Post-Election Violence in Baton Rouge? Should You Buy a Shotgun and a Case of Spam?

I received a message on my Nextdoor app inquiring about the possibility of post-election violence in Baton Rouge. "Does anyone know if there are safety precautions in place in case of a riot after the election?" the writer asked. "I don't anticipate a riot, but I keep hearing things that 'may' happen."

The writer's post indicated she (or he) lived in the Riverbend neighborhood, an affluent suburb located near LSU in the Mississippi River floodplain. I can't image election-triggered violence in Riverbend's quiet, leafy streets, and I initially thought the messenger intended to be humorous.

I was tempted to respond that the writer should drive to Academy Sporting Goods without delay and purchase a home-defense shotgun and 200 rounds of buckshot. Then, I would continue, she should make her way to Costco and buy a case of Spam, a fire extinguisher, and at least four bottles of Makers Mark whisky—enough alcohol to make it through a couple of weeks of arson and rioting.

On reflection, however, I concluded that the messager was serious; she really wanted to know if municipal authorities were taking precautions in case Baton Rouge is engulfed by post-election rage.

So, here is my serious response. Baton Rouge has experienced some tense times recently with remarkable calm and civic dignity. The George Floyd killing sparked large-scale riots in several American cities, but not in Baton Rouge. The city's mayor and police chief responded calmly and sympathetically to race-charged events, and no one rioted.

Baton Rouge residents have legitimate things to worry about. The skyrocketing cost of property insurance may soon force people on fixed incomes out of their homes—particularly in flood-prone neighborhoods. Coastal erosion and environmental hazards are ongoing problems that Louisianians can't seem to solve, and our educational system has flaws everyone recognizes.

However, Baton Rouge residents will not riot due to the outcome of the presidential election. After all, this is a city of decent people with proper regard for law and order, for which we should all be grateful.

Not in Baton Rouge

Trump and Kamala Are Afflicted by Severe Communication Disorders

Our nation's presidential election is only a few days away, and Americans have concluded that both presidential candidates are afflicted with severe communication disorders. I'm not talking about foot-in-mouth disease. I'm talking about a profound inability to speak clearly.

Kamala Harris can't elucidate a clear, declarative sentence. She can't do it. Thus, she relies on teleprompters to give the deceptive impression that she knows what the hell she's talking about.

Her communication disorder is compounded by her compulsive urge to cackle when a reporter asks her a difficult question.

Trump speaks too long at public gatherings, tells bombastic tall tales, and gratuitously insults his political enemies if he thinks he can get a laugh.

Let's discuss Kamala first. She's actually bilingual.

Her mother tongue is woke-speak, a language that emerged from academia, where thousands of professors spend their lives conversing in an intentionally meaningless dialect. She also speaks standard English at a primitive level. She can make a bartender understand that she wants a glass of chardonnay, but she can't discuss foreign policy without lapsing into woke-speech.

Trump's disorder involves a disturbing tendency to express himself so poorly that the left-wing press can maliciously interpret his speech as racist, fascist, or even Hitlerian.

For instance, Trump intended for his astonishingly inappropriate criticism of Liz Cheney to make the reasonable observation that militaristic public leaders promote war because they themselves are not in harm's way. Unfortunately, he expressed himself in such a way that his adversaries claimed he was calling for Cheney's assassination.

Here's my take on the two candidates' linguistic disorders. Kamala speaks the way she does because she's unintelligent and has bullshitted her way through life, speaking gibberish (word salads). 

Trump's inability to speak succinctly, civilly, and prudently confounds me. I can't understand why he doesn't choose his words in such a way so as not to invite his enemies to take cheap shots at him.

If Kamala loses the election, I predict she will become president of Harvard University, where everybody converses in woke-speech and no one feels obligated to do useful work.

If Trump loses, he'll have to go into exile if the Supreme Court doesn't shut down the lawfare litigation against him. Ivy League attorneys, like Javert, the fanatical police inspector in Les Miserables, will not rest until they put Mr. Trump in prison. 

This malicious prosecution can only end in two ways. Trump will go to jail, or the lawyers who persecute him will be disbarred for abusing the law.

Me no speakee English

Mamas, Don't Let Your Cowboys Grow Up to be Babies: Willie Nelson Performs at a Kamala Harris Rally

 Kamala Harris held a rally in Houston over the weekend. Someone in the Harris camp promised an appearance by Beyonce, and thousands of Beyonce fans showed up in anticipation of a musical performance.

Beyonce did indeed appear briefly, but she didn't sing. Instead, the crowd heard Willie Nelson, the legendary country singer. Same difference, right?

Apparently not. Feeling victimized by a bait-and-switch, thousands of rally attendees booed Kamala when she appeared on stage to diffuse her politics of joy.

I love Willie Nelson. I am the last living fan to have attended his first 4th of July music festival in Dripping Springs, Texas, in 1973. I wore the grooves off my antique vinyl record of "The Red Headed Stranger" album. 

I sympathize with the Kamala supporters who were angered by the Beyonce debacle. If I had shown up to attend a Kamala rally expecting to hear Willie Nelson's golden voice, I would have been miffed to be treated to Beyonce instead. 

Nevertheless, what makes Kamala Harris think she can win votes by snagging celebrity endorsements? Who gives a shit about George Clooney's political stance, or an endorsement by Beyonce, Bruce Springsteen, or Julia Roberts? 

I'm casting my presidential vote based on global events. Which presidential candidate will help bring the Ukraine war to a close so my grandkids don't get drafted to fight in Eastern Europe? Which candidate will honor our nation's commitment to guarantee Israel's right to exist?

In these volatile times, when the world is on fire, Americans who cast their vote for Kamala Harris because a celebrity endorsed her are behaving like infants.

Let's grow up to be babies. Photo credit: Amazon.com

Wild Pigs Divert My Attention from LSU's Disastrous Loss to Texas A&M

It’s Saturday evening at Lake Mary, Mississippi, and my family has congregated around our big-screen TV to watch LSU play Texas A&M in College Station. It’s a big game: LSU is ranked Number 8 in the national polls, and the Aggies are rated Number 14. Neither team has lost a Southeast Conference game.

I am filled with a sense of well-being. Loved ones are gathered around me. Cold beer is in the refrigerator, and we have plenty of game-time snacks. I adjust my Lazy Boy recliner to a comfortable semi-prone position.

All goes well in the first half, and LSU shows good prospects of beating the insufferable Aggies. Then, my team falls apart. Three interceptions and three missed field goals attest to a Tiger meltdown. I prepare myself for a major case of the weekend blues. We’re running out of beer.

Then providence intervenes. The game camera affixed to a pecan tree alerts us to two feral hogs rooting about in our three-acre front yard. All distress about the ballgame vanishes, and two family members break out their rifles from our gun safe. Armed with a 30.06 and a 30-30, they creep down to my home’s ground level and start shooting.

Both pigs squeal and head for the brush. The smaller hog is mortally wounded but manages to travel about 50 yards before succumbing to her wounds. Two generations of family members with flashlights follow the blood trail and find the interloper. She is stone dead.

What to do with a dead feral hog? Family members truss it up to one of the steel girders that keep our living quarters above the annual spring flood waters. Then they field dress the pig, dividing it into hams, ribs, pork shoulders, and backstrap. 

The hog slayers ice down the meat in a large ice chest and call it a night. We learn that LSU lost to A &M by a score of 38-23, but nobody cares.

The next morning, I propose we take all the hog meat to a nearby game processing plant and turn it into pork chops, sausage, and dinner-size pork loins. I offer to foot the bill.

We vote, and everyone except me opts to process the hog on our kitchen counter. By two in the afternoon, our feral hog is parceled and tucked away in the freezer--about a hundred pounds of meat.

Feral hogs are a major nuisance in the rural South, where they tear up the landscape and destroy crops. People are allowed to hunt them year-around by day or night. 

Everyone I know who has eaten wild-pig meat tells me that the small porkers are delicious. Thus, I ended my weekend feeling good about my family's contribution to feral hog control. And I'm looking forward to eating a pig harvested in my own front yard.

Who cares who won the LSU-Texas A&M game?

Pay no attention to the North Koreans behind the curtain

 Ukraine’s war with Russia is nearing its third anniversary. So far, things have gone swimmingly. As one US Senator boasted, the United States has hired the Ukrainians to kill Russians and we don’t have to get our hands dirty. What’s not to like?

Everyone is lying about how many people have been killed, but some experts estimate the Russians have suffered half a million  casualties--both killed and wounded. Who knows how many Ukrainians have died, but surely the Russians are as efficient in the killing fields as the Ukrainians. It’s a fair estimate to say that one million people have been killed or maimed in this needless war, and at least 6 million Eastern Europeans are refugees.

I confess that I never learned to hate the Russians. Even as a child, when my second-grade teacher ordered me and my classmates to crawl under our desks for our periodic nuclear war drill, I couldn’t work up any animosity toward the Slavs.

My seven-year-old mind told me that the grown-ups had fucked things up somehow, and I figured some really smart person would get everything straightened out before I had to register for the draft. 

Indeed, the Cold War between the US and the Soviet Union ended in 1991, and the Commies took President Reagan's advice and tore down the Berlin wall.

For a while, East-West relations improved, and some people envisioned a day when the old Soviet regime would join the global economy and embrace western values. Ukraine and other Soviet republics declared their independence, and a brighter world seemed just around the corner.

Then, in 2014, the Ukrainians elected a pro-Russian president, and the CIA engineered a tin-pot uprising that forced the poor schumk into exile.

The Russians, understandably alarmed, reclaimed Crimea as part of the Russian motherland partly because it had an important naval base in the Crimean city of Sevastopol. Most Crimeans were okay with that because they overwhelming voted to rejoin Russia.

Meanwhile, separatists in Eastern Ukraine fought a smoldering war for independence, and the US and the Ukrainian government became cozy friends.

Then, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and the Ukrainians beat them off with Western weaponry, notably the Javelin missile systems.

Since then, the US and the NATO countries have showered Ukraine with advanced killing machines--Abrams and Leopard tanks, Bradley Fighting vehicles, F-16 jets and anti-ship missiles.

In response, Russia strengthened its ties with China, Iran, and North Korea, and North Korean troops will soon be fighting the Ukrainians.

Russia has repeatedly threatened to escalate the Ukrainian conflict into a nuclear war, but Americans are not worried. In fact, we think our demented president and idiot vice president are doing a great job managing our international affairs.

What's the long game? Ukraine and its allies could recognize Russia's claims to the Donbas and Crimea and promise not to allow Ukraine to join NATO. That action would bring the war to an end.

Alternatively, we can allow this war to drag on at the expense of another million casualties until Ukraine's cities and infrastructure are pounded into rubble.

 Then we could dust off America's strategy in Vietnam and Afghanistan and simply declare victory and go home--perhaps leaving our tanks and armored vehicles on the Ukrainian steppes as a farewell gift to Ukrainian Presidents Zelensky and Putin.

Meanwhile, our government is distracting the donkey-brained American people with histrionic claims that Donald Trump is a fascist. We'll see how things work out.

Join he North Korean Army and see the world.

Progressive Democrats Despise Rural America and Don't Care Who Knows It

Kamala Harris's frenzied minions hate rural America and have written it off in their frantic campaign to put their addled candidate into the White House. In their fevered minds, the battle for control of America's soul is not a conflict between blue states and red streets; it's a war between Democratically run cities and the rural and small-town heartland.

It is true that the Dems tried to sell Tim Walz, Kamala's running mate, as a common-sense Midwesterner, but the hayseeds smoked him out as a buffoon who can't load a shotgun. They derisively mock him as "TamponTim," a moniker that may or may not be fair.

The progressive Dems showed their hand years ago when Obama referred to rural Americans as bitter rubes clinging to their religion and their guns, and Hillary referred to them sneeringly as "a basket of deplorables." 

Indeed, today's Democratic party bosses are much like the Russian Bolsheviks, whose idea of ideal proletarians were urban factory workers too dumb to realize they were being manipulated by their Communist overseers.

Robert Conquest, in his study of the Bolsheviks' ruthless suppression of the Russian peasants, wrote that Stalin considered the peasants to be mere "scum" and that Marx compared them to "a sack of potatoes."

The Soviet apparatchiks in Moscow simply could not understand the Russian peasantry--people who lived close to the land, dwelled in small, close-knit villages, and had a mystical devotion to their religion and Mother Russia. 

 

Thus, Stalin falsely defined the Russian kulaks as anti-revolutionary capitalists and deliberately starved millions of them to death. In Stalin's mind, Russian peasants were a basket of deplorables who should be wiped from the face of the earth.  One might say the Russian peasants were getting in the way of Stalin's politics of joy.

 In two weeks, the election will be over, and America will either return to sanity or the nation will descend into the mind-fuckery that brought the nation transgender school sports and Venezuelan drug gangs. 

 
If Americans are stupid enough to elect Kamala as president, then America is done. We will no longer be the land of the free and the home of the brave. 

If Kamala is sworn in as our nation's commander and chief, in my view, rural and small-town America will become more of a backwater than it already is--a land of rising mortality rates, drug dependecy, joblessness, and suicide.

But who cares? Kamala's fawning press corps refers to the people in the Heartland as "white Christian nationists, which, of course is a code word for fascists.

I'll have a word salad to go and a basket of deplorable fries..

Lazy College Professors are Voting for Lazy Kamala Harris

 "Kamala Harris," James Howard Kunstler pithily observed,  "was just pulled out of a hat, like a rabbit. And everybody involved knew she was a dud, a slow learner, inattentive, not well-educated, lazy, possibly high a lot of the time, self-medicating due to anxiety, insecurity, purposelessness."

Yet college professors overwhelmingly support Kamala Harris over Donald Trump for the presidency. According to an Inside Higher Education poll, 78 percent of college professors plan to vote for Harris on November 5th, while only 8 percent said they will vote for Trump. 

Why? Because a high percentage of college faculty members—like Kamala Harris—are lazy. 

Professors feel a kinship with Harris. Like Kamala, most professors speak gobbledegook, a lazy mode of speech, and they find the Vice President's incoherent word salads strangely comforting.

President Biden appointed Kamala as the border czar, but she was too lazy to act on the nation's southern border crisis. Her sloth reassures professors because many aren't doing any practical work themselves.

On college campuses across America, rigor and discipline have collapsed. Grade inflation is rampant because professors are lazy. It's too damn hard for an instructor to distinguish between an A exam paper and a B. It's easier to give every student an A grade. Even at Harvard, the nation’s most elite university, 80 percent of undergraduate students have an A- grade average.

Academic assessment in graduate programs is almost nonexistent. Most graduate students get A or B grades, and plagiarism is no longer a serious academic offense. Professors are too lazy to uphold academic standards.

Again, Harvard is an example. Harvard president Claudine Gay was accused of plagiarizing passages in her dissertation and three academic articles. Harvard investigated these allegations and cleared her of any intentional wrongdoing. After all, plagiarism is no longer an act of academic dishonesty. It's merely a sign of laziness, and laziness is not a sin in the culture of American higher education.

We should not be surprised to learn that lazy college professors support Kamala Harris, a lazy vice president who wants to become our lazy president.

Kamala wants to be president. How hard can the job be?