Dunkirk

Spoiler alert: this film is spoiled.

In case you were waiting for someone to tell you to go see this film, here you are:

Keep waiting.

I wanted to like this film. I'd been anticipating its release for days. And director Christopher Nolan probably wanted to deliver an epic masterwork for the ages. He couldn't pull off delivering even a decent flick. The cinematography was riveting, as are most train wrecks. In service of a film in search of a reason for existing at all. At two hours' running time, it's exactly one hour and fifty-seven minutes too long. Watch any of the trailers, then save yourself two hours of your life you'll never get back. There are no solid heroes to root for: the movie opens with two men conniving any dodge they can to get off the doomed beach. By turns, it displays how harrowing the experience was, but the most suffering is done by the audience, having to sit through long expositions of the horrors of war with no payoff for the journey. In Gravity, by ten minutes in, I was rooting for the debris to kill the entire cast; in this flick, you'll almost want to root for the Nazis to do the same thing.

Normally, an epic war movie would have a hero, or even multiple heroes; a villain; some suspense and plot twists; and hopefully, some sort of triumphant conclusion. You'd think a movie about Nazis pounding the French army and sending the British Expeditionary Force fleeing for their lives as they ransack western Europe wouldn't have any trouble coming up with a villain, but you don't see the face of so much as one single German in a movie about a defeat handed out by them. They're less visible than the shark in the first half of Jaws, except through the entire flick.

Any suspense is beaten out of every scene and shot by dragging the audience over the same ground over and over and over, which fills time in what could have been a 20 minute documentary, and makes any hope of suspense and payoff as forlorn as the hopes of the soldiers on Dunkirk beach in the spring of 1940. The conclusion is anything but triumphant, to the point that the writers of this piece of garbage should be lecturing at Lockheed on stealth technology, for how to hide a climax in a war movie so well that the audience can't find it. The most fitting scene is the pointless waste of one of the cinematic heroes, who inexplicably lands his intact plane in German territory, after passing up the chance to ditch in front of the true heroes of Dunkirk, the fleet of Small Boats, and hitch a ride back to England, and instead ends up captured as his Spitfire, like the movie itself, goes up in flames.

This movie owes a lot to other war movies: mainly to the baker's dozen of shitastic anti-war tripe vomited on American troops during the first dozen years of this century, for instance. It's as rousingly bad and malformed as Hurt Locker. It sucks the drama out of an epic tale better than Memphis Belle. It makes the would-be heroes of the movie less likeable than the cretins in Three Kings. It's what Zulu would have looked like if it had been directed by Robert Altman or Roman Polanski. It's what The Alamo would have been like if it had starred Billy Bob Thornton instead of John Wayne. It's what you get when you take a grade school play and try to film it like it's opera. It's Hamburger Helper hash masquerading as haute cuisine. And it makes the first half of M*A*S*H* and the second half of Full Metal Jacket seem coherent by contrast.

If it weren't for the talents of award-winning actors like Kenneth Branagh starring as the Exposition Fairy, and Mark Rylance (who managed to steal every single scene he was in with Tom Hanks in 2015's Bridge Of Spies to win the Supporting Actor Oscar) plugging away beginning to end, this thing wouldn't even be fit for the fin bin at WallyMart. Hans Zimmer's ominously atonal cacophonous score is annoying and aptly bad for such a horrendously confused, disjointed, and ultimately pointless film.

And all those clueless SJWs should get down on their knees and thank a merciful heaven there aren't more women and minorities in this craptastic stinker: so women and minorities get off scot-free and blameless for not ruining an already ruined movie. Nobody's been so happy in Hollywood to miss appearing in something since Denholm Elliot died to get out of making IJ4: Indiana Jones and the Temple of What The Fuck.

The real villain of this piece is director Christopher Nolan (who should have gone with crediting it to Alan Smithee), having proved with the Dark Knight trilogy that he can make movies with a purpose, let alone style and meaning. Just not this one. The hero is the audience, for sitting through this awful bore. And the comedy was any of them thinking it was going to be worth the trouble. And the triumphant conclusion is when the credits roll, announcing you, like those helpless hopeless Tommies in 1940, finally get off that horrid beach, and survive to hope for better days.

Warner Brother shelled out $150 to produce this p.o.s., which means they threw away another $150M to promote it. It "won" the box office this weekend, but the second and third weekends will crater when word of mouth kills it (or at least, ought to), so after they split the $50M weekend gross with theatres and distributors, they'll only have to recoup the other $275M they wasted in foreign tickets and DVD sales. BLUF: short Time Warner stock.

My rating: Drowned on the beach. Torpedoed. Burned alive. Half buried.
And still shining and stinking like a dead mackerel in the moonlight.

Wait for it to come out on free TV.
Then watch reruns of Robot Chicken and Doctor Who, or infomercials, instead.
And if anyone ever meets the @$$hole(s) who green-lighted this sorry pork chop, please, take them deep sea fishing: as bait.

dun: What one deposits in a dunny.
dunny: Australian slang for shitter.
kirk: church.

Dunkirk: Church of Shit. Making this the best film title in decades.

The Core Problem

h/t WRSA

Essayist "Baron Bodissey", writing regularly at Gates of Vienna:

I used to think that the biggest problem was the lack of any credible alternative offered to the voters. But the Dutch general election last March proved me wrong — on March 15 the voters had a clear alternative. Everyone in the Netherlands knew who Geert Wilders was, and exactly what he stood for. They’d heard him say the same things for many years. The awful future that he had predicted was being realized before their very eyes.
Yet they didn’t vote for him. Not enough of them. Eventually, after a protracted minuet of negotiations, they will get a coalition government of More of the Same. Because that’s what they voted for.

The core problem is not even the New World Order, although all the politicians and apparatchiks who are pouring the fire ants over our heads are disciples or paid servants of the NWO. But we, the electorate of the nations west of the Iron Curtain, keep voting in these same loathsome snoids, over and over again.And that is the core problem.

My response:

1) What have the voters in Netherlands, Germany, France, or the UK ever done, to lead you to believe any sort of electoral common sense was likely, let alone possible? (Nota bene "normative" common sense as voting policy isn't even suggested as an option.)
2) When and where can one point to any such sensible outcome(s)? 15, 20,  30 years ago? More? Anytime since the Second World War? Earlier?

The pool was polluted long since, generations since, and the sort of behavior one might hope for has variously emigrated elsewhere, died off, been bred and "educated" out of entire generations, for generations, and what little that remains is the truest miracle.
It's not incredible that Wilders, for your example, didn't get enough votes; the miracle is that he even existed as an option, and got any votes at all.

The elites, financial, educational, media, entertainment, and governmental, have been amalgamating feces and sawdust with steak for so long, most of the peoples in question can't recognize the taste of actual meat anymore, and actually prefer what they have been born to, raised on, and died under, for going on decades and decades.

Once in a miraculously great while, penicillin and mold may grow on the same piece of bread. But mainly, the mold that overtakes the bread is all malignant.
We're living in societies where they haven't even been growing the mold in bread, but on a cultural stew of the vilest sort, with the foulest strains pre-selected and nurtured, then foisted upon people before they're old enough to know good from bad.

Under those conditions, the outcomes noted aren't surprising, they are in fact exactly what one should expect, and exactly the outcome planned for and worked for by those mixing up batch after batch of such foetid horrors.

The true miracle is the recessive genomes that manage to thrive despite such a malignant incubation, and manage to allow a remnant to mature and recognize that both the agar they've been handed, and the social scientists who planted them in it, are exactly the core problem you seek.

Amidst that thesis, ponder the allegorical choice by someone like J. K. Rowling, of the malign servants of the Dark Lord of her fictional universe being named "Death Eaters".

Every once in awhile, when and where least expected, the masks slip off, just a bit.

JUSTICE!!!

                                  "Guilty!"
Apparently, the CHP's mills grind slowly, but exceedingly small.
Remember this malignant dwarf from the Sacramento capitol brawls last June?

Aside from noting the worthless coptards who just watched the assault in question until it escalated to full-contact three-on-one beatdown, you can see the shrill harpy egging the entire confrontation on was the star of that little piece of street theatre.

That little twat is Yvette Felarca, head of the leftwing fascist terrorist organization BAMN: By Any Means Necessary.

You can find her gleefully expressing her foul little screeds and incitements to violence on any number of archived news reports, YouTube videos, etc.
But after weeks of careful investigation, the CHP (which has jurisdiction over state property, like the capitol grounds) came down on Felarca Tuesday, after taking a mere two months to discover what any casual observer could figure out in about 20 seconds:

"Yvette Felarca was arrested on Tuesday night on charges of assault by means of force likely to inflict great bodily injury, participating in a riot and inciting a riot."

           Thanks guys. Took you long enough.

She's due for arraignment and bail hearing on Friday, then trial, and in all likelihood, a nice stay as a guest of the State of CA, which will also hopefully cost the rabid pugnacious bitch her teaching credential, or any other position of trust, if convicted of all charges. Especially if they charge the assault as a felony, rather than a misdemeanor (such choice in CA known as being a "wobbler"). I didn't see the actual filing, but given the grounds on which she performed the acts (the state capitol), a felony filing is likelier than another misdemeanor. The rioting charges are both misdemeanors.

But she should get her wish for a world without white males (except for some of her guards), and she's likely to make some ferocious bulldyke in prison a nice wife for the next year or three. Unless she hangs herself in custody, which is the definition of dulce et decorum.

Either way, it couldn't happen to a more deserving little orc-lette.

Coming on the heels of news of Sen. McCain's brain tumor, I can hardly wait to see what the third wondrous thing will be to complete the Hat Trick Of Fate.

Just to be safe, I'm buying a powerball ticket.

Oozing Towards The Abyss

h/t WRSA

Victor Davis Hanson: The Fifth American War

"The country is coming apart, and the advocates of radical egalitarianism are winning."

VDH is a national treasure, and ought to be the president of Stanford or Harvard U.
But my response to this essay, and its premise:

Meh.
We’ve been here for going on nine months.
And eight years before that.
And eight years before that.
And eight years before that.

 VDH is right in his summary of where we are, but whether it will amount to anything imminently, maybe not so much. Things are not as bleak as his worst fears, and Trump isn’t doing anything like anyone’s best hopes. (Which is the problem, along with how much he could realistically accomplish in the first place.) He’s just gotten the elephants pulling us towards the cliff to trudge more slowly.

But no one can say precisely where the cliff is. And there’s no single swinging Richard, from Hell to breakfast, who can tell you any different, no matter how many try. Until the wagon goes ass over teakettle over its edge.

So what is it, exactly, that can’t continue?
No one can point to a thing, or an actual demarcation of how far is too far.
How much debt, how much corruption, how much lawlessness, how much lying? Anyone? Beuller? Ferris Beuller…?
You can list any number of things all day long that are bad, very bad, and horribly bad, and have my wholehearted agreement.
But no one knows where the balance point is where beyond equals certain disaster.

Even the Titanic launched lifeboats, because someone noticed seawater was supposed to be outside the hull.

What we’re headed for is more like the Hindenburg. Nobody inside or out had a clue there was really a problem until it exploded around or on top of them.

The smartest people in both cases were somewhere else, and not along for the ride. And the farther from it they were, the less it mattered.

I suspect there’s a greater lesson there, if anywhere.

The reason this country worked as much as it did, when it did, was because it depended on most people, if not all of them, to want it to work; almost everyone depended on everyone else. So you can’t have the guy running the bank doing lines of cocaine, the airline pilots can’t be sound asleep, the folks running nuclear plants can’t be shooting up heroin, and the people passing laws or teaching K-PhD can’t be doing all of that too, plus raving batshit lunatics and child molesters.

Now we have all that, except exponentially bigger, times decades. Is it any wonder that every day we slide closer to being the country of Trashcanistan?

And nobody’s stringing them up when they fail.

No one went to jail when banks crashed. The feds spent more time on Martha Stewart’s Case About Nothing than they did going after the people that looted and destroyed your 401k. The captain of the Exxon Valdez, drunk off his ass when he crashed the ship, paid a $50K fine – thirteen years later. He still has his master’s ticket. (Thankfully, no one wants to hand him the keys to their ship anymore, but he still never did a days’ time behind bars.)

Now one can grasp why John Adams would state something like this:
“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”

Every bit of your existence that depends on other people to be clean, sober, sane, and diligent, is now just another point of failure when they live up to reality, rather than your expectations.

The only answer I can see is to do as much of everything you depend on to live and function, yourself. Even if you think you have tribe, every person you’re depending on is another point of failure between you and getting by. (Ask anybody that’s ever been served divorce papers.) You’re going to have to “go Galt” in every sense you can think of – and you’d better think of all of them — or you’re going to pay the consequences of having one foot under the Hindenburg, and being there in the first place, when it explodes and lands in flames on top of you. And you’re going to have to be far enough away from it that the crash doesn’t affect you.

Historically, that sort of existence has been accurately described as solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

So knowing that, ask yourself why people will claw tooth and nail to uphold what they have right now, even a dysfunctional corrupt broke-dick system, rather than face that.

Murder -- By Criminal Stupidity

Apparently that's the angle investigators are seeing in the murder of a woman who called them for help by Officer Fuckstick of the Minneapolis PD, in the Saturday night shooting by one of them, executing an unarmed middle-aged woman in her pajamas.

MN DPS BCA Press release:

ST. PAUL — The Minnesota Department of Public Safety Bureau of Criminal Apprehension (BCA) today confirmed identity of the two Minneapolis Police Department officers involved in an officer involved shooting incident on Saturday, July 15. The BCA is conducting the investigation at the request of the Minneapolis Police Department.

• Officer Matthew Harrity has been an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department for one year.
• Officer Mohamed Noor has been an officer with the Minneapolis Police Department for 21 months.

The Hennepin County Medical Examiner’s Office on Monday evening confirmed the identity of the deceased as Justine Maia Ruszczyk, 40, of 5024 Washburn Avenue South in Minneapolis. Ruszczyk died of a single gunshot wound to the abdomen.
BCA agents interviewed Officer Harrity earlier today. Officer Noor has declined to be interviewed by BCA agents at this time. Officer Noor’s attorney did not provide clarification on when, if ever, an interview would be possible.
According to the BCA’s preliminary investigation, officers Harrity and Noor responded to a 911 call from a woman now identified as Ruszczyk of a possible assault near her residence just after 11:30 p.m. Saturday. Officer Harrity was driving. Officer Noor was in the passenger seat.
The officers drove south through the alley between Washburn and Xerxes avenues toward West 51st Street in search of a suspect. All squad lights were off.
As they reached West 51st Street, Officer Harrity indicated that he was startled by a loud sound near the squad. Immediately afterward Ruszczyk approached the driver’s side window of the squad. Harrity indicated that Officer Noor discharged his weapon, striking Ruszczyk through the open driver’s side window.
The officers immediately exited the squad and provided medical attention until medical personnel arrived. Ruszczyk was pronounced dead at the scene. Both officers have been placed on standard administrative leave.
Officer Harrity told investigators that the officers saw an 18-25 year old white male who was bicycling eastbound on West 51st Street immediately before the shooting. This individual stopped at the scene and watched as the officers provided medical assistance to Ruszczyk. BCA agents would like to speak with this person, and anyone else who may have witnessed the incident. These individuals are asked to contact the BCA at 651-793-7000.
Crime scene personnel recovered a cell phone near the victim. No weapons were recovered.
Body cameras were not turned on until after the shooting incident. The squad camera was not turned on. Investigators are aware of no video or audio of the shooting. The BCA’s investigation does not determine whether a law enforcement agency policy was violated. That would be reviewed through the agency’s internal affairs process.

Of course, Officer Fuckstick immediately lawyered up, and refuses to provide any statement to investigators. Fair enough: exercise your constitutional rights, impede the investigation, forfeit your job for being a total knob. Back to the civilian world - after 25 years to life in the slammer for murder. (And if he's not a full citizen, deport his ass back to Skinnyland after he's served the full nut.)

All MPD needs do now is suspend him without pay pending trial, arrest and charge him with the homicide, and shitcan the @$$hole once a jury takes the obligatory time to find him guilty. Like the DA there would have done to a civilian under such circumstances in 0.02 seconds.

Otherwise, it should be open season on MPD officers, with gusto. @$$holes should have consequences. Especially if the rule now is open fire without warning on anything that moves. Challenge accepted, you incompetent badged dipshits.

No news release on why MPD had two officers barely beyond rookie status in the same car, rather than, say, pairing each of these two ding-a-lings with separate experienced officers as adult supervision. Sounds like a few people above Fuckstick (supervising sergeant, watch commander, etc.) need to be suspended without pay and sent back to non-supervisory status for that bit of shitheadedness too. But clearly Fuckstick failed the ability to use mature judgment test, by shooting the first person he saw after hearing a "loud noise". No word on whether the loud noise was actually his weapon going off, because he's not talking to anyone. And cleverly, all three sound/video recording devices in the vehicle, which would exonerate (or prove the lies) of this tale, including both officers' bodycams, were turned off. So it's still he said/she's dead.

Which should merit firing both of them for cause just for that cock-up, even before Fuckstick turned his weapon on a citizen seeking help from her murderer.

Eighty years out, and this is still more fact than fiction:

No S--t, Sherlock!

Stunned by people's senatorial representatives' refusal to sign on to ObamaCare Lite, or ObamaCare Plus, the latest attempt to foist socialism on the American medical industry went down in flames.

Now, our governmental betters (just ask them) have miraculously lit upon the obvious solution: shitcan the entire damned ObamaCare abortion.
This is what happens when you vote for retarded people, and why we can't have a nice country.

Link

WASHINGTON, D.C. — President Donald Trump and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called for the full, clean repeal of Obamacare in late-night statements Monday.

Kudos to Bitch McConjob for recognizing the obvious after only being hit with a cluebat two or three times, and proving Churchill right, yet again:

The Americans can always be counted upon to do the right thing...after exhausting all other options.

One can only wonder how long it will take them to suss out that we weren't kidding about locking up Shrillary, or building a border wall either.

Subtle hint, congressional fucktards: the 2018 midterms are right around the corner.
If you find the job too tough, we can find a replacement for any or all of you.
Read up on the Whigs, and get back to us.

 

WTFBlisteringF...??? Case # 10,421

Link

Somali-born Minneapolis cop shoots unarmed 40-year old white woman through the police vehicle door, from the passenger side, while she was talking to his partner. She was in her pajamas, and was talking to the driver-side officer through the window about the 911 home intruder report she'd made earlier by telephone, when she was shot dead by the cop in the passenger seat, who fired across his partner, without a whit of explanation! No, really.

Victim and murderer:

"No explanation" by Minnie cops. Both cops' bodycams were conveniently turned off when the shooting occurred. Color me shocked. (After all, you can only fit 16+ hours of non-stop 1080p video and sound on a chip the size of a nickel nowadays, so why let it run continuously for an 8-12 hour shift, every day, right?) So it's all down to he-said/she's dead.

Oh, and no points for guessing the shooter's first name.

Unf***ingbelieveable.

Apparently, all interactions with police now require that you be armed, weapon drawn, and wearing body armor. Ideally, from behind cover.
Challenge accepted.

And despite any number of "good" officers out there, the "one rotten apple" defense cuts no more ice with anyone any more; it's all played out after the first 10,000 deployments. If the chief doesn't get way out ahead of this in short order, he's just retired, whether he knows it or not. I sincerely hope MPD loses a few dozen officers to this by way of payback, unless they hang this badged @$$hole out to dry, and he goes down for murder two, in about 48 hours. In fact, if they don't do that, they should all either quit, or just kill themselves, and save time.

Apparently, Team Blue thought Dallas was just an aberration.
Hope ain't a plan, boys and girls. There will be an accounting, and "just following orders" as a defense, expired about 71 years ago.

As to motive...?

Just more random "workplace violence," obviously.
What with cops being taken out by unarmed middle-aged women in their pajamas every day, I can totally see how this is just pure coincidence.

Whether this was another case of Sudden Jihadi Syndrome, or Murder Under Color Of Authority, or a little bit of both, the best cure is a tree, a rope, and a suitably motivated mob.
Within hours, if they can't book the guy and arraign him by noon today.
(TPTB have jack and shit by way of explanation for shooting the person reporting the crime on the street, in her pajamas, whilst completely defenseless. That's an execution, and justice merits one in response.)

This stuff isn't going to stay tamped down, and the backsplatter's going to get ugly, fast.
When Whitey throws a riot, continents get burned down.

$#!^ Happens. And You Brought...?

Summer in SoCal is everything you've heard about. Really.
I'm off for the weekend. Cruising down the street listening to my own song mix. The birds are singing. Not a cloud in the sky. And over there is a white haired woman face down in the street. Not a care in...

WTF? Why is grandma doing the dead fish impression off the edge of the curb?

So I pull over smartly, hop out with my first aid kit from behind the seat, and step over to where she lies.
She is, happily for both of us, conscious and breathing, so we chat.

Turns out moments ago (Why in front of me? Just lucky like that...) she negotiated a tall curb badly coming out of the jewelry store, tripped, with both feet on the curb, and fell to the street. As she's telling me this, and giving the okay for help, I tenderly pull her out of the traffic lane in which she was laying, noting her bilateral ankle pain and tenderness.

(And nota bene, total number of helpful bystanders who come over to assist, in front of three open business...zero, start to finish. Plan on that and you'll never be disappointed.)

I'm in town, and can call 9-1-1 while simultaneously cracking a couple of ice packs, after assuring myself that her feet have good pulses, are warm, and she can wiggle her toes. While also noticing she's probably broken both her ankles, at the tender age of 70-something.

So rather than having to splint both of her lower legs, I can wait the 110 seconds it takes for the city's red-engine pride to arrive, while I gather a quick history and baseline vitals, less BP, because I can hear the truck coming before I could deploy the cuff.

She is gently loaded on a gurney, to be whisked to the local ER, in little more than the time it took to write this, and other than handing the lead paramedic all the meat and potatoes of his run report, I'm done, and ready to depart. It also helps that he and the captain both recognize me from multiple contacts in that same ER, even though I'm not in scrubs at the moment.

The point, gentle reader, is that $#!^ happens anywhere. Are you prepared for that? You'll use a first aid kit in your lifetime one helluva lot more often than a gun, so whether or not you have a CCW and a weapon, where's your aid kits?
D'ya know what to do after you grab it?
Note I said kits, not kit. If you have a weapon, you should have an IFAK/blow-out kit on your body, as well as a mini-kit, and a disasterpiece theatre SHTF kit in the car, 24/7/365.
Mayhem doesn't send warning notices. He just shows up.

Can you quickly assess, evaluate, and treat someone you come across who needs medical attention? How about when you go shooting? (Of course, we know you'll never have an accident, because infallibility, but what about all those other jackasses waving guns around? Haven't you seen the bullet holes everywhere but downrange??)

Everybody carries one of these:

Okay, nice, provided you've got contact bars.
Some of you carry one of these:

Cool. Now, use it to stop bleeding. Can't do that?
Maybe it's time for one of these:

And one of these is even better.

For some problems, there's no other work around. You simply must have the proper tool, or you can't do the job. And waving your gun, or your arms, (or some other worthless anatomy) at the problem won't fix things.

Please, don't be that guy.
Naked and Afraid isn't even much good as a reality show, but it's orders of magnitude worse as a plan for coping with emergencies.

As a wiser man teaching field medical care once pithily explained,
"If you ain't got a kit, you ain't got $#!^."

Not the happiest ending in this case, but better than it could have ended.

Life happens. Tag, you're it...

Beating The Stupid Out With A Slide Rule

Apparently the latest "thing", if you are calculationally retarded, is to claim some hogwash to the effect that "The US could have avoided the entire Civil War by simply buying the slaves for market prices, ergo no war."

This from the Underpants Gnome School Of Economics.

Item One: The black population of the US in 1860 included 3,953,761 slaves.
Item Two: The average US budget from 1789-1860 was $19,000,000 per year.
Item Three: The price of the average slave ca. 1860 was $1400 to $2000 (and those are pre-CW 1860 dollars).
For the quibblers and nit-pickers, I'm inclined to grant that half the slaves would be women and children, and worth half the market rate for a prime healthy male. We'll ignore the fact that women could and did make more slaves, as their children were not considered free-born, which in a closed slavery market makes them more valuable, not less.

3,953,761 slaves x 0.5 = 1,976,880.5
So, we'll call it 1,976,880 males, and 1,976,880 women and children (and I'll drop the fraction).
Simple math follows (too hard for the die-hard moron):
So the market price for the male slaves only would be $2,767,632,000 - $3,953,760,000.
The women and children would fetch  $1,383,816,000 - $1,976,880,000.

Bringing the total cost to purchase all slaves to between $4.2 and $5.8B dollars (yes, following the rule, I rounded up, but if there was such a plan, the prices would have risen as well.) And at a price 2-3x the cost of the actual Civil War, in inflated wartime dollars.
(Oh, and nota bene that post-Civil War inflation jacked the federal budget up 800-1600%, for the half-century afterwards, which means inflation bit the hell out of everyone: there's your "slavery reparations", on top of the lives and blood shed for your freedom, and you're welcome, entitled race-baiting @$$holes from the other side.) 

At any rate, yes, the US could have bought all the slaves up in 1861:
By simply spending 218-312 years worth of federal budgets (which would have taken us to somewhere around 2007-2100) in 1860 dollars, provided they spent not one single penny on anything else.

During which time - two to three centuries, mind you - no other federal outlays would exist, and taxation would have been at exorbitant levels to pay off the interest on that $4-5 billion dollar note. (Yeah, that would totally fly in a country that had a revolution over a half penny tea tax...as if).

No government whatsoever; no Louisiana Purchase - cancel the entire plains states expansion; no Mexican War, so no Texas, no California, no Arizona, no New Mexico; no army for frontier settlement or Indian Wars; no Gadsden Purchase, so no AZ or New Mexico scrap, no intercontinental railroad, no Mississippi River trade, no navy, no patent office, no Alaskan purchase, no nothing, whatsoever, to this day, if not beyond. Except maybe hordes of tariff and tax collectors, sussing out every stray nickel from north to south, east to west, 24/7/365/forever.
America The Miniscule, in living stupidity.
If you think total actual anarchy was the way to save the union facing those facts, show your work.

For an asset that would have been, at best, shipped back to Africa, or at worst, pawned off on Northern cities in droves, and with worse bloodshed than the last century and a half on the same issue.

In fact, in all likelihood, the entire US, an Atlantic power, is re-absorbed following their defeat by the British in 1812.
God Save The King!
Or, God save us from innumerate @$$holes who can't even do chalkboard math.

So no, no way in hell was there an economic possibility of the United States simply buying our way out of slavery. (Though clearly, reconstruction of some morons was and continues to be an abject failure. And a testimony to the waste of billions in compulsory public schooling in the last century that would have been better spent on video games and porn.)

If you're one of those coulda-shoulda-woulda mathematically-challenged fucktards, please, I beseech you:
Go back to the third grade, take your diplomas and report cards, and demand a refund.
Or else pull up a chair and re-do math for grades 1-6, inclusive.
But spare me this sophomoric argument, doubly so if you can't look things up and do the equivalent of a sixth-grade essay on the subject.

Wound Care Hip Pocket Talk*

*(Hip pocket talks are mini-lessons NCOs and such can pull out during any 5-10 minute period of Nothing Is Going On to fulfill their duty to train and mentor their charges, E-3 and below, with all the tender loving kindness their mommies would want for Their Baby.
Every good NCO can probably only pull out 500 or so of them at the drop of a hat. So can any subject matter expert in any field of endeavor. I am and have been both, so here you go.)

For multiple reasons, certain questions and lessons of basic first aid keep coming up. Some because people are new to the topic. Some, because people have been fed a lot of nonsense, and didn't know any better. Some, because people are stupid.
Yes, really. As Gunny told us,"There are no stupid questions, privates, only stupid people."
(And some people are new and stupid, which is why there's a Darwin Awards website. Try not to get honored there.)

So you've got a wound to deal with; yours, or someone else's.
In order:

Expose the wound(s). Find them all. ALL of them.
Get all the clothes, debris, dirt, blood, etc. out of and away from it.
If you have to cut or rip clothes, do it now, and do it fast.
Strip 'em and flip 'em is the rule to follow.
These all work for that:

If they aren't in life-threatening danger, and you're not a dick, you can cut along seams, and through laces preferentially. Laces can be replaced cheaper than boot leather, and cutting on/along seams lets them sew a garment back to being intact with a lot less trouble.
Which might be a consideration if clothes and sewing machines are hard to come by.
If they are or could potentially be bleeding out, BE A DICK.
Tell them I said it was okay. 

Leave impaled objects where they are.
If there are objects impaled further into the wound than you can see, leave them alone.
Why?

November 14, 1990

TUCSON(AP) — An 8-year-old boy was listed in critical condition today after surgeons unscrewed a steel rod that pierced his body when he fell from a roof.
"He probably just thinks this is kind of a slight inconvenience in his life," trauma surgeon Dr. Michael Esser said of Justin Stiner, who asked for some ice and wanted to play Nintendo on Tuesday after waking up from surgery.
The 4-foot-long, 1/2-inch-thick threaded bar used to reinforce concrete was literally unscrewed from the boy's neck and torso Monday in a 2 1/2-hour operation at University Medical Center. Eighteen inches of the rod had penetrated his body.
Esser said that the heart wounds should heal fully and that, although the boy's severed jugular vein was tied off, other veins can provide the needed circulation. The jugular vein carries blood back from the head to the heart.

The 4-foot-10, 86-pound third-grader from Sierra Vista fell onto the rod while playing with friends on the roof of a house Monday morning. He was suspended two feet off the ground for about 20 minutes, alert the whole time, while paramedics cut the rod, which pierced him just below the breastbone.
Justin, who was taken the 80 miles from Sierra Vista to Tucson by helicopter, neither panicked nor screamed, and on arrival "wanted to know if I was going to remove it. He was very cooperative," Dr. Phillip Richemont said.
Richemont said surgeons were stunned to find that the rod had pierced the heart in two places and divided the jugular vein. "But yet it didn't bleed. It's amazing," Richemont said.
During the operation, the heart seemingly "contracted down between the threads," cutting off bleeding, Richemont said.

The rod was a piece of rebar that he fell onto from his garden shed roof; grandma used it as a stake to coil the garden hose around. After penetrating into and out of the right ventricle of his heart, the rod severed the external jugular (IIRC) and then pinned it against his right clavicle. If it had been moved at all, he would have died from either wound. The paramedics on scene hand-sawed it off , packed it, and transported him to the hospital with it in place. He's 35 years old now instead of dead in his grandma's garden because of that move.

The piece of whatever impaled into the globe of an injured eye may be the only thing keeping the aqueous humor inside the globe. If someone is blind, you won't fix that, but if they aren't, you might create the problem. Leave things alone you can't fix. Splint them so they don't move or cause additional problems.

Clean and disinfect the wound(s).
The solution to pollution is dilution.
Which is a med school canard that means "irrigate all wounds until they bleed saline solution".
Clean tap water is your second choice for superficial wounds.
And the only way to get something clean is to get something else dirty.
True with cars, houses, and patients.  Saline, gauze, rags, etc. will be consumed out of all proportion to the wound. Get over it, and get it done.

For deep wounds, a solution of half sterile saline, and half povidone iodine {Betadine[tm]}solution (not scrub, which is a stronger and harsher liquid form) gets squirted under plunger pressure from a syringe (5-20cc) into the wound. Splash shields and safety goggles are your friend here, unless you want a faceful of bloody (or something worse, think abdominal wounds) backsplatter.
One blast isn't nearly enough. Keep going, then irrigate with just saline, then repeat, then repeat, then repeat, until you're sure you've gotten everything foreign out.

You can also do this with superficial injuries.

For small stuff, like cuts and scrapes, Bactine[tm] has both BZK (benzylkonium chloride, a relatively harmless disinfectant) and a small amount of lidocaine (which numbs pain).
Use it.
Not isopropyl alcohol, which is flammable, and only for sterilizing instruments.
Not hydrogen peroxide, which is only for getting blood out of clothes, carpet, and fabrics, not cleansing wounds. (Like moving a body before the cops get there, and tidying up...)
Both of the latter also burn like hell in fresh wounds, because they're killing healthy vital tissue, and they don't work well. Using them anyways may get you socked by your patient.
Or their lawyer.
After Bactine, clean tap water, or water you've made sterile by boiling (and cooling, please) is okay.

Water from the ocean, lake, river, stream, pond, or from your or the patient's canteen that's been backwashed in, absolutely not.

We either use sterile solutions, or holy water on wounds.
Holy water? How do I make holy water?
You boil the Hell out of it.

Stop serious bleeding.
Direct pressure.
Direct pressure and elevation.
Tourniquet (TQ).
Pressure points.
In that order, unless you're under fire (in which case, you use the TQ now, get back in the fight, then go back and re-address things after the shooting stops.)

Nota bene: And for deep bleeding wounds, esp. of the torso, this is what that Combat Gauze was made for: as an internal instant scab over large bleeding wounds (assuming you're evacuating your patient to higher care, where someone can surgically repair what you're putting a temporary packing against, which will be removed at a Battalion Aid Station or equivalent, or else in an OR). If that higher level of care is not an option, because Zombpocalypse, Combat Gauze just means they'll die from infection in a couple of days, instead of massive hemorrhage now.
Your call in that case. Just remember, death is final, either way.

Apply Magic Spackle
By which, I mean products purposely made to keep wounds clean. And help kill germs.
Neosporin (triple antibiotic).
Polysporin (double antibiotic).
Bacitracin (single antibiotic).
Burn gel (for burns, if you have that).

Most of what's in these (like 98% for the first three) is just sterile petroleum jelly, to hold the antibiotic components (the other 2% or so) in stasis where you want them, next to the open wound.

If it doesn't have FDA drug information on it, the answer is generally "No."
In some cases, "F**k NO!"

("But can't you put honey on cuts? I read this outdoors nature manual where Sumdood from the Discovery Channel wrote...")
Yes, honey can work. It also works to attract bees. Flies. Ants. Cockroaches. Etc. While providing a potential growth medium for new bacteria, and sticking them and anything else next to the wound. And getting bloody honey onto everyone and everything nearby.
Save your honey for hypoglycemia patients, or your buttered rolls, unless you have no other choices.

Save also your butter, Crisco, and any other concoction of cat piss, dog shit, and sourdough batter you got from your mom/granny/crazy aunt/some witch in the woods.
Dumber than fuck, and probably not a good idea, plus someone else will have to traumatize the patient later by scraping all that happy horseshit off again, somewhere down the medical pipeline. Neither patient nor practitioner will thank you for your misguided efforts at that point.

If the Zombpocalypse has already occurred, you're on your own; use your best judgment. Starting with some judgment, sil vous plait.

And once a wound scabs over and seals in a few days, topical goo is pointless.

Dress the wound(s).
Sterile dressings, completely covering the injury.
Non-stick, if appropriate.
Absorbent and multi-layered, if appropriate.
Occlusive to air, if appropriate.
This is where your variety of bandaids, 2x2s, 3x3s, 4x4s, ABDs, and multi-trauma dressings will kick in.

Bandage the wound(s).
A dressing protects the wound; a bandage secures the dressing(s). Dressings therefore, must be sterile, because they're going on open wounds. Bandages only have to be clean.
Sterile is nice, but you can, for example, wash bandages that have gotten soiled, bloody, or dirty, and reapply them once they're dry.
Dressings get burned or red-bagged afterwards; they're single-use.
Plain gauze, Kerlix fluff, Kling/Coban/vet wrap, ACE wrap. Or even cut-up sheets in rolls.

Nota bene that old-school field dressings and new Israeli bandages in all flavors are both dressings and bandages. Less flexibility, but less bulk, and handier if you aren't the medic, nor carrying the well-stocked aid bag.

Secure the bandage(s).
Tape gauze so it doesn't unroll. Tape metal Ace bandage clips so they don't pop out (or get the cool ones with Velcro tips). Make things fit, and stay put, despite the patient walking, being carried, put on a helicopter, or just sitting out on a windy spot.

Wounds get dressed and bandaged before splints go on broken limbs.

Dressings get changed daily, and whenever soiled. Note that "soiled" means "funky from the outside dirt, water, and other contaminants". The stuff draining from the wound inside is why you change them daily anyways - unless we're talking dressings that are saturated suppurating puss buckets. In which case you have bigger problems than dressing changes.

There are a host of special application dressings and bandaging, many of which protect skin by not having you rip and replace adhesives daily. These can be learned from the appropriate chapter of a decent comprehensive textbook of nursing care, for instance this one ($25-80 on Amazon):

You can also download the 1957 Army Field Manual on Bandaging and Splinting for free, here.
(You're welcome, and thank the TX ArmyNG.) 

Smartest would be to acquire both.

One way or another, you will see this material again.

Unconventional Foolishness

h/t to WRSA

Unconventional Wisdom by Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club/PJMedia.

"You would think this a Eureka moment: to contain oil prices is to contain Russia (and Islamism)." 

Fernandez notes correctly that low oil prices cripple Russia (and the petro-Islamic states).
While helping our own economy to boom (or at least, not crater - yet).
He also glosses over the point that Green Weenie eco-tardism is mainly a Russian- and petro-monarchic-funded scheme to hamstring America and the West. And should have been on that like a terrier on a rat.
So drill, baby.

But he overlooks completely that cheaper energy has also fuelled the precise boom in China that now makes them an emerging threat to the West.

Oops.

This is what happens to analysts, even on our side, who look at maps, rather than a globe. There are no free moves on the chessboard. Everything has a cost as well as a benefit.

"Pax Dickinson wants to fund the revolution. Not a blood-in-the-streets revolution, but one where hardcore right-wingers can economically secede from the parts of society they vehemently dislike. "We need parallel everything. I do not want to ever have to spend a single dollar at a non-movement business."

In conversations with Inc., Dickinson explained that he sees CounterFund as the linchpin of a parallel far-right economy. The alt-right movement shouldn't fund or depend on platforms that are hostile to their goals, he believes. CounterFund's website sports endorsements from Richard Spencer, the suit-wearing white supremacist who went viral after being punched in the face, and comedian Sam Hyde, whose divisive show Million Dollar Extreme was kicked off the air by Adult Swim.

Dickinson is pitching CounterFund itself as a new kind of political party, one that cares for its community rather than pouring money into candidates' campaigns. It's hard to overstate the degree to which he's willing to take this project beyond mainstream acceptability. Dickinson compared CounterFund to Hezbollah: "Hezbollah is a government within a government. They collect garbage, they operate hospitals, they're an economy within an economy, and a government within a government."

The Resistance is probably embarked on the same process of internal secession themselves.  How long can this mutual escalation of mistrust continue without effect?"

As to such ideologically buying and selling, good luck with that nonsense. People (who are non-idiots) don't buy from Wal-Mart or Amazon because they like the politics, they do it because the things they need to buy are the cheapest there, which trumps the next ten reasons people buy anything.

Thus, as usual, the correct answer is pure capitalism, not politically-motivated trade cartels.

Make a product or provide a service based on the loyalty of your own ideological group, and some of them will buy from you.
Make the best product or provide the best service at the best price, and everyone goes there, including people whose politics you hate (but which are none of your damned business, literally).
You can figure out which is a better business model.
Wal-Mart and Amazon are already on that case.

This is Econ 101 stuff, and if Fernandez can't figure that out without a cluebat, he shouldn't be writing beyond his depth.

Or at least, Thomas Sowell should be editing his essays with red pencil.

Military Justice In The Post-HopeyDopey Return To Sanity DoD

Criminal deserter Bergdahl's legal defense team is now on suicide watch:

Last week, the military judge overseeing the trial rendered two adverse decisions. First, he decided that Bergdahl will stand trial on all charges. Most damaging, though, was his decision that if Bergdahl is convicted that the jury would be allowed to hear about the injuries suffered by an Navy SEAL and an Army NCO while specifically searching for Bergdahl.

Serious wounds to a soldier and a Navy SEAL who searched for Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl can be used at the sentencing phase of his upcoming trial, a judge ruled Friday, giving prosecutors significant leverage to pursue stiff punishment against the soldier.
The judge, Col. Jeffery Nance, ruled that the service members wouldn’t have wound up in the firefights that left them wounded if they hadn’t been searching for Bergdahl, so their injuries would be relevant to his sentencing if he’s convicted of misbehavior before the enemy at trial in October.

I suspect we are heading for a guilty plea and Bergdahl taking his chances with a military judge. Any court-martial panel Bergdahl draws will be composed of officers with combat tours. Bergdahl can demand that a third of his jury be composed of noncommissioned officers senior in rank to him–but he’d have to have a profoundly incompetent defense team for them to think that senior NCOs are going to be very sympathetic to his case.

                   SecDef to Bergdahl: "Time for your final promotion. Any last words, punk?"

It was also announced that volunteers for Bergdahl's firing squad will be selected by marksmanship scores. So far, out of 1,081,291 members of the US Army active duty, Reserve, and National Guard components, only about 8,000,000 have expressed interest in shooting the traitorous yellow sumbitch. (The discrepancy was when it was announced that recruit poolees and honorably discharged veterans would also be eligible for the shoot.) 

Oh Really...?

CNN could track down and cyber-bully the internet wiseass who punked them silly with a reworked video in two days, but after EIGHT AND A HALF MONTHS they can't find a shred of evidence about their "bullsh*t" "nothingburger" "purely ratings-driven" Russian collusion story...?

Top. Men.