare Handbook is the doctrine for a new generation of war. Over the last 40 years, the world has gradually entered into a post-Clausewitzian state where the wars are undeclared, the battlefields can be anywhere, the uniforms are optional, and the combatants as well as the targets are often “civilian”. Conventional militaries have repeatedly attempted to utilize technology to meet the new challenges posed, but even the most advanced technology has provided little more than meaningless short-term victories rendered futile in months, if not weeks.

This inability of Western governments and militaries to come to terms with the changing nature of modern warfare has led to failed interventions, failed occupations, and now even failed states everywhere from Eastern Europe to Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. And with the recent mass movement of peoples around the world, 4th Generation Warfare can be safely expected to appear in Western Europe and the United States before long.

Drawing on their decades of experience with military history and military action, the authors have distilled 4GW theory into a short, concise, easily accessible handbook that provides the soldier, the military analyst, and the civilian observer with a guide to understanding and responding to the changing realities of this challenging new form of war.

What does “audiobook+” mean? It means you get the audiobook in high-quality DRM-free MP4 format, plus the ebook in DRM-free EPUB format, plus the ebook in Kindle format. Not all of our audiobooks are audiobook+ due to the limitations imposed by Kindle Select, but over time, almost all of them will be audiobook+.

And no, we can’t do anything similar with the print editions. While we may eventually be able to permit you to buy them from the Arkhaven store, they are in an entirely different production system and it’s not possible to reasonably wrap them all together into a single product. We’re doing what we can. Speaking of which, 4GW Handbook is not the only new audiobook we’ve added to the catalog, as in addition to the Wardogs Inc. trilogy, we’ve also added The Irrational Atheist and The Last Witchking & Other Stories. More are rapidly incoming.

We’ve had a fair number of requests for an Audible-like system that would permit people to pay a monthly subscription in return for a free audiobook every month, as well as some for a Kindle Unlimited system that would permit unlimited downloads. The latter is not practical since, unlike Kindle, we don’t wall the garden and there would be no real incentive for a second month. But we could do an Audible-style system, the question is, what would be a fair price for it? Audible charges $14.95/month, gives you two free audiobooks initially, and an additional free one per month. My first thought is $9.99/month with one free audiobook+ initially, and an additional free one per month.

The other thing we are contemplating is crowdfunding the cost of developing a joint audio/ebook reader app for iOS and Android. Please feel free to share your thoughts.

Boomer hate goes mainstream

Best quote from the fake game show Millennial Millions: “I’m Gen-X. I just sit on the sidelines and watch the world burn.”

It’s interesting to observe that Boomers have finally lost control of the Official Zeitgeist. And it’s amusing to see how so many of them are still so generationally narcissistic that they genuinely don’t understand why all three succeeding generations not only don’t regard them as cool, but collectively hate them.

Is it entirely their fault? No. Of course not. The destructive decisions of the Silents and the Greatest Generation certainly played a significant part in the decline and eventual fall of the United States. But is there a lot for which to blame the Boomers, not least of all their unabashed pride in their ongoing demolition of their nation? Indubitably. He who breaks the generational compact, leaves his descendants worse off than his parents did, and dies with the most toys does not win, because the children and grandchildren he robbed will write his history.

This comment from a Gen-X progressive speaks for an awful lot of post-Boomer Americans: “I bought into the American dream and was heavily disappointed when I discovered that it was dead and only for the previous generation.”

NFL: Championship Weekend

Ender pointed out that I predicted a Chiefs-Saints Superbowl long before the season ended. I don’t see any reason not to stick with that going into the two championship games today. A long time ago, when Eli Manning’s Giants were going into Lambeau to face Brett Favre’s Packers, Bill Simmons observed that if the weather is cold and one quarterback is a lot older than the other one, go with the younger guy. And Mahomes is a lot younger than Brady.

In the NFC, the Rams have been too inconsistent throughout the season. While it’s theoretically possible that they’ll just run right over the Saints in the Superdome with their two-headed rushing attack, I think it’s more likely that Jared Goff’s limitations will be exposed in a shoot-out that favors Drew Brees.

Discuss amongst yourselves

UPDATE: REVENGE FOR FAVRE! The Saints were the better team, but the refs robbed them of the Super Bowl. How do you like being on the other end of that this time, Sean Payton?