Welcome to Ye Olde Colde Furye Blogge’s shiny new open-comments thread, where y’all can have at it as you wish, on any topic you like. Do note that the official CF comments policy remains in effect here, as enumerated in the left sidebar. All new posts will appear below this one. There will be blood…
Jeez O Pete, what the hell is WITH these degenerates, anyway?
EXCLUSIVE: Hunter Biden was living with his brother Beau’s widow Hallie while sending raunchy texts and FaceTiming in the shower with her married SISTER as they declared their love and she called him her ‘prince’
Hunter Biden had a controversial affair with his brother Beau’s grieving widow Hallie, while exchanging raunchy texts, ‘partying’, and even renting a house with her sister, DailyMail.com can exclusively reveal.Hallie Biden’s older sister, Elizabeth Secundy, who was recently separated from her husband of 15 years, referred to Hunter as her ‘prince’ and told him she loved him, in a series of text messages dating back to 2016.
The pair’s relationship was revealed in files and emails recovered from Hunter’s laptop – the contents of which became public last year after it was abandoned at a Delaware computer shop.
While Hunter has promised to reveal details of his personal life and struggles with alcohol and drugs in his upcoming memoir, Beautiful Things, it is unclear whether Hunter has included details of his relationship with Secundy.
The embattled father-of-five, now 51, split with his first wife Kathleen in 2015. When his brother Beau died of brain cancer that year, he became close to his grieving sister-in-law.
He and Hallie became a couple in 2016, according to an interview Hunter gave to the New Yorker two years ago.
According to Ace, that’s revealed to be a damnable lie a few paragraphs on down, but as this article was even more disgusting than the one I complained about below I didn’t finish it either. Regardless, in light of their amorality; their shameless self-indulgence; and a complete inability to rein in their warped and self-destructive sexual gluttony, it’s all too apparent that there’s something profoundly haywire in America’s professional-politician class. With few exceptions, these irredeemable rotters are without question the lowest-order scoundrels in all existence. No decent, sensible person would trust them to be left alone with the family dog for five minutes.
Yet they’re running the goddamned country. Even so, as disgusting as these people are, it comes as no big surprise. Perhaps ubiquity has reduced this stuff to mere routine, stripping Ruling Class japery of its ability to shock. None but an American ProPol or his witless, pampered spawn could be so predictable, so insipid, so flavorless and banal as to be capable of making sin, sleaze, and sexual transgression seem uninteresting.
This next one, on the other hand, I absolutely LOVE.
SWABBED: Chinese Government Anally Swabs U.S. Diplomats, Biden’s State Department Begs Them To Stop
The Chinese government forcibly anally swabbed U.S. diplomatic officials as part of the Chinese Communist Party’s new Covid testing protocols “in error,” prompting Joe Biden’s U.S. State Department to beg China to stop violating the “dignity” of Biden officials.
VICE and the Washington Post were among the first outlets to report the story, in which China originally promised to stop anally swabbing State Department officials after complaints from the Biden administration, but has now reversed course and denied forcibly applying the test in the first place.“The State Department never agreed to this kind of testing and protested directly to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs when we learned that some staff were subject to it,” a spokesperson from Biden’s State Department reported to VICE on Wednesday.
In the Vice story, an Aussie visiting in China who was subjected to the (literal) rumpswab described it as feeling “like having diarrhea.” But if this video of Chinese testees duckwalking gingerly, all hunched over and in obvious pain, right after having this new, improved Anal Intruder™ FauxVid19 test inflicted on ’em is any indication, it feels a whole heck of a lot worse than just that.
Hell yeah, all Bai-Ding junta officials and appointees should be forced to get ’em, I say. On the regular. Six days a week, and twice on Sundays.
Taken together, this all counts as proof positive that both our domestic masters and the ChiComs who own them alike are all just laughing themselves sick at this point, in incredulous amazement at the degree of abuse the American serf class will passively submit to. After “temporary” lockdowns; mask mandates; the ruination of entire industries; travel restrictions; the closing of churches; curfews; &c &c &c, they’re probably stumped for ideas on what outrage might be tried on us next.
Below the fold, an actual photo of one of these butt-buster “testing” swabs, which is no way no how safe for work. Or for children. Or the elderly. Or the faint of heart. Probably best not to click on the thing at all, actually. Seriously, don’t do it. Really, now.
Okay then, but don’t say I didn’t warn ya.
All told, seven people died in connection with the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6. But only Ashli Babbitt’s death was directly caused by violence that day. She was a rioter killed by a Capitol Police officer, who fired the only shot by any person during the 4½-hour siege. Yet the story of who he is and why he opened fire remains shrouded in mystery.
The Deep State looks after its own.
More than six weeks after Babbitt succumbed to a single gunshot wound to the upper chest, authorities are keeping secret the identity of the officer who fired the fatal round. They won’t release his name, and the major news media aren’t clamoring for it, in stark contrast to other high-profile police shootings of unarmed civilians.
Baffling, that.
Drawing on interviews with informed sources and available documents, RealClearInvestigations has put together a portrait of the actual shooter and the shooting, which some describe as completely justified and others call murder.
The officer who opened fire on Babbitt holds the rank of lieutenant and is a longtime veteran of the force who worked protective detail in the Speaker’s Lobby, a highly restricted area behind the House chamber, sources say. An African-American, he was put on paid administrative leave pending the outcome of an internal investigation led by the Metropolitan Police of the District of Columbia, which shares jurisdiction with the Capitol Police. The Justice Department is also involved in the inquiry.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the officer has been interviewed and cleared of criminal wrongdoing by a preliminary investigation, suggesting that the police killing may soon be ruled justifiable homicide. But D.C. Police spokeswoman Alaina Gertz told RCI, “This case remains under active investigation.”
The well-placed sources told RCI the plainclothes officer has gone into hiding out of fear for his safety.
Aww, that’s a shame.
They said he worries about reports that some of those arrested in the riots have declared “open (hunting) season” on whoever killed Babbitt, now a martyr in their cause. Twitter accounts have been created in her name, including “We Are Ashli Babbitt” and “Justice For Ashli Babbitt.” “An unarmed American patriot was murdered in cold blood! We need to know who murdered #AshliBabbitt!” proclaimed one recent post.
Meanwhile, numerous lawmakers from both parties have hailed the lieutenant as a hero who saved lives that fateful day.
I’d expect no less from the cringing, despicable cowards.
Most of the circumstances that led to his actions are still unclear. But video footage filmed by rioters shows the lieutenant, after taking up a defensive position in a doorway, carefully aiming and shooting Babbitt as she tries to climb through a smashed window beside a barricaded double door leading to the Speaker’s Lobby, part of a pro-Trump mob of protesters. Babbitt, 35, had no weapon. She died later at a hospital. The decorated Air Force veteran, who had traveled from San Diego, was wearing a Trump flag as a cape when she was shot.
Dressed in a dark suit and white shirt with cufflinks, along with a beaded bracelet on his right shooting hand, the Capitol Police officer fired at her from the side of the barricade, where he had been hidden from view in a doorway. At least from what can be seen and heard from the video, he appears to issue no commands to stop nor any verbal warning that he would shoot.
“That was an execution,” said Jack Feeley, a fellow Air Force vet and friend of Babbitt, adding that it “breaks my heart to know millions of people watched my friend be executed on live television.”
A former White House national security aide and Pentagon official agreed the officer appeared trigger happy. “It was an assassination. I’ve never seen a more clear case in all my years. I’ve seen EJKs that were cleaner than that,” said the former official, referring to an extrajudicial killing, or state-sponsored killing outside the formal legal system of a country. “He stepped into it [the shot] for [expletive deleted] sake.”
But appearances are deceiving, countered the lawyer whom the Capitol officer has hired to defend himself. In an RCI interview, Washington attorney Mark Schamel said his client did, in fact, warn Babbitt and other rioters to keep back — and that he did so firmly and repeatedly.
“It’s a false narrative that he issued no verbal commands or warnings,” Schamel said. “He was screaming, ‘Stay back! Stay back! Don’t come in here!’” He added that witness statements back him up. Schamel explained the lieutenant’s commands were not picked up on the video because it was recorded on the other side of the doors where dozens of rioters were shouting and banging against the doors and drowning out his words. And he said his client could not be seen yelling out the instructions because his mouth was covered by a mask he wore as part of COVID-19 protections.
It’s not clear if the officer in fact warned the marauders breaching the barricade that he would shoot if they did not heed his commands. However, his service weapon — a .40-caliber Glock semiautomatic handgun — was visibly drawn. Some of the rioters spotted it through the lobby windows and shouted: “There’s a gun!” followed by, “He’s got a gun!”
Schamel said his client, who received his training primarily at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Centers in Glynco, Ga., was acting to protect himself and lawmakers from harm.
“He was acting within his training,” he said. “Lethal force is appropriate if the situation puts you or others in fear of imminent bodily harm.”
Hm. Good to know. So, should an old white male like myself shoot and kill a black intruder breaking into his home late at night, I can expect to be likewise hailed as a “hero” by the authorities in my home state—a state, mind you, which does NOT have a “castle doctrine” law in effect? A state which, on the contrary, mandates that a hypothetical victim of violent criminal assault must jump through quite a few flaming legal hoops before being allowed to defend his very life against his assailant(s) without being subject to judicial persecution as a “murderer” for the rest of his life?
No need to answer; we all already know well enough that lethal force is “appropriate” only if “the situation” puts panicked, trigger-happy LEOs at risk of wetting themselves, and only if the victims are Trump supporting dissidents.
He pointed out that the officer was the potential last line of defense between the rioters and dozens of members of Congress and staffers, who he said had yet to be escorted out of the House chamber by security at the time. (House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other VIPs had already been evacuated.)
The Speaker’s Lobby is a hallway that runs behind the chamber and leads to exits on both ends, so the doors where the mob had gathered, which were manned by the lieutenant, served as a strategic chokepoint. Before they arrived, the officer had piled tables, chairs and other furniture from the hallway in front of the doors to create a barricade.
“He stopped them from coming through to the hallway and into the chamber,” Schamel said. “He stopped a potential massacre.”
Gee, hyperbolize much, you ambulance-chasing drama queen?
Pantloads more of such overwrought, self-serving twaddle in the linked article, which frankly I found so repulsive I threw up my hands before I’d gagged my way through much more than half of the thing. Even so, a few things are infuriatingly clear:
As I said: infuriating. But if Ashli’s scurrilous killer is forced to remain in hiding, to live in abject terror of being identified or exposed until the frabjous day he drops dead—hey, I’m good with it, myself. It ain’t much, and is by no stretch a satisfying outcome. But if it’s all we can get, at least for now…well, I’ll take it, in hopes of something better to come along someday.
Update! Much, much more from Gateway Pundit, including photos that reveal the murder to be a blithering incompetent—finger in the trigger well, muzzle-sweeping everybody around him, etc—as well as self-contradictory statements showing him to be an unusually inept liar. If this oaf is typical of Mordor OTP law enforcement, then Mordor OTP is in seriously dire straits.
Bill says it’s the finest Rush memorial he’s seen yet, and he ain’t wrong about that.
If you’re a showman – and Rush was that above all else – they say that it’s best to go out on top. And he did, just at the moment when it became apparent that the approach to politics that he championed his whole life won’t be enough to save us; that superior arguments won’t win the day and that we’re not going to vote our way out of this. That he left the stage at precisely the right point so it could honestly be said that he never became irrelevant is perhaps the one small consolation that can be found within this. The future will always be able to look back on him and say: “He was a man of his time”. Yes, his time has passed, as it does for all men. But if we are to look back now and evaluate what he meant, it can only fairly be in the context of those times.
A common sentiment heard from callers in the early days of Rush’s show was that before they found him, they had no idea that anyone out there thought the same way they did. This shows how powerful the left’s stranglehold on public discourse was back then, and the importance of his having singlehandedly broken it. Causing one’s enemy to feel isolated, alone, and out-of-step with the society around them is a powerful weapon of demoralization, and breaking through that to offer a sense of community, even if only through the airwaves, is massively empowering. Beyond this, Rush brought a sense of fun to being on the right, perhaps for the first time ever. He mocked liberals at a time when it was assumed by all that this was a tool to which liberals alone had exclusive rights. He laughed at them, and his audience laughed along with him. This is a deeply underestimated strategy – people like to laugh; they like to have fun. It is something that the left has forgotten in the age of the dour, hectoring SJW. It is something that, other than at the height of the Meme Era that surrounded Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign, the modern right forgets all too often as well. But it should never be overlooked, and very much of Rush’s success and his political and cultural impact relied on the fact that he didn’t. Perhaps most importantly, he never backed down from his beliefs; he never seemed ashamed of them or felt the need to qualify them with endless disclaimers explaining how he was really a good person despite them. Simply being confident and proud in those beliefs inspired millions of others to do the same.
Of course, he couldn’t ever have gone with us as far as it now seems that we’ll need to go. But this was not a symptom of any lack of courage; it was only a reflection of the hold that the America in which he was born had on him, and of how far we have fallen from it in just one lifetime. To the end, Rush was a genuine “Shining City on a Hill” believer; the kind that not only thought that America was unreservedly good at its core, but that its empire was the only thing keeping the world from falling into tyranny and chaos. That’s a belief that most of us on this end of the right, if we ever held it at all, gave up on around 2006, but that seemed manifestly true for someone who grew up in a stable, prosperous America in the years directly following World War II, and whose only frame of reference was the comparison to Nazism or Communism. Even his support for the disastrous wars of the Bush era, which continued long after it was obvious that they had been a terrible mistake (this was the only point at which I found his show unlistenable, and had to take some time away from it) were based in an unshakable faith that the American way of life was the best in the world, and that everyone would want to live that way if they were only given a chance to. There is a temptation for a man of today’s Dissident Right to sneer at this, and in a 21st century context, it might be justified, but it also must be remembered that the America that Rush had in mind was eternally a vision of the 1954 of his youth; a better place that you and I have never had the privilege to see. Had we seen it for ourselves, we might find it just as hard to let go of as he did.
Rush could understand that his country wasn’t what it used to be, but couldn’t allow himself to believe that it would never again be what it had once been. That’s a dream that can only die hard; one that anyone would hold onto for as long as they could. It only really became undeniable that it was gone for good in the very closing moments of his life, and it is perhaps for the best that he essentially died with it. In a way, I wish he hadn’t been here to see the past few months, and in a way, I’m happy he won’t be here to see what comes next. It would break his heart. It breaks mine. I would love to have personally seen the Shining City that he saw, and would love to believe that it can be restored someday. But just as he was a man of a time that I never could live in, I must be a man of a time that he cannot live in, and I must face its realities.
A guaranteed stinkeroo of a task for sure, as unpleasant as the realities of this time and place most definitely are. All in all, I’d say Rush got out when the gettin’ was still good, and was lucky he did too.
I think it’s sooooo cute how some people still want to believe that, even after all we’ve seen, the System can be relied on to correct the malfeasance and corruption the System itself birthed and nurtured.
‘Inexplicable’: Alito and Thomas Dissent as Supreme Court Strikes Down Pennsylvania Election Lawsuit
Inexplicable? Hardly. The explanation is right there in our faces, for all to see. Refusal to see a thing does NOT mean the thing does not exist.
On Monday, the Supreme Court threw out several of the remaining challenges to the 2020 presidential election as moot, considering that former President Donald Trump conceded to Joe Biden, who has now become president. Yet Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas dissented, arguing that the Supreme Court should have taken the opportunity to clarify election law, especially in the case of Pennsylvania.
“The Constitution gives to each state legislature authority to determine the ‘Manner’ of federal elections,” Thomas wrote. “Yet both before and after the 2020 election, nonlegislative officials in various States took it upon themselves to set the rules instead. As a result, we received an unusually high number of petitions and emergency applications contesting those changes.”
Thomas’ dissent is well-reasoned and -written, as is his usual wont, and so is Alito’s. The mistake made by both these worthy Justices is that their arguments proceed from an assumption that the Constitutional Republic known as the United States of America still exists. That assumption is unfounded; said much-mourned Republic most assuredly does not, and the flyblown traveshamockery that displaced it bears no recognizable likeness to what it so rudely elbowed aside. The shifting and pathetic rationalization puked up by the USSC’s majority of shifty dissemblers for cavalierly sidestepping their sworn duty gives the game away:
What the Supreme Court codified yesterday, and what it started with the Texas rejection, is that election laws and procedures cannot be challenged beyond a state court, at any time, regardless of how badly those states shred the United States Constitution, and regardless of the major consequences to the other 49 states as a result. They don’t ever say that per se, but the results of what those two rulings have done are just that. Period.
Those trying to challenge Pennsylvania’s obviously corrupt and rigged election system have been told that they cannot challenge the laws ahead of the election, because there is not yet a victim. They’ve been told that fellow Americans impacted by Pennsylvania’s corrupt system cannot challenge, because of standing. Now they’ve been told that they cannot challenge after the election, because it’s after the election – and therefore moot.
This kind of infantile and absurd logic just defies belief and takes one’s breath away. And not just mine. I think it’s clear that Justice Clarence Thomas is even more mystified than am I, and he was livid. He was also, as he always is, right on the money in his analysis.
“One wonders what this Court waits for,” understates Thomas in his dissent, adding “we failed to settle this dispute before the election, and thus provide clear rules. Now we again fail to provide clear rules for future elections. The decision to leave election law hidden beneath a shroud of doubt is baffling. By doing nothing, we invite further confusion and erosion of voter confidence. Our fellow citizens deserve better and expect more of us.”
“Baffling?” My deep, sincere, and abiding respect for you notwithstanding, sir, I must repeat: hardly. It is dismaying. It is disgusting. It is despicable, and it is damning. At this point, though, “baffling” it is NOT, sad as it is to have to say it.
Here t’is; the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. The 2020 election was stolen. We know it; the thieving scoundrels know it; the Vichy GOPe swine all know it. Everybody knows it, and the US Supreme Court knows it too. As not only a crucial subdivision of the Deep State but one of its most effective guardians also, the Court intends to see to it that the fraud stands, and that further challenges to the ragged legitimacy of the current Occupation Government will be summarily and contemptuously rebuffed using any excuse that can be manufactured. Ace puts it cleanly and clearly.
I can explain it: the “Shadow conspiracy” article in Time Magazine explained it.
The Shadow Conspiracy article in Time was written to alert the left that these changes were absolutely critical to fake-winning the election, and that therefore, anyone on the left and anyone supporting the permanent corrupt Deep State must fight with all their might to keep these illegal rules in place.
By the way, they keep saying that this wouldn’t effect the results of the election because they have repeatedly sifted the number of challenges down to the point where we’re talking about just a couple of thousand ballots.
They’ve figured out other ways to ignore the challenges to all the other ballots.
It’s like breaking down a cargo into a hundred pieces and saying of each tiny piece, “No, this won’t meaningfully affect the ship’s seaworthiness. No this one also won’t meaningfully affect the ship’s seaworthiness. No this one also won’t appreciably affect the ship’s seaworthiness…”
Yeah but take them all together and the ship sinks.
And so it has. Once again, Real Americans are treated to the unlovely spectacle of the Master class openly laughing in the faces of the lowly Serf class, taunting and jeering in celebration of a victory the Masters arrogantly presume to be permanent and unassailable. May Hubris of such unprecedented extravagance as this provoke a rebuke from Nemesis of equal magnitude. Never forget that History has a dissenting opinion of its own to offer, a judgment far more sweeping and powerful than any piffling petarade the pompous gasbags of the USSC can muster. The last word I’ll leave to Vox:
So much for the importance of electing Republicans to appoint Supreme Court justices….
Yup. Oh, and then there’s this:
Yup again. And now we know that, too. So what, if anything, shall we do about all this?
What IS it with Commies and their hatred for children, anyway?
This past christmas day was the 30th anniversary of the public execution by firing squad of Romania’s last Communist dictator, Nicolae Ceaușescu, who’d ruled for 24 years. In 1990, the outside world discovered his network of “child gulags,” in which an estimated 170,000 abandoned infants, children, and teens were being raised. Believing that a larger population would beef up Romania’s economy, Ceaușescu had curtailed contraception and abortion, imposed tax penalties on people who were childless, and celebrated as “heroine mothers” women who gave birth to 10 or more. Parents who couldn’t possibly handle another baby might call their new arrival “Ceauşescu’s child,” as in “Let him raise it.”
To house a generation of unwanted or unaffordable children, Ceauşescu ordered the construction or conversion of hundreds of structures around the country. Signs displayed the slogan: the state can take better care of your child than you can.
At age 3, abandoned children were sorted. Future workers would get clothes, shoes, food, and some schooling in Case de copii—“children’s homes”—while “deficient” children wouldn’t get much of anything in their Cămine Spitale. The Soviet “science of defectology” viewed disabilities in infants as intrinsic and uncurable. Even children with treatable issues—perhaps they were cross-eyed or anemic, or had a cleft lip—were classified as “unsalvageable.”
After the Romanian revolution, children in unspeakable conditions—skeletal, splashing in urine on the floor, caked with feces—were discovered and filmed by foreign news programs, including ABC’s 20/20, which broadcast “Shame of a Nation” in 1990. Like the liberators of Auschwitz 45 years before, early visitors to the institutions have been haunted all their lives by what they saw. “We flew in by helicopter over the snow to Siret, landing after midnight, subzero weather, accompanied by Romanian bodyguards carrying Uzis,” Jane Aronson tells me. A Manhattan-based pediatrician and adoption-medicine specialist, she was part of one of the first pediatric teams summoned to Romania by the new government. “We walk into a pitch-black, freezing-cold building and discover there are youngsters lurking about—they’re tiny, but older, something weird, like trolls, filthy, stinking. They’re chanting in a dronelike way, gibberish. We open a door and find a population of ‘cretins’—now it’s known as congenital iodine deficiency syndrome; untreated hypothyroidism stunts growth and brain development. I don’t know how old they were, three feet tall, could have been in their 20s. In other rooms we see teenagers the size of 6- and 7-year-olds, with no secondary sexual characteristics. There were children with underlying genetic disorders lying in cages. You start almost to disassociate.”
“I walked into an institution in Bucharest one afternoon, and there was a small child standing there sobbing,” recalls Charles A. Nelson III, a professor of pediatrics and neuroscience at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. “He was heartbroken and had wet his pants. I asked, ‘What’s going on with that child?’ A worker said, ‘Well, his mother abandoned him this morning and he’s been like that all day.’ That was it. No one comforted the little boy or picked him up. That was my introduction.”
Monstrous, simply monstrous. It’s difficult to get one’s head around such mind-boggling, inhuman brutality as this. But then, as someone who lives in the nation which spawned the world’s foremost promoter and practitioner of eugenics, maybe I should just sit back and keep my fat yap shut. But similar horrors, and even more grotesque ones, aren’t the result of some failure to correctly implement or interpret Marxist ideology. They’re innate to it, baked right into the Commie cake: not an aberration, but an indivisible component of it. They crop up sooner or later in every nation-state that foolishly allows itself to be seduced by it—as if extreme abomination and atrocity were some kind of Frankenstein’s monster that, instead of electric current, require Communism to bring them fully to life. And as with Frankenstein’s misbegotten creation, there’s only one way to put an end to Communism’s deadly rampage once the monster has been reanimated and unchained to wreak its destructive havoc.
(Via Insty)
BCE uncovers the devil lurking in the details about Peelousi’s desk-ridin’ General Bigtalk.
That’s the H.M.N.I.C now.. (Head Motherfuckin’ Nigger In Charge) of ‘investigating’ the January 6th Shenanigans.
There has never been a more self-loathing Black Man in uniform.
Uncle Tom indeed
He was the one who was in charge of the fucked uppedness of the Katrina Response.
He was the one who didn’t do shit during the Global War on Terror
He’s the one who’s consistently been a partisan hack and anti-gun and outright anti-American across the board.
Fucker only has jump wings and a fucking EIB (Expert Infantry Badge) and as a General, I’d even call that into question as I can’t see a grader on an EIB course telling a General or any other occisfer under the rank of Major that he failed out.
I fucking have the EIB for fucks sakes.
All fine and well, Expat. But why don’t you just go ahead and tell us all what you really think about this Paper(cut) Warrior? Please feel free to not mince any words.
This partisan fuck?
Fuck him. Piece of shit rear echelon motherfucker… REMF for short.
Fucker was responsible for anti-constitutional calls for gun confiscation in New Orleans during Katrina, and never paid the price, which should have been castration, followed by public hangingBut
Unfortunately, we don’t hang obsolete non-functional farm equipment
Pity That.
Heh. Okay, duly noted. And endorsed. I look forward to the day this affirmative-action promotee unleashes a couple-three regiments from the US Army’s renowned 113th Transgender Division. Here’s a photo of a few of these dreaded war-pigs marching off to war:
My GOD, but this is one fucked-up country.
An intriguing look at the Texas disaster, from the inside.
How would your family, and a hundred thousand other families, like to be stuck in your cars for days at minus 16 degrees?
The death toll would be huge. It almost happened in New England in 1989.
And in Texas this week.
I was part of the 1989 Freeze and have some hopefully interesting insights.
In 1989, the weather just before Christmas was terrible. Cold temperature records were set from Texas to New England.
That year, I was responsible for a midcontinent gas gathering system that normally produced about 500 million cubic feet (MMCFD) of natural gas a day. That could supply up to 2 million New England homes. During the 1989 Freeze, we produced 30 MMCFD, roughly a 95% decline. Similar results were happening throughout the Oil Patch. Supply cratered.
Meanwhile, demand for natural gas was exploding, almost literally (more on that below). While the midcontinent temperatures were low enough to freeze gas wells, New England had dangerous arctic temperatures of minus 16 degrees. This created huge natural gas demand for home heating in a major New England town.
The city ultimately weathered that crisis through luck.
Now that we’ve established this guy’s credentials, on to the juicy stuff.
Your city gas company takes gas from high-pressure interstate and intrastate gas pipelines. The gas then moves to customers through its lower-pressured gas distribution pipes. The gas pressure decrease as it as moves to the customers. Normally the utilities’ inlet gas pressure is more than enough for them to supply gas safely.
With 1989 gas production down dramatically and demand exploding, the high-pressure gas system could not supply enough gas to meet demand. This resulted in decreasing line pressures in the high-pressure supply system, lowering the gas utilities’ inlet gas pressure.
The utility’s inlet pressures were so low, and dropping, that soon the distribution system pressures would be below atmospheric pressure. Air could then flow into the gas pipelines. Typically, back-flow valves stop that. Since many of the furnaces were old and converted from prior fuels (oil, coal), proper valving was a big problem.
Oxygen in natural pipelines is incredibly dangerous. Whole city blocks could be destroyed in an air/gas explosion.
To maintain safe gas pressures, the operators wanted to shed load with localized gas shutoffs. Since all non-critical gas loads had already been shutoff, only critical loads were left. This included houses and hospitals. To save the gas grid, the operators had to cutoff gas to a very large number of customers.
Whose gas to shut off?
Scary stuff, this is, and absolutely essential reading. Don’t worry, though; now that Pretend pResident Bai-Ding has given complete access to all aspects of the decrepit and barely-functional US power infrastructure to his CCP handlers and officially made it a wholly-owned subsidiary of ChiCom Inc just like he personally is, I’ll sure our new overlords will be able staighten out this mess for us straightaway.
Appease the Left all you like. Suck up to them, kiss their asses, go along to get along, makes not a bit of difference; it buys uou nothing. You’re gonna get bit anyway.
To the surprise of precisely zero Rabid Puppies, Baen Books shuttering the Bar didn’t suffice to appease the SJW swarmtroopers after Jason Sanford pointed-and-shrieked at it. As an expression of gratitude for cowering before the mob, Worldcon has disinvited its 2021 Guest of Honor, Baen Books publisher Toni Weisskopf.
In fairness, this almost certainly would have happened anyhow, no matter what Ms Weisskopf did. But demonstrating weakness in front of SJWs is nearly as predictably counterproductive as doing so in front of an angry, snarling dog.
As Vox goes on to note, Progtard-Monster Hunter Larry Correia is…displeased.
Dear WorldCon,
You are cowards.
Several years ago, because some of you were angry at me for getting a bunch of people you don’t like award nominations, us lowly deplorable outsiders with the incorrect kind of politics, you treated my publisher, Toni Weisskopf, like garbage. Years later, after you thought the controversy had safely died off, you felt bad about how you acted and tried to make amends. You invited her to be the Guest of Honor. Only you have no concept of honor. And you screwed her over again.
I’m not here to debate what I did for the umpteenth time. I’m not here to talk to the woke mob you bend the knee to. I’m talking to the regular WorldCon people. I’m here to talk about how you’re fucking pieces of shit who turned your back on someone who was once one of you, someone you called friend, and how after you felt guilty about it years later, you tried to make amends. But the instant it became uncomfortable, you threw her under the bus again.
Toni had been participating in WorldCons for decades. She grew up in your scene. She volunteered. She hung out with you. She helped out. When she got into the publishing business she kept on helping out, whatever you needed, she was always there for you. She became an editor, and a damned good one too (and you fucking know it).
In fact, she became one of the best and most successful editors in the history of the genre… yet year after year, she got no prestigious award nomination, and instead you just kept giving the award to the same assholes from the same publishing house, over and over and over, as you ignored Toni because she was at that publishing house. The uncouth one. You talk a big game about “honoring strong women” as you took turns rotating through the same cadre of old white dudes for best editor.
It took me, the barbaric outsider, to rally the barbaric outsider fans to finally get Toni some recognition in your sainted halls. And even though your bleating social justice contingent threw a fit, you know what most of you old time, old school, long attending WorldConners told me in private? Good. About time.
Possibly a bit too inside-baseball for some CF Lifers, perhaps, but you might enjoy Larry’s big fat “fuck all y’all” missive nonetheless. It really is a thing of beauty.
What do I keep telling you people? Never, ever cede a single inch of ground to the PC mob. All it does is guarantee that they’ll be back with more and bigger demands, until finally they’ve taken everything you have. Another of Mike’s Iron Laws, one that, as you can see, applies even in as arcane and relatively footling a context as this: You cannot placate the implacable, nor sate the insatiable. It’s a mistake to even try.
As I mentioned the other night, I really do need to get busy formalizing and categorizing all those Iron Laws of mine, don’t I?
Update! To sort of nudge myself forward on the MIL project, I went ahead and set up a new category for ’em, and updated this post as the inaugural one therein. Wish me luck…
Oh goody, the Chair Force has itself a new platform to use in hunting down MAGA types.
The U.S. Air Force has taken delivery of its first Beechcraft AT-6E Wolverine single-engine turboprop light attack aircraft. The service has said in the past that it could acquire up to three of these aircraft to support a program called the Airborne Extensible Relay Over-Horizon Network, or AEROnet, focused on developing a low-cost communications and data-sharing architecture to help allies and partners work together better during coalition operations.
The Air Force Life Cycle Management Center (AFLCMC) based at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, announced the arrival of the AT-6E on Feb. 17, 2021. The AT-6E is a variant of the T-6 Texan II trainer from Beechcraft, a division of Textron, configured for light attack and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) missions. The Air Force, as well as the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Army, already operate unarmed versions of the Texan II.
The most immediately visible difference between the AT-6E, which Beechcraft has marketed in the past as the AT-6B, AT-6C, or simply the AT-6, and standard Texan II trainers are its six underwing pylons. These can accommodate various precision-guided bombs and missiles, as well as rocket and gun pods, among other stores.
It’s actually a good-looking aircraft. I started to embed one of the pics, but there’s no pressing need for that, really. Contra the USAF’s blushful demurral about “help(ing) allies and partners work together better during coalition operations,” it’s a fair bet that at least some Real Americans will be enjoying a close-in view of the new birds soon enough.
Okay, “enjoying” might not be exactly the mot juste here.
(Via Insty)
Like so many things these days, it’s much, much worse than anybody thought.
NEW YORK – A new report from the NYC Hospitality Alliance shows the extreme financial problems restaurants in New York City are facing, as 92% of the city’s restaurants could not afford to pay their rent in December.
92%?!? HO. LEE. KERRAP. Stick a fork in New York, New York, people, because it is DONE. Ain’t gonna be no reviving the City That Never Sleeps after this self-inflicted catastrophe; it ain’t just sleeping, it’s comatose.
The number has steadily worsened throughout the pandemic, from 80% of restaurants in June 2020 not being able to pay rent.
As every good NYC Leftard knows, the only way to recover from socialist tyranny is with more socialist tyranny. Yep, THAT ought to do it, you betcher. Then, when that fails—UNEXPECTEDLY!!™—you can flee the nest you fouled for greener, freer climes and immediately resume voting for the exact same stupid shit that doomed your previous home.
Idiots.
Cometh, the Mark-1 Mod-0 horsepuckey everybody seems to enjoy spewing nowadays:
“We’re nearly a year into the public health and economic crisis that has decimated New York City’s restaurants, bars, and nightlife venues,” said Andrew Rigie, executive director of the NYC Hospitality Alliance.
92% ain’t hardly “decimated,” bubba. The situation demands stronger words to describe it, something more along the lines of denuded, depopulated, or demolished. Less alliterative but more accurate, maybe—since this was done intentionally, as a ploy to ensure Trump got the bum’s rush—would be exterminated.
“While the reopening of highly regulated indoor dining is welcome news, we need to safely increase occupancy to 50% as soon as possible, and we urgently need robust and comprehensive financial relief from the federal government. We will continue to work with Senator and Majority Leader Schumer to ensure that the $25 billion restaurant industry recovery fund is passed as part of the Biden administration’s emergency relief plan, and advocate for the enactment of the RESTAURANTS Act to save as many local eating and drinking spots and jobs as possible.”
We don’t have a “health crisis,” and we never did. Your city’s economy was destroyed by two things: (1) the self-serving lies of power-hungry despots; and (2) your panicky willingness to not only put up with it, but cheer it on and beg for more; call it Sheepleism, to coin a new term. Mencken’s Prophecy is in full effect, and New Yorkers are getting exactly what they voted for—no more, no less.
Such a shame; NYC was unique and wonderful not all that long ago, and a hell of a lot of fun. Those days are over now, more’s the pity. Expect it to resemble a more dangerous and unpleasant version of Thunderdome before too very long, then collapse into a certain Kurt Russell classic after that.
(Via Bill)
It’s an occupation government. It damned well ought to look like one.
We’ve been reporting on the troubling question of what are the National Guard still doing in Washington, D.C. at this point and why are there reports that they intend to keep them through the fall?
So far there’s been no explanation given as to why that’s happening and what the rationale is, what the “threats” are supposed to be. No one is being told, including the governors whose units were being used or Congressional Republicans. Rep. Lisa McClain, who is on the House Armed Services Committee, is demanding answers from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi on the matter. It’s ridiculous that there’s so far been in excess of $480 million spent without any explanation to Congress as to why it is continuing.
But that’s not the only problematic security measure continuing in D.C. Remember that fencing around the Capitol? The Capitol Police are now asking that the 8 foot barbed wire fencing stay in place around the Capitol until September to help protect lawmakers “while authorities work to track down threats.”
Guess what those “threats” are. Go on, guess. I double-dog dare ya.
Pelosi hired a bigot to hunt MAGA. pic.twitter.com/uBsksGZXfs
— Rep. Matt Gaetz (@RepMattGaetz) February 18, 2021
Well.
Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL) tweeted out a video which features points from Tucker Carlson’s blistering exposé on Wednesday showing just how unhinged the good General is. The video also includes clips from Gen. Honoré’s interview on Roland Martin Unfiltered laying out what his views and goals for this review will entail.
Gen. Honoré is cut from the same cloth as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin: you are proven racist because you have a certain skin color and hold certain political beliefs, and our job is to root you out and eliminate you from the military and/or law enforcement, as well as polite society.
What he said to Roland Martin pretty much confirms this:
“So they allowed their buddies in yesterday. They had help inside the force, and you can assume that 30 percent of that force support the guy in the White House, that’s just demographics.”
“As hard as we try as an institution in the military, among us are people who think the election was stolen.”
Ahhh… so this is the problem. Not aligning with the preferred narrative and groupthink makes you dangerous. How Orwellian of you, good General.
But wait, there’s more.
“What they really are P.O.’d about, they are worried that they will lose their white power. They don’t like the browning of America. It took the sheet off a bunch of people proclaiming themselves to be conservative. And what they are is racists.”
Aww, who isn’t? Amongst us blue-eyed devils, that is.
So let’s recap. Piglousi is deploying a RAYCISS!™ slimeball from the upper reaches of the Uruk-hai officer corps to help the Occupation Government hunt down its enemies. Good to know, I suppose. But back to those heightened security measures protecting Mordor OTP from We the People for a sec.
Meanwhile, it’s fascinating this newfound love that Democrats seem to have for walls. I thought walls don’t protect anything according to their arguments and we didn’t need a wall at the border to protect the country? Yet, they have no problem with a wall to protect themselves.
In the United States of America, seeing the halls of the people walled off is a particularly troubling look, making one think of banana republics and dictators. Surely doesn’t look like they think they have the confidence of the voters with this. Imagine for the moment if President Donald Trump had done this, what they would have said and how they would have gone off with how dictatorial it was.
Missing the point yet again, I see. Imagining the Enemy reaction “if Trump had wank-wank-wank” is pointless whataboutism, carrying no more force than a child whining about having to eat his broccoli. Anybody who continues doing it should be sent straight to bed without dessert. Cry all you want to, kid. Daddy don’t care.
Nor do our masters care a whit about “the confidence of the voters.” There is one and only one takeaway from this that really matters: They have the power now, and they intend to keep it. Whatever they must do to ensure that, they will do. The thing that does matter comes in the form of a question: What, if anything, are Real Americans willing to do to take it back from them? If your answer is “Vote harderer!” then may your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget you were ever our countrymen.
Are you beginning to see now why I actually love the idea of the Imperial City walling itself off; disallowing its subjects all access to it; and surrounding its scuttling, slithering denizens with armed stormtroopers goons to scare off the serfs? I hope it stays this way always—until the Citadel Of Democracy Tyranny is finally taken down. Get yourself a good, long look at stark reality. Consider it something of a nudge, or prompt. Let Terrible Ted take us on home.
Update! When half-literate slander against civilian leadership bleeds over into actual insubordination.
Since Monday, several more partisan and profane comments have come to light featuring Honoré blasting Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mis.) and other Republicans for objecting to the 2020 election results, blaming conservative Capitol Police for “allowing Trumpsters” to get into the Capitol, and savaging President Trump.
“That little peace of shit with his @Yale law degree should be run out of DC and Disbarred ASAP,” Lt. General Russel Honoré wrote of Hawley in a now deleted Twitter post on January 11.
Becker News unearthed several more tweets that point to the general’s extreme partisanship. On November 18, Honoré tweeted out a meme with an image of himself wearing a black mask on the left and President Trump looking gruff on the right. The tweet included a statement he apparently made last March beckoning the president to “stop the bullshit” and deploy the National Guard “to meet national testing needs.”
In another tweet, Honoré tweeted somewhat incoherently, “Covid19 the @WhiteHouse Shit Show. Wear ya Damn Mask. Stay ya Aaa Home.”
This hysterical buffoon is a real gem, ain’t he? He’s perfect for the role Pelosi has him playing, I’d say.
This isn’t the part of Kruiser’s Morning Brief I wanted to mention, but there’s something in the second paragraph I can’t let slide by without comment.
Lent is here and none too soon. This year I’m giving up regret and despair. That stuff is too easy to get addicted to these days. Let’s hope and pray that the secular heathens don’t try to cancel Easter in the name of public safety now.
Maybe Stephen didn’t intend it, but the implication seems to be that the Fauxvid panic-pimps didn’t already cancel Easter once. In fact, if I remember right, last year there was even a minister or three arrested for daring to defy Amerika’s One True God (the Almighty State, that is) and hold Easter worship services anyway. Our power-drunk despots coast to coast then went on to try to rigidly control every other holiday in 2020, meeting with varying degrees of submission. So sorry and all that, but any hope that our masters might deign to relent and take the boot off our necks in time for Easter this year is vain, a fool’s fantasy.
Now let’s move on to more heartening stuff.
It’s no secret that I’m a fan of Governor Ron DeSantis of Florida. I’ve been singing his praises since last spring, when he was doing all of the right things in response to the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu while idiot boy Andrew Cuomo was killing as many elderly New Yorkers as he could. The press was excoriating DeSantis and praising Cuomo, and a conservative star was born.
DeSantis’s handling of the bottom feeders in the mainstream media has been so masterful that I recently wrote that it would be nice if he could teach some tricks to other Republicans. The kinds of Republicans who are going to try and screw up the party now that Trump is no longer in D.C.
DeSantis continues to make all the right people angry, which as you know is a favorite criterion of mine for judging our elected officials. DeSantis has been flying in the face of the liberal hypocrisy orthodoxy regarding whether schools should be open or not. Lib politicians are, of course, utterly beholden to the demands of teachers’ unions, who have been lobbying hard to get paid, get vaccinated, and not return to work.
As the GOP looks to 2024, it should look outside the Beltway for its nominee. This is, of course, setting aside the idea of Trump making a comeback, which I would still support. Who knows where we will all be by the time the 2024 presidential campaign kicks off on New Year’s Day 2023? If we had to set the wheels in motion for a candidate now, however, DeSantis would be one of the most obvious choices.
As the governor of a large state, DeSantis has a name recognition advantage that most governors don’t enjoy. Additionally, all of the undeserved negative press he’s gotten in the last year has backfired and made him better known than the Democrats probably wanted him to be. If he remains popular and is a serious contender in ’24 it will make all of his haters’ heads explode. He might get my support just for that.
The Republican cupboard isn’t bare as we head into the next couple of election cycles.
We have to take our comfort where we can get it.
True enough, as far as it goes. But knowing that there is no longer the proverbial snowball’s chance of electing anything but a housebroken GOPer from now on—that having gotten away clean with stealing the last one, the pattern for successful Demonrat election theft going forward is firmly set—makes that comfort mighty cold indeed.
Just another example of Limbaugh’s hateful racism, I guess.
Ladies and gentlemen, I was 16; I was just starting to work in radio when Aretha Franklin bopped on the scene. I was telling Snerdley, “Everybody’s calling her the Queen of Soul,” and there’s no doubt she was. I think that doesn’t go nearly far enough in describing Aretha Franklin, who she was and what she did, her talents and so forth. She was soul, there was no question. She defined it. Well, she and James Brown, who was the Godfather of Soul. James Brown was the Ambassador of Soul. He wasn’t just the godfather; he was the ambassador.
Her talent, her abilities, the range of music she could sing. There’s something else that I think we need to remember and kind of remain in awe of. Aretha Franklin, after having moved there, was from Detroit. There’s a little neighborhood in Detroit that an entrepreneur turned into one of the most powerful, one of the most identifiable, one of the most amazing music industry stories there has ever been. His name was Berry Gordy, and he did Motown. And there were two houses.
If you ever go to Detroit, you gotta drive by these two houses. That was Motown, where the recording studios were. In fact, the Motown artists thought that one of them was better than the other, and as time went on some of the acts only wanted to record in one of those studios because they felt that the sound was just better there, acoustics and everything else. But stop and think of it. You had the Four Tops. You had Gladys Knight & The Pips. You had The Supremes. You had Smokey Robinson. You had Diana Ross.
You had later on the Jackson Five, Marvin Gaye, the Marvelettes… (interruption) No, no. No. What was her name? City Council Detroit, yeah. Martha Reeves and the Vandellas, all in one neighborhood in Detroit, and that’s where Aretha was. She didn’t go with Motown. She went with Atlantic. She was wooed by the great Atlantic executive Ahmet Ertegun, and he signed her to Atlantic, and Gordy had all these other people.
But it’s just amazing, and that’s where Aretha Franklin came from. She stood above. It’s hard to say, but she stood above all of it. It is the quintessential American story, Aretha Franklin, and the impact she had, the reach she had, the talent and so forth. So, yeah, she was the Queen of Soul. But, to me, I mean, everywhere you turn in the media, “Queen of Soul, Aretha Franklin” it seems not enough. It’s like “right-wing talk show host Rush Limbaugh.’ That’s not enough. It doesn’t get anywhere near describing what I do, does it?
No Rush, it really, really doesn’t, bless your great big heart. El Rushbo’s heartfelt gushing over Queen Aretha provides me an opportunity to present one of the best of her many stellar performances, for which I thank him.
The Blues Brothers got a pretty tepid reaction when it was first released, from those critics whose reviews weren’t just downright cruel about it. I didn’t agree then, and don’t agree now; I thought it was great. The film was full to bursting with some truly wonderful music, enhanced by Aykroyd and Belushi’s refusal to hog the spotlight for themselves. Their humility is to their eternal credit. Think of it: at the very height of their fame—which necessarily implies the egotism that accompanies it—these boys were still respectful enough, sincere enough, big enough fans, to step back and allow some of their favorite blue stars to really shine.
Wilder does an in-depth examination of the Trouble with Texas, contending that it ain’t all about the windmills.
When we lived in Houston, I was shocked at the really poor design of the homes – sure they were fine for 95°F (2°C) and 95% humidity, but the house we lived in (and many I had seen when we were looking for a home to buy) had bare copper pipe running on the outside of the house. The spigots outside were so poorly insulated that just walking by them with a decently cold beer would cause them to freeze and split.
And that’s just one problem.
As I’ve said before of John, it’s hard to excerpt his stuff. He deftly covers a lot of ground and is a damned good writer to boot, which makes it kinda tricky to limit yourself to mere snippets in a fashion that gets the point across. So go read the rest. Yes, there’s a bikini involved, should anybody require another reason.
Which isn’t to suggest that the Green Energy con isn’t playing a significant role in this (ahem!) Man-Caused Disaster, mind. Buck Throckmorton reminds us that things are tough all over.
Of course, once you get north of Texas, it’s even colder. Much of the central plains is dealing with temperatures below zero. They are rationing power too.
A snapshot of Midwest electricity production on February 17 shows that 55% is coming from coal while less than 3% is coming from “clean” wind and solar. The sun isn’t shining and the windmills aren’t turning. Yet our current ruling class is promising to take that coal down to 0% and replace it with wind and solar. Our country would be a frozen killing field if that plan were in place now.
Considering the Left’s professed predilection for massive population reduction in relief of poor overtaxed Gaia, plus their lunatic insistence on the installment of Communist tyranny worldwide, it’s easy to see that a frozen killing field IS the plan. There’s only one conclusion to be drawn.
We are ruled by a deluded class of fools who are no longer satisfied to use the climate hoax to limit our liberty and economic freedom. They are now freezing ordinary Americans to death. We need better leaders.
Better? Hell, I’d gladly settle for “not evil” at this point. Frighteningly enough, we haven’t even gotten to the REALLY bad news yet.
Texas’s Power Grid Disaster Is Only The Beginning
The mess with the Texas power grid is only the beginning. In the years to come, American infrastructure will fail more and more often, as America becomes less capable of maintaining the core elements of a First World country.Why would America become less First World? That’s a simple question to answer: Because America is making itself less First World.
Texas’s struggles are only a standout example of a problem that has been building up for years. Last summer, California suffered rolling blackouts because electrical providers were unprepared for a surge in demand during a heat wave. But the problem is greater than that. America’s electrical reliability has been declining, almost everywhere, for decades. The United States of America now trails competing nations, often dramatically.
What causes this? One popular answer is simply aging infrastructure. America was one of the first countries to build a modern power grid, so infrastructure in many areas is very old and now fails with increasing frequency.
Of course, that naturally raises the question. If infrastructure is aging, why isn’t it being updated or replaced?
That is a political question, with many answers.
Follows, a look at a few of ’em, one of which manages to be a real jawdropper yet wholly unsurprising at the same time.
Another red flag for America’s infrastructure future is the Washington, D.C. Metro. The Metro has been known for years as one of the world’s worst, plagued with delays, safety issues, cost overruns, and poor maintenance.
How did the Metro get so horrid? In large part, because of wretched hiring. A 2012 report in The Washington Times revealed that Metro hiring was starkly racialized, with applicants clearly being hired or rejected based on skin color rather than demonstrated job aptitude:
Ninety-seven percent of the bus and train operators at the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority are black, with only six white women out of more than 3,000 drivers … It is a culture in which a white male engineer near completion of a Ph.D. was passed over for a management position in favor of a black man who was barely literate, multiple staffers said. … Dozens said white workers, especially women, were openly subject to racist and sexist remarks without repercussion — behavior that drove many targets to seek transfers or leave the agency. All said they have been inexplicably passed over hundreds of times for promotions to positions such as station manager while others with less seniority passed them by.
Why do Metro’s particular failures matter? Because its rotten ethos is spreading across the country. While Metro is an outlier case, where a major public agency became a racial racket, countless agencies are adopting “diversity” guidelines that encourage choosing employees and contractors based on skin color rather than competence alone. When ability and effectiveness ceases to be the sole consideration for jobs, effectiveness suffers. That may not matter much for writers at The New York Times, where the only victims of affirmative action (besides whose passed over for jobs) are the paper’s readers. But for the basic buildings blocks of civilized life, the consequences can be severe.
In Steyn’s famous formulation, decline is a choice. But choice might not be the whole story. Ultimately, it will be the Great Dumbing-Down that dooms us.
Recent studies have reported a worrisome decline in IQ scores in Western nations over the last decades, a reversal of the once-hopeful Flynn Effect (named after the late philosopher and psychologist James R. Flynn) which posited a growth in cognitive abilities for much of the 20th Century. Now the Flynn Effect seems to have reversed, leading to predictions of a general dumbing down of selective populations. Other studies report that IQ erosion is not confined to this century but that IQ has dropped by an average of 14.1 percent over the last century. As Evan Horowitz writes for NBC News, “A range of studies using a variety of well-established IQ tests and metrics have found declining scores across Scandinavia, Britain, Germany, France and Australia.”
One recalls MIT economist Jonathan Gruber, the architect of Obamacare, who referred to “the stupidity of the American voter” as helping him to pass the controversial law. One wonders if Gruber ever heard of Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget’s test results purporting to show that “the rot starts at the top.” This would implicate Gruber and his cohort in the experience of what Piaget calls horizontal décalage, which stymies the application of cognitive functions and logical operations to extended tasks. In other words, Gruber et al. are also stupid, gradually destroying the very society that enabled them to flourish. But the rot can also start at the bottom, as a combination of generalized mental vacancy and low-to-no-information voters furthers cultural and social degeneration. As Morris Berman remarks in The Twilight of American Culture, “A society cannot function if nearly everyone in it is stupid.”
And, well, here we all are.
Why should we be surprised that an American president should pronounce “corpsman” as “corpseman”? Or that a Canadian prime minister says “peoplekind” in lieu of “mankind”? Or that a Washington, D.C., mayor and his staff should have objected to a perfectly good word like “niggardly”? Or that a Methodist pastor and Congressman should follow the exclamation “Amen” with “a-woman,” when an ordained minister should surely know that “Amen” is an acronym for the Hebrew אֵל מֶלֶךְ נֶאֱמָן (El melech neeman: “Lord and faithful King”)—or, as some scholars think, a calque for the Aramaic “so be it”? One can multiply these gaffes, misnomers, and malapropisms indefinitely among those who should know better—and that is merely scratching the surface. The dumbing down phenomenon is virtually encyclopedic in heft and extent.
And so it goes. A London community activist, asked about removing a Churchill statue during the summer of BLM love, admits she hasn’t “personally met” Winston Churchill. A swarm of Twitter users condemns Tampa Bay Buccaneers QB Tom Brady as “racist” for defeating half-black Kansas City Chiefs’ QB Patrick Mahomes on Super Bowl LV during Black History Month—the fact that the great majority of Brady’s teammates are black and are clearly Brady enthusiasts seems to have escaped their attention. Major economic and energy policies seem planned not by cerebral giants but by weed-addled pubescents. Bill Gates, for example, wants to pepper the sky with aerosols to reflect sunlight out of the atmosphere and initiate global cooling—the risks are incommensurable and likely irreversible. Gates has what we might call “sector-intelligence” and might do well on segments of the Stanford-Binet IQ test, but I wouldn’t bet on his g score. The travesty of intelligence, prudence, and wisdom is beyond calculation, and it is only getting worse as IQ continues to slip down the great chain of thinking. This is the world that the classic film Idiocracy extravagantly punctures.
Why this should be is anybody’s guess. No one really knows. Various theories have been proposed to account for accelerating neural descent, ranging from the Dewey-inspired “progressive education” agenda working its leveling passage from the turn of the 20th century to the decrepit public schools and failed universities of the present day; to the softening effect of prolonged affluence and ease on a culture; to the debilitating influence of “smart” technology that performs our cognitive functions for us; to the assumption that women of higher intelligence are having fewer children, implying that women of lower intelligence are driving population growth; to the effects of increased media exposure and the consequent lessening of reading; to the emergence of the vices of envy and resentment owing to radical egalitarianism and the rancor of the under-performing against the skilled, hard-working, and successful, a dynamic cogently analyzed by Dinesh D’Souza in Stealing America; or to the merely inescapable fact of decay: as Robert Frost wrote, “Nothing gold can stay.” One thinks, too, of poet Gerard Manley Hopkins’ remark in his Journal: “From much, much more; from little, not much; and from nothing, nothing.” Whatever the cause or causes may be, intellectual deterioration seems to be the case.
The decline of intelligence—moral rectitude and creative exuberance are collateral casualties—is now in full throttle. The exceptions to the debacle—monks, nomads, people of integrity, people capable of common sense, the classically educated—represent the only viable hope for a new “ideational” age to arise out of the rubble of a “sensate” disaster. It may take another century to bring about what Sorokin called “the turn,” the slow ascent up the IQ ladder, which is cold comfort indeed. But I suspect it’s the only real comfort we have.
Cold being the operative word in all this.
Update! On the other hand, when you do the math you realize it kind of IS the unreliable renewables that are the biggest problem.
One decade ago, almost to the day, Feb. 2, 2011, extreme put a strain on the electric grid. The electric grid was unable to meet demand, and many experienced rolling blackouts for “up to an hour.” Yes, fossil fuel plants also struggled in the cold, but this isn’t about spin or protecting industry or pushing an agenda, it’s about facts.
Fast forward one decade and two weeks, and Texas again faced with extreme cold and a straining electric grid, but it’s not the same electricity mix. Texas for the past ten years had made concerted efforts to go green.
In 2011 about 6 percent of the electricity mix was generated from wind power. Today it’s 25 percent. Simultaneously, Texas has increased its overall electricity consumption by 20 percent as the state is attracting people from everywhere and the population is booming. Furthermore, three coal plants were taken offline. Indeed, the same type of storm of 2011 did not play out in the same circumstances in 2021. Did fossil fuels struggle? Absolutely, but their percentage of the grid dropped significantly.
Energy isn’t sexy. It’s math, physics, and numbers. But it’s also life. We’re told to stop the “existential threat” of climate change we must “go green,” and switch to green energy. I do this for a living and I’ve never seen one confirmed death from “climate change,” but today I can show you several Texan deaths clearly attributable to the cold, and no NBC news spin or AOC twitter stupidity will comfort their families. They are dead from a combination of factors: billionaires don’t like coal, politicians invent mandates, and utility commissioners rest on their reports as well as a severe winter storm.
Fossil fuels aren’t perfect, but renewables aren’t either. They have severe shortcomings, and the results can sometimes be deadly. We can learn what happened in Texas if we have a serious and necessary conversation about renewable energy. But will we?
After much careful, sober deliberation I decided to consult the online Magic 8 Ball for an answer to this momentous question, which responded with Outlook not so good. Going by the evidence to date, I’d say that thing’s predictive abilities are uncanny.
Living la vida locka.
Conservatives who predicted that COVID-19 would end with the Trump Administration were overlooking a central point: The Left’s hatred of Trump is merely a symptom of their guiding philosophy, which is, as “Yes, Minister” put it so concisely back in the 1970s, gradually to exclude people from government. The Left is in favor of any action that will expand the authority of bureaucrats by taking decisions out of the hands of citizens.
With the coronavirus, the Left is beside itself with glee: This is the first crisis since 9/11 broad enough to make possible a fundamental transformation of American society.
Every great crisis in American history, without exception, has been used to expand government. The greater the crisis, the greater the scope for expansion: 9/11 led to the NSA monitoring the traffic of the entire internet. It also created the Department of Homeland Security and the TSA, with the power to ruin air travel forever and give passengers a taste of how they’d feel being processed into a federal penitentiary. Of course Israel, facing a much more persistent terror threat, manages to keep terrorists off planes without touching their passengers’ privates. America’s security measures—which will never go away—were not a result of what needed doing, but what the government thought they could get away with doing.
In the 1930s, the Great Depression was used as an opportunity to create a welfare state in America and issue every citizen with an identification number, which we call Social Security. The Depression didn’t actually go away until World War II, and, once it did go away, the massive new government programs remained. In the 1860s, the Civil War was also an opportunity to impose an income tax for the first time in American history. The income tax was unconstitutional, so it wasn’t until another great looming crisis—World War I—that the constitution was amended to make the income tax a permanent feature of our lives.
The reason coronavirus so delights today’s Left is that the public response to their power grab has been overwhelmingly docile: The numbers of deaths are vastly below historic health panics, even with generous inflation via guidelines encouraging doctors to record anyone who previously had the virus as having died from it.
Even so, the government was able to lock people in their homes for a “two-week period” that turned out to be roughly a year, destroy much of the hospitality sector of the economy, force people to cover their faces in public as though living under a secular sharia, and, perhaps best of all, they got neighbors to snitch on neighbors and children to report their parents when these edicts weren’t followed.
It has been a bonanza. The everyday American citizen will always remember 2020 as a painful, terrible, soul-crushing year. For the Left, that makes it one of the best years on record. It is one of those great years in which they changed how Americans live.
They’ve been on quite a tear, enjoying a very nearly uninterrupted win streak since, oh, FDR at least. Those wins come with an asterisk attached, though, signifying their slightly tainted nature. Cattle Car Americans earned collective credit for an assist on each one, by docilely moo-ing their assent to every successive encroachment on the rights and freedoms they no longer care about.
The article’s title is “The Pandemic Is Over,” which isn’t entirely accurate. This will only be over when enough of us finally get off of our knees to stand up and say it is, and not a moment before. Until such time as our compliance is withdrawn, locked down we are, and locked down we shall remain.
When we need ya, we’ll call ya, double-dealing bitch.
According to a new report, neoconservative anti-Trumper Nikki Haley reached out to former President Trump on Wednesday to request a sit-down at Mar-a-Lago — but he shot her down.
The opportunist Haley, who has been described by some as “the right’s Hillary Clinton,” trashed President Trump prior to Joe Biden’s inauguration.
According to Politico’s Playbook, “Haley reached out to former President Donald Trump on Wednesday to request a sit-down at Mar-a-Lago, but a source familiar tells Playbook that he turned her down. The two haven’t spoken since the insurrection on Jan. 6, when Haley blasted Trump for inciting his supporters to storm the Capitol.”
Haley’s presidential ambitions have been clear for some time, but supporters of President Trump have already been promoting a “Never Haley” movement on the right. It is clear that she represents the neoconservative GOP of the past, while voters prefer the America First vision of Trump.
I think it’s so sweet how the author seems to think that The Power cares even a little bit about what voters might or might not prefer, as if the consent of the governed was still a thing.
And right they are.
Russia Blasts Biden Regime For ‘Persecution’ Of Trump Supporters, Political Dissidents
Russia calls on the United States to observe the human rights of political opponents.
The irony, it burns.
The Russian Foreign Ministry has issued a statement lambasting the United States government under Joe Biden for the “ongoing persecution campaign” taking place “against anybody at all who does not agree with the results of the latest presidential election.”
In the statement, Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova delivered a scathing assessment of the human rights situation in the United States under President Joe Biden.
Zakharova described the ongoing crackdown against Trump loyalists in the United States:
“The FBI has reportedly opened more than 400 criminal cases and applied for more than 500 search warrants and subpoenas for suspects; it has also brought charges against and detained around 200 people. Only several dozen defendants have been released on bail or placed under house arrest. The others are being subjected to harsh pressure, with members of their family and social circle being coerced into giving a ‘convenient’ testimony. Moreover, people who have not even been officially charged are losing their jobs; they are being banned from social media and publicly ostracised.”
She also questioned the “objectivity of the law enforcement agencies” involved in this campaign, noting that they were acting under orders and “in line with the narrative of the current administration who declared the events of January 6, 2021 a riot and everybody who was near the US Congress on that day all but plunderers.”
She went on to correctly note that far from being violent rioters, most of the attendees of the January 6 rally were peaceful protesters.
“In fact, the majority of those people were ordinary citizens concerned about the situation in their own country,” she said. “These were 74 million voters who voted for their president and defended their views.”
Living in Biden’s shiny new Amerikan Gulag, you might devoutly wish to be able to dispute all that. But if you’re at all honest, you can’t. Bottom line:
As the human rights situation continues to deteriorate in the United States, it is becoming apparent to the world that Trump supporters are a repressed group in Biden’s America.
A-yup. Know the old saying “the truth hurts”? Well, when you’re trapped in a rapidly disintegrating banana republic, watching a formerly powerful and prosperous nation fall into decay in the iron-fisted grip of an illegitimate, repressive junta that is openly hostile to half its own population, it damned sure does at that.
Someone who understood that, once in a great while, it really is possible for a single individual to change the world—understood better than most, because he did it himself.
Before Rush, talk radio was different. Talk radio was about cotton-candy issues. Larry King on the Mutual Broadcast Network hosted an overnight parade of callers talking about pets, childhood memories, landscaping, and just how they were doing. Scores of local talk show hosts – like Perry Marshall at KDKA in Pittsburgh – entertained with friendly chat, the sweet cotton candy that dissolves away quick into meaninglessness.
That was radio B.R. – Before Rush.
To exactly no one’s surprise, the Compassionate, Caring Left™ responded with their usual subhuman, barely-sentient cruelty.
After news broke that conservative talk show giant Rush Limbaugh had died at age 70 on Wednesday, many on the Left took to trashing Limbaugh and celebrating his death. Many on Twitter expressed ill-wishes, hoping Limbaugh would “rest in piss.” Many prominent celebrities shared fabricated quotes falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh or took his remarks out of context to condemn him.
Because of course they did; this is who they are, this is what they do, and I see no need to belabor that more than obvious point. There’s a different one to be made here, a far more worthwhile one, which I’ll preface with this ostensibly more “reasonable” response:
No, you lying, sniveling pussy, what Limbaugh actually attacked was Leftism. Which brings us to the bottom line:
THERE IS NO LONGER ANY REASON WHATSOEVER FOR NORMAL AMERICANS TO TREAT THESE VICIOUS ANIMALS KINDLY, FAIRLY, OR RESPECTFULLY, NOR TO ACT AS IF THEIR OPINIONS MATTER IN THE LEAST.
Sympathy? Restraint? For them? Not on your life. Their own unrestrained hatred and vileness must be returned tenfold. The war against them must be acknowledged and waged as war to the knife—real, existential, and morally just.
All fretting over “becoming more like them” or “taking the high road” from our side must now be abandoned. There is no longer any need for analyzing or genteely discussing such matters; there is no longer any question about them. Ugliness and evil must be reflected directly back, in fullest intensity, at the twisted goblins who weaponized them for political use—the tools of tyranny—lest the righteous find themselves overwhelmed. Those who fail to recognize this demonic Enemy for who and what he is, or are too fastidious to do everything necessary to ensure his destruction, will surely perish.
I decided long years ago—I think it was the frabjous day that the odious Ted Kennedy assumed room temperature, maybe—that I would no longer express anything but my truest feelings on the passing of such filthy scum. Never again will I feign grief or sadness when some cancerous Lefty boil on the ass of humanity is finally removed from this world. Their rightful place is in Hell, in the presence of the Master they were always so eager to serve. So when such a one shuffles off this mortal coil at long, long last to receive his eternal due, is there anybody who could seriously argue that his departure from our midst ought to be regarded as some kind of loss? When decent men contort themselves to heap empty, false praise upon the death of lesser sorts whose corruption, moral bankruptcy, and contempt for justice is well known, does not the dishonest act, although well-intentioned, put their own eternal souls at risk? Is prostitution really the price exacted by politesse at times like this?
Speaking strictly for myself: nope, don’t think so, sorry, not gonna do it. Call me uncivil, call me uncouth, call me whatever other names you wish. This is a game I just won’t play anymore. After so many years of enduring the sordid spectacle of soulless fiends gleefully ladling shit over the memory of our dear departed the way they always do I am quite happy to return the favor, with interest compounded. If I even bother to say anything at all, that is. If that leaves me open to a charge of “sinking to their level” or some such from my more effete colleagues…well, so be it then. Don’t like it? Don’t care. Henceforth, I desire only to inflict any and every injury I can on The Enemy, crippling or trivial, and pledge not to allow a single opportunity to do so pass me by. The more he suffers, the gladder I’ll be. To hell with them, one and all. That’s all there is to it.
Now let’s leave the Left to their abominable obsequies and get back to Rush, shall we? Doc Zero says it’s a funeral for a friend:
I never got to speak to Rush Limbaugh, but he always seemed like a friend I heard from every day. He quoted my work on the air a few times, and it was a surreal delight, a joyous thing that could not possibly be happening. He helped us all become friends.
That’s the real measure of Rush’s impact. He helped so many people realize they were not alone, even as the mainstream media labored to make them feel isolated and hopeless. He understood that totalitarians overwhelm and dominate ordinary people by making them *feel* surrounded.
How often good and decent people felt isolated before Rush! They wondered why nobody could see what was so perfectly obvious to them. The secret of totalitarian success is to make ordinary people fear everyone around them is an informer or enforcer. Rush shattered that illusion.
The illusion of manufactured consensus and forced conformity never worked on Rush, not for a minute. He KNEW we were all out here, long before his ratings proved it. He gave so many others the confidence to raise their voices, knowing they were not alone.
It takes incredible talent and discipline to realize a bold vision like that. I heard him on the air not long ago, and thought he sounded great, as if time had not touched the voice I first heard over 30 years ago. Someone had to do what he did, but not just anyone COULD have.
And now the Internet will be filled with ugly cries of triumph from the howling darkness Rush spent his life opposing… proving him right once again, one more time. They’re still dangerous, but they aren’t scary any more, not after Rush spent all those years mocking them.
We all lost a great friend in Rush Limbaugh today, but he showed us how many friends we really have, across this nation and many others. We are one less, but because of him, we will never again fear we are alone. One voice is stilled, but there will never again be silence.
We can only hope not. Even so, it’s hard to imagine who could possibly fill his shoes. Whatever comes next, the struggle will go on. Klavan recommends defiance as the proper way to honor Limbaugh’s memory:
How could I not be delighted at the fear and loathing he inspired in the great and good? During my long absence from America, the great and good had become such smug, small-minded, and provincial little people, it was a guilty pleasure to watch them writhe on the flame he lit beneath them. For decades, feminists had called men “pigs.” Now Rush called them “feminazis,” and they threw their aprons over their faces and sobbed about his lack of civility. For decades, race-mongers had blamed an innocent generation of whites for a history that they hadn’t made, and now Rush mocked the mongers with wicked impressions, and declared it was time for black Americans to get on board the freedom train with their white fellow citizens.
It was beautiful. Courageous. The kind of radio magic I’d grown up with. And it changed me, or at least helped me change. Rush gave a joyful voice to the new thoughts I didn’t even know I’d had.
I do not cry for dead celebrities. I have just enough tears for the people I know and love. But I choked up when I heard that Rush had left the studio. He was silenced just at the moment when the elite and powerful would silence us all. Our politicians seek to demonize half the nation—Rush’s half. Our news media calls for censorship. Tech billionaires sit on their mountains of gold and gesture like foppish princes to tell us who shall speak and who shall not.
Let us defy them, then. Let us all speak, and fearlessly. Let that be Rush’s monument. In a way, he built it himself.
Seconded, heartily. In his brief post, Michael Walsh offers similar advice:
A great man died today: Rush Limbaugh was 70. He was perceptive on many social and political issues, including the ludicrous claims on the Left that human beings are causing “global warming” or “climate change,” when in fact the “crisis” was and remains simply another “progressive” path to power and domination — “a political movement disguised as science.”
A notion that carbon-based life forms (us) are destroying the planet (ours) by means of carbon emissions is profoundly anti-human. Rush’s greatest legacy may well turn out to be how accurately he exposed them and their malignant misanthropy on this and many other subjects. Let us never forget his lessons and continue to face down the enemies within with humor, wit, intelligence and, above all, courage.
Above even that, let our perception of the Enemy be clear-eyed; let us neither shirk nor flinch from whatever our sacred duty to defend liberty may demand of us, no matter how daunting or distasteful. Let our resolve in the face of the Enemy be as steel, our hearts as ice. Let us be unstinting and implacable in the pursuit of victory—uncompromised victory, unambiguous victory, TOTAL victory. Let us be fully aware that anything short of it would be tantamount to defeat, therefore unacceptable.
Elsewhere, Steyn’s compelling tribute might be the perfect closer, so I’ll excerpt liberally from it even as I also insist that you read every word of it.
It is with profound sadness that we announce the death of Rush Limbaugh, a giant of American broadcasting, a uniquely talented performer, and a hugely generous man to whom I owe almost everything.
One man doing what he wanted to do saved an entire medium – AM radio – and turned all its old rules upside down: Traditionally, morning drive is your big audience, and everything tapers off from there. Rush figured that everyone needs a local guy at that time, with traffic and weather updates, and that the opportunity to build a national show lay in the hitherto somnolent slot of noon-to-three Eastern/nine-to-twelve Pacific. And within a couple of years hundreds of stations were building the entire schedule around the midday guy. In the scheme of things, I am not sure how many of those stations will be able to keep that going without him.
Powerful politicians and longtime fans were often surprised, upon meeting him, to find a man who was quite private and indeed shy – because, like many radio guys, he had no desire to have a public persona other than at the microphone. Unlike so many others in this business, Rush was hugely generous and totally secure. Unlike other shows of left and right, where the staff come and go every six weeks, everyone at the EIB Network has been there fifteen, twenty, thirty years. That includes, in a very peripheral way, yours truly. When I first started guest-hosting, I found it odd that, on the rare occasions Rush mentioned the subs, it would be to put them down. Because, I mean, who would do that? But Rush is the least insecure star on the planet, and I came to see that he was actually teaching the neophytes a very important lesson: You guys need to be completely secure too – because it’s the only way to survive in this wretched media. I came to appreciate that being put down by Rush was actually a far greater compliment than him doing some boilerplate hey-he’s-a-great-guy shtick. And one of the saddest days of my fifteen years with EIB was when I heard Rush a few months back expressing genuine, sincere gratitude for something I’d said about him a few days earlier. As I pleaded on air, I just wanted the old Rush back scoffing at his guest-hosts – so we’d know all was well in the world.
I have come to admire him even more this last year. When he announced his diagnosis, we all knew this story only has one ending, and it’s just a question of how many chapters there are leading up to it. Rush loved what he did more than anything in life except his family. He had no interest in going to Tahiti to watch the sunset. He wanted to be behind the Golden EIB Microphone every day that he could. So initially he took a couple of days off every three weeks for treatment, and then the two days became four, and the treatment weeks took their toll and spilled into the following week. But, through it all, he remained determined to do every single show he could – because, aside from anything else, he wanted to make sure he, his listeners, his brand, his stations did everything they could to put President Trump across the finish line on November 3rd.
Events didn’t quite turn out the way he wanted – although they might have if more people had worked as hard as a man ravaged by Stage IV cancer did, in defiance of his doctors’ prognostications. The last three months, when he and Kathryn had surely earned those Tahitian sunsets, took a terrible toll. But he stayed on the air until just a fortnight ago – because above all he wanted to keep faith with tens of millions of listeners, many of whom had been listening to him their entire lives and could not imagine a world without him.
We are about to find out.
We are at that, and it promises to be neither pleasant nor pretty.
In a sense, it’s fitting that Rush leaves us even as the light of America That Was has been dimmed, if not extinguished outright. One can easily imagine how deeply the unprecedented events over the last year must have troubled him, how painfully they wounded him as he witnessed his beloved country wantonly savaged by audacious but wholly witless fanatics. The Shadow, expanding as it descends, is a drain on the spirit of the strong and weak alike, until it finally devours all.
In his post title, Steyn calls Rush The Indispensable Man, and that he indubitably was. Although I haven’t listened to him much over recent years, there’s no gainsaying his impact, and we can all expect the impact of his loss to be no less momentous. Conservatism as we know it today would simply not exist without Rush Limbaugh. As he singlehandedly revived the dying medium of AM radio, so it was with conservatism itself. Love him or hate him, he was and will ever remain not merely “The Big Voice on the Right,” as he dubbed himself with the bombastic yet slyly facetious overstatement so characteristic of the man. In reality, his voice was The Biggest.
If that ain’t indispensable, I don’t know what is. Be at peace, Rush. You will be sorely, sorely missed.
Update! Several good reminiscences from reformed liberals on their conversion from darkness to light, starting with the valiant, much-lamented warrior Andrew Breitbart.
One day I asked [my future father-in-law Orson Bean] why he had Rush Limbaugh’s book The Way Things Ought to Be on his shelf. I asked him, “Why would you have a book by this guy?”
And Orson said, “Have you ever listened to him?”
I said yes, of course, even though I never had. I was convinced to the core of my being that Rush Limbaugh was a Nazi, anti-black, anti-Jewish, and anti-all things decent. Without berating me for disagreeing with him, Orson simply suggested that I listen to him again.
This is where my rendezvous with destiny begins.
I turned on KFI 640 AM to listen to evil personified from 9 a.m. to noon. Indeed, my goal was to derive pleasure from the degree of evil I found in Rush Limbaugh. I was looking forward to a jovial discussion with Orson to confirm how right I was. One hour turned into three. One listening session into a week’s worth. And next thing I knew, I was starting to doubt my preprogrammed self. I was still a Democrat. I was still a liberal.
But after listening for months while putting thousands of miles on my car, I couldn’t believe that I once thought this man was a Nazi or anything else. While I couldn’t yet accept the premise that he was speaking my language, I marveled at how he could take a breaking news story and offer an entertaining and clear analysis that was like nothing I had ever seen on television, especially the Sunday morning shows, which had been my previous one-stop shop for political opinions.
Most important, though, Limbaugh, like the professor I always wanted but never had the privilege to study under, created a vivid mental picture of the architecture of a world that I resided in but couldn’t see completely: the Democrat-Media Complex. Embedded in Limbaugh’s analysis of politics was always a tandem discussion on the media. Each segment relentlessly pointed to collusion between the media and the Democratic Party. If the Clarence Thomas hearings showed me that something was wrong, the ensuing years of listening to Limbaugh and Dennis Prager — who at the time was also undergoing a political transformation from the Democratic to the Republican Party — explained to me with eerie precision what exactly was wrong. I swallowed hard and conceded to Orson that he was right.
It takes great courage, strength, and humility to swallow one’s pride, admit error, and redirect oneself towards the path of wisdom. Not everybody possesses those gifts; hardly any Leftists do, which helps to explain the extraordinary vehemence and frenzy fueling the ritualistic denunciation of former comrades who reject their previous Progtard beliefs for conservatism. Another:
It was 1992, and I was on vacation in Dallas, Texas. I had literally escaped Los Angeles after riots had broken out, but that’s a story for another time. My friend, who is an airline pilot, told me about this great new radio program called The Rush Limbaugh Show, and since I was a passenger in his car I got a chance to listen in. This Rush Limbaugh guy was kind of funny, but a little too bombastic for my then-moderate tastes. So, once I returned to California, I dismissed the show from my mind.
In 1995, I had a roommate who I couldn’t stand, and she was a Dittohead. Rush Limbaugh was in the last year of his television show, so she watched it religiously. I thought it was a bit cultish and, coupled with my disdain for this particular roommate, I decided that if she liked it, then it wasn’t for me. So, I once again dismissed the show.
Fast forward to 2007. I had a hella long commute to work, and since my very new husband at the time listened to talk radio, I decided to give that a try to get me through the miles, and give us another point of commonality to share. Guess who happened to be on during the time I was on the road? the one and only Rush Limbaugh.
Maybe it was the ability to listen to the entire show, but this time, I was drawn in. Rush’s distribution company Clear Channel Communications had just received a censure letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, lambasting Rush for criticizing U.S. troops who were against the war in Iraq, calling them “phony soldiers.” What ensued, with Rush auctioning off the letter to charity for $2.1 million dollars, was the ultimate troll, and extremely savage. Rush gave zero f**ks about it and flipped the script by doing some good for a worthy cause while handing the evil Harry Reid his ass.
From that moment on I was hooked, and listened regularly.
Rush was indeed unique in his ability to persuade, as well as his near-uncanny insight into the effectiveness of humor to get his ideas across. But there’s another essential ingredient in the Limbaugh formula for success, maybe the most important of them all. And somehow, despite their self-proclaimed intellectual superiority, it’s always been beyond the comprehension of Lefty Limbaugh-haters.
Rush’s critics always… always misunderstood him. Maybe it was purposeful. Rush’s critics always depicted him as an angry flame-thrower ranting into his microphone and giving marching orders to his army of ignorant, brainwashed minions.
They couldn’t be more wrong about all of that.
Rush was always smiling… and he was always funny. And he wasn’t giving us marching orders by telling us what to think. It was, in fact, the very opposite.
Rush wasn’t telling us what to think; he was articulating what we already believed. He was just the first to come along and respect us for our views, told us he shared them, and then he used his talents (on loan from God) to crystalize those ideas and articulate them in a clever, succinct, and entertaining way. And…never forget this…he was communicating those ideas on our behalf.
He was there for us. Not to tell us what to think but to help us articulate what we believed and remind us that we are not alone. And he did that in a very personal way.
Precisely. It’s so simple and obvious only a liberal could be unable to grasp it. It’s hopeless, I know, but what the hell. I’ll explain it one more time.
See, some might wave away Rush’s astounding and prolonged success as a matter of sheer dumb luck or, slightly more charitably, fortuitous timing. I think that’s dubious at best. Rush had a huge audience already in place just waiting for someone like him to come along. Millions of put-upon Americans, traditionally revered as the very heart, soul, and backbone of their nation, suddenly scorned as disgusting, bigoted ignoramuses—undeserving beneficiaries of a commodious lifestyle made possible only by the systematic exploitation and abuse of blameless foreigners. From salt of the earth to scum of the earth, in what must have felt like no more than the blink of an eye.
So here’s Normie Joe Sixpack, having had a bellyful of being defamed, denounced, and socially disenfranchised for crimes he never committed at the (soft) hands of mollycoddled ingrates who parasitically enjoyed the fruits produced by Joe’s hard work and ever-stiffening taxes. Then he happens upon a fella on the radio one fine day who not only professes the same beliefs as him, but is doing so with pride, passion, and eloquence. Can you even imagine what that unlooked-for discovery must have felt like to bewildered, frustrated, increasingly pissed off ol’ Joe? It was an affirmation long overdue, and well-earned. How could poor Joe reasonably be expected not to respond with jubilation, rewarding this newfound champion with undying loyalty and affection for their against-all-odds liberation?
Note: If this doesn’t remind you of the response bestowed on a certain outsider President (himself criminally harried from office by the same Lefty hellhounds persecuting poor Normie Joe) for a like affirmation, you should see a doctor to have yourself tested for latent Libtard Syndrome without delay, before your affliction can metastasize and reach its final, incurable stage. The good news is that a significant percentage of the population enjoys a powerful natural resistance to infection; for reasons not yet understood, those with higher levels of intelligence and self-respect have nothing to fear from this mysterious and deadly disease. For the unfortunate percentage who do contract it, LS is known to be one hundred percent fatal to reason, happiness, and mental stability in the briefest of intervals following the onset of frank symptoms. It is nothing to be messing around with.
Anyways. Evidence abounds supporting the contention that Rush was well aware of his potential audience, and of what that might mean for his own prospects, and his country’s. Not to imply that he cynically exploited that knowledge solely for his own enrichment; far from it. Limbaugh still faced years of toil, skepticism, and overt opposition from within his own industry, which I’m sure he also knew. It’s to his eternal credit that he didn’t let the obstacles daunt or dissuade him, readily accepting the challenge to eventually win through via dogged determination; an unshakable faith in his talent, his audience, and his message; and a lifelong ambition to carve out a career for himself in the broadcast-radio industry he so passionately loved.
It sounds like a horrible thing to say, but it’s kind of a shame Rush’s death had to come during the chaotic, floundering rein of an Enemy regime composed entirely of traitors mindlessly hostile to absolutely every principle he stood for. Trump would have seen to it that this profoundly consequential patriot’s legacy was honored as it ought to be, the grief of his admirers respected instead of ignored. But regardless of the indifference that is the very best we can hope for from the illegitimate BaiDing-Harris junta, I’d bet Rush Limbaugh’s funeral is going to be as unforgettable as the man himself was.
So fuck all the haters anyhow. Who cares? There’s not a damned thing they can do to prevent Real Americans from paying their last respects to a truly extraordinary man who was truly one of their own, and proud to be. Maybe the incandescent rage sparked by their own impotence will cause a few of them to keel over dead from a stroke or something. Let them fume, let them shriek, let them hate; the hatred of a scoundrel is an honorable man’s reward. The MahaRushi will be fondly remembered long after the pathetic Stumblebum In Thief and all his works have been forgotten. Rush Limbaugh’s inspiring legacy of achievement and uplift will forever eclipse the usurper Biden’s disgraceful record of corruption, self-regard, and insignificance.
Imagine my surprise to learn that reverting to primitive, unreliable technologies that civilization abandoned four centuries ago as superior ones came along might NOT have been such a great idea after all.
Historic winter storm freezes Texas wind turbines; millions without power
Nearly half of Texas wind energy production has frozen to a haltMillions are without power in Texas after a historic winter storm blasted the state over the weekend, creating freezing conditions that have made the roads dangerous and knocking out nearly half of Texas’ installed wind power generation.
Texas grid operators who spoke to the Austin American-Statesman said freezing rain and historically low temperatures caused wind turbines in West Texas to freeze to a halt, knocking out some 12,000 megawatts of energy production. Wind farms in Texas typically generate up to 25,100 megawatts of energy, almost half of which is currently out of production as the state works to thaw out the turbines.
“This is a unique winter storm that’s more widespread with lots of moisture in West Texas, where there’s a lot of times not a lot of moisture,” said Dan Woodfin, senior director of system operations for the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, the nonprofit corporation that manages the power grid. “It’s certainly more than what we would typically assume.”
Um, is this a bad time to mention that, according to the exact same liberal idiots who demanded the useless windmills, we were supposed to all be roasted alive by Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) before now? That cold, icy winter weather was confidently predicted to be a thing of the past as rising CO2 levels brought Gaia to the brink of destruction, the polar ice caps melted, and temperatures and sea levels alike went up and up?
What we have here is a failure to learn from the deadly disasters Leftist ideas cause each and every time wiser heads give in and let them have their way.
If you are looking at the facts in TX, the obvious lesson here is: stop subsidizing and mandating unreliables–which are often useless when you need them most–and do a better job at managing reliables.
Instead of acknowledging the reality that unreliables can’t keep us warm or powered in the winter–and that the “100% renewable” direction is disastrous–advocates of unreliables are instead implying that no source of electricity can be relied upon, so no need to single out wind.
Dr. Emily Grubert of GA Tech writes: “Let us be absolutely clear: if there are grid failures today, it shows the existing (largely fossil-based) system cannot handle these conditions either.” Really? Ever heard of the Midwest or Canada?
TX is having an electricity crisis during bad winter weather because it did not focus enough on building reliable power plants and infrastructure–because it was obsessed with getting as much unreliable wind/solar electricity as possible. Let’s all learn from this mistake.
Right now TX’s plans include
- 0 new nuclear plants
- 0 new coal plants
- 9.4 GW wind (the existing 32 GW went to 1 GW during crucial times this week)
- 11.9 GW solar (solar was useless much of the week)
- 5.0 GW gas (to handle the unreliables)
These plans should change.
As bad as TX’s plans to “rely on unreliables” are, they are nothing compared to the Biden Plan, which calls for nearly 100% solar and wind electricity by 2035! Everyone should be asking him how the hell his plan would have fared in TX this week.
Actually, we shouldn’t be asking libtards a damned thing. What we should be doing is telling them, very bluntly and firmly. While we’re on the subject of asking about things, though, I have a couple of questions to put: will anybody ever bother totting up the number of Texans who will die because of Leftist folly this week, and will said Leftists ever be held to account for those deaths, in any meaningful way? I’m afraid we already know the answers, sad to say. Which means Tucker is right when he says that we can all expect more of the same from them.
The Green New Deal has come, believe it or not, to the state of Texas. How’s it working out so far?
Well, the good news is all that alternative energy seems to have had a remarkable effect on the climate. Sunday night, parts of Texas got the temperatures that we typically see in Alaska. In fact, they were the same as they were in Alaska. So global warming is no longer a pressing concern in Houston.
The bad news is, they don’t have electricity. The windmills froze, so the power grid failed. Millions of Texans woke up Monday morning having to boil their water because with no electricity, it couldn’t be purified.
The ironically named Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which oversees the grid, had no solution to any of this. They simply told people to stop using so much power to keep warm. So in Houston, hundreds of shivering Texans headed to the convention center like refugees to keep from freezing to death. Some Texans almost certainly did freeze to death. Later this week, we’ll likely learn just how many more were killed as they tried to keep warm with jury-rigged heaters and barbecues and car exhaust.
Rather than celebrate and benefit from their state’s vast natural resources, politicians took the fashionable route and became recklessly reliant on so-called alternative energy, meaning windmills. Fifteen years ago, there were virtually no wind farms in Texas. Last year, roughly a quarter of all electricity generated in the state came from wind. Local politicians were pleased by this. They bragged about it like there was something virtuous about destroying the landscape and degrading the power grid. Just last week, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott proudly accepted something called the Wind Leadership Award, given with gratitude by Tri Global Energy, a company getting rich from green energy.
So it was all working great until the day it got cold outside. The windmills failed like the silly fashion accessories they are, and people in Texas died. This is not to beat up on the state of Texas — it’s a great state, actually — but to give you some sense of what’s about to happen to you.
Indubitably so, unless and until sensible adults get serious about putting a stop to it. More cold, hard reality from Larry Johnson:
Guess who else is suffering from the blue lip, frozen snot artic temperatures? Electric vehicles–say goodby to Tesla as a reliable companion if the mercury is in single digits. Talking with an old friend in Clarion, Iowa, I had a full belly laugh as he described his recent conversation with a friend who owned a car dealership.
Iowa has been particularly savaged by howling winds and temperatures worthy of a deep freezer. People with Teslas and other electric cars (e.g. Volt) have discovered much to their chagrin that electric batteries do not like the cold. Severe, low temps rapidly drain the batteries of their charge, and the next thing you know you are stranded next to a corn field in a lonely stretch of road. You just have to hope that you kept your cell phone charged to call for help. This discovery is leading many formerly happy owners of the electric cars to dump them as fast as they can get themselves into a gas-fueled pick up truck or SUV capable of plowing through a snowdrift.
I say thank God for Mother Nature. She’s not angry or cruel. She’s just reminding the silly academics and climate change scientists that their prescription for cheap, renewable energy does not work where the temperature hovers around zero and the sun only shows itself during winter for a few scant hours.
While climate change obsession is absurd, it is not funny. People died because wind-supplied electricity stopped working. Women and children died because the loss of power led them to rely on gas-burning stoves that produced carbon monoxide. That said, I am all in favor of the Democrat-controlled states to go all-in on getting rid of fossil fuel power systems and supplies. Why? Let Darwin do his work and rid us of these delusional souls.
Now THERE’S an idea I can really get behind. Far as I can see, if a society wishes to rid itself of the disasters, misery, and hardship caused by Leftists, it must rid itself of Leftists.
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"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards." – Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution
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