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…
Fundamental Transformation, no kind of accident, with plenty enough blame to go around.
For most of the ninety years since James Truslow Adams coined the term American Dream, most Americans still believed the fairy tale of the American Dream, that no matter how humble your beginnings, everyone had a fair chance to become a success in America, based upon your individual talent, intelligence, work ethic and a society that rewarded those who exceled. Sadly, that dream is no longer achievable for most Americans. Our society has devolved into an oligarchy since The Epic of America was published in 1931, where a powerful few rule over a willfully ignorant many through propaganda, mistruth, fear, and an iron fist.
The real questions are why did the American dream turn into an American nightmare and is there a pathway back to the kind of country our forefathers created? There are numerous reasons why the country has fallen far from its original conception as a proud defiant Republic to its current state as a dying empire of depravity, decay, debt, and decadence. The conspiratorial creation of the Federal Reserve and implementation of a Federal income tax in 1913 marked a true destructive turning point for America.
Our world is now ruled by a tyrannical few who have used the system, created by their class, to accumulate immense wealth and power, sustained by a government they manipulate by buying politicians and having their cronies and thugs write and enforce the laws. The misinformation, propaganda, and fake news dished out by a mainstream media, owned, and controlled by the ruling oligarchy, creates a smokescreen to obscure who wields the true power in this country. The Deep State is no longer a looney conspiracy theory, but the reality of how this country is now controlled and run.
Radical Communist professors infest our universities. With 76% of K-12 teachers being female, the feminization of boys from twelve years of indoctrination has been unavoidable. They have been forced to feel and emote, rather than think, question and experience life outside prison classrooms. When boys act like boys, they are diagnosed by women as having ADHD and immediately drugged into submission. School is now a detriment to learning and irrelevant to a person attaining wisdom and understanding.
Irrelevant, hell. It’s an actual, active obstacle.
The rot within our educational system does not appear to be a mistake. It seems to be a calculated goal of those controlling the system. Our overlords want obedient, easily manipulated, non-questioning, conformist, robotic consumers of material goods who believe debt equals wealth, the family unit is irrelevant, systematic racism is real, there are 65 genders, a flu with a 99.7% survival rate is a reason to surrender their remaining freedoms and liberties, and an all-knowing benevolent government is here to help them.
The dystopian American nightmare into which we are descending is not solely the fault of the globalist cabal. Americans need to look in the mirror and honestly assess their role in this plunge into madness. The once independent, self-sufficient individualists that populated this country have become dependent, government reliant, materialistic, quivering shadows of the patriots and frontiersmen who created this country.
In the name of safety and security, the American people have allowed their government to accumulate complete control over every aspect of our lives. The American Dream has become a nightmare as we have allowed individualism, materialism, and selfish greed to override our duty to be good citizens, good fathers, good mothers, good neighbors, and going as far as our ability and hard work would take us.
Up until 1913, the American Dream, where every person had the opportunity to live a richer and fuller life, was achievable. Up until that time, every generation born in this country had an excellent chance to live a better life than their parents. Relentless progress was the American way. Based on the actions of those controlling the direction of this country, I doubt my three sons will live a richer and fuller life than myself. The debts are too extreme, the military overreach too excessive, the looting by the financial class too great, the political corruption too extensive, suppression of truth speech too stifling, and opportunities too few.
The dream of a social order where everyone could rise to the highest level of their capabilities, regardless of their birth, has been systematically crushed by those who prefer the masses to be debt slaves doing the menial labor necessary to keep their money-making machine running. With all out assaults on the First, Second and Fourth Amendments by those who find the U.S. Constitution inconvenient to their despotic intentions, time is running out for those who still believe in and will fight for their country.
We have ignored our obligation to the past and the future. The Founding Fathers created an imperfect Republic. Ben Franklin knew its future depended upon the people administering it well. The founders did not want a national religion to be misrepresented as keeping religion out of America. The Founders were religious men. They believed religion and morality were vital to the country, being administered in a moral ethical way and guided by a code of conduct. As God, religion and morality have been disparaged by those in power we have moved further and further from the letter and spirit of the Constitution. Only a people with a strong moral backbone can be trusted to honor the Constitution.
The people have allowed the country to be corrupted by evil self-seeking men, and as a result, we are on a course towards despotism. We are descended from rebels and revolutionaries. The future of our country requires the restoration of that revolutionary spirit of dissent and opposition among a sufficient number of patriotic citizens, as there is no longer a chance to vote ourselves out of this predicament. Sadly, bloodshed will be required in any effort to regain control of our country. Time is growing short.
The author covers one hell of a lot of territory in this one, pulling together what could fairly be considered a politico-historical Theory Of Everything. It’s the deepest of deep dives, it’s lengthy, and it makes for some mighty uncomfortable reading in spots, which you should nonetheless do.
The burning of a righteous man.
Papa John’s Pizza founder and CEO John Schnatter was forced out of his own company back in 2018 after he reportedly used the N-word on a phone call. Yet in the past few weeks, Schnatter has released the transcript of the phone call in question, and that transcript reveals the true story — it appears Schnatter was set up and the alleged “offense” wasn’t an offense at all. The Papa John’s founder suffered a heinous defamation of character.
Schnatter has sued Laundry Service, the company he hired to help bolster his public image, for many breaches of contract. His lawsuit claims that the company blackmailed him and orchestrated his destruction.
The racism accusations against Schnatter had always been politically motivated and overblown, but the transcript reveals just how duplicitous Laundry Service was and just how deceptive was the story that tanked Schnatter’s career.
The Laundry Service is a shitlib firm, staffed entirely by dishonest, amoral, hate-crazed shitlibs. Schnatter, as a prominent and tremendously successful Right-thinking entrepreneur, was like a fat, juicy steak dangling in front of a hungry tiger’s nose—a prospective kill so enticing that no vicious shitlib could pass up a chance at taking him down and destroying his life. Yet the inexplicable fact remains that John hired the evil bastards himself, shelling out millions of his hard-earned dollars to enrich the same scabrous curs who would then happily engineer his ruination without batting an eye.
The quote that damned Schnatter, scandalized the citizens, and was used to construct the gallows for the low-tech lynching of a guiltless man?
The Papa John’s founder did not use the N-word in the exercise but rather when he spoke with members of his team after the call. The recording and the transcript captured Schnatter’s remarks along with those of Laundry Service personnel who spoke to one another on mute afterward.
“I got to tell you, heaven forbid this company if they’re not going to use me at all. After I’ve looked at this research, I mean, I’m just not seeing how you’re not going to tell the Papa John story and let them – what bothers me is Colonel Sanders called blacks n******. I’m like, I’ve never used that word. And they get away with it,” Schnatter said. “Yet we use the word ‘debacle’ and we get framed in the same genre. It’s crazy. The whole thing’s crazy.”
Well, I won’t say it isn’t. But what’s much, much crazier is that, after having seen so many of their fellows get their butts caught in the blades the exact same way time and time again, there are still some who profess shock when they DO get away with it. Which they always, always do. Why conservative businessmen go right on entering into business relationships with people that so desperately hate them—foolishly trusting in the integrity, professionalism, and broadmindedness of people who possess none of those fine qualities—is beyond comprehension.
An extremely unflattering comparison.
Those old enough to remember the Cold War will recall, perhaps with some prompting, that the fight with the Soviets was as much a moral war as a political one. It was not that the communists were in error about some item in dispute. The communists were immoral because communism was immoral. Whatever the faults of liberal democracy, it was morally superior to the evils of communist totalitarianism.
At the time, this was not a tough case to make. Americans could speak out against the government, while Russians had to suffer in silence. The West had elections and big public spats over policy. Debate in the East was always behind the dreary walls of the communist party. Most important, the West did not have political prisoners, while the East operated camps, even small cities, for their dissidents.
A generation later and the roles are not exactly reversed, but it is now possible to argue that Russians are freer than Americans. Putin has his enemies jailed, but that’s now official policy in America. In the case of Putin, he does not relish in the torment of his opponents. There is some hint of shame there. In America, members of the regime take pleasure in tormenting those who speak out against them.
Take, for example, the case of Alexey Navalny, the CIA-sponsored critic of Putin who is now in jail. He claims poor treatment at the hands of the government, but he is able to speak to the media about it. In contrast, there are an unknown number of people in jail right now over the January protests. One was beaten by guards to the point where he lost sight in one eye.
Unlike with Alexey Navalny, The New York Times and The Washington Post are not demanding Ronald Sandlin be set free. The great and the good are not calling him a political prisoner, despite the fact he is literally in jail for politics. The folks who tell us “democracy dies in darkness” are happy that Ronald Sandlin now lives in darkness at the hands of the state. The political prisoners being held by the Biden regime envy Alexey Navalny.
It is not just at the extreme where the moral relationship has reversed. Russian citizens can walk up to the Kremlin and take pictures of it and themselves in front of it without fear of being shot by the army. Americans, on the other hand, will be sent to prison for daring such a radical act. People protest in Moscow all the time. As long as they are peaceful, they are left alone. Protest is banned in Washington now.
A generation ago, Americans knew they would win the Cold War, because they were right about the moral depravity of communism. Such a system could not last. The Soviet system did collapse, because devoid of moral authority, the cost of maintaining it eventually exceeded the benefits of the system. By the end, no one could think of a reason to sacrifice for the system or the people running it.
Americans are quickly approaching the same decision. As long as the material benefits are not threatened, most are happy to remain in their cells. At some point, though, the number of people no longer able to tell the good guys from the bad guys, the white hats from the black hats, will reach a critical mass. The ruling regime is burning what is left of its moral authority to fuel its hold on power. When the tank runs dry, they will join the communists in the dustbin of history.
There are other equally-invidious comparisons to be made, and to be learned from.
The parallels are so striking that one can wonder if there really is an unseen force guiding history along. Was there no one who might have stopped Hitler’s rise or the Russian revolution? Germany had no such person. Russia did. Pyotr Stolypin, though, was assassinated in 1911, and things just muddled along until Lenin and the communists took charge. Donald Trump in America tried heroically to stop the communists but failed. The left, controlling nearly all that matters in America, didn’t have to assassinate Trump to attain its goal.
Another interesting parallel works in reverse. Joe Biden best matches the pathetic Tsar Nicholas II, whom a coalition of liberals and socialists overthrew (before the Bolsheviks then overthrew them) to seize power and whose legacy is that of an uncomprehending fool. Biden came after the seizure of power by the Reds in Washington, but that hasn’t stopped him from modeling Tsar Nicholas’s foolishness. In fewer than three months, Joe’s incompetence has become legendary, bordering on comical.
Comical, only nobody’s laughing.
Ordinary people in 1917 Russia and 1933 Germany generally went about their business after monsters ascended to power. Perhaps they dreaded the future but had no way to change it or any idea of where things would go. It was probably best for them that they did not know. And so with us today.
“Best for them”? Well, back then, maybe. But only maybe, and only by a whisker. As the man says, in 1917 and 1933 the world didn’t have the benefit of a hundred-year record of death, impoverishment, and enslavement that are the inevitable products of Leftist ideology that we enjoy today. So people of that time can perhaps be given a pass for having been taken in by this extreme and inhuman ideology and all its evil works.
But today, we have no such excuse. Thus, I hardly think it can be considered “best” for anybody “not to know” their history. Actually, I consider such ignorance to be unforgivable, amounting to a crime which creates its own punishment—an extravagantly harsh punishment suffered by the deserving and the blameless alike. If we witness yet another nation stricken by this self-inflicted plague, no one who was either too mulish, too starry-eyed, or too just goddamned stupid to see what any even half-sentient soul could have told them was coming ought to be given a bye.
A practical application of the Second Amendment.
On Tuesday night a second round of riots and looting took place in Brooklyn Center, Minnesota, which is not far from the riot-and-crime-ridden city of Minneapolis. Footage of Dollar Tree and other storefronts being burglarized in act of civil protest against racial injustice circulated online, and gunshots were routinely heard in the distance.
A few stores in Brooklyn Center were left unmolested, however: businesses guarded out front by armed civilians.
Emphasis mine, and vital.
Despite calls to violent “revolution” by looters, they did not appear interested in a confrontation with determined shopkeepers.
No, I reckon not. The pics at the bottom of this Tweet say it all.
Some Brooklyn Center stores are being protected by civilians with firearms. The looters have stayed away from these places. pic.twitter.com/fAcmYFxLG6
— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) April 13, 2021
Another day, another effing brilliant SteynMusic outing.
This weekend marks the centenary of George David Weiss, born April 9th 1921. Who was George David Weiss? Well, he’s no household name, but, to reprise my old line on obscure songwriters, you’d be hard put to find a household that doesn’t know at least one George David Weiss song.
So who was George David Weiss? Well, even George Shearing, who wrote his one and only enduring song with Weiss, had no more to say about him in his autobiography than that he was “a man by the name of George David Weiss”. The man by the name of was born under that name in April 1921 and was all set to become a lawyer or accountant when he decided to follow his heart and go to Juilliard, where he learned composing and arranging. The latter got him employment with Stan Kenton and other bands, until he met his first songwriting partner, the talented West Indian composer Bennie Benjamin. A young Sinatra picked up their “Oh, What It Seemed to Be”, and a few years later Kay Starr had a monster hit with “Wheel of Fortune”…
Starr’s chartbuster is of course a true gem, one which I’ve thoroughly enjoyed performing onstage myself who even knows how many times. Robert Gordon did a mighty fine version as well.
Weiss had one hell of a capacious catalog, and as Steyn somewhat bemusedly notes, had everybody from Sinatra to Nat Cole to Peggy Lee to Elvis to…ummm…Whitesnake(?!?) cover his stuff over the years. That’s a variety so stylistically broad that it says a lot about the enduring appeal of the man’s work all by itself. I’ll embed another of my personal all-time Weiss faves before we all move on to what I consider the really fun part of the story.
The Tokens, in an ironic twist quite commonly found in the music biz, not only had no faith in the song but actually despised the thing, even going so far as to plead with the producers and their label not to release the very song that would end up being their one and only bona fide smash. Not the first time such lightning-strikes weirdness has occurred in the biz, and you can be sure it won’t be the last.
Now we come to the part I was most amused by, a chapter of the Weiss story all a-brim with music biz irony of its own unique flavor. This will require some heavy excerpting, but I assure one and all that the payoff is well worth the arduous wade to get there.
It started with Bob Thiele, who was a successful record producer but only a very occasional songwriter. So, for a composing partner, he turned, as so many others have done, to George David Weiss. In theory the latter could have written any or all of “What a Wonderful World”, but Thiele told me that Weiss stayed mostly down the musical end.
Which I find hard to believe, because the tune is mostly “Twinkle, twinkle, little star” and, after decades in the music biz, Weiss was way beyond that.
On the other hand, Weiss told Graham Nash (of the Hollies and Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young) that he wrote it with Louis Armstrong in mind – which suggests he also had a hand in the lyric.
Why Satchmo? Well, it was a ballad of hope and optimism that transcended the times. But for that very reason it also required a singer who transcended the times.
A singer like, say, Louis Armstrong…
And, if you think that seems kind of obvious now, it certainly wasn’t in 1967. If you pick up almost any jazz critic’s biography of Satchmo, they generally follow the same basic arc: Terrific trumpeter, innovative musician – and then he sold out and did commercial pap for suburban hi-fi filler. I don’t subscribe to that crude reductio myself, but it is true that, after he’d booted the Beatles off the top and taken “Hello, Dolly!” to Number One, the calculus changed somewhat for Armstrong’s management: There’s a new Broadway show opening? Take the big song and do another “Dolly” knock-off. Hence Satchmo’s “Mame” and Satchmo’s “Cabaret”, and doubtless, had he lived, Satchmo’s “Jesus Christ Superstar” and Satchmo’s “Phantom of the Opera”.
Nevertheless, the writers met with Louis to pitch the song. As Bob Thiele recalled, “We wanted this immortal musician and performer to say, as only he could, the world really is great: full of the love and sharing people make possible for themselves and each other every day.”
Instead, Satch peered at the sheet – unlike many singers, he was a musician who could read the music – and, when his eye got to the bottom of the page, he looked up and said:
What is this sh*t?
He was studying the music – no words, just a contemporary ballad tune that called not for Armstrong’s tight jazzy All-Stars but for a string section willing to play “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star”. I wouldn’t myself say the tune was exactly “sh*t”…But, as I said, Armstrong hadn’t seen the lyrics. And, when they passed him the words, he fell in love. Not so much because of the green trees, red roses, blue skies, white clouds, but because of the final eight bars, which ditch the “colors of the rainbow” theme:
I hear babies cry, I watch them grow
They’ll learn much more than I’ll never know
And I think to myself
What A Wonderful World…That quatrain reminded him of 107th Street in Queens, the tree-lined block he and his wife Lucille had lived on for a quarter-century (and whose modest red-brick home now houses the Louis Armstrong Museum):
There’s so much in ‘Wonderful World’ that brings me back to my neighborhood where I live in Corona, New York. Lucille and I, ever since we’re married, we’ve been right there in that block. And everybody keeps their little homes up like we do and it’s just like one big family. I saw three generations come up on that block. And they’re all with their children, grandchildren, they come back to see Uncle Satchmo and Aunt Lucille …and I got pictures of them when they was five, six and seven years old. So when they hand me this ‘Wonderful World,’ I didn’t look no further, that was it.
He was genuinely touched by the heartfelt optimistic simplicity of the sentiment, and its faith in the future – that a new generation would know things that he would never live to see. Like, er, Twitter. Well, let’s not get hung up on the details. He was struck by the song’s message, and so agreed to sing it.
An arrangement was made, musicians were booked, and a studio was procured – for a midnight session in Vegas, after Satch had finished up his set at the Tropicana. There was just one problem. Louis Armstrong had recently switched record labels, to ABC, and the president of the company, Larry Newton, was opposed to Satchmo doing “What a Wonderful World”. I don’t mean he was antipathetic or indifferent to it, or felt it was not a strong choice for a single but would be okay for Side 2 Track 5 of an album. I don’t even mean that he disliked it. He loathed “What a Wonderful World” with a passion: He thought he’d signed the Number One bestselling pop star of “Hello, Dolly!”, and he didn’t want his new act doing what he regarded as the polar opposite of “Dolly” – a soporific inert crawl-tempo ballad.
He’s not necessarily mistaken about that, as my kid’s class certainly demonstrated. So I’m not unsympathetic to Larry Newton’s concerns. The trouble was that on August 16th 1967 he’d flown in to Vegas for a photo shoot with his new star and that evening he showed up at United Studios determined to prevent the recording. He went so totally bananas that Ed Thiele, as producer, and Artie Butler, the arranger, and George Weiss and Frank Military, who were also present, hustled him through the door and locked him out of the studio. Which isn’t exactly conducive to Louis Armstrong recording a tender and sensitive ballad unlike anything he’d sung before…
It was a long session – either because of Newton’s antics or because they were interrupted by the toots of passing Union Pacific freight trains, or because the material was a little outside Pops’ comfort zone. They stayed there till 6am, and then they all went for breakfast. And the label only agreed to pay the orchestra for their extended shift on condition that Satchmo himself accept a mere $250 for the session. But it was worth it: Louis worked and worked on his interpretation until he and the writers were satisfied. I confess as a young child I always heard “the dark sacred night” as “the dark say goodnight”, but once I’d grasped Satch’s enunciation I appreciated what a fine pairing that makes with “the bright blessed day”: it adds a subtle touch of the holy and transcendental to the song; that the world is not merely “wonderful” in the way that a great cheeseburger and a vanilla shake can be, but truly wonderful because it’s the wonder of God’s creation. But, as I said, it’s discreetly done. And Armstrong’s reading of the middle-eight, in that unmistakeable beautiful gravelly rasp, is as sincere and true as anything he ever sang:
The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky
Are also on the faces of people going by
I see friends shaking hands, saying ‘How do you do?’
They’re really saying, ‘I love you…’Is that really what they’re saying? Well, Pops bought into it. In the studio that night, representing all those children who’d grow to learn more than he’d ever know, was George Weiss’ kid Peggy. “So you’re George’s daughter? Pleased to meet you!” And he shook her hand, and maybe, for a small, shrunken old man not in the best of health, it really did mean “I love you.”
And, for those wondering what the hell all this hippie-dippie peace’n’love stuff had to do with Louis Armstrong, he waited to the very end to tie it back to his entire oeuvre in what, with hindsight, was the only possible wrap-up:
Ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh.
Larry Newton wanted another “Hello, Dolly!” Well, he got the last two words.
But he wasn’t happy, and he swore to exact his revenge – by doubling down on the petty and stupid. In order to prove he was right about the song, he released the single in late 1967, but refused to promote it. He didn’t ship it to radio stations, so no disc-jockeys played it, and nobody bought it. In those days, ABC’s UK distribution was licensed to EMI, and, in the fullness of time, “What a Wonderful World” showed up at the London office, and they released it as a normal single. Actually, not that normal, because it was, I believe, the very last single EMI released on their HMV label. But, other than that, they did all the things you’re meant to do with a new release: They sent review copies to the BBC and to trade magazines, and discovered what Larry Newton, once he’d gotten over being locked out of the studio, should have realized – that people really liked it. It entered the UK charts at the beginning of February 1968 at Number 45, cracked the Top Forty in its second week, the Top Thirty in its fourth, and then climbed through March and April up to Number One.
So, just for the record, where did it get to on the Billboard Hot 100?Er, big hit sound Number 116.
In fact, Larry Newton’s singular talent for sabotage was so effective that he wound up with a record that was a hit everywhere except his own territory: Top Thirty in Australia, Top Twenty in New Zealand and the Netherlands, Number Seven in Switzerland, Number Six in Belgium and Germany and Norway, Number Two in Ireland, Number One in Austria… What a wonderful world (America excepted). In London, EMI decided the song was so big they needed an album built around it. At which point Larry Newton decided to triple-down on the moronic. He agreed to the LP, but only if Armstrong did it for $500. Joe Glaser, Louis’ manager, wasn’t in the mood for that, and instructed Bob Thiele:
You tell that fat bastard to go f**k himself and give us $25,000 for eight more sides.
Larry Newton responded:
Tell him to go f**k himself, and why do we give a sh*t about these European companies? Screw ’em all.
They’re really saying “I love you”.
Three years later, Louis Armstrong was dead. If you’d been listening to the radio in Britain, Europe, around the planet in 1971, they marked his passing with “What a Wonderful World”. On American stations, they played everything but.
It took two decades and Good Morning, Vietnam for a great record finally to achieve the recognition on its home turf it had known for a generation everywhere else. It doesn’t matter that Satch was born in 1901; he sounds old and elegaic on the record, and that’s the point: he’s a fellow approaching the end of his life, but he’s not bitter or even bittersweet; he’s not looking back but looking forward to when those babies will grow. It’s an old man, but it’s a young song. That’s why it’s a popular father/daughter dance at weddings: It’s the past blessing the future.
And that’s also true of any great songwriter’s catalogue – which is why we salute George David Weiss on his centennial.
As for Larry Newton, well, I wasn’t sure whether he was still with us or not, so I looked him up, and read:
Newton is probably best remembered today for trying to stop Louis Armstrong from recording ‘What A Wonderful World’.
Ohhhhhh, yeahhhhhh!
Beautiful song, beautiful story, no? Tales like this provide a small window onto why it is that people get into the music business in the first place, and why a not-negligible percentage of them are perfectly willing to break themselves—financially, spiritually, morally, even physically—to stay in, on any level they can contrive. I swear, out of all the great music posts Steyn has done, and he’s done quite a few, this one may well be the beat of ’em all.
About a guy most of us have probably never even heard of.
Steyn gives us one more perfect Prince Phillip quip, with a Shirley Bassey bonus thrown in.
If you’re a Royal consort, you wind up going to a lot of nights out you have not the slightest interest in, like the Royal Command Performance and the Royal Film Premiere and the like. In November 2002, arriving at the Royal Albert Hall for the world premiere of the James Bond film Die Another Day, His Royal Highness was informed by an excited person in the welcome line that Madonna would be singing the title song. He turned to the Queen, and remarked drily, “So we’ll need earplugs then.”
He was quite right. Shirley Bassey had neglected to bring hers, and so, just a few minutes later, the opening titles and the song ended, and Dame Shirl yelled from the stalls, “Rubbish!” She was quite right, too.
Hey, when you’re right, you’re right.
Enemies in common update! If they’re ag’in him, I’m for him.
It's Prince Philip's comments about other nationalities — often inappropriate, occasionally racist and sometimes made on visits hosted by the nations who were the subject of them — that most complicate his legacy. https://t.co/IXLFYTF3oZ
— CNN (@CNN) April 10, 2021
I had the privilege some years ago to be invited to a July 4 dinner at the American ambassador’s residence in London. Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip were the guests of honor, there presumably to bear witness that, after a couple of centuries, the unfortunate business over the repeated injuries and usurpations inflicted by one of her ancestors had been quietly forgotten.
The ambassador rose to give the not-so-loyal toast.
He began with the inevitable nod to the two nations’ divergent histories, noting that some time earlier, in their great wisdom, his compatriots had decided to go it alone. “Oh yes!” cried the prince from a sedentary position, fortified, no doubt, by a couple of glasses of the embassy’s very good wine. “And how’s that working out for you?” It was a good question then, and it’s more apt than ever now given America’s current predicament. The people that once boldly threw off the tyranny of a distant monarch now seem to be meekly submitting to the diktats of a regnant class and ideology that tolerate less independence of thought and action than King George III did.
As the prince did at that dinner, he had an unerring capacity to ask awkward questions, speak inconvenient truths and challenge polite orthodoxies.
When we are obligated to toe an increasingly stultifying conventional line, the queen’s consort was the human antidote to the virus of verbal oppression that has us in a death grip. You’d search a very long time to find a less woke individual than the duke of Edinburgh.
He got all the right knickers in a twist, and he’s still doing it, which makes him a-okay in my book. The unhappier shitlib types are, the better I like it. Kruiser says it well:
Three cheers to Prince Philip for being able to annoy our worthless woke morons first from beyond an ocean and now from beyond the grave.
I don’t care how rich he was, I would have bought him a drink in a heartbeat.
Rest in peace, Phil.
Amen to that.
Another one I’ve had open in a tab for a cpl-three days and now can’t remember where I first ran across it.
The same US Navy that once got sunk at Pearl Harbor, turned around, rebuilt the fleet, then put the entire Tojo navy on the bottom of the ocean in four years. The same Navy that braved the Nazi U-Boats of the Atlantic to supply the war effort in Europe. The US Navy that prepared at a moment’s notice to rain thermonuclear death onto the Soviet Union from the cold, pressing, silence of the deep.
Ahh, but there’s the rub, see: it AIN’T the same Navy, any more than it’s the same nation.
They are afraid of a fucking virus with a more than 99.9% survivability rate for anyone young and healthy enough to serve in the US Navy. When COVID broke out on the USS Roosevelt, there were 1,156 cases, three hospitalizations, and one death.
But the Navy is so scared that they had to pervert the symbol of the United States Navy and virtue signal with it.
The Navy is under the command of cowards.
Utterly, utterly pathetic. But fitting enough for all that, seeing as how, like I just told ya, the larger society said Navy is burdened with defending has shown itself to be composed mostly of ditto over the last year, for the selfsame piss-poor reason. Bearing that in mind, there may be something of a bright side here: the Navy’s shiny new Be Saaaafe!!! approach to warfare—whatever that even means in Amerika v2.0—in combination with the American “military” establishment’s unswerving commitment to Diversity Is Our Strength™, just might be enough to entice this mentally-ill freakamuffin into signing up for a hitch:
“It’s not really up for debate.” pic.twitter.com/32cnPDtCiD
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) April 11, 2021
Dude(ette), I just…just…can’t even. The above rampant psychosis was found at the joint from which I hijacked the disgraced-eagle image and commentary above, a place yclept Gun Free Zone, which clearly needs to be cast into my bookmarks and Ye Olde CF Blogrolle with a quickness. Thus was it written, and thus it has been done. Welcome aboard, fellas.
Inmates, running the asylum.
We used to have mental hospitals, sanitariums, asylums, for the seriously, and long-term, mentally ill. We locked dangerous people away. But too damned many of those facilities were terrible. Outright abuse of patients, well-intended treatments that were abusive, neglect… you name it, they did it. There was a backlash against them. We still have some comparatively small, specialized in-patient treatment centers, but for the most part, we started “mainstreaming” the mentally ill, the out-right crazed. Give enough drugs to keep them from completely flipping out, and hope they’ll keep filling the prescription and taking the meds.
We didn’t just mainstream crazy people, society mainstreamed insanity. A generation grew up watching crazy people acting out around them without knowing they were crazy. It became acceptable to act that way. And as more people picked it up, it set the example for even more.
That’s why we have people like “crewcut lady” who think sharing their psychotic breaks in videos to the world is a good idea. If they left it at that, fine. But they didn’t.
Our new batch of lunatics applied their crazy and illogic to everything in life. That’s how idjits like David Hogglet can demand that oh-so-mature sixteen year-olds be able to vote on life or death issues, but eighteen year-olds are to immature to be trusted with a firearm.
Not entirely sure whether that’s crazy per se, or just fucking stupid. No matter, I suppose; we all wind up in the same place either way.
That’s how we got Alexandria Occasionally-firing-Cortex’ grand plan to save the planet by strip mining it, and filling the holes with the toxic waste left over from manufacturing all those wind gennies and solar panels. Or her plan to simply print monopoly money to pay for it all, then tax every bit of it back to “prevent inflation.” (Hint: Paying for something, then taking the money back without returning the thing is theft. Paying people to work, then stealing the pay back though taxes is slavery.)
Contra my above statement, I am one hundred percent certain that Toothy McBigTits, however out-of-her-mind she may seem to sensible people, is really just plain old-fashioned stupid. That enough New Yorkers voted for her dumb ass to send her to Congress instead of keeping her in her titty-bar habitat humping the pole, as God intended? THAT’S what’s crazy.
That’s how we got a generation of socialist-indoctrinated schoolkids, who see so much crazy on the street that the crazy in classroom doesn’t faze them a bit.
So yeah; when I wrote about how everyone got too dumbed down to keep up the infrastructure? Remember that they are just dumb, they’re crazy. Enjoy operating appliances — “water-saving” clothes washer and dishwashers that take hours to not clean and use more energy, “water-saving” toilets that require multiple flushes to actually flush — designed by the criminally insane.
Bad enough, sure, but there’s worse.
United Airlines plans to hire and train 5,000 pilots, including some with no flying experience
It appears that the skies are about to get a lot less friendly, to repurpose United’s old ad tagline for use against them.
United Airlines says it will train 5,000 pilots this decade, including taking on applicants with no flying experience, and plans for half of them to be women or people of color.
United will borrow an approach used elsewhere, notably at Germany’s Lufthansa, by taking people at the beginning of their flying careers and training them at its own academy, which it bought last year. United will continue to draw pilots from traditional sources such as the military, however.
Airline officials began accepting applicants for United’s flight academy Tuesday.
The subject of a pilot shortage — it is not universally accepted that one exists — was hotly discussed in the airline industry before the coronavirus pandemic hit, and then receded as airlines around the world grounded planes and reduced their pilot ranks in response to the plunge in air travel.
Now travel is rebounding, although it hasn’t returned to 2019 levels.
Much as I’ve always loved to fly, I can guar-on-TEE I won’t be getting on any commercial flights now that I know that they no longer consider being, y’know, a fully-trained, capable pilot a more essential requirement for strapping on an airliner and calling him, zxher, or itself a bona fide, pro-fessional Bus Driver In The Sky than gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, Wokeness, or any of the myriad other irrelevancies to which our society now grants primacy of place over such oppressive and hateful inequities as aptitude and ability. In the unlikely event I’m forced to fly someplace, it damned sure won’t be on United, their having officially declared a newfound disinterest in recruiting the best, most qualified people for left-seater employment, preferring instead to bump Diversity and PC Feelgoodz right on up to Item One on the job application.
Nice of them to be upfront about their total abandonment of all standards of safety, rationality, and corporate responsibility, I suppose. But after a bonehead move like this, I’d rather crawl on hands and knees over a mile of alcohol-drenched broken glass than Fly United™. Henceforth, if I want to fly my brother and I will drive to one of several local civil-aviation facilities, rent ourselves a 172, Seminole, or something along those lines (or a King Air—YES!!!), and just DIY it, thenksveddymuch. We’ve actually done quite a good bit of that very thing over the years, whether for strictly Point A-to-Point B purposes or just an afternoon’s amusement. If you’ve never traveled on a small private aircraft, you can take my word for it when I say that it’s one heck of a lot more fun than flying commercial anyhoo.
Yes, renting a small plane ain’t exactly cheap, especially the fuel cost. But these days, the airlines ain’t exactly cheap either. Throw in a plethora of indignities and/or abuse at the halfwit whim of handsy, thuggish TSA mouthbreathers; interminable delays, endless lines, long walks, surly counter personnel, layovers, and scheduling cockups; and too much other terminal and concourse unpleasantness to list, before you even board. All of that, to then put your very life—quite literally—in the hands of some diversity-hire horrorshow who can’t even run the preflight checklist without more-competent supervision? Someone hired not because thorough vetting confirmed them as the best person for the job, but because there’s a box on the gooberment’s Mandatory Diversity Form that the airline needed to put an X in?
Yeah, no. Spendy or not, the fly-it-yourself option begins to look like a real bargain in comparison, don’t it?
Update! Diversity is NEVER a strength, in any business or industrial context. But in certain fields where the hazard to life and limb is both real and significant, diversity goes from being merely an expensive but more or less bearable nuisance to a serious threat.
After a hard year of reduced travel from the coronavirus, United Airlines decided it was time to announce a new initiative: “Our flight deck should reflect the diverse group of people on board our planes every day. That’s why we plan for 50% of the 5,000 pilots we train in the next decade to be women or people of color.” This type of corporate mantra is so common these days as to be unremarkable. But this announcement led to a lot of critical comments on social media—the dreaded ratio—about how this initiative has nothing to do with making flying safer.
United’s policies, however, are a rather typical expression of the ideology of diversity, a successor to the earlier, more limited concept of affirmative action.
By the 1990s, diversity itself became an entire industry. There were diversity consultants and chief diversity officers. Everyone in the public and private sector now mouths platitudes in support of diversity. An important factor missing from all the diversity talk was data. One reason, of course, is that certain questions are simply too dangerous to explore. The wrong conclusion can lead to pariah status, as The Bell Curve authors learned.
This is why diversity is especially prominent in soft fields with vague metrics of productivity: higher education, government, journalism, nonprofit management, marketing, and human resources. These fields have diffuse responsibility and limited accountability. Bad work by a mediocre employee cannot easily be measured or found out.
In a sense, diversity is a luxury good. Profitable enterprises can absorb people who are not the best of the best, particularly for jobs where being the best is not an important requirement; other talented and hard-working people can cover the slack. In large organizations, there are also jobs where less skilled people can do relatively little harm, like “community liaison.”
For more tangible fields, like firefighting or police work, the costs of lowering standards are more tangible—sometimes directly causing real headaches—but there is little courage inside or outside organizations to speak frankly about the costs of diversity.
This brings us back to United Airlines. There are certain jobs—heart surgeon, pilot, oil tanker captain—where there is almost no room for error. There is a linear relationship of talent and skill, and those on the customer side, as well as the general public, insist on excellence. Mistakes are immediate and costly.
In response to customer criticism, United insisted there would be no degradation in standards or quality. This seems unlikely. In every other field where diversity becomes the watchword, excellence becomes a secondary priority. After all, excellence is rare. Whatever criteria were used to pick the best people before could simply be applied to all comers, the results listed first to last. Everyone knows this would undermine diverse outcomes.
Another important reality undermines diversity propaganda. Hiring and promotion are zero-sum games; to advance one group, one must artificially hold back another. For example, United has said it will definitely not hire more than 2,500 white men to be pilots no matter how skilled. These messages have an impact. Even so, we are told “diversity benefits everyone,” and it is “our” strength.
Surveying the country, it’s hard not to see a more general reduction in quality across the board…not in strength, but fragility. Consider the recent COVID episode. Does this look like a society with a lot of resilience, or one with highly skilled elites and decision-makers?
One would think the airline business is fundamentally simple: get people from point A to point B quickly, cheaply, comfortably, and, most important of all, safely. Presumably airplanes not falling out of the sky is just as important as who wins the Super Bowl.
But for United, safety has to fly coach.
Unfortunately for United, there are other options out there. After this self-inflicted debacle, UA can expect those alternatives to be carefully weighed, by a large number of prospective passengers—planeloads of ’em, one might say.
Haven’t mentioned the death of Prince Phillip here yet, because…well, because meh, honestly. But then I saw this.
The royal consort of the UK has died at age 99. An acerbic individual, here are a selection of Prince Philip’s greatest hits, including his long-running wars against Tom Jones and Elton John, from a 2011 article in The Independent:
1. “Ghastly.” Prince Philip’s opinion of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.
2. “Ghastly.” Prince Philip’s opinion of Stoke-on-Trent, as offered to the city’s Labour MP Joan Walley at Buckingham Palace in 1997.
7. “How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?” Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.
8. “Damn fool question!” To BBC journalist Caroline Wyatt at a banquet at the Elysée Palace after she asked Queen Elizabeth if she was enjoying her stay in Paris in 2006.
11. “We don’t come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves.” During a trip to Canada in 1976.
13. “British women can’t cook.” Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women’s Institute in 1961.
15. “What do you gargle with – pebbles?” To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: “It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs.”
16. “It’s a vast waste of space.” Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.
18. “If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it.” Said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.
22. “I would like to go to Russia very much – although the bastards murdered half my family.” In 1967, asked if he would like to visit the Soviet Union.
Good, goooood squishy, that is. More equally succulent Royal badinage at the link. May flights of angels sing thee to thy rest, Your Highness.
Florida shows us the way back to the Light.
Florida Is Back To Normal And Corporate Media Are Calling It A Hellscape
If your perception of the world is based on what corporate media tells you, you might think Florida is overrun by wild spring break revelers who are running around killing people by flaunting COVID precautions.“How spring break in South Beach spun out of control,” the Washington Post blared. The Associated Press reported “deaths” and “violence,” while “police have arrested hundreds of partiers involved in violence and property destruction” in South Beach.
Business Insider lumped “street fights, arrests, and maskless crowds” together in its description of the debauchery. On March 20, the city of Miami Beach established a state of emergency, complete with an 8 p.m. weekend curfew.
The narrative that “Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis’ ‘open-for-business’ policy is backfiring in Miami Beach,” as Slate suggested, is as lazy as it is inaccurate. I’m sure there are some ne’er-do-wellers in Miami, as in any other place on earth. But the corporate media is so busy trying to dunk on DeSantis’s successful and freedom-centric COVID-19 response, they won’t tell you what’s really going on in the Sunshine State.
I’ve spent the past week in Florida, and visited beach towns on both the Atlantic and Gulf coasts. I’ve seen cheerful street musicians, sailboats unloading in marinas, kids on playgrounds, and moms pushing strollers in seersucker dresses. I’ve seen a few groups of what look like spring breakers too, walking down sunny sidewalks or sitting at beachfront bars enjoying fresh fried seafood.
Teenagers rollerblade down the boardwalk, while fishermen cast off the edge of the pier. People sit and dangle their bare feet over the water, practicing the old southern ritual of passing the time. A maskless street musician plays the accordion, while his dog retrieves dollar bills from the hands of delighted passersby.
Kayaks pass under the pier and jet skis speed around the bay. On the boardwalk, an older gentleman being pushed in a wheelchair is out for a stroll. “We’re open!” signs grace a few storefronts.
At the Saturday morning market, crowds buzz around tents buying farm produce, fresh-baked bread and fresh-squeezed orange juice, jewelry, art, and empanadas. Jenn Sperato mans the booth from the Habana Cafe, a local restaurant in Gulfport.
“Five dollars, honey,” she says as she hands out hot Cuban sandwiches and plantains. She asks another customer, clearly a regular, about her baby.
MMMMMM, Cuban sammitches!!!
Uhh, sorry about that digression, gang, I just couldn’t help myself. Anyways.
“Business keeps picking up,” she tells me. “You get tourists, but you’ll also have locals that will be here every week.”
Down on the beach, kids play in the sand and teenagers climb on rocks that jut out into the water. A few groups are taking family pictures. Behind them, a parasail glides by. An older lady walking her dog passes me on the sidewalk and grins, saying, “It’s so nice not to see masks!”
Normality is alive and well in Florida, as much as corporate media don’t want to admit it. Families with young kids are enjoying the open restaurants, beaches, and storefronts alongside retired couples and teenagers. I sense an attitude of friendliness, and camaraderie with strangers rather than fear of them. And there seems to be an extra abundant number of American flags.
For Fake News Media, what’s to like about any of that? They aren’t journalists anymore, nor do they aspire to be. They’re Gatekeepers and Influencers, the Deep State’s Propaganda Korps shock troops. Their job is decidedly NOT to honestly and fairly report on the day’s events but to steer them—to ensure the Sheeple remain compliant; the State remains all-powerful and pervasive; and the recently restored status quo ante-Trump of Amerika v2.0 remains undisturbed. Florida has become problematic for the Holy Narrative, a threat which must not go unchallenged.
In DeSantis’s Florida, America That Was is fighting back, even beginning to turn the tide. Can it be much of a surprise that her enemies would launch a fierce counterassault, hoping the rest of us will stay in our cages?
Update! A bigger problem than Trump was?
You would think it was summer 2024 and presidential polls were showing Democrats ten points behind the way they and the media (“Democrats with bylines” as Glenn Reynolds put it) are coming after Ron DeSantis, hurling any ridiculous accusation they can find at the proverbial wall, hoping one will stick.
The other day it was “Sixty Minutes”—Dan Rather’s old stomping grounds before he was caught in some big time fibbing, speaking of presidential elections—trying to smear the Florida governor, asserting he had favored Publix in lucrative COVID vaccine distribution because the supermarket chain gave him a campaign donation. (As is the corporate custom, Publix did the same with virtually every other politician, including, apparently, Bernie Sanders.)
About five minutes serious research would have unearthed the absurdity of this charge—since debunked by several Florida Democrats—but with the anti-DeSantis zeitgeist at the ultra-establishment “Sixty Minutes” five months wouldn’t have been enough, even with the myriad producers and assistants working at CBS.
The need to “get” DeSantis overwhelmed all, including, as has been noted everywhere except for most of the mainstream media, cherry-picking the governor’s remarks to turn them inside out.
So the Democrats are seeing a problem down the road, a problem with the potential of growing even bigger than Donald Trump, if such a thing were possible, a Republican presidential candidate who is considerably smarter than they are and, thus far, keeps his cool and is willing to punch back at their excesses.
Besides that, he might be more appealing to the “soccer moms” than Trump.
Better to wipe him out now.
Perhaps. Of course, the proposition that DeSantis might be a credible threat depends on the fatally-flawed premise that “elections” still mean a thing, which they don’t, so why bother “wiping him out” at all? Then again, though, the proposition that the Democrat-Socialists might not feel any particular need to wipe out DeSantis rests on an equally flawed premise: that they wouldn’t destroy anyone they wanted to destroy—threat or no threat, need or no need, with reason or without. Perverse villainy; force of habit; pure spite; an innate compulsion to crush all dissent; some unknown factor—any one of these would be sufficient motivation to drive the Demonrats to it.
The politics of personal destruction is simply what these people do; the odds against an attempt to preemptively take DeSantis out of play don’t make for comfortable betting.
Another fine idea whose time has…well, not come, exactly. More like been crammed down our throats.
Whew, digging a 300 square-foot bunker suitable for young children is hard work. My back isn’t what it used to be. So far, we’re 50 feet down in the backyard and are about to pour 10-inch thick WiFi-proof concrete walls. The kids will have goldfish, coloring books, a Kindle that contains all of Western classical literature, Play-Doh, and a hose for drinking water. They’ll be lowered into the hole when they turn six, and we’ll let them climb out when they turn 18.
We plan to tell any nosy neighbors that we sent the kids away to a new progressive anti-racism academy.
Cruel, you say? Not if you’re trying to insulate your precious children from the all-powerful wokeness algorithm. In fact, it’s the only way to be sure.
Will I miss them? Sure, but I’m comforted knowing they’ll be among the few who survive the radioactive wokelear fallout released this year.
Oh, you don’t want to chain your kids up in the basement and seal all the doors? Rather not ship them to an ice floe off Greenland, or a yurt in outer Mongolia?
Then, friends, you’re going to need to become a master of anti-wokeness.
They—you know who I mean—wish to consume your children: skin, muscle, bits, and bone. You must therefore make your children taste awful, like the little orange tree frogs who coat their skin with poison so hungry toucans spit them out. Force society to spit your children out of their ravenous maws. Make your children undesirable. Make them unbearable to the predations of the Left. It’s your job to ensure that the only way to change your kid’s minds is under threat of death, which, if present conditions hold, we may be approaching before they reach adulthood.
No one is pumping the brakes, like, at all. It’s only getting faster. You’re going to have to leap off the train, and push your babies out ahead of you. Fingers crossed you land on a soft patch of hay in a quiet ravine with no Wi-Fi or public schools within 100 miles. But you’ve got no choice. You are their only hope! Do not fail them. If you do nothing else as a parent, you must do this: prevent wokeness from colonizing their developing brains.
I dunno, but I get the feeling that maybe, just maybe, the author intends this piece to be taken as satire—it’s just so hard to tell nowadays. Be that as it may, the first recommendation seems practical enough.
ONE: Speak truth to gender, and never shut up.
I spent years pointing out decrepit junkies by the freeway on-ramp to my kids as a real-life anti-drug lesson. “See that sunburned hobo covered in open sores, Son? When he was a teenager he smoked pot once—once—and now look at him.”When it comes to gender, beware! Lack of confidence and moral uncertainty in otherwise normal, educated parents have given the Pronoun People an easy port of entry into your child’s hungry cortex, and they are rushing into the breach.
Despite what the clowns running this circus want you to think, it actually IS possible to be 100% certain which gender your baby will identify with, as long as you commit as a parent to stopping entry of brain worms. Fake gender identities are a modern progressive social epidemic induced by the Internet, so it requires some avoidance techniques to prevent this infection.
First, you must shun gender neutrality. Dress your girls like ladies and your boys like off-duty firemen. If your little boy requests to wear a dress to school, tell him firmly that boys do not wear dresses, only girls do, and you refuse to allow him to entertain fantasy notions. If boys are allowed to wear dresses at your school, find a new school. If your children insist there are more than two genders, spend some time at the zoo and challenge them to identify these elusive other genders.
Oughta clear things up nicely, I believe. When it comes to dispelling the shitlib brain-fog, there’s no better fan than reality.
Or has it passed us by?
Liberty activist Ammon Bundy of Idaho is warning Americans that there’s little time left to turn back the tyranny that’s taking hold from authoritarian COVID-19 dictates.
Party affiliation seems to mean little across the country as, whether Democrat or Republican, few are willing to stand up for liberty, according to Bundy. Idaho Gov. Brad Little is a Republican, and the state is one of the largest GOP states in the nation.
“I’m getting tired. I’m about ready to say to hell with everybody. Literally, to hell with everybody,” Bundy said. “I’m tired of going to jail and standing up, and I’m grateful for the small amount of people who have stood up with me, but why can’t people see the danger of what is happening. I wish I would have never ever read a history book or the Constitution. That’s how I feel sometimes because then I could feel like ‘well, there’s no problem you know. I’ll just put on a mask. I’ll just comply. There’s no problem here.’”
Bundy added: “But no, these are serious things that have happened before over and over. These are not the beginnings. We’re in the middle to coming up to the end of basically when people lose complete power over themselves and over their freedom. And people just don’t seem to care. I’m not trying to be pessimistic or a downer, but we have to wake up. We have to wake up. I don’t want to live in a dictatorship any longer. I don’t want to pass this on to my children.”
Although a local story, Bundy said every American is facing similar tyranny.
“We’re in trouble, and Idaho’s not the only one doing this. Idaho’s not the only state doing this,” Bundy said. “Either I’m completely crazy or we’ve got a really, really big problem.”
Bundy added: “I’ve been trying to do my best on warning people and showing people and exposing people what this COVID is all about. It is about force. It is about taking the rights of the people away, you and I. They use it for everything, an excuse for everything. An excuse not to have a jury trial. An excuse not to have hearings. An excuse to completely trample on the rights of the people. An excuse to arrest you here and arrest you there. An excuse to destroy the liberties of the people of an entire state and then try to get immunity out of a special legislative session, and then an excuse to arrest people who show up, peacefully show up and just trying to make a difference.”
Whatever your opinion of Bundy may be—and there seems to be a fairly wide variance among ’em out there—he’s right about all this, and you know damned well he is. Supporting evidence:
In August of last year, Bundy was arrested and charged with trespassing twice within two days at the Idaho State Capitol in Boise. He, along with other liberty activists, were seeking to offer public comments during a special legislative session to oppose Little’s effort to “make himself immune from the COVID decisions and all the terrible things he’s done to Idaho,” Bundy said.
This came after Little gave himself control, via an executive order, over all federal dollars coming into the state concerning COVID-19 after the CARES Act was signed by former President Donald Trump. Bundy stated that Idaho has received at least $8.1 billion from the federal government, and Little has effectively declared martial law by stating “all the government of Idaho is under the governor, and then he did exactly what the federal government wanted him to do.”
One of those trespassing charges has already been dropped because the Director of Administration, who made the charge, did not have authority to trespass anyone. Bundy is still awaiting trial, along with a co-defendant, on the second charge.
After the arrests in August, Bundy was arrested last month for “failure to appear in court” on the other outstanding trespassing charge. However, Bundy and his co-defendant did show up to court but were denied access to the building because they refused to wear a face mask.
Fast forward to yesterday, Bundy was arrested on trespassing charges at the state capitol and again by the Director of Administration who the court’s already ruled did not have authority to trespass citizens. After bailing himself out, Bundy returned to the capitol and again was arrested for trespassing, this time by Sargent Blake Higley of the Idaho State Police who Bundy said told him “I don’t have to have authority” when asked for authority to make the arrest.
Lots of people in my circle are fond of lamenting that America is now “a joke,” but that’s not so. What it actually is, and has long been, is a lie. The powerlessness to see things put right again that we all feel, the frustration and despair that burdens Bundy right along with every other Real American, is no accident. It’s just another part of The Plan, and it seems to be working quite well so far, thanks.
Now tell me again all about how wrong and unhelpful it is to say that they’re evil, whydon’tcha. That one’s my favorite.
If there’s any one aspect of the overblown reaction to the January 6th doin’s that I find most sick-making of all, it’s the way putative conservatives just blandly swallowed whole the Deep Statists’ intentionally manipulative mischaracterization of the protest as “deadly riots,” “insurrection,” “coup attempt,” et al. America’s Sweetheart Julie Kelly is way too smart to be fooled by it.
January 6 Is the New Russiagate Lie
It’s impossible to count how many impressions of “five people killed” pollute government documents, news websites, social media, and the brains of tens of millions of Americans. The line is a permanent chapter in the folklore of January 6—and it’s untrue. Just like the notion the protest was an “armed insurrection” and the people involved are guilty of “sedition,” the January 6 body count is one more myth.There will be no retractions, however, and no apologies. Last weekend, following the killing of a Capitol police officer by a Nation of Islam follower, news and opinion sites reupped the lie about Sicknick, some even laughably sticking to the completely debunked fire extinguisher attack.
The public can expect the same here. Everyone invested in the original version will ignore the evidence and keep repeating the lie that five people died at the hands of bloodthirsty Trump loyalists. Facts simply do not matter.
In some ways, the crusade to criminalize January 6 is far worse than Russiagate. Regular Americans exercising their First Amendment rights are being treated as political prisoners, held hostage by their own government, denied due process. Hyperpartisan Biden appointees in charge of the most potent government tools are aiming those weapons at the Right as a whole, threatening to create no-fly lists and warning Americans half their countrymen are wannabe domestic terrorists.
Team Mueller undoubtedly marvels at what the Biden Justice Department is getting away with.
Jules goes on to note one last point of comparison betwixt January 6th and the Russiagate swindle, which is perhaps the most nefarious of them all.
And must either be confronted, or yielded to.
Elections in America have always been contentious things, as the point of them is to get all sides as agitated as possible. If you wanted to find the point at which our elections turned ugly it would be when the concept of turnout became the focus. The surest way to get your guys motivated to vote is to convince them that the alternative is pure evil, the worst thing imaginable. Since one side will always lose, it means something close to half the country is always angry at the result.
The thing is though, it was always a game and most people got it. The candidates would say the vilest things about one another, but then carry on like old pals during a debate, showing the world they did not really mean those things. In fact, this is why the Left has controlled the country. Everyone else has always been sure the Left was not really serious about what they were saying. Despite it all, many people remain convinced that the Left today is just putting on a show.
That may be one of the factors creating the current crisis. The eruption of mass media over the last couple of decades puts the Left in our face all the time. There is no escaping politics today, which means there is no escaping the Left. Watch a sporting event and there will be lefty political preaching. Check the weather for your trip to the beach and you get a lecture on global warming. Go outside and you see people wearing three masks in their car, letting you know they are in that cult.
Of course, social media is like standing in front of a firehose. Even if you only want to follow something banal like entertainment news, you will be drenched in political commentary, almost entirely from the Left. The carnies all fashion themselves as philosophers now. The athletes have made politics a feature of their act. These are the dumbest, crudest people in our society, but they are sure you need to know what they have to say about current events.
There is another part to this. Along with not being able to escape the left-wing crazies, it is becoming increasingly clear that there is no living with them. Politics, regardless of the system, is about compromise. The opposing sides find some middle ground that they can accept or some combination of their proposals that prevent either side from feeling cheated by the other. In a democracy, compromise is based on the understanding that both sides want what is best.
How do you reach a compromise with someone who thinks invisible men from a faraway land used mind control to change an election? On top of that, they were perfectly willing to destroy the country over it. If one side is sure the other side is evil, there can never be a compromise. The best you can get is a truce in the hostilities, but eventually one side will attack again. After all, any compromise with evil is immoral on its face, so the only more thing to do is confront it.
The larger issue isn’t that one side believes the other is evil. The most pressing issue is that one side is, in fact, EVIL. When one identifies the Left as capital-E Evil, one is neither exaggerating for effect nor issuing an unfounded charge.
The problem is redoubled—nay, retripled, reFOURPLED, even—by the fact that the non-evil side is extremely reluctant to acknowledge that the Evil side is, in fact, EVIL. Then redouble it again owing to the Not-Evils’ dread of being thought of as—GASP!!—impolitic, overwrought, or just goshdarnit RUDE should they dare to conduct themselves according to the acknowledgement that they didn’t want to own up to in the first damned place, and…well, it won’t be long before everybody throws up their hands in despair, says to hell with it all, and heads on back home for a nice, frazzled-nerve-soothing nap on the couch.
Some of our Non-Evils really need to ask themselves a few things, and should not be allowed any dessert until they’re able to provide a satisfactory answer:
This, in turn, brings to boil a whole kettle of other most pertinent fish, a standout among which is the cognitive dissonance created by recognizing Evil and at the same time denying yourself any effective means to combat it. Some of the others I’ll likely be going into in a later post.
How it’s fucking DONE, people.
Absolutely spectacular.
Love seeing this. pic.twitter.com/MX54bVeZpB— Kyle Kashuv (@KyleKashuv) April 7, 2021
So wonderful to know that, despite everything, there are at least some places where the good old American spirit of rebellion, resistance, and defiance endures, ain’t it? Try though the rotten bastards have to extinguish it, liberty’s flame yet burns in American hearts.
(Via Ace)
James asks one which is incorrectly constructed due to his use of the wrong tense.
Wrong choice of protagonist as well, I see. Here’s a better version, corrected for phrasing, tense, and nomenclature: Did America survive Barrack Obama? The answer is all too obvious at this late stage of the game, alas, so I see no need to further belabor the point.
Nevertheless, Kunstler has a larger point to make here, involving not only the extravagantly sordid and venal Biden famiglia felonosa but the entire execrable FUSAn political system of which they’re such pluperfect representatives. Although it’s neither new nor surprising, it remains a point worth revisiting.
If you want to understand the complete failure of moral authority in America, seek no further than the gothic doings of the Biden family, especially now that the President’s degenerate son, Hunter, has been rewarded with a $2-million advance-against royalties (i.e., money up-front) from Simon & Schuster, and a gala publicity tour of the national news media designed to conceal his criminal culpability in evidence contained on the “laptop from hell” that he stupidly abandoned in a Delaware repair shop while lurching through his daily doings on one of countless drug jags he’s enjoyed between rehabs since his dad stepped back into national politics.
The failure is shared by a national news media that refuses to scrutinize the obvious financial crimes documented on the laptop, the FBI, which sat on the laptop through the months of Trump Impeachment No. One — while the computer contained evidence of Hunter’s grifting and money-laundering directly benefiting “the Big Guy,” Joe Biden, at issue in the impeachment — and the Department of Justice, which has been sitting on its hands pretending to conduct an investigation into all this.
The moral darkness of the family is beyond Shakespearean. It ranges from fantastically sordid personal indecencies like Hunter posting drug-fueled selfie sex videos with whores on the PornHub website, to intimations of lewd consort with his teenage niece, to the admitted fact of him bird-dogging his dead brother’s wife, Hallie… and into financial misdeeds that suggest Hunter sold out his country by peddling Joe Biden’s favor to agents of the Chinese communist party and other foreign nations. This body of unresolved allegations haunts the House of Biden like some stinking dead animal decaying under the Oval Office floorboards that everyone pretends not to notice.
The gross failure of federal authority, and abuse of authority, in this land is an ongoing process. You can date it back to wherever you like — say, to all the confusion and deception around the JFK assassination, or even further — but it had never been so broad, so deep, and so blatant as when Donald Trump became a candidate and all the resources of the CIA, DOJ, and the FBI were marshaled against him in the phony operations that became RussiaGate. Now, under Joe Biden, the system is entirely poisoned and corrupt.
Hunter is supposedly under investigation by the DOJ for tax fraud. Is that all? Are they not curious at all about the imputation of Chinese influence over decision-making in Joe Biden’s White House? Apparently, China paid for the influence it now enjoys. Millions of ordinary American citizens have seen the actual record, screen-captured from Hunter’s laptop, of email correspondence that details the many deals and payments made by Chinese companies run by the CCP to Hunter’s various shell corporations, as well as the memos between Hunter and his partners breaking down the payment schedule among Biden family members, including “the Big Guy.”
Is there not some larger — very large — question as to how this Manchurian Candidate with failing mental capacities, seemingly run by other figures in the shadows, came to be installed at the head of our government? The USA will not survive as a nation unless we seek to find out.
It appears less and less likely that the FUSA as currently constituted will survive whether we do or we don’t. Either way, the question is past its sell-by date, as is the mouldering mess of a nation it refers to. A far more cogent question now is whether it should survive—and whether Real Americans ought to hope that it does, or instead try to do whatever they can to help speed the process of collapse along.
COME ON, MAN.
Uhhhh HUH. God, but I love this soooo much, I really do. Rave on, Gramps.
President Joe Biden claimed Wednesday that commercial aircraft would soon be able to travel at speeds of up to 21,000 miles per hour.
“I tell the kids, the young people that work for me — I told my kids, when I go on college campuses, they’re going to see more change in the next 10 years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years,” Biden said during an address about his proposed infrastructure legislation. “We’re going to talk about commercial aircraft flying at subsonic speeds, supersonic speeds, be able to figuratively, if you may, if we decide to do it, be able to traverse the world in an hour, travel at 21,000 miles an hour.”
Which, in case you didn’t know, is actually quite a bit faster than the ISS, which plods along at a bit under 18,000 mph or thereabouts. Never you mind, Gramps, you go ‘head on.
It was not clear what Biden meant by “figuratively.” The speed he suggested is roughly equivalent to Mach 28, which would make airlines capable of traversing the 2,400 miles between New York and Los Angeles in roughly seven minutes. The fastest commercial airliners presently travel at speeds of about 600 miles per hour, a little less than Mach 1.
Several companies do have plans in the works to increase top speeds to nearly 4,000 miles per hour, or Mach 5. Boeing announced plans to that effect in 2018. Florida-based Aerion announced similar plans last month for a Mach 4+ commercial airliner, which it said would be ready “before the end of the decade.”
Shyeeeaaah, like that’s ever gonna happen. I mean, I’m sure they can build ’em, but everyone who thinks the Safety Nazis will permit any such super-speedster aircraft to fly here without protest please raise your hand. Not to even mention that the sleek, beautiful, now sadly-defunct Concorde, a real pokealong at just over Mach 2, got itself banned from overland flight in the US and several other countries due to complaints about the noise from sonic booms.
It’s a beautiful, beautiful dream you have there, Gropey, it truly is. But if it ever comes true the FUSA won’t have had any part in it, it won’t be because of anything you did, and you won’t deserve an ounce of credit for it.
Not that any of that will stop him from trying to glom it for himself anyway, natch.
You’ve all seen the hysteria, the hyperbole, the agenda-driven misrepresentation. Now have a gander at what might have been.
The FBI isn’t alone in claiming the January 6 Capitol protest was the worst thing to happen to America since 9/11. A substantial share of nominally Republican politicians has joined that chorus. Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) went so far as to say that Donald Trump will have “a place in history” for the Capitol riot: “They could have blown the building up. They could have killed us all.”
If only.
When Graham says this, he knows perfectly well that he is lying. Trump asked the hundreds of thousands of Americans who came to show their support to walk with him peacefully to the Capitol. He made “peaceful” explicit. Nonetheless, every corrupt politician and newscaster in America has been able to find the violent subtext buried somewhere in Trump’s speech.
Well, try this on for size: Suppose if, instead of saying “let’s walk to the Capitol peacefully,” Trump instead had said what everyone accuses him of saying. Suppose he’d said, “The election is being stolen from us and I’m not giving up power.” (Remember how the Left fantasized Trump would have to be removed from the Oval Office by force?) Suppose Trump continued: “I am calling on my supporters to defend my presidency with violence. Come to Washington. Bring your guns! Bring every weapon you can lay your hands on. Don’t let anyone stop you. No justice, no peace!”
If only.
What do you suppose would have happened then? Do you think that the only person to be shot that day would have been an unarmed protester? If Trump had one ounce of the autocratic, dictatorial tendencies the press accuse him of having, he need only have asked his supporters to defend him with force. They would have.
It’s hard to say what would have followed, but it would not have been pretty. If Trump had actually encouraged violence, the “Capitol Riot” would have been a bona fide riot. We wouldn’t be able to count the death toll on a single hand. It would take hundreds, or thousands, of hands. If Americans had come to Washington actually seeking to “kill them all,” as Graham so despicably insists, you can bet that they would have succeeded in killing at least some.
By some estimates, 1.5 million Americans showed up on January 6 to protest the theft of their right to vote. They were angry as hell, but overwhelmingly peaceful. Even with the FBI in maximum repression mode, there has been a grand total of 127 arrests. No one burned cars or besieged police stations. What, in contrast, would a million-and-a-half Antifa have done to Washington, D.C.?
Hundreds of thousands or even millions of Americans would have answered a call to arms from President Trump. That he never made such a call is patently obvious, most of all to the liars and blackguards who make these accusations. They feel safe to say whatever they want because they know that Trump is a vastly better man than they: Trump believes honestly (and in my view correctly) that he won reelection. He believes the most powerful office in the world was stolen from him. Yet he loves America far too much to bring it to violence on his account. His accusers know this, or else they wouldn’t dare utter a peep—because it would actually be dangerous for them.
How ironic, then, that Trump’s sincere patriotism and reluctance to thwart the coup against him by any means required should result in the permanent loss of the very nation he so cherished. Now, all anyone can do is watch as the dismal drama plays out to its unhappy ending, with all the horror and grief that will inevitably ensue after the curtain falls. We’ll never really know all the reasons for it, but whatever they were, Trump’s failure to “cross the Rubicon” didn’t come without its own cost, and it was steep.
Another point worth mentioning: Whereas Trump loves an America that has ceased to exist, Leftards have always reserved their allegiance for a muzzy dream of some future “America” that bears absolutely no resemblance to the one conceived, created, and bequeathed to us by our Founders.
WARNING: Some of you more genteel types will definitely want to avert your eyes from what follows, which I’ll tuck below the fold just as a courtesy. The embedded and/or linked material is, by all civilized standards, not safe for work—or for polite company in places outside the office, probably. Vulgar old bastid that I am, I think it’s just hilarious. Continue reading “Doin’ the dirty boogie”
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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
"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." — Daniel Webster
“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.” – Frank Zappa
“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.” - John Adams
"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged." - GK Chesterton"The only way to live free is to live unobserved." - Etienne de la Boiete
"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid." — Dwight D. Eisenhower
"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil." - Skeptic
"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork." - David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar
"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress." - Frederick Douglass
"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine." - Joseph Goebbels
“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.” - Ronald Reagan
"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it." - NC Reed, from Parno's Peril
"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in." - Bill Whittle
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