#ScoobyGang Chronicles: A personal note from the Captain

"Now this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning." Sir Winston Churchill, Speech in November 1942

Some miscellaneous personal stuff

First of all, thanks to everyone who has offered me feedback, support, and even proofreading assistance. This blogging thing is new to me and I am still getting my sea legs here. I try to respond to everyone, but there's a lot on my plate these days so I just wanted you to know that I appreciate the kind words. And to all the haters and the losers, well...

There will be a flurry of activity over the next day or so here, but then there will likely be a lull and the Captain may not be manning the bridge for a few days. There is a serious family emergency here on Pescespada Island and Twitter may have to just get by without my ledership for a few days. I will check in from time to time to make sure you are all behaving yourself and to reassure you that the Captain Steve is still out there.

A Quick (fake) Q&A session with the Captain

Almost unbelievably, the Captain has received some negative feedback about this blog. IKR? I am not interested in having the same argument over and over on Twitter so I think I'll paraphrase the questions I have heard from some of the kids in the back row and respond here for easy reference. For maximum fun, read the italicized parts below in your best "dumb guy" voice.

This is just character assassination of Louise Mensch?

Character and history are actually one of the keys to credibility.

When are you going to get around to refuting her claims in detail?

When are you going to get off your ass and do your own work? My consulting fee is $125/hour - how much time do you want me to spend helping you figure this puzzle out? 

Look, when the Captain first set sail into the Sea of Mensch, his original thought was to mirror the Patribotics blog and refute her ridiculous claims one-by-one in near real time. To be bluntly honest, I didn't go that route because I felt that her claims were so transparently self-refuting that it would be a waste of my time. I obviously overestimated the intelligence of a lot of people. Also, the sheer volume of nonsense that she was cranking out was pretty daunting; that's one of the keys to her scam. It would be a full-time job for anyone to catalog and refute all of her claims. Knowing what I know now about how many gullible people are out there, maybe I should have gone with that plan but hindsight is 20/20.

At this point, nearly everything she has put out there HAS BEEN REFUTED: both by people on Twitter and by plenty of actual journalists. It's all out there; if you can't find it, you aren't looking very hard. It just doesn't seem to make a difference to a lot of people, so I am going with a different approach here. I will be adding some handy reference material to the blog, so look for that if you are one of the lazy ones.

Are you saying that she is wrong about everything?

Given the volume of shit she has thrown against the wall and richness of the target here, it seems a near impossibility that none of her claims will pan out. To be bluntly honest, that's as meaningful as a fart in a hurricane. The vast majority of her "scoops" and "reports" are going to turn out to be wrong. I'd hazard a guess that the dud rate will be > 95% when all is said and done. Of course, she'll go back and edit her blog to try to make it match up better with reality and she'll delete some of the more egregiously wrong Tweets as she has been doing all along. The fact reamins that you'd be better off throwing magnetic poetry pieces on the floor to get your news than listen to her.

Are you saying there is nothing to the Trump/Russia investigation?

Does the Captain look like a fool to you? Of course there is. There's a fellow named Robert Mueller who is on the job. He's not fucking around. Louise can write all the fan fiction she wants and if you want to waste your time reading it, that's your business. Just don't fool yourself into thinking that LM/CT/JS and the rest of this clownshow has anything to do with the actual investigation. The two are cheese and chalk.