Snowvember

My entire plan for today: reflect on how rarely it snows while autumn leaves are still falling.

And how absurdly beautiful it is when it does.

Enjoy your day, whatever it looks like.

Snowflakes Invade America

An arctic blast left unseasonably early snow and ice all across the country last week.

Apparently President Trump said mean things about Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch that made her feel bad…and threatened.

Ms. Yovanovitch told investigators that when she learned Mr. Trump had criticized her in a July phone call with his Ukrainian counterpart, “the color drained from my face.”

“[I was] shocked, appalled, devastated that the president of the United States would talk about any ambassador like that to a foreign head of state,” Ms. Yovanovitch said.

“It was a terrible moment.…I think I even had a physical reaction,” she said. Of the president’s comment about what she would “go through,” she said: “It didn’t sound good. It sounded like a threat.” – WSJ

Then he tweeted some more mean things about her while she was testifying and that made her feel threatened, again.

Now I don’t want to make Ms. Yovanovitch feel any worse than she already does, but isn’t she just a wee bit long in the tooth to be such a snowflake?

Jane: So Strong, So Brave

About mid-week I realized I hadn’t been assailed with a picture of Hanoi Jane last Friday being escorted away in her red coat, hands restrained by zip ties.

Arrested development: week 3

I thought I had read she vowed to be arrested every week through the end of the year as part of her principled protest against her latest boogey man, Climate Change. She seemed convinced that doing so would ensconce her in the freedom fighters hall of fame and cement her legacy of fighting for world peace. So naturally I wondered what had happened to her last week.

I discovered she was in Washington D.C., again in her red coat, again leading the cheer team, again demanding we give up our way of life and enact the Green New Deal because we only have 11 more years. Imagine my surprise then to learn she had stepped away from the fray, literally, to avoid being arrested. It turns out she did not wish to disrupt her way of life too much while demanding that you do just that.

Week 1: righto, we don’t need any new fossils

For the fifth straight week, Jane Fonda led a throng [ed. in liberalese that’s defined as more than a dozen but less than a gross] of climate change protestors in Washington, D.C. But unlike the previous instances, the actress avoided arrest.

According to reporter Ted Johnson…Fonda left early. "Jane Fonda has now left, but gave a big hug to Ben and Jerry before she did," he reported via Twitter.

Speculation for the early departure revolved around Fonda being potentially slapped with a longer stay in jail after racking up a number of misdemeanors in a short amount of time. Last week, she spent the night in jail after her fourth arrest. She reportedly faced weeks this time around.

You see, here’s the inconvenient truth: as Jane explained to The Hollywood Reporter earlier last week, getting arrested for the 5th time would be quite inconvenient for her:

Fonda spoke about her night in jail and plans for her fifth week of demonstrations "I have to be careful not to get to a point where they're going to keep me for 90 days because I have to begin preparing for “Grace and Frankie” in January. So I'm not going to get arrested every time. They give you three warnings and so I will step away at the third warning," she said.

For the uninitiated Grace and Frankie is a Netflix series about a group of sex-obsessed 80-somethings (Jane, Lily Tomlin, Sam Waterston, Martin Sheen) who were once two married couples but are now divorced as both of the women’s husbands had both been carrying on a 20 year relationship – with each other. Season one actually showcased the surprisingly funny premise quite well but it went straight downhill from there. Put it on your DO NOT WATCH list.

Frankie and Grace, doing what they do best

I should note that the show must have many fans as it will film its 7th season early next year – assuming none of the octogenarians croak or are incarcerated before then.

The boys: doing their bit to carry Hollywood’s gay agenda into the daylight for all to enjoy

Also in fairness I should likewise note that Jane doesn’t care as much about the environment as she does her fans…and her TV legacy. So while she will continue to show up for her Friday Climate Shows, she will no longer be photographed being handcuffed and hauled away. Instead, she will show up in a red coat, black hat and passionately implore us as the consummate hypocrite she is, to do as she says, not as she does.

The sun is not your friend, dear.

And still the media fawns:

First of all, how are you holding up?

I'm good. I'm just on the train headed back to D.C. from New York.

What have been your living arrangements through all of this?

I've gone back and forth to L.A. and New York a few times for speaking engagements. But other than that I've basically moved to D.C. for four months. The climate is an urgent crisis.

Just not quite as urgent as the next season of her Netflix gig.

But don’t worry, Jane has a plan: she wants Congress to cut the military budget and use it to fund the Green New Deal. She launched this bold agenda at last week’s “Fire Drill Friday alongside Ben & Jerry’s co-founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield  - who have been “very anti-military” for decades, as if that’s a good thing. They may have stood with Jane, but they too “stepped away” at the third warning, preferring not to spend the night in jail. But remember, “the climate is an urgent crisis!”

With the level of commitment demonstrated so far I don’t expect any interesting arrests - or indeed anything of import – to transpire in D.C. today, either on the steps of the Capital where the Friday Fire Drill team likes to hang out or in the kabuki theater being conducted inside.

The Riders Cup

I have a theory about why Joe Biden decided to run for president in 2020 at his advanced age. I think he’s just part of yet another rider to the Democrats’ seemingly endless insurance plan riders.

Of course Joe’s always wanted to be president but I don’t think he would have run unless some influential members of the Democratic party - very likely Barack Hussein Obama himself - encouraged him to do so. And by encouraged I mean pandered to his giant ego. Of course nobody actually wants him as their ultimate candidate but I doubt very much that either Joey or Dr. Jilly know that…yet.

Here’s how I think it was set up and will play out:

When President Trump’s team discovered nefarious linkage between the Bidens and Ukraine, sometime in 2018, the Dems decided they better take out another rider on their impeachment insurance policy: call this one the Biden Rider. With old beloved Joe running for president the powers-that-be determined that the troops would be outraged that their their beloved - and leading - candidate was being smeared by Orange Man Bad and accused of things only Republicans are ever held accountable for.

The Biden Rider would allow them to turn poor old Joe and his junkie son into victims while simultaneously accusing President Trump (again) of high crimes and misdemeanors. Quid pro Joe could be turned to their advantage and presented as a quid pro quo impeachment proceeding against Trump. 

Two birds and all

Therefore, when the time was right (i.e. after the Mueller report’s failure to launch) the Ukrainian allegations dropped, seemingly like manna from heaven but in reality from a “whistleblower.” Game on. And although the new allegations arrived with a guarantee of impeachment, it looks to be simply another mini-coup by Deep State that will also be put down. Here’s a rundown of all the other insurance rider claims submitted by the Dems for payout, all of which have been rejected:

Voting-machines-fraud hoax, the Logan Act, the Emoluments Clause, the 25th Amendment, the McCabe-Rosenstein faux coup and various Michael Avenatti-Stormy Daniels-Michael Cohen psychodramas. Ukraine, then, isn’t unique, but simply another mini-coup. - h/t Victor Davis Hanson 

Anyway, once this Ukraine thing is put to rest the Democrats will be free to cut Joe loose and promote their next rock star candidate: Deval Patrick. You know, the candidate so good even Barack Hussein saw fit to plagiarize him. 

Seriously, what could be better for the Democrats than getting rid of an old (creepy) white guy and choosing another Magic Negro as their flag-bearer?

“You know only a few years ago you’d be serving the covfefe, right?” – h/t Bill Clinton

Opening Day

Pick your team. Grab your hat,

and bring your favorite bat.

Keep a sharp lookout for incoming flying objects:

By all means be prepared to enjoy a ballpark frank:

The score has already been determined so just sit back and enjoy the game: it’s opening day.

Squid Pro Quo: The Tentacles Are Complicated

With the Kabuki theatre scheduled to reopen tomorrow some program changes have been announced.

First, the lead role of “Whistleblower” will again be played by the understudy, Rep. Adam Schiff. The audience can expect more emotional “parody” performance art on his part.

Second, the allegation of “Quid Pro Quo” will be replaced with the terms “extortion” and “bribery” because, well it’s “complicated” and as Rep. Himes explained on one of the Interchangeable Sunday Morning Television Shows:

“Number one, when you're trying to persuade the American people of something that is really pretty simple, which is the that the president acted criminally and extorted in the way a mob boss would extort somebody, a vulnerable foreign country, it's probably best not to use Latin words to explain it.” 

Stand in terms - such as corruption, abuse of power, extortion and bribery - were focus grouped with potential audience members and the later two were found to invoke the greatest emotional response and hence were selected.

So I’m going to predict that you will enjoy the show as long as you keep a couple of caveats in mind:  1) Adam Schiff is a bad actor and 2) the concept of “extortion” and “bribery” only apply in cases where both parties are subject to a set of common, domestic laws which make them illegal. That does not apply in the arena of foreign relations where they do not.

Number 2, above, may be a non-starter for some critics, like Andrew McCarthy. He explains in “uncomplicated” terms that even Democrat partisan should be able to understand:

Foreign relations typically involve quid pro quo arrangements. Governments do not ordinarily assist each other out of fondness. Nations pursue their interests in the world. Where interests align, they assist each other. Where interests are opposed, they are adverse to each other. In any event, they bargain with each other to advance their interests. It is a matter of “We want you to do this; what do we need to do – whether for you or to you – to make you do it?”

I wonder if these same partisan hacks would object if President Trump conducted extortion in extracting a “quid pro quo” from Mexico in order to stem the flow of illegal drugs into our country. Or if he “extorted” Iran with threatened sanctions in order to get them to stop their drive to nuclear armament? (Technically I think we know the answer to that last one.)

Sometimes it’s a survival tactic

I believe that Stephen Green’s observation sums the upcoming hearings up best:

The impeachment mess would look less like a kangaroo court and an insult to the Constitution and congressional institutions if it weren’t such a kangaroo court and an insult to the Constitution and congressional institutions.

Veteran’s Day: 2019

The price of greatness is responsibility. – Sir Winston Churchill

It is hard to adequately acknowledge the sacrifices made by the men and women who responded to that call of responsibility, especially in times of war, but today we honor them. The President will do so by attending and speaking at the beginning of New York’s Veterans Day parade. The 100 year old New York tradition which began with a huge tickertape parade honoring our troops returning from World War I which had technically ended on the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in 1918.

The “war to end all wars” of course did not.

It would be nice if we could focus today solely on the the sacrifice our armed forces have always made when called upon to protect and defend our country. It would be refreshing to go just one day without the media being in full cheer mode for the Deep State coup being conducted in plain sight. It would also be nice if we could make it through a single day without a batch of nitwits somewhere ranting about social justice, male toxicity and the evil patriarchy.

Have at it women

Wouldn’t it be swell if just today we could all acknowledge that in times of threat America has always pulled together, men and women, black and white, service members and civilians,

Ford Motor Co.’s Willow Run Bomber plant, where Rosie the Riveter and many like her assembled B-24s  during WWII

to fight against an evil far greater than referring to someone by the wrong pronoun. Could we not all concede that fighting for the the right to choose your own “gender” from a list of 31 flavors is not the moral equivalent of fighting for your right to exist at all?

There certainly are many Jews who – were they alive - might think that the evil of true tyranny and genocide trump your gender choice and cultural appropriation issues.

All I know is that I for one am eternally grateful to those who served as armed centurions at the gate throughout America’s history.

Outside the American sector there are wolves everywhere; that’s why we fight

While the face of freedom’s enemy may morph over time, it never goes away.That is why we’ll always need people on the wall, willing to do whatever is necessary to keep the malignancy at bay; people who don’t need safe spaces and for whom “trigger warning” means something altogether different than hurt feelings. It is why today we honor all those who have responded to the call to serve. Please accept my heartfelt gratitude for helping preserve the last best hope of the world.

"You and I have a rendezvous with destiny. We will preserve for our children this, the last best hope of man on earth, or we will sentence them to take the first step into a thousand years of darkness. If we fail, at least let our children and our children's children say of us we justified our brief moment here. We did all that could be done."

The Witch of November: Edmund Fitzgerald Edition

Each year, those of us who live surrounded by the Great Lakes commemorate the sinking of the The SS Edmund Fitzgerald in a hellacious Lake Superior storm on November 10, 1975 resulting in the loss of the entire crew of 29. The early wicked cold bearing down on the Great Lakes this year is very much like it was that fateful November 44 years ago. Dewey from Detroit began our annual commemoration night back in 2009, a bleak period in America so we didn’t find the somewhat maudlin memorializing of another tragedy so strange; it was more like singing the blues.

I try to continue the tradition each year because Great Lake shipping is about as American as a job can get, and the men who worked the freighters are a special breed – the Mike Rowe dirty jobs kind of men that have built and maintained American greatness for generations.

From the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum:

The S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald was conceived as a business enterprise of the Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Company of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Northwestern Mutual contracted with Great Lakes Engineering Works of Ecorse, Michigan to construct a “maximum sized” Great Lakes bulk carrier. Her keel was laid on August 7, 1957 as Hull No. 301.

At 729 feet and 13,632 gross tons she was the largest ship on the Great Lakes, for thirteen years, until 1971.

If you’re wondering how a ship so massive can be destroyed by a lake, here are a few facts about Lake Superior where the Fitzgerald went down:

1.  Lake Superior is, by surface area, the world's largest freshwater lake.
2.  The surface area of Lake Superior (31,700 square miles or 82,170 square kilometers) is greater than the combined areas of Vermont, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Connecticut, and New Hampshire. 
3.  Lake Superior contains as much water as all the other Great Lakes combined, even if you throw in two extra Lake Eries. 
4.  Lake Superior contains 10% of all the earth's fresh surface water.
5.  There is enough water in Lake Superior (3 quadrillion gallons) to flood all of North and South America to a depth of one foot.
6.  The deepest point in Lake Superior (about 40 miles north of Munising, Michigan) is 1,300 feet (400 meters) below the surface.
7.  The Lake Superior shoreline, if straightened out, could connect Duluth and the Bahama Islands.
8. The lake is about 350 miles (563 km) in length and 160 miles (257 km) in width.
9.  In the summer, the sun sets more than 35 minutes later on the western shore of Lake Superior than at its southeastern edge.
10.  Lake Superior has over 400 islands, the largest of which is Isle Royale, with a size of 207 square miles.
11.  Waves of over 40 feet in height have been recorded on Lake Superior.
12.  Travel by car around Lake Superior covers a distance of about 1,300 miles.

They don’t call them inland oceans for naught.

Click the image to see the interactive version

As the evening is dedicated to the memory of sea-faring men there’s really only one drink on offer:

The Dark ‘N Stormy®:

So the story goes sometime after World War 1, the Dark ‘n Stormy was born. It has its origins in a Ginger Beer factory that was run by the Royal Naval Officer’s Club. The sailors soon discovered that a hefty splash of the local Gosling’s Black Seal rum was a great addition to the Ginger Beer.

As for the name the Dark ‘n Stormy, it was coined by a sailor who, while enjoying the cocktail, commented that it was the color of a cloud only a fool or a dead man would sail under.

As you can’t patent a drink recipe, you can trademark a name and that’s what Goslings did with the Dark ‘n Stormy. Kind of like what Pusser’s Rum did with their Painkiller cocktail. So if you make a Dark ‘n Stormy with anything other than Gosling’s dark rum, you’re breaking the law.

Unmixed you can see where the drink’s name came from

Ingredients

• 1.5 oz Gosling’s Black Seal Rum
• Gosling’s Stormy Ginger Beer

Method

In a tall glass filled with ice add 4 – 5 oz of Gosling’s Stormy Ginger Beer and top with Gosling’s Black Seal Rum. Garnish with a lime wedge (optional).

The Gales of November®:

Not wanting to “break the law,” Dewey From Detroit trademarked the name “Gales of November®” to commemorate the sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald with a modified recipe, replacing the Bermuda ginger beer with Vernors Ginger Ale – because that’s what we drink around here.

Although honestly, it has gotten sweeter over the years so if you prefer Fever Tree or Bundaberg feel free; but please - no spiced rum. That’s for pirates.

Our memorial begins with a delicious Gales of November© or if you, like VSGPDJT, don’t imbibe, just enjoy a glass of Vernors on the rocks.  Because it’s what we drink…well, you know.

 

Now, beverage in hand, sit back and listen to the best sea shanty ever composed:

Gordon Lightfoot: “The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald”

Bonus footage: