Saturday Updates

We wake up this morning with a sore knee. What's up with that? Probably our walk yesterday. We had a good week of working out at the gym. Two weight sessions, one with the machines, one on the treadmill. 

The post-Ida basement is half finished. We're talking to flooring people yesterday and today. We and the Stroocklettes will paint it ourselves. What to do with all those books.

We are generally disgusted with the state of things, freedom, speech, lockdowns and the like. We've committed several acts of mask defiance in recent weeks. Nothing happened. We have no idea where things are headed, but nowhere good. We expect the GOP to wipeout the Dems in 2022. Heck, they may even win Virginia next month. So what? As Ace has said, we're not voting our way out of this. Ace* is always right.

But generally we were at a loss all 2020 and remain so in 2021. Last year we did something we've never done before. This Gen-X slacker volunteered. We went out and made phone calls for Tom Kean, candidate for NJ-07. We've thought about creating a twitter account to cover news and make trouble here, with the sub-goal of pestering our own congressman Tom Malinowski. We'll see.

The things:

Work is coming along slowly on World War 1990: The Final Storm. We are quite distracted. Nevertheless the plot has been advanced and we expect the Tornado bomber raid on Yedrovo to be completed by next Friday. From there we'll do another airstrike scene. No idea who (whom?). I dunno. We'll have to work out a way to differentiate from scene to scene. Otherwise it's just more, 'Target acquired in three...two...one...release!' Tracer's followed Hewson's F-111 as is broke off west...

On the Great Nuclear War of 1975 front, gaps are filled in, breaks are written out, changes are made. We'll be printing out a copy this weekend and giving it to a guy for beta reading. There's just nothing more we can do to this thing. We hope this makes a faster formatting process. It's certainly made a better book.

Boy did we get a good idea for the week of 10/10/21, thanks to you bastards. I curse. I curse with great alacrity and depth. 

*Okay, not about McConnell. Nobody's perfect. Yes, Mitch kicked the can down the road and has told the Dems to use reconciliation. He can argue, 'I gave you your extension and you still can't get it done. Your problem, not mine'. This is just another headache for Schumer, who remains the worst Jew in North America. Mitch McConnell remains Cocaine Mitch.

The New 20's

Ace points out that we finally 'have a decade with a name' and says we're at the end of a 20 year decade. This seems right and also seems like a common occurrence.  The first two decades of the 20th century pretty much feel the same historically, it all has the same grainy historical footage, everyone is wearing button upped collars. One can even do the trick with the 19th century. Throughout the second decade of the 19th century a founding father was president, the first five years were dominated by our relationship with Britain. Heck fashions didn't even change that much.

Ace nails the feel of the last 20 years perfectly. 'Culturally' he says the long decade begins on 9/11. From there we have war, more war, economic stagnation, cultural rift, technological wonders, the decline of film, the rise of TV drama, the death of comedy.

Over at Legal Insurrection, Leslie Eastman marks the 'Return of the Roaring 20's'. Heh. For younger reader(s), growing up in the 70's and 80's the 20's kinda sorta felt like the modern world. Thinking about our own grandfather's childhood, in the 20's he had everything we had in the 80's just less modern versions of it. Cars, movies, radios, baseball, electricity. The only thing we had that he didn't was TV. Otherwise...

Reader(s) should click on through and read the rest.

Just think Generation-X, in ten years the 20's won't refer to Flappers and Prohibition but whatever is about to happen in this decade.

Blogs Get Star Wars, Disney Doesn't

John Nolte (PBUH) reviews The Rise of Skywalker and is not impressed. In his review Nolte makes a great point and with Original Trilogy:

There are two moments I’ve never forgotten from the original Star Wars trilogy. In 1977, I was 11 years old, so of course I’m going to mention that jaw-dropping Star Wars opening. Endless space, John Williams’ rising score, and that never-ending Imperial Star Destroyer passing overhead. The second is Luke Skywalker’s first appearance in Return of the Jedi (1982). What an arc that character had — from a starry-eyed, somewhat spoiled child in Star Wars, to The Empire Strikes Back’s unseasoned and impatient warrior eager to do his duty, to this… Look at Luke now. Look at his poise, his confidence… He’s a Jedi! No. Better. He’s a man.

That, reader(s), is why when John Nolte speaks about movies, one should always listen.

Nolte is sooooo right about Luke in Return of the Jedi, and we too recall Luke's entrance vividly, from our very first viewing. God, Luke is such a badass walking into Jaba's palace. 'You will bring Captain Solo and the Wookie to me.'

Here's Ace writing about world building in Star Wars:

You could take the Star Wars story and just plop it into any setting because it’s a tale as old as time, to coin a phrase. Around that simple story, though, is a new world. The setting of the film seems to spill over on every side. Yes, we have the Empire and the Rebellion, but we also have hints of the Old Republic, a Senate, the Emperor, an ancient religion called the Jedi (or the Force), and a host of new species that all look different and sound different. There are droids that speak English and those that speak their own clicks and beeps.

Hinted at but not over-explained. 

The world around Luke seems old and tired, worn out. Look at those X-Wings, they have battle-scars, the pilot's helmets are dinged and dented. In fact Star Wars seems like...1977. For younger reader(s) that's how American felt, and that's one of the reasons why Star Wars was such a huge phenomenon. Five years earlier and Star Wars flops becuase everyone's thinking about Vietnam. Five years later and we're in the go-go 80's.

We're not bothering with The Rise of Skywalker, a sentence we'd never thought we'd write about a Star Wars movie. We couldn't care less about this trilogy or the characters. After two movies Rey, Finn, Po are uninteresting, dull and pointless. What the hell is Finn even there for?

It's Star Wars week here at William Stroock dot Blogspot dotcom, and we'll be writing about, and maybe vlogging about, the Star Wars movies we do care about.

Stroock to left, GOPe: Bite me

Robert Stacey McCain says Ace of Spades is our Churchill.*

Ace's is a long post about the left, Trump, Vichy GOP, Never Trump soy boy cucks, etc etc. You should read the entire thing. A poignant bit:

The pablum issuing from NeverTrumpers and Neocons is just creating a pleasant illusion in which it's 2003 forever and the only thing that should really matter is whether we are "consistent" on Trump and Clinton, preferring that political Neverland to the actual America we find ourselves in in 2019, pretending away unpalatable truths in favor of pleasant fantasies, continuing to pretend that everything's great (and that which is not great can just be saved by another round of tax cuts and trade deals), and that the left isn't scary at all -- that's just Evil Trump trying to convince you that they're really serious about their openly announced plans to seize America's guns and force churches to perform gay marriages, or go to prison.

2003 is not forever. We've often described ourselves as an unprepentent Neocon but are we, really? Not really. Not when we think putting gators in the Rio Grande is a good idea and don't give a crap about pulling troops out of Syria. 

The facts have changed and we're proud to say so have we.

As Ace writes about the left, let's ask, how much of America is left? No more than 30%. No more than 30% of Germany was Nazi. How many people in craphole Islamic nations are really Islamist assholes? 

30% is it and it is enough.

So what do we do? We wear our MAGA hat everywhere. Everywhere. Go to Twitter. Search our congressional district, #NJ07. It's all us. It's a start.

RSM is right. Ace is Churchill and we're a junior, backbencher MP.

*Ace is always right.

Writer the Humbled

Ace, as he is want to do, makes an excellent point:

Any journalist who has ever written a short story about CERN thinks she's pretty much a high-energy physicist, only technically missing a credential here or there, but otherwise, yeah, a working high-energy physicist herself.
They really do believe this. "I wrote the word 'quarks' in an article one time! And now I can split atoms with my mind!!!"
Because they're stupid. The stupid do not know what they don't know.
Everything seems simple to the stupid, because they're simple-minded themselves.

We've played guitar for 15 years and still don't think we really know what we're doing. There's a reason why we don't post guitar vids each and every week. We just don't think we're that good and it takes a hell of a lot of work to get confident enough that the nerves don't bring us down during a recording.

Which is why when we write we try to stick with things we know.

We are an expert on somethings. History, military history, the American revolution. We are merely well informed on others, Israeli politics, etc. 

Which means we have no business telling governments how to fight wars or politicians how to run campaigns. All we can do is site similar examples from the past and hope we learn from them.

For as often as we are right, and we are often right, we are also sometimes very, very wrong.

Just ask President Romney.