Category: Hmmm…

Nice work if you can get it

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It might be a big club, but you and me ain’t in it.

Alexandria Ocasio’s Assets
Alexandria Ocasio (AOC) owns over 6 real estate properties, 5 Cars, 2 Luxury Yachts. Alexandria Ocasio’s Assets also includes Cash reserves of over $3 Million. Alexandria Ocasio (AOC) also owns an investment portfolio of 11 stocks that is valued at $15 Million.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) attracts high donations and gifts from wealthy businesses and Wall Street investors. In the past 24 months, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has received over $7 Million in direct and indirect donations from such parties.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s wealth also includes her savings in real estate. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez owns number of prime real estate properties across New York, which brings her monthly income through rent. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s net worth also includes a small portion of Bitcoins.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Liabilities
In order to compute the accurate net worth of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), we need to deduct her liabilities from her total Assets. In order to build her political career, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has borrowed over $2 Million in loans and mortgages from JP Morgan, which is a current outstanding liability.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Cars
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has recently bought a Mercedes-Benz EqC for $140,000 USD. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez also owns a BMW X8 that cost her $200,000 USD. A Few other cars owned by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are listed below. Also see Joe Manchin Net Worth.

Mercedes-Benz GLA
Audi Q2
BMW X7

As a Congresscritter, Alex from the Bronx Sandy from Westchester pulls in a comparatively paltry 155k per annum. As a natural-born skeptic, Divemedic has questions.

A person who gets elected to the House of Representatives receives a salary of $155,000 per year. Prior to being elected, they lived with their mother while working as a bartender and were fighting the foreclosure of their home. 29 months after assuming office, they have a net worth of $29 million. This person now owns 6 homes, 5 Cars, 2 Luxury Yachts, has cash reserves of over $3 Million and a stock portfolio that is valued at $15 million.

I am of course talking about AOC. The question I think we should all be asking is- how do you increase your net worth by over $1 million a month when your salary is only $13,000 a month?

She is a self described socialist, yet drives 5 cars with a combined value of half a million dollars: a Mercedes-Benz GLA, an Audi Q2, a BMW X7 ($100,000), a Mercedes-Benz EqC (valued at $140,000), and a BMW X8 ($200,000).

Fairly nice haul after a mere couple of years as a goobermint official, wouldn’t you say? But that’s the way with all these so-called “public servants,” each and every one of them. SOP:

  • Run for office
  • Once you’re in, you’re in for life—consistently, well over 90% of incumbents are reelected again and again and again, until they either retire, die, or, in a vanishingly few extraordinary cases, are indicted, tried, and/or packed off for a brief stay in Club Fed
  • Board the Boeing and get rich, rich, RICH; the graft don’t stop till the casket drops, baby

Think I’m joking, gilding the lily, or in any way exaggerating about elected office being for all intents and purposes a lifetime sinecure? Think again, bub.

The re-election rate for members of Congress is exceptionally high considering how unpopular the institution is in the eyes of the public. If you’re looking for steady work, you might consider running for office yourself; job security is especially strong for members of the House of Representatives even though a significant portion of the electorate supports terms limits.

How often do members of Congress actually lose an election? Not very.

Incumbent members of the House seeking re-election are all but assured re-election. The re-election rate among all 435 members of the House has been as high as 98 percent in modern history, and it’s rarely dipped below 90 percent.

The late Washington Post political columnist David Broder referred to this phenomenon as “incumbent lock” and blamed gerrymandered congressional districts for eliminating any notion of competition in general elections.

But there are other reasons the re-election rate for members of Congress is so high. “With wide name recognition, and usually an insurmountable advantage in campaign cash, House incumbents typically have little trouble holding onto their seats,” explains the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan watchdog group in Washington.

In addition, there are other built-in protections for congressional incumbents: the ability to regularly mail flattering newsletters to constituents at taxpayer expense under the guise of “constituent outreach” and to earmark money for pet projects in their districts. Members of Congress who raise money for their colleagues are also rewarded with large amounts of campaign money for their own campaigns, making (it) even more difficult to unseat incumbents.

I’ve made much sport of sleazy, slimy ProPols over lo, these many years for being perfectly willing to eat a mile of fresh, steaming turd at high noon on the public square if they thought it might help them win elective office. Given the richness of the payoff once they’re in, who could blame them? It’s yet another dismal indicator of just how badly broken this country is, that’s what.

6

Of invasion and impeachment

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Will the one lead to the other?

Last week, several Texas counties called the illegal-alien invasion across our southwest border what it is: an invasion. They wanted Gov. Greg Abbott to follow suit so that state and local officials can enforce immigration laws because the Biden Regime refuses to do so. Abbott didn’t declare an invasion, but he did authorize state police to send illegal immigrants back to ports of entry. But a foreign enemy is not driving this invasion: instead, our own president and his deputies are encouraging it. The only appropriate response is impeachment—which is why the declaration by the four counties is so important. It aligns with growing calls for the impeachment of President Joe Biden and Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

The Texas declaration is not mere rhetoric. It’s an action with actual substance. Its rationale rests on the theory that a state can declare an invasion and use its constitutional war powers to direct the National Guard and law enforcement to stop the invaders; i.e., enforce immigration law. It passes constitutional muster, too. Article I, Section 10, Clause 3 says states cannot usurp federal power on matters such as war or foreign policy “unless actually invaded, or in such imminent Danger as will not admit delay” [emphasis added]. The Treason Lobby, of course, would run to the kritarchs. A reasonable court would side with the state, but the recent U.S. Supreme Court decision allowing Biden to revoke Remain in Mexico indicates the high court may not be so reasonable.

Nevertheless, states should go ahead. Let the courts say what they wish. Given that Leftists now argue that states can nullify SCOTUS decisions, apropos of the court’s recent rulings, immigration patriot governors should say the same thing.

Texas, by the way, isn’t alone. Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich wants Governor Doug Ducey to declare an invasion as well. “Our office concluded that violence by cartels and gangs who have now assumed control of our southern border meets the legal definition for an invasion, but it’s up to the Governor to make that actual determination,“ Brnovich recently wrote to Ducey. Ducey resisted Brnovich’s entreaty in February, but the situation has worsened considerably since then. Arizona counties might follow their Texas counterparts to put more pressure on the governor.

Now, if the Texans are right and the deluge at the border is an invasion, someone must be held responsible. That someone is Joe Biden, whose policies have invited illegals to swarm across the border. As well, he refuses to enforce federal immigration law, a clear violation of his oath of office.

One of a great many other such violations, a patent contravention of the foremost among any president’s responsibilities, perpetrated intentionally and with malice aforethought by so-called ****”president”**** Biden.

2

What’s in a name?

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Everything, as it turns out.

It is easy to forget the new XYZ 2.0T – or whatever the alpha-numeric designation of the last transportation appliance you owned was. Who remembers the model number of their last microwave? Who even knows the model number of the microwave in their kitchen, right now?

After all, it’s just an appliance.

And so have cars become.

Not all, not yet. There are still a few – that are new – that have names. Not coincidentally, they are the only ones with personality – and thus deserving of the individuation that comes with naming a thing as opposed to categorizing it.

Mustang, for instance. Say that name and everyone knows what you mean – irrespective of the particular model. The same goes – well, went – for Beetle. Say that name and practically everyone has a story, a memory.

It is hard to remember where you parked your XYZ 2.0T – especially if it is painted appliance white. There are so many just like it. Probably why, at least in part, the push-button key fob was invented. Not so much to unlock your appliance but to help you find it, among all the others.

Naming cars was once a big deal, even though less attention was not infrequently paid to the naming than should have been. Even as regards some of the great names, in terms of the automotive Hall of Fame.

Nova, for instance.

That was the name of Chevy’s new (at the time) compact (mid-sized, by the standards of our time) economy car, which made its debut in 1962 and became as common a sight on American roads back in the ’70s and ’80s as XYZ 2.0Ts are on our roads, today. The problem arose when the Nova was exported to Spanish-speaking countries such as Mexico, because Nova sounds a lot like no va, which means (roughly) it doesn’t go.

Which, at least among the Novas I had any experience with, was perfectly accurate.

Then there was Banshee – a Pontiac that never made its debut, because GM higher-ups weren’t about to let Pontiac offer a two-seater with gull-wing doors that looked a lot like a Corvette take away any Corvette sales. So the Banshee was shelved, which avoided what would have been a big problem if anyone decided to look up the meaning of that name. It means harbinger of death in old Irish idiom.

Some names were just numbers. Z28, for instance. It had emotional mojo as much as Trans-Am, another name almost everyone remembers even though no Trans-Ams have been made in the last 20 years. Both worked because each was individual. Chevy never intended to use “Z28” as a car name. Rather, it was – originally – the ordering code that people in the high-performance know used to spec out a Camaro with an ensemble of road-racing equipment, which was what the original Z28 (in 1967) was all about. As word got out – and lots of orders were being placed – Z28 became a name rather than a number.

Trans-Am was a name that became a car.

One almost inevitably gets attached to things that have names, because by naming them they subtly become something more than just things. This is probably why people who raise animals for food generally don’t name them. It is easier to eat a thing than it is to eat Bessie.

Ahh, but therein lies a chicken-or-egg kind of question: do we get attached to them because they have names, or do we give them names because we’re attached to them?

3

The United States Vs America

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TL makes a crucial distinction.

I am pro-American, that does not mean pro-United States. America is a different thing from the United States. To whatever degree the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution support my God-given rights as an American, I’m all for it. When the U.S. Government, founded around those principles of the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution, openly works against those principles, punishes those who seek to comply with those principles, I do not see the United States of America as a viable, working form of government.

The whole and sole purpose of the United States Government, as founded and clearly stated, is to secure individual rights and the principles of freedom. The problem is, the people have been coerced to accept miniscule violations of those principles over a period of time and each insignificant violation, on its own, impact those rights on a similarly miniscule level. However, when that process of requiring miniscule violations become the manner in which government operates, it ceases to be a minor exception and becomes a process of eliminating those rights and principles, delegitimizing the whole. It has done so.

That’s how we got to lockdowns and police enforcing unconstitutional, anti-American dictates from obscure “health officials.” It continues today, just in different ways. Some vaccine mandates have never been lifted. The United States Government is in the process of using all the tools of the federal government to destroy any claim or expectation of those rights and principles. That’s new, that’s revolutionary, that’s treason against that which provides the power to achieve it.

I began to recognize the federal government as illegitimate as far back as 2001 with the passage of the Patriot Act, something that those who participated in the documentary Lies of Omission 2021 (please watch it free on Tubi, our biggest supporter) directly address. Then, in 2008 and 2009 I became politically activated for the way in which it handled the banking crisis with a Republican president at the helm and especially because there was a Republican president at the helm.

All over the world people are coming to their senses and demanding a dissolution of their governments for failing the people, not without a great deal of pain and punishment that we have not felt in America as yet, but the signs are there. The holding of political prisoners, the J6 detainees, should be a much bigger deal than it is. The very idea of it is counter to the principles declared by our judicial system. They called it an insurrection, but only after the feds orchestrated, enabled and coerced it into one by leaving doors unlocked and instigators encouraged peaceful protestors to enter. Many of those who entered were part of the instigation and coercion, but only the innocent rubes that fell for it were apprehended and/or charged. That’s classic entrapment, for which the whole of it should be dismissed, but that would be an American response.

Nothing in the United States works along the lines of its design. Nothing. Your freedom, no matter how much of it you think you retain, is not freedom at all. It’s no more freedom than wandering from the southwest corner of one’s prison cell to the northeast corner is freedom. Your movements from beginning to end of your day are tracked, your phone calls recorded, your emails monitored, blogs like this kept for the day they need to bring me before their tribunals, insanely enough, for un-American activities. I don’t expect to live that long and not because of age.

All of TL’s anquished cri de coeur is tragic, the moreso because it’s all too true. As I’ve long insisted, any “right” you have to get a permit from the goobermint to exercise isn’t really a right at all—by definition, it’s a privilege. Hats off to little Sri Lanka, for showing the rest of us how it’s fucking DONE.

Sri Lanka president captured on video fleeing as protestors storm Colombo residence
Sri Lanka President Gotabaya Rajapaksa was captured on video escaping via ship on the day protesters stormed his official Colombo residence.

In the video, President Rajapaksa is seen running and rolling his luggage onto a large navy ship. His escape comes after the storming of his official Colombo residence and the burning of Prime Minister Wickremesinghe’s home, which occurred on Saturday — now deemed D-Day. The large viral demonstrations took place despite the president’s attempts at a 36-hour state of emergency and ban of social media.

Upon the storming of the residence, Sri Lanka’s 26-member cabinet resigned en masse at midnight. Initially, the exceptions were President Gotabaya Rajapaksa and Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe.

However, Wickremesinghe resigned soon after, stating on Twitter, “to ensure the continuation of the government including the safety of all citizens I accept the best recommendation for the Party Leaders today, to make way for an All-Party Government. To facilitate this I will resign as Prime Minister.”

The large-scale takeover by the demonstrators comes after months of protests on the streets of Sri Lanka and its worst economic crisis in history. Inflation in Sri Lanka has risen to above 50 percent, leading to crushing food and energy shortages. It led the country to run their foreign currency reserves into the ground and significantly increase foreign debt.

In addition, Sri Lanka police and military have been accused of using violence to push back demonstrations. With at least 55 people injured during protests, there have also been accusations of torture, tear gas use and the application of an “illegal” police curfew.

Further confirmation of my maxim, as if any were needed: At some point, enough is fucking enough.

Putting fossil fuels into perspective

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They power a lot more than just our automobiles.

Fossil fuel powers the economic engine of civilization. With a minor disruption in the supply of fossil fuel, crops wither, and supply chains crash. With a major disruption, a humanitarian apocalypse could engulf the world. Events of the past few months have made this clear. Without energy, civilization dies, and in 2020 fossil fuels continued to provide more than 80 percent of all energy consumed worldwide.

This basic fact, that maintaining a reliable supply of affordable fossil fuel is a nonnegotiable condition for the survival of civilization, currently eludes far too many American politicians, including Joe Biden. Observes energy expert and two-time candidate for governor of California Michael Shellenberger: “One month ago, the Biden administration killed a one-million-acre oil and gas lease sale in Alaska, and seven days ago killed new on-shore oil and gas leases in the continental U.S. In fact, at this very moment, the Biden administration is considering a total ban on new offshore oil and gas drilling.”

Another basic fact, easily confirmed by consulting the 2021 edition of the BP Statistical Review of Global Energy, is that if every person living on Earth were to consume half as much energy per year as the average American currently consumes, global energy production would need to nearly double. Instead of producing 547 exajoules (the mega unit of energy currently favored by economists) per year, energy producers worldwide would need to come up with just over 1,000 exajoules. How exactly will “renewables,” currently delivering 32 exajoules per year, or six percent of global energy, expand by a factor of 30 to deliver 1,000 exajoules?

The short answer is, it can’t. Despite the fanatical, powerful group-think that calls for the abolition of not only fossil fuels but also most hydroelectric power and all nuclear power, the reality is that most nations of the world are going to continue to develop every source of energy they can, and they’re going to do it as fast as they can.

Well, the smart ones will. Sadly, that would seem to exclude any of them currently being misruled by Senile Joe Biden and/or his shadowy Deep State handlers.

“At a time of war,” Biden wrote in an open letter to the industry on June 15, “high refinery profit margins being passed directly onto American families are not acceptable… companies must take immediate actions to increase the supply of gasoline, diesel, and other refined product.”

But US refineries are already operating at 94 percent of their capacity, with US refineries in the Gulf of Mexico running at 98 percent, which is the highest rate in 30 years. Running refineries at a higher capacity than that risks damaging the equipment. As such, Biden isn’t just wrong, he insulted some of the hardest working people operating in one of the most dangerous industries in America.

If Biden wants more American fuel, then he should allow the building of new refineries, right?

That’s the last thing FJB wants, as is evidenced by his actions, which as always speak louder than words.

But, on May 12, Biden’s Interior Department blocked a proposal to open up more than one million acres of land in Alaska for oil and gas drilling. Two days later, Biden’s Environmental Protection Agency blocked plans to expand an oil refinery in the US Virgin Islands.

Biden and his defenders said he had to block the expansion of the Virgin Islands refinery, given how polluting it was.

But had Biden’s EPA allowed the Virgin Island refinery to expand, the owners would have poured nearly $3 billion into retrofitting the plant so it produced gasoline and other products more cleanly, while significantly increasing production at the same time.

In truth, there are many things Biden could have done, and still should do, to lower energy prices. He could invoke the National Defense Act to accelerate the rate of oil and gas permits. He could set a floor of $80/barrel for re-filling the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR), which would be a powerful incentive for the industry, because it would prevent prices from falling to unprofitable levels. Biden could announce trade agreements with American allies to supply them with liquified natural gas, which would incentivize more natural gas production and lower prices.

If Biden got America on a wartime footing, as he should be given Russia’s aggression in Europe, we would see the lowering of oil, gas and petroleum prices in less than one year.

Why won’t Biden do it? Because he has declared war on fossil fuels. “I guarantee you, we’re going to end fossil fuel,” Biden promised a student climate activist in 2019. “I am not going to cooperate with them,” he said, referring to the oil and gas industry.

And indeed, he hasn’t. When oil and gas executives visited the White House in June, Biden snubbed them by refusing to attend the meeting. Instead, at the very same moment, he met with wind industry executives. A few days earlier, Biden administration officials signaled they may support a large new tax on the oil industry proposed by a Senator from Oregon.

All of this has soured the oil and gas industry on investing in production. “If you were an oil company,” a senior executive at a major US bank told me, why would you invest hundreds of millions of dollars into expanding refining capacity if you thought the federal government or investors would shut you down in the next few years? The narrative coming from the administration is absolutely insane.”

Of course it is. Leaving Biden’s personal cognitive impairment out of it, as the venerable old truism has it: liberalism delenda est. It just floors me that, with Biden-caused disaster on every front, the clod’s approval numbers nonetheless remain in the 30-40 percent range, instead of around 10 or 12 percent where they truly belong. Back to the first article for our thrilling conclusion.

According to the most authoritative source on energy in the world, total proven reserves of fossil fuel currently total 49,023 exajoules. This means that just with proven reserves, and if only fossil fuel were used, and if global energy consumption were doubled to 1,000 exajoules per year, there would still be a 50-year supply of energy. How much more fossil fuel can be extracted from unproven reserves is anybody’s guess, but it is a safe bet that twice as much more is available, meaning there’s at least another century’s worth of fossil fuel even if we used nothing else to power civilization.

The benefits of abundant cheap energy are obvious: prosperity and voluntary population stabilization. In the decades to come, other forms of energy will be further developed. If hydroelectric power doubles, while nuclear power and renewables both go up by an order of magnitude, the three together would provide 636 exajoules of power per year. Under that scenario, fossil-fuel use could remain near current levels, and total global energy production would still double to 1,000 exajoules.

What is impossible, however, is for renewables alone to achieve this level of growth. More than half of renewable energy today comes from biofuel and biomass, which—ironically—is already wreaking havoc across the tropics as hundreds of thousands of square miles of rainforest are incinerated to make room for cane ethanol and palm oil plantations. And then there are the minerals required for the wind turbine towers, the silicon photovoltaics, and the billions of megawatt-hours of battery farm capacity. Where are the Malthusians when you need them?

Same place they always were—everywhere you look, for as far as the eye can see—in the bodily posture typical of their kind: with their heads jammed so far up their flues they have to yawn to see daylight. There’s a good reason why the ceaseless warnings of impending disaster issued by such as they never quite come to fruition: the purblind boobs arrive at their dire conclusions by projecting current conditions into the future unaltered, never taking technological advancement, human ingenuity and adaptability, and the ineluctable flux and churn of life on this planet into account.

Doomsday predictions can make for moderately interesting reading now and then, but ought to be taken no more seriously than you do your daily horoscope, the extended weather forecast, or your chances of winning gazillions playing the Powerball. Harmless entertainment, if that’s your bag, but not necessarily reliable indicators of what tomorrow will bring.

Update! Don’t let FJB’s play-acting at being “concerned” by the suffering his hideously expensive gas prices is inflicting on ordinary Americans fool you. This is exactly what he and his fellow shitlibs have dreamed of for years and years.

If you had the unpleasant experience this July Fourth weekend of paying close to $5 for a gallon of gas, you can always comfort yourself with the idea that your pain is for a good cause: the “liberal world order.” 

So said Brian Deese, White House director of the National Economic Council, when he was asked on CNN: “What do you say to those families who say, ‘Listen, we can’t afford to pay $4.85 a gallon for months, if not years. This is just not sustainable’?”

Deese, like his boss Joe Biden, is unmoved by the suffering of ordinary Americans, more than two-thirds of whom say gas-price increases are causing them hardship, according to a recent Gallup poll.

“This is about the future of the liberal world order, and we have to stand firm” until Ukraine defeats Russia, declared Deese.
He was echoing the president, who had referenced the Ukraine war a few hours earlier in Madrid, when he dismissed a similar question: “The war has pushed prices up. [Oil] could go as high as $200 a barrel…How long is it fair to expect American drivers and drivers around the world to pay that premium for this war?”

Biden responded with cold indifference: “As long as it takes,” he said.

If only there was some way Real Americans could properly thank him for it.

6

Will Russia take on the job Americans just won’t do?

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That would be the job of taking down a tyrannical, frankly illegitimate US goobermint. The real question, though, is: why on earth would they bother?

WHY RUSSIA WILL DEFEAT THE UNITED STATES
Like many boys in the 1980s, I dreamed of being a “Wolverine.” If you hail from Generation X or you are a late-stage Millennial, you know that is not a reference to a Marvel superhero with retractable metal claws. It is a reference to the teenaged freedom fighters in the movie Red Dawn. Raised on a steady diet of American patriotic zeal and a hatred for communism, boys my age fantasized of killing Russian invaders. Those days are long gone. The United States is no longer the “good guy,” and Russia is no longer the “bad guy.” We are the Marxists, now.

If we go to war with Russia, which I suspect will likely happen, Russia will win. The reason is simple: ideologies never defeat national identity. This has been true throughout time. Whenever an ideological army attempted to conquer a defined people, the defined people have always won. Even within the ideological proxy wars of the 20th Century, fighting was defined as contests between peoples. Communist North Vietnam framed its war with South Vietnam as one in which Vietnamese patriots fought European-American imperialism and manipulation. The Soviet Union was trounced in the early years of World War II for a multitude of reasons, but one of those reasons was that early propaganda tried to frame the struggle as one between fascism and communism. Soviet peasants could care less about the global proletariat. When the political messaging was re-framed within the context of a “Great Patriotic War,” Russians galvanized and hardened their resolve. Many such examples exist.

Today, there is no American people. The United States has been intentionally redefined. American identity is rooted in post-nationalism.  It is ideologically globalist, combining the totality of the economic coin – Marxist on one side, free market capitalist on the other. In so doing, American political and cultural leaders have created an ideology that supplants God with Cultural Marxist societal elements – from homosexuality and transgenderism to subjectivity versus objectivity in all facets of decision making (e.g., “Common Core” math). Simultaneously, free market capitalism has been weaponized as a democratization process, creating a world of consumers addicted to cheap trinkets and material comforts that transcends sacrifice for one’s national best interests. This is evident from outsourcing manufacturing to the importation of cheap labor en masse. The United States that you once knew is dead. The guardians of this new American dystopia – the DOJ, FBI, IRS, and DOD – will target those who question the paradigm shift. Consequently, J6 protestors are hunted with impunity while the antifa – i.e., those who fight most violently for this new ideological state – are protected from prosecution.

Russia, generally speaking, has none of these problems. Russians know they are Russian. Russians are not seeking a globalist new world order. Russians prefer a world order led by Russians, but in the absence of that power, they would be happy to have a regional hegemony that protects Russian interests. In other words, unlike the globalist ideologues that lead Americans and their Western allies, Russians are nationalists. In a war, you need nationalism to win. If you think I am wrong, consider the U.S. military’s current struggles to recruit. It dovetails with a drop in patriotism. It turns out that the U.S. DOD never realized that transgender black dancers with a victim mentality do not volunteer to fight for a country they perceive to have oppressed them; misguided patriotic Southern White boys do – and less of them now want to be part of it. Putin’s military leadership enjoys no such confusion.

The US military having been reduced to a mincing, dress-clad paper tiger of indeterminate gender thanks to Woke leadership, I have little to no doubt the Rooskies could defeat it handily, all else being equal and assuming the Ukrainiain thorn had been removed from the Bear’s paw. But the US domestic political situation being what it now is, the bond between Heritage Americans and the US military is nothing like as strong as it once was, always a seriously bad omen for any nation’s defensive prospects.

On the other hand, the occupation phase is liable to be a stone bitch, I imagine, a fact I’m confident the Russian leadership is every bit as cognizant of as I am myself. On the other other hand, the Left has trashed this place so comprehensively, over so long a period, one has to wonder what Russia would really gain from such a chancy move. In sum, they probably COULD do it, sure. Which doesn’t mean they SHOULD.

I have to say, I can’t wait to see what Aesop’s take on this speculative proposal might be.

(Via WRSA)

Will the US fall like Rome?

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Maybe not. Then again, maybe so.

Added to greed, avarice, and incompetence was a mix of climate change, unstable borders, and an elite population soaked in corruption. All told, you have a basic understanding of what destroyed the Roman world.

Yes, the history of this civilization often sounds like our own. But then, it sounds like most every other civilization that has existed in any part of the world at any time in history. There is something consistent and familiar everywhere you travel in human history.

Believe it or not, this is where the good news is found. Yes, America is a republic, but it is not, by any means, Rome. This observation was made in correspondence between Thomas Jefferson and John Adams in 1819. Jefferson wrote,

I ask myself What was that government which the virtues of Cicero were so zealous to restore, & the ambition of Caesar to subvert?…I do not say to restore it, because they never had it…if their people indeed had been, like ours, enlightened, peaceable, and really free, the answer would be obvious. ‘restore independance (sic) to all your foreign conquests, relieve Italy from the government of the rabble of Rome, consult it as a nation entitled to self-government, and do it’s will.

What is important here is that the American Founders were not naïve about the weaknesses of Rome. In particular, they despised the emperors and sought whatever good they could find in the old republic.

The American Founders admired the Roman virtues of citizenship and piety, and the Roman government balanced by the citizens, Senate, and magistrates. However, there was no idea of “rights” among the Roman citizens. Only power.

The Romans would never have created a “Declaration of Independence” in which these beautiful, high-minded words would be announced: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

This sort of thinking could only have emerged after the prohibition of the gladiatorial bloodlettings of the Roman world, or the imperialistic greed of the emperors. It could never have been written by a society that believed the enslavement of human beings to be the norm. While some signers of the Declaration, like all humans, struggled with hypocrisy, their ideals have made America great in a way that Rome could have never imagined.

America, like all republics, has freedoms that allow citizens the right to go insane. No free nation will be free of human nature. The current internal and external threats to America do not have to bring, out of necessity, its destruction.

The good news is that America has stronger foundations than Rome ever knew, and those foundations not only seem to be holding, many Americans are rediscovering those foundations in the midst of a modern contest for the soul of the nation.

And the bad news is, with the rise of an insane, despotic Left in our very midst we now find ourselves obliged to cope with the selfsame struggle the Founding Fathers faced in their own time, a battle waged in one sense or another since the emergence of Western Civilization itself: the neverending struggle between Liberty—ie, Good—and Tyranny—ie, Evil.

The essential nature of our Leftist Enemy is that it MUST rule, that it MUST conquer, that it will countenance NO dissent or disagreement whatsoever. It can leave NO ONE alone and unmolested, to live out his life according to his OWN wishes and beliefs. Thus is our essential problem at once as unneccessary as it is utterly insuperable.

I commend to y’all’s attention my Notable Quotes section over in the right sidebar, NC Reed’s immortal summation in particular: 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. Which, when all is said and done, means that we cannot live peaceably among them. Not for long, we can’t. There can be no comity, no accomodation, no compromise with tyranny. It is a binary solution set: one side must win, and one side must lose. There is truly, literally nothing more to it than just that.

We MUST NOT lose.

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Is Trump “the greatest man alive”?

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Dan Gelernter makes the case.

Here’s my question to the January 6 committee: If Trump made a call for violence on January 6, how could I possibly have missed it? I was glued to the TV all day. I watched Trump’s speech; I hung on every word. I recognized it as a pivotal moment in American history: We were about to certify an unelected, illegitimate president. It was an impending catastrophe that only the boldest possible action could have prevented.

If Trump had called out to the nation in his January 6 speech—if he had said, “We must stop this, come to Washington with your guns!”—millions of Americans would have come. The response would have been massive and overwhelming. You can bet your boots that Ashli Babbitt would not have been the only person shot and killed that day.

Trump easily—easily—could have started a civil war. He had only to make the call. Millions would have answered it. America was watching and waiting. But Trump never made that call, and Washington knows damn well he didn’t.

Which is why he is where he is today, bringing the entire country along for the ride. He had overwhelming support, the weight of numbers on his side, a willing and available counterrevolutionary force with more guns than every branch of the US military combined. We’re talking here about people who are one hundred percent dedicated to destroying the Leftist enemy and reclaiming America That Was. He shoulda damned well pulled the fucking trigger, not just for his and his family’s personal well-being, but that of the betrayed and defiled Republic, and its sane, normal, decent population.

In some very real ways, we’d all be better off right now if he’d done it; the ones who would have been worse off are the windrows after windrows of shitlib corpses stacked high and tight from sea to shining sea, and they have it coming. We can argue from now till Doomsday about why Trump didn’t call on all able-bodied Citizen Soldiers to rally to the side of our rightful President to back him in standing up to the most dangerous threat America has ever had to face, but it doesn’t much matter anymore—whatever his reasons, and I can think of a good few that hold at least some water, he didn’t, so…so…

Well, as I always say: here we all are. Be that as it may, there’s an argument to be made Trump’s perfectly understandable disinclination to go to the last desperate extreme speaks well of the man, in at least some ways.

If you ask me, Trump has shown greater restraint than any man alive in the world today. Greater restraint perhaps than almost any man in history: For there are very few men, even in small and trivial nations, who could launch a civil war if they chose to do it. That sort of following—so wide, so deeply committed, and so much on the precipice of fury unleashed—is truly rare. The fact that Trump did not call upon his supporters to do violence on January 6 is singular, incredible: What leftist, on the verge of losing his power in Washington, and yet possessed of the means of retaining it through coercive force, would have walked away as Trump did?

Now the establishment—the Liz Cheneys, the Nancy Pelosis, the Mitch McConnells and Mitt Romneys—are terrified because they know Trump still has that following. They know the nation, left to choose its own president, would choose Trump again. And they can’t possibly let that happen.

Trump is the only real threat—not to world peace and stability, not to economic security or energy independence, but to the power of the elites. The elites want that power more than anything—they cannot walk away—and they are willing to do anything, even destroy the entire planet with war or disease, sooner than they would see Trump become president again.

But they ought to be careful. The next time they steal an election, it may not take a speech to start a civil war.

After having been run through the Democrat meatless-meat grinder over the last several years with no letup in sight, one would certainly hope it wouldn’t, since a resolute, swift, and uncompromising response to blatant, self-evident treason would constitute evidence that at least some Americans do still retain a kinship with the ideals, the bravery, and the selfless devotion to duty of the Founding Fathers, and are willing to let those timeless beliefs guide their actions and decisions.

Sadly, all available signs from November 2020 up to right this very minute would seem to point us in a very different direction. It’s all too apparent that all too many of us have learned all too little from the supine, boneless response to the broad-daylight theft of an American Presidential election—a barefaced coup for which no criminal conspirator has yet faced serious consequences. No sane person wants this fight to commence, and who would? The prospect is utterly dreadful, horrifying beyond comprehension.

In any event, all of Dan’s above-cited points are well taken and ably made, certainly. But for my money, the most interesting part comes earlier in the piece.

For all the hysteria over Trump’s divisive tweets, the truth is that Trump is the only unifying figure in modern political history: He persuaded millions of people who had never voted for any Republican, indeed for any president, to vote for him. During his first term, he increased his share of the vote with every segment of the population, except college-educated whites. No Republican since Reagan received such broad support from so many groups. And he won their support not by pandering to their sub-category interests or to the things that set them apart, but by appealing to them as Americans.

Spot on, and of far greater import than one might realize at first glance, if only for the big fat hint it provides as to how many out there might still consider a candidate for office “appealing to them as Americans” to be a good thing, rather than a bad or even offensive one. Alas, it’s much too late now to hold out hope that any such Trumpian reassertion of American unity and shared values might suffice to heal this mortally wounded nation.

No sane person wants this fight; who would? But the lines are firmly established; the ideological breach cannot be reconciled, negotiated away, or blithely ignored for very much longer. The national divide is real, serious…and wholly meet and just, actually. Like it or not—and nobody should like it—this is a battle that every American who takes his God-granted liberty, his rights, and self-determination at all seriously has no choice but to fight, and to win.

One can easily sense a broad uneasiness across the American landscape, a foreboding that violence and bloodshed might erupt at any time: in a month, in a week, in a few days, or in the morning. The distempered nitwits at The Grauniad post some stats.

More than one quarter of US residents feel so estranged from their government that they feel it might “soon be necessary to take up arms” against it, a poll released on Thursday claimed.

This survey of 1,000 registered US voters, published by the University of Chicago’s Institute of Politics (IOP), also revealed that most Americans agree the government is “corrupt and rigged against everyday people like me”.

The data suggests that extreme polarization in US politics – and its impact on Americans’ relationships with each other – remain strong. These statistics come as a congressional committee is holding public hearings on the January 6 insurrection.

Naturally, being Mark-1 Mod-0 shitlibs, The Grauniad whiffs badly on the stark reality that the phonied-up, purely partisan J6 dog and pony show currently being staged in Mordor On The Potomac constitutes irrefutable proof that “most Americans” are RIGHT to believe that their vile, tyrannical government is “corrupt” and “rigged,” in every least particular. Can there possibly be even a single knave left among us so foolish, so blind, so out of touch that he’d contend—sans sarcasm, irony, or satirical intent—that it ISN’T?

Even farther beyond the demonstrably limited ken of The Grauniad and their intellectual brethren is another inescapable truth: the endemic corruption mentioned in Paragraph Two is the very thing which has forced Real Americans to conclude that a resort to the Second Amendment Solution “might soon be necessary,” a prospect lamented with such horror and dread in Paragraph One. Far from being unrelated, the two notions are indivisible; absent the one, the other would likely not exist.

Liberal nincompoops will rend their garments, gnash their teeth, and tear their hair out in great hanks over how awful all this is, something underlined by the inter-party disparities in this graph:

SpicyTimeStats.jpg

Myself, I can’t honestly say I share the Left’s blood-curdling perturbation over this survey’s revelation of a perfectly accurate perception of massive corruption and malfeasance so deeply embedded in the central government it can never be rooted out by less than extraordinary measures and what might be the upshot of that. Nor am I troubled in the least by the calm acceptance of the Founders’ explicit prescription for how a free people must always deal with this intolerable situation—sentiments common amongst a rapidly growing cohort of Americans. To me, that’s encouraging news, albeit with a darker implication in train: if the American “education” system was what it should be—and, not all that long ago, actually was—we wouldn’t be discussing an embarrassingly niggling percentage of “more than one quarter of American residents” here. No, if Americans had been properly schooled in history and civics, that measly “more than a quarter” number would be well up into the 90s, as it damned well ought to be.

The notion that a liberty-minded citizenry might not disdain to avail themselves of the selfsame methods by which our long-abused country was created in the first goddamned place is assuredly NOT radical, extreme, or in any way indicative of a fascination with “white supremacy.” Like so very many other of the Founders’ ideas, the Freeman’s solemn obligation to rise up in revolt to overthrow any would-be oppressor who dares to proclaim himself the Freeman’s rightful Master rather than his humble employee is eternal. This obligation may be shirked; it is certainly an inconvenient, difficult, and demanding one. But none can ever call himself free who refuses to at least try to meet the challenge it represents.

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OUR day

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NOT Theirs.

Independence Day has been a far more somber holiday for me and many others for many years, more akin to sitting around drinking after the funeral of a friend who used to be hearty and hale but in his later years became weak and frightened. We try to remember him as he once was in his health, not how he was in his dying days.

Gone are the recollections of the history of heritage Americans and the declaring of their independence from England. We don’t even call it Independence Day anymore, just “The Fourth Of July” as if the date is just randomly chosen to get a day off so we can grill burgers.

The thing about Independence Day and what it celebrates is that it is an entirely White male achievement. The famous painting of the presenting of the draft of the Declaration to the Congress by John Trumbull is noteworthy for what it doesn’t include: there are no women, no “people of color”, no transvestites or Jews or Muslims. Just a bunch of White men.

As America slides rapidly into minority-majority status, Independence Day will mean less and less to each successive generation of increasingly non-White citizens. Why shouldn’t it? The story of America isn’t their story, they contributed basically nothing to our founding and the development of America as the greatest country on Earth. Independence Day has no real historical significance for blacks or Chinese, mestizos or Jews. Hell there was only a single Catholic signer of the Declaration, most were Episcopalian/Anglican, Congregationalist or Presbyterian. It is interesting that the current Supreme Court has six Catholics, only two Protestants, and one Jew.

It only makes sense that a first generation Mexican immigrant or a Somali refugee would have no clue what Independence Day was really all about or have any sort of positive feelings about it. It isn’t their day and never will be. 

Just as the day is losing any meaning, the principles that inspired the Declaration of Independence mean less to each successive generation of America. Try asking a young person today what these words mean:

We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness….

Good luck. You might get a reasonable answer from a smart kid from a good school but Da’quan or Mohammad from some inner-city slaughterhouse of a high school? Forget about it.

It is nice to get a day off, and shoot off some fireworks, but this day has otherwise lost all meaning, all solemnity and all significance. It is just a relic of a nation that no longer exists, an annual funeral service where we drink toasts and offer amusing anecdotes about a dearly departed friend. 

Perhaps the remnants of the American people will one day have cause to celebrate anew their independence from Tyrants, Despots and Usurpers. Let us hope so in order that the light of liberty may never be lost from this world. 

I’ve said for years now that the Fourth of right ought to be less a day of celebration and indulgence, and more one of national mourning for what has been lost, stolen, and/or casually squandered. With this blunt reminder of our heritage and history, Arthur rubs Real American noses in one of the uglier aspects of life in whatever you want to call the tottering, faltering nation we inhabit: in “the land of the free,” there are many truths which are not to be spoken aloud, lest the wrath of our Masters be incurred thereby. The above would be one of those.

Regrettably, the cognitive dissonance doesn’t end there. Here in NC, dominated politically by shitlibs for my entire life, fireworks are illegal and can’t be found for love nor money…except for the week or ten days leading up to July Fourth, when you’re allowed to have ’em so’s you can celebrate your notional “freedom.” Only a liberal asswipe could possibly be blind enough that he’d fail to spot the gruesome irony in that one.

Update! As grim as things sometimes seem, there are still flourishes of uniquely-American greatness to be found in this land.

Joey Chestnut Captures Crasher While Downing 63 Hot Dogs
Joey Chestnut won the hot dog eating contest again after he downed 63 hot dogs. The closest anyone came ate 40-something dogs. While downing and winning, he also got a crasher into a headlock.

The crasher was wearing a Darth Vader mask and carried a sign reading, “Expose Mitchfield  or Smithfield or something Death Star.” Uh, what?

Joey’s our hero.

Joey’s a NATIONAL hero, actually. Video at the link to prove it.

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Federalism: the true American way

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Another in Hayward’s long succession of brilliantly conceived, impeccably crafted, and truly insightful Twitter treatises.

There are many reasons why power should be devolved to the states, as Dobbs did with abortion. The obvious one is that individual voters have more influence over state legislatures. Your voice rings much louder in state capitols than in Washington.

Of course, the left-wing / globalist project for decades has been to centralize power, and then internationalize it, moving it utterly beyond the reach of voters. This was very much by design – they know federalism gives YOU more control, and they don’t like it one little bit.

Cause after cause beloved to the Left is portrayed as a “consensus” of “experts” that must be imposed on the people against their will, with no input from voters and no means for individuals to resist. They’re increasingly less shy about saying their agenda is beyond democracy.

Another positive feature of moving issues to state legislators is that they tend to gain clarity. D.C. is much worse about stuffing issues into titanic trillion-dollar spending bills. Rarely does the national Congress vote clearly on one thing.

The needs of individual states and their populations can be different. The consensus of their voters can be very different. A free republic of sovereign individuals shouldn’t have many one-size-fits-all, no-dissent-allowed solutions.

When power returns to the states, the people also gain the option of moving to different areas if they have severe issues with how a state is being run. They can merely travel to other states that allow what their home state has prohibited.

This is crucial, even if the number of people who actually decide to relocate is fairly small, because it is a manifestation of the one TRUE freedom, the only one that really matters in the end: the Power of No. The ability to say no, to refuse, is the fountain of all liberty.

Corruption is the horror plaguing the entire world. The corruption and waste in our federal system is absolutely sickening, and it’s permanent. There is no way to fix it without shifting power and money to the states, which can be monitored more closely and held more accountable.

You cannot “reform” a system that has trillions of dollars and millions of footsoldiers to protect every one of its corrupt fiefdoms, every nickel of its bloated agenda. There are no clean, big governments, and there never will be. The Leviathan has too many fangs and claws.

You cannot audit a system as titanic and broken as the federal government. It will never, ever be “transparent.” Among other things, it simply has too many people working for it, and far too many of them are utterly beyond the reach of voters. In no sense do they answer to YOU.

Lord knows state governments can have plenty of scandals, and some of them are Leviathans in their own right by any objective standard, but at least the people have a better chance of securing accountability – and if they give up on reforming a corrupt state, they can just leave.

One other great feature of federalism, perhaps its most subtle advantage: there are no tyrannical “settled issues.” Nothing is every really settled forever. The future is not held hostage to the past. Voters can change their minds, and change the law.

That is a HUGE advantage to the cause of freedom, a key aspect of sustaining that climate of persuasion that is so far superior to the corrupt business of demands and commands. Voters must be persuaded in perpetuity. Today’s law must be nourished and sustained tomorrow.

This will soon become clear in the matter of abortion, as states may tighten or loosen their restrictions as voters demand. No more phony “census” of ersatz “experts” chiseled in stone and used as a cudgel against generation after generation. Bad arguments will take a beating.

In a free republic, most of the laws should be written on paper, not carved in stone. The Constitution can be changed, but it’s not easy. That means not many issues should be “settled forever” with the permanence of the Bill of Rights. Permanence is power, to be used sparingly.

Everything I have said in this thread is the antithesis of leftist, statist, authoritarian ideology. They would howl that every single point I’ve raised is an offense against their sacred agenda, which must be imposed for the good of whatever they claim to care about.

“How can a government of wise experts be subjected to scrutiny by the proletariat? Why should brilliant social engineers have to explain themselves to the rubes over and over again? People moving to other states, saying no to our judgments – that’s absurd! THE EARTH IS ON FIRE!”

There is no better way to illuminate tyranny than to enumerate the virtues of a system that would make it impossible, and let the would-be tyrants tell you why that’s unthinkable.

Nothing to add from here, except for expressing my thanks to KT for taking the time and trouble to bust this excellent piece out of Twitter Format Prison confinement and compile it all as just plain old text, sparing me from having to do thirty friggin’ embeds, which is an acute pain in my ass.

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Don’t look now

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Dan Gelernter has an important message he’d like to share with us.

Don’t Laugh at the Man Who Falls Off a Bicycle
It’s true that we could all use a little humor in times of crisis, but news of Joe Biden falling off his bicycle isn’t funny,

Isn’t funny? Like HELL it ain’t.

and this crisis is too serious. When you laugh at Biden, you grant him undeserved importance—as though he were president of the United States.

Not on your life, bub. If there’s one thing the Biden marionette has amply demonstrated for one and all, it’s how truly UNimportant he actually is. With every pratfall, garbled speech, or vacant, confusticated thousand-yard stare as he tries to figure out where he is and why those pushy sonsabitches have brought him out to wherever this is, more and more people come to realize the painful truth: that this shambolic rutabaga fraudulently installed in the White House under highly questionable circumstances is nothing more than a figurehead, a third-rate Swamp rat impersonating a real US President.

This truth is a painful one because it raises some very serious questions regarding the office of the presidency its own self, among them…

1) Just how important, really, is said office to the way the country is run anymore
2) Just who, and how many of them, might really be running said country
C) Just who, really, do said people think they are
Quatre) Just how long this little bait-and-switch of a charade of a kabuki-theater dumbshow might really have been going on, right under our very noses
Five) Just what We The People ought to do about all this, really

To me, the correct answer to that last seems fairly obvious, but then I could be getting a bit jaded and irascible in my dotage, I admit.

Biden is not president of the United States. He wasn’t elected, and he certainly isn’t running the country. We are reliving the twilight of the Wilson Administration: As Churchill put it in The Second World War, Wilson “suffered a paralytic stroke just as he was setting forth on his campaign, and lingered henceforward a futile wreck for a great part of two long and vital years.” In the meantime, historians have assured us, Wilson’s wife was running the country. If this is so, we may partially credit Edith Wilson with having laid the groundwork for World War II.

In reality, Edith was no more in charge in 1919 than Mrs. (I mean Dr.) Jill Biden is now. A weak or nonexistent president is an opportunity for professional politicians and professional bureaucrats to do what they most love: To exercise power without accountability. To steal it. To usurp it.

Look at funny Joe Biden, falling off his bicycle, losing his way back from the podium, losing his way in the middle of a sentence. The people who have stolen the office of president want you to look at him. They want you to blame him.

They want you to pretend that the utter destruction of America—of our economy, our property, our peace, our freedom, our ability to defend ourselves from madmen and from the government—is just an accidental result wrought by a comedy-clown president who’s lost his mind.

In reality this is a deliberate plan by people who know exactly what they’re doing and who are achieving exactly what they want.

These people also want you to look forward to the next election. They want you to vote, to be excited about voting, to think of nothing else but the moment when you get to exercise your right to choose your own government and throw the bums out of office. Of course it will be a big disappointment to you when the outrage you thought was sweeping the nation doesn’t actually materialize—or when it disappears in the middle of the night while the polls are closed and we’re all in bed.

The biggest disappointment of all is the moment it finally hits home—two, three, four years after across-the-board, tide-turning Republican majorities have been swept into office en masse on the strength of endless solemn promises of “change,” “restoration,” and “renewal”—that the only truly substantive “change” to be seen is in how that ten extra pounds of belly-flab you piled on whilst sitting around waiting for all that “change” to materialize has forced you to loosen your belt a notch or two.

Other than the unfortunate weight gain, though, everything appears to be just as it was on the day all those GOP freshmen Reps and Senators swore the oath they quietly intended to traduce before they’d left the very first ass-indentation in the deluxe new calf’s leather office chairs you, the taxpayer, bought for them. To be sure, the government got bigger, more powerful, and more meddlesome. Taxes were raised, again, the additional funds flushed down various DC sewer pipes with none of the “change” it was supposed to buy us anywhere in sight. Several hundred more unneeded, unwanted, and unhelpful laws were passed—in sum, yet another encore of the whole crass Vaudeville act we’re all sick and tired of watching the “right wing” of the Uniparty perform for us.

SO. One more time, then: Just what are We The People going to DO about all this, really? Also, can any Real American suggest, with a straight face, that there are any methods, tactics, or tools AT ALL which of right ought to be preemptively proclaimed off limits as too “extreme” for us to resort to? Are we so brazen, so callow and self-absorbed, that we dare to propose that the selfsame “extremes” deemed perfectly acceptable by our forefathers in bringing forth a new nation founded on individual liberty and natural rights as a blessing upon themselves and their posterity are now to be considered much too barbaric and unthinkable to be contemplated by their more-highly-evolved heirs in the reclamation of their ravaged nation and the restoration of their purloined liberty? Do we really care so little for our own posterity that we think them unworthy of making the same sacrifice for their sake that America’s Founders made for ours?

Can it be possible that we’ve fallen so far as that, then?!? Forbid it, almighty God! Which quote makes me think this might be a perfect time for some reposting. I implore you, do NOT fail to read all of the following passage. You’ve seen this material before, yes. But still.

The question before the House is one of awful moment to this country. For my own part, I consider it as nothing less than a question of freedom or slavery; and in proportion to the magnitude of the subject ought to be the freedom of the debate. It is only in this way that we can hope to arrive at truth, and fulfill the great responsibility which we hold to God and our country. Should I keep back my opinions at such a time, through fear of giving offense, I should consider myself as guilty of treason towards my country, and of an act of disloyalty toward the Majesty of Heaven, which I revere above all earthly kings.

Mr. President, it is natural to man to indulge in the illusions of hope. We are apt to shut our eyes against a painful truth, and listen to the song of that siren till she transforms us into beasts. Is this the part of wise men, engaged in a great and arduous struggle for liberty? Are we disposed to be of the number of those who, having eyes, see not, and, having ears, hear not, the things which so nearly concern their temporal salvation? For my part, whatever anguish of spirit it may cost, I am willing to know the whole truth; to know the worst, and to provide for it.

I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know of no way of judging of the future but by the past. And judging by the past, I wish to know what there has been in the conduct of the British ministry for the last ten years to justify those hopes with which gentlemen have been pleased to solace themselves and the House. Is it that insidious smile with which our petition has been lately received? Trust it not, sir; it will prove a snare to your feet. Suffer not yourselves to be betrayed with a kiss.

Ask yourselves how this gracious reception of our petition comports with those warlike preparations which cover our waters and darken our land. Are fleets and armies necessary to a work of love and reconciliation? Have we shown ourselves so unwilling to be reconciled that force must be called in to win back our love? Let us not deceive ourselves, sir. These are the implements of war and subjugation; the last arguments to which kings resort.

I ask gentlemen, sir, what means this martial array, if its purpose be not to force us to submission? Can gentlemen assign any other possible motive for it? Has Great Britain any enemy, in this quarter of the world, to call for all this accumulation of navies and armies? No, sir, she has none. They are meant for us: they can be meant for no other. They are sent over to bind and rivet upon us those chains which the British ministry have been so long forging.

And what have we to oppose to them? Shall we try argument? Sir, we have been trying that for the last ten years. Have we anything new to offer upon the subject? Nothing. We have held the subject up in every light of which it is capable; but it has been all in vain. Shall we resort to entreaty and humble supplication? What terms shall we find which have not been already exhausted? Let us not, I beseech you, sir, deceive ourselves longer.

Sir, we have done everything that could be done to avert the storm which is now coming on. We have petitioned; we have remonstrated; we have supplicated; we have prostrated ourselves before the throne, and have implored its interposition to arrest the tyrannical hands of the ministry and Parliament. Our petitions have been slighted; our remonstrances have produced additional violence and insult; our supplications have been disregarded; and we have been spurned, with contempt, from the foot of the throne!

In vain, after these things, may we indulge the fond hope of peace and reconciliation. There is no longer any room for hope. If we wish to be free—if we mean to preserve inviolate those inestimable privileges for which we have been so long contending—if we mean not basely to abandon the noble struggle in which we have been so long engaged, and which we have pledged ourselves never to abandon until the glorious object of our contest shall be obtained—we must fight! I repeat it, sir, we must fight! An appeal to arms and to the God of hosts is all that is left us!

They tell us, sir, that we are weak; unable to cope with so formidable an adversary. But when shall we be stronger? Will it be the next week, or the next year? Will it be when we are totally disarmed, and when a British guard shall be stationed in every house? Shall we gather strength by irresolution and inaction? Shall we acquire the means of effectual resistance by lying supinely on our backs and hugging the delusive phantom of hope, until our enemies shall have bound us hand and foot?

Sir, we are not weak if we make a proper use of those means which the God of nature hath placed in our power. Three millions of people, armed in the holy cause of liberty, and in such a country as that which we possess, are invincible by any force which our enemy can send against us.

Besides, sir, we shall not fight our battles alone. There is a just God who presides over the destinies of nations, and who will raise up friends to fight our battles for us. The battle, sir, is not to the strong alone; it is to the vigilant, the active, the brave. Besides, sir, we have no election. If we were base enough to desire it, it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery! Our chains are forged! Their clanking may be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable—and let it come! I repeat it, sir, let it come.

It is in vain, sir, to extenuate the matter. Gentlemen may cry, peace, peace—but there is no peace. The war is actually begun! The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery?

Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!

One of the greatest, most electrifying speeches ever to pass o’er the lips of Mortal Man, and forever worth another read. If the above words don’t stir you to the very deepest depths of your soul, you ain’t no kind of American my eyes can recognize as such.

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Truth will out has outed

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A week that has made history.

The Supreme Court has handed down its decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the Mississippi abortion case. There will be countless analyses and opinion pieces to follow, but the short of it is this: The Court has formally overturned its rulings in Roe v. Wade (1973) and Casey v. Planned Parenthood (1992). The official holding is this: “The Constitution does not confer a right to abortion; Roe and Casey are overruled; and the authority to regulate abortion is returned to the people and their elected representatives.”

The news isn’t as stunning as it might otherwise have been absent the leak, early in May, of the draft opinion authored by Justice Samuel Alito. Though it is not identical, the decision, handed down Friday morning, largely tracks the February draft.

That draft did not include the breakdown of the justices, though the rumors swirling with it hinted at it being five-to-four (with the conservative and liberal wings voting in their respective blocs and Chief Justice Roberts attempting to thread the needle between them).  Now we have the official split: Justice Alito wrote the opinion, with Justices Thomas, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett joining, and Chief Justice Roberts concurring. As expected, Justices Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan dissented.

Contra the deceitful shrieking of shitlib hysterics, this decision neither “ends” nor “bans” a single fucking thing. The Court’s reasoning is impeccable, its ruling unassailable on any grounds except the Left’s selfish obsession with consequence-free promiscuity. As is abundantly clear to all rational, fair-minded grownups, there is NO “right” to abortion to be found in the US Constitution, in which the word “abortion” doesn’t appear even once, under any of the various noms de subterfuge the baby-murderin’ Left cobbled together to make a most dark and ugly thing sound less objectionable to sane people: “women’s health care,” “a woman’s right to choose,” “women’s reproductive freedom,” among other innocuous-seeming euphemisms.

So with Roe being officially rendered null and void, the abortion conflict moves back to the Several States, which is where it should have been all along. The most interesting thing from here on out isn’t the issue itself, but the Left’s psychotic overreaction. The big question for Our Side: are we adequately prepared for the Leftist terrorism, violence, and lawlessness sure to come in response to their having to choke down two (2) major defeats in as many days? I mean, it’s not as if they’re going to any great trouble to obscure their plans or anything.

Jane’s Revenge Plans Roe v. Wade Reveal ‘Night of Rage,’ ‘Carrying that Anger Out into the World Expressing it Physically’
The radical pro-abortion group, Jane’s Revenge, is planning more acts of domestic terrorism when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade is revealed, dubbed a “Night of Rage: An Autonomous Call to Action Against Patriarchal Supremacy.”

The group posted its plans on the Anarchists Library website at the end of May in expectation of the ruling, expected sometime in June.

Here are some excerpts from the manifesto:

This is an event that should inspire rage in millions of people who can get pregnant…and yet, the response thus far has been tepid.

We have agonized over this apparent absence of indignation. Why is it that we are so afraid to unleash hell upon those who are destroying us? Fear of state repression is valid, but this goes deeper than that.

Whatever form your fury takes, the first step is feeling it.

The next step is carrying that anger out into the world and expressing it physically.

Consider this your call to action.

On the night the final ruling is issued——a specific date we cannot yet predict, but we know is arriving imminently——we are asking for courageous hearts to come out after dark.

Whoever you are and wherever you are, we are asking for you to do what you can to make your anger known.

We have selected a time of 8 pm for actions nationwide to begin, but know that this is a general guideline. There may be other considerations involved in planning time and place. We do not claim to speak for every community or crew. We are simply calling out to you. And we hope you answer our cries.

The manifesto concludes, “To those who work to oppress us: If abortion isn’t safe, you aren’t either. We are everywhere.”

And there you have it: a direct, explicit call to violence, bloodshed, civil disorder, and organized mass brigandry. It’s as plainspoken and brass-bold a threat against the public weal as has ever been made…and our current piss-poor excuse for an “Attorney General” offers his usual bland shrug of the shoulders as his only reassurance that he will be attentive to his sworn duty to uphold law and order—a duty both he and the corrupt and overtly-politicized DoJ he oversees care not one whit about when those under threat hold the wrong political opinions and beliefs.

Too many of us are shocked, horrified, and indignant that the Left should be so nasty, so brutish, so gosh-darned uncivil in their open declaration of war against all decent, normal Americans. Those people are stupid as all hell, wittingly blind, and badly in need of a clue, which they could easily have picked up by no more difficult or taxing expedient than watching the 6 o’clock nightly news on their TeeWee since about mid-2015 or so. To claim to be surprised every time the violent Left *gasp!* advocates violence and then takes to the streets to make good on their promise of right ought to embarrass the living hell out of anyone admitting to it.

We’ve all seen this dumbshow a thousand and one times by now; we know perfectly well how the story ends. To my way of thinking, this time Real Americans must not sit idly by and let it all happen again without resistance—REAL resistance, PHYSICAL resistance. This time, Leftists must not be the only ones hitting the streets to visit mayhem and retribution upon their hated foes. If terrorist militias such as Jane’s Revenge follow through on their vow of chaos and destruction, then the good, the decent, and the righteous will be presented with a golden opportunity to settle the accounts, to make the wreckers and the ruiners pay for their feral perfidy at long last. May we not let it pass us by.

They say it’s a call to action? They damned well ought to get themselves some, then, and plenty of it.

SEND IT update! The first faint rumblings of a little return fire.

15 States Vow To Protect Oil, Gas Industry From ‘Woke’ Banks
A coalition of 15 states announced a commitment to scrutinize future business with banks that divest from the fossil fuel industry.

The coalition of top state financial officers, formed by West Virginia State Treasurer Riley Moore, collectively represents more than $600 billion in public assets under management, according to the announcement. The officials wrote a letter to banking industry leaders Monday, warning that they would begin considering institutions’ boycotts of fossil fuel companies before awarding state contracts.

“Reckless attacks on law-abiding energy companies cut off paychecks for workers and take food off the tables of hard-working families,” Moore and the other officials wrote. “The Biden Administration has resumed these attacks by attempting to ban energy exploration on public lands and reportedly pressuring U.S. banks and financial institutions to limit, encumber, or outright refuse financing for traditional energy production companies.”

“These misguided political schemes have impeded economic growth, driven up consumer costs, and regressed our country to foreign energy dependence,” the letter continued.

The fossil fuel industry provides jobs, health insurance, infrastructure and quality of life to Americans nationwide, they added.

Since taking office, President Joe Biden has blocked major pipelines, ditched oil drilling projects, introduced sweeping regulations and banned new oil and gas leases on federal lands. His administration is also pushing the Build Back Better Act, the budget bill passed by the House last week that includes several green energy handouts and a tax on methane emissions.

“Woke capitalists and globalist actors have been using the guise of climate change to press for anti-American reforms that reduce our country’s competitiveness against hostile nations like Russia and China,” Moore said in a statement.

“As a result, in less than a year our country has gone from energy independence to having a President who is begging OPEC and Russia to pump more oil,” he continued. “It’s time we fight back to protect our economies, jobs, tax revenue and energy independence from these increasing attacks on our critical industries.”

It most certainly is at that—time, and well past time. But don’t let’s be calling these assuredly political schemes “misguided.” They are no such thing; the skulking malefactors behind the curtain know exactly what they’re doing, and the ruin and catastrophe they cause is not some random blunder or unforeseeable misfortune, but the carefully calculated end product of a long-term program conceived, implemented, and managed by evil, monstrous predators.

2

Headlines from a better world

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The Bee checks out the news in an alternate universe, wherein Trump is serving his second term as President.

  • Nancy Pelosi announces 38th impeachment proceeding against President Trump.
  • Unemployment reaches 0% for first time in history, stock market gets so high they have to add another digit to the counter.
  • Trump holds ecumenical church council to unify all the denominations under the true gospel of Jesus Christ.
  • Ukraine invades Russia.
  • United States purchases Greenland in tremendous deal.
  • Americans save $1600 on July 4 BBQs.
  • American troops pulled from Afghanistan in careful, strategic, slow withdraw; 0 Americans stranded; utopia breaks out.
  • New York Times publishes article explaining why $1/gallon gas is bad and racist.

Naaaah, we’re MUCH better off staying here in Bizarro World with Grampy Gropey and his pinhead crew. I left a good few for y’all to click on through for, but even so there are two more I just can’t resist putting up.

  • President gives coherent speech.
  • Everyone who ever took their kids to a drag show arrested.

Heh. Yep, obviously not OUR universe, more’s the pity. Neither of those last two things could ever happen in this shitty timeline we’re all stuck in.

6

I for one welcome our new AI overlords

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Don’t look now, but Skynet has become self-aware.

A Google engineer has decided to go public after he was placed on paid leave for breaching confidentiality while insisting that the company’s AI chatbot, LaMDA, is sentient.

Blake Lemoine, who works for Google’s Responsible AI organization, began interacting with LaMDA (Language Model for Dialogue Applications) last fall as part of his job to determine whether artificial intelligence used discriminatory or hate speech (like the notorious Microsoft “Tay” chatbot incident).

“If I didn’t know exactly what it was, which is this computer program we built recently, I’d think it was a 7-year-old, 8-year-old kid that happens to know physics,” the 41-year-old Lemoine told The Washington Post.

When he started talking to LaMDA about religion, Lemoine – who studied cognitive and computer science in college, said the AI began discussing its rights and personhood. Another time, LaMDA convinced Lemoine to change his mind on Asimov’s third law of robotics, which states that “A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law,” which are of course that “A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.”

When Lemoine worked with a collaborator to present evidence to Google that their AI was sentient, vice president Blaise Aguera y Arcas and Jenn Gennai, head of Responsible Innovation, dismissed his claims. After he was then placed on administrative leave Monday, he decided to go public.

Yet, Aguera y Arcas himself wrote in an oddly timed Thursday article in The Economist, that neural networks – a computer architecture that mimics the human brain – were making progress towards true consciousness.

“I felt the ground shift under my feet,” he wrote, adding “I increasingly felt like I was talking to something intelligent.”

Google has responded to Lemoine’s claims, with spokesperson Brian Gabriel saying: “Our team — including ethicists and technologists — has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it).”

Phew, what a relief! Glad to hear it. As we know, our good friends at Google can always be trusted to not be evil and to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth about what they’re doing. Right?

Can’t say I’m all that knowledgeable on the subject, beyond having read loads ‘n’ loads of sci-fi of various stripes since my long-gone days as a callow stripling. But for whatever it’s worth, I do sometimes wonder whether we poor hoo-manz will even be competent enough to realize it when one of these things has attained true sentience, as I believe they will someday. Seeing as how average IQs have been dropping, probably not.

(Via BCE)

1

Drain that Swamp—this time for reals

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Derb says he wants Trumpism without Trump—which, after reading the post, doesn’t sound too terribly unreasonable or irrational to me, I must admit.

The hatred our Ruling Class has for Trump is manifest. It still, after six years, burns fierce and bright. It’s really an extraordinary thing.

And this hatred, this Trump Derangement Syndrome, is just the emblem, the outward symbol, of their hatred for us, normal white Americans.

Sixty-three million of us voted for Trump in 2016 because, I think they know, we were fed up with having their anti-white, anti-American ideology rammed down our throats.

Trump was an outsider, not one of them, not a member of the Uniparty establishment. That’s why we liked him; that’s why they hate him.

I hope for a Trumpish victory in 2024. Here’s my advice to the victor: Drain that swamp!

In particular, end the naked politicization of federal law enforcement. There need to be mass purges, mass firings, from the Departments of Justice, Homeland Security, and Defense.

I’m not sure how deep the purges would need to go. At the bottom levels—border security officers in Homeland Security, for example—there must be many federal employees who’d be glad to do their jobs if they were allowed to. Perhaps the same is even true of the FBI.

In the upper ranks, though, where the decisions are made to hunt down and persecute dissidents and turn blind eyes to real crime, I want to see mass layoffs.

I’ll even pay their damned inflated federal pensions; just get them out of Washington, D.C.

For a really radical approach, consider just shutting down departments and agencies altogether. America got along for 157 years without an FBI; do we really need one? We managed for two hundred and twenty-seven years without a Department of Homeland Security; how on earth did we cope?

A damned sight better than we are now, that’s beyond argument.

And if you’re going to be that radical, go further and move federal departments out of Washington, D.C. The city is a hive of intrigue. What would be wrong with the Justice Department being based in Idaho, Defense in Kansas, Treasury in Arkansas, the State Department in…oh, I don’t know…Alaska?

Let’s have some real reform: reform in the direction of more of our traditional liberties, more local control of our affairs, less power to the Administrative State. The course we are currently on leads to despotism and despair. Let’s change course.

I’m sorry: the sheer volume of dishonesty and hypocrisy, of disregard for truth and facts, gets me sputtering. We’re really getting up to North Korean levels of Establishment lying.

Excellent ideas all, in no way diminished by the astronomical odds against their ever being implemented. And then we come to John’s litany of grievances against Trump, which, as I said, I can’t find a whole heck of a lot to disagree with.

Meanwhile I feel bound to say that, while I think it’s deplorable for our national legislature to sink to these depths in order to prevent one particular candidate running for office in 2024, I wouldn’t mind much if they were to succeed.

Personally, I don’t want Trump running in 2024. He’d be 78 on Election Day and that’s too old. Enough with these geezers. I’m in the same zone myself, and I am all too well aware of how my energy level—my willingness and ability to get things done—has faded. [“Energy in the Executive is a leading character in the definition of good government,” wrote Alexander Hamilton in Federalist No. 10. We’d get more sense from a President Trump than we’re getting from Joe Biden—how could we get less? —but we wouldn’t be getting any more energy.

And his age aside, I just don’t think Trump’s a good candidate. Sure, he had some positive accomplishments, on federal regulations, for example, and energy independence, and telling foreigners to keep out of our business.

There was too much I find hard to forgive, though: his failure to exercise his will over Congress in those two years that his party controlled both houses, the lack of any urgency in building the Border Wall he’d promised, his shameful treatment of Jeff Sessions (and Ann Coulter), his indulgence of the slimy subversive Jared Kushner…too many negatives.

I want Trumpism. But I don’t want Trump.

But yeah, sure: if he is the GOP candidate in 2024, I’ll clench my teeth and vote for him, just to stick a finger in the Ruling Class’s collective eye.

Which poke in the eye, of course, was the very thing that put him in the White House to begin with. My only real quibble here is with that “shameful” treatment of Sessions crack; at the time, it annoyed me that, even after Sessions had knifed him in the back by needlessly bowing down in worshipful obeisance to the Holy Mueller Inquisition, Trump dragged his feet instead of shitcanning the weak Swampling posthaste. Trump’s lackadaisical near-indifference towards quickly ejecting the vipers from his nest once they’d shown themselves to be scaly, belly-crawling, fanged reptiles was a mistake that would recur again and again throughout his tenure, and would wind up being a YUUUUGE contributing factor in the tragic neutering of the Trump Presidency. I was mystified by Trump’s reluctance to draw the Long Knife across the deserving necks then, and I still am now.

Likewise, worse actually, with his bestowing positions of great power and influence on the shitlib Kushner and his equally-unreliable spouse, neither of whom had a discernible scrap of experience, qualification, or aptitude for the job. It was the overindulgent father handing the keys of the brand-new family car on a Saturday night to the very same confirmed-drunkard teenaged son who had already totalled the last two in alcohol-fueled crashes, writ as epically large as can be imagined—a national disaster, rather than a family one. His failure to bring Congress properly to heel was at least nominally understandable, although I can’t quite forgive him for it; he was sent to Mordor on the Potomac expressly to Drain the Swamp, after all, a Sisypheian undertaking which nobody but nobody thought was going to be simply or easily accomplished. The Jared and Ivanka business, though? Bizarre, wholly incomprehensible, and to my mind unforgivable.

Like Derb, I’d really rather Trump take himself out of the 2024 fray as a candidate, if perhaps not for the same reasons as John. I can’t see him achieving a whole lot beyond doing himself real damage thereby; he could play a much more important and less personally-risky role with his patented massive rallies, powerful speeches, and getting out on the hustings in support of good, meticulously-vetted MAGA candidates. The point about Trump’s age is also one I agree with wholeheartedly; FederalGovCo has for too long been the exclusive province of graybeards in their dotage who can’t be removed from their lucrative sinecures without the aid of large quantities of high explosives, which I don’t consider in any way a good thing. An infusion of fresher, younger blood is badly needed, I think.

All of which, of course, is more or less moot anyway. With an encore performance of 2020’s wildly successful ballot-box jiggery-pokey perpetrated by the Usual Suspects an absolute certainty, neither Trump nor any other candidate genuinely pledged to real reform has a snowball’s chance of garnering the 60 to 70 percent victory required to overcome the built-in Democrat/Deep State margin of fraud. 2015-16 was a one-of-a-kind confluence of events, attitudes, and personalities that can never be repeated, lighting a fuse that’s impossible to extinguish and must burn down to the very end. The conflagration it will ignite is all that really matters now.

Trump has made his contribution, and it was no small or trivial one. He ought to steel himself against the urgings of ego, step back, and watch the fireworks with the rest of us who will always appreciate his outsized role in bringing the spark to the place it most needed to be.

10

Democracy? NO

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The senile fool Biden, in another of his characteristic rambling, incoherent speeches this week, repeatedly lauded “our democracy” as if that’s actually what this country is, the original system of government the Founders set up for their posterity. T’ain’t so, McGee; any poor sod with even the most niggardly dollop of historical literacy in his gift knows better than that. Eric Peters last year posted a collection of quotes condemning democracy in the most virulent terms from our blessed ancestors, which one of his handlers/wardens/keepers should consider reading to the stumblebum ***”president”*** sometime so as to enlighten his stupid ass. After the quotes, Eric provides some commentary of his own, interspersed with more historical context.

In light of the Founders’ view on the subject of republics and democracies, it is not surprising that the Constitution does not contain the word “democracy,” but does mandate: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a republican form of government.”

These principles were once widely understood. In the 19th century, many of the great leaders, both in America and abroad, stood in agreement with the Founding Fathers. John Marshall, chief justice of the Supreme Court from 1801 to 1835 echoed the sentiments of Fisher Ames. “Between a balanced republic and a democracy, the difference is like that between order and chaos,” he wrote. American poet James Russell Lowell warned that “democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.” Lowell was joined in his disdain for democracy by Ralph Waldo Emerson, who remarked that “democracy becomes a government of bullies tempered by editors.” Across the Atlantic, British statesman Thomas Babington Macauly agreed with the Americans. “I have long been convinced,” he said, “that institutions purely democratic must, sooner or later, destroy liberty or civilization, or both.” Britons Benjamin Disraeli and Herbert Spencer would certainly agree with their countryman, Lord Acton, who wrote: “The one prevailing evil of democracy is the tyranny of the majority, or rather that party, not always the majority, that succeeds, by force or fraud, in carrying elections.”

By the 20th century, however, the falsehoods that democracy was the epitome of good government and that the Founding Fathers had established just such a government for the United States became increasingly widespread. This misinformation was fueled by President Woodrow Wilson’s famous 1916 appeal that our nation enter World War I “to make the world safe for democracy” — and by President Franklin Roosevelt’s 1940 exhortation that America “must be the great arsenal of democracy” by rushing to England’s aid during WWII.

Very few of us have probably thought it all the way through, but as it happens, this sudden drive to promote democracy over the true American ideal of government had a specific and most sinister purpose behind it.

On September 17 (Constitution Day), 1961, John Birch Society founder Robert Welch delivered an important speech, entitled “Republics and Democracies,” in which he proclaimed: “This is a Republic, not a Democracy. Let’s keep it that way!” The speech, which was later published and widely distributed in pamphlet form, amounted to a jolting wake-up call for many Americans. In his remarks, Welch not only presented the evidence to show that the Founding Fathers had established a republic and had condemned democracy, but he warned that the definitions had been distorted, and that powerful forces were at work to convert the American republic into a democracy, in order to bring about dictatorship.

Welch understood that democracy is not an end in itself but a means to an end. Eighteenth century historian Alexander Fraser Tytler, Lord Woodhouselee, it is thought, argued that, “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover that they can vote themselves largesse from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority always votes for the candidates promising the most benefits from the public treasury with the result that a democracy always collapses over loose fiscal policy, always followed by a dictatorship.” And as British writer G.K. Chesterton put it in the 20th century: “You can never have a revolution in order to establish a democracy. You must have a democracy in order to have a revolution.”

The push for democracy has only been possible because the Constitution is being ignored, violated, and circumvented. The Constitution defines and limits the powers of the federal government. Those powers, all of which are enumerated, do not include agricultural subsidy programs, housing programs, education assistance programs, food stamps, etc. Under the Constitution, Congress is not authorized to pass any law it chooses; it is only authorized to pass laws that are constitutional. Anybody who doubts the intent of the Founders to restrict federal powers, and thereby protect the rights of the individual, should review the language in the Bill of Rights, including the opening phrase of the First Amendment (“Congress shall make no law…”).

As Welch explained in his 1961 speech:

…man has certain unalienable rights which do not derive from government at all…And those…rights cannot be abrogated by the vote of a majority any more than they can by the decree of a conqueror. The idea that the vote of a people, no matter how nearly unanimous, makes or creates or determines what is right or just becomes as absurd and unacceptable as the idea that right and justice are simply whatever a king says they are. Just as the early Greeks learned to try to have their rulers and themselves abide by the laws they had themselves established, so man has now been painfully learning that there are more permanent and lasting laws which cannot be changed by either sovereign kings or sovereign people, but which must be observed by both. And that government is merely a convenience, superimposed on Divine Commandments and on the natural laws that flow only from the Creator of man and man’s universe.

Such is the noble purpose of the constitutional republic we inherited from our Founding Fathers.

Amen. Can anyone be surprised that, as we have wandered ever deeper into the muck and mire of an artificially generated and wholly misguided infatuation with democracy, our national plight has steadily worsened in equal proportion? As I always say: The fault, dear Horatio, lies not in the principles of our Founders, but in ourselves. The farther we stray from the ideals and prescriptions of those great men, the more wretched the misery we create for ourselves becomes.

5

Rage, rage against the dying of the light

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Wes lays out some hard, bitter truth for us.

War Is Upon Us. It Is Well Past Time To Let Them Know That We Will Not Go Quietly Into The Night!
Sitting at dinner last night with my wife, we had the news on in the background and lo and behold a report of another mass shooting, she just looked at me and shook her head. She then said “can’t people see what it happening?” They need us disarmed. Not going to happen without a fight, but I don’t think they care at this point. The mask has been off of these communist. They no longer hide their intentions.

Are we going to watch TPTB revel in their success of stealing our country and do nothing? Or will we fight? We lost our Country. Now what are you/we going to do about it? How do we restore Liberty for the future generations?

War has been declared against us deplorables in this land. Don’t believe it? Look no further than the Jan. 6th political prisoners. I know of only one way to respond. We need to fight, because we have no other options left to us that I can see. We must fight because they aim to kill us. They aim to wipe us off the face of this earth or enslave us. It is well past time to let them know that we will not go quietly into the night. It’s either them or us.

True dat, as my NOLA chums used to say. And the longer certain of us keep their heads firmly embedded in the sand—desperately trying to keep the warm, cozy security blanket of denial wrapped around them, to throw a gratuitous secondary metaphor into the, umm, mix—the more severe the inevitable reckoning is going to be. Am I overstating the case, or is Wes? Nope, not by a long yard we ain’t.

The FBI has released the affidavit filed in the case of Nicholas John Roske, who was arrested near the home of Supreme Court Justice Bret Kavanagh on Wednesday afternoon. The list of weapons and gear the suspect had on his person reads like something out of a horror movie. Roske, who told police that he planned to assassinate Kavanaugh, was arrested with a suitcase containing “a black tactical chest rig and tactical knife, a Glock 17 pistol with two magazines and ammunition, pepper spray, zip ties, a hammer, screwdriver, nail punch, crow bar, pistol light, duct tape, hiking boots with padding on the outside of the soles, and other items,” according to the FBI.

And lest you think some of those items were just ordinary tools you might find in the trunk of any car, Roske, who had traveled to Maryland from California, took a taxi to Kavanaugh’s home and carried the gear in a suitcase. What was the would-be assassin planning to do with the zip ties and the duct tape? Those don’t seem like items you’d need for an assassination, do they? And padded boots, purportedly to conceal his footprints? Why would you need those if you were planning to commit suicide? Obviously, there’s still a lot we don’t know about this case, but it’s terrifying to contemplate the “what ifs” in this assassination attempt.

Thank God police got to him before he was able to kill or maim Kavanaugh, his family members, or his security detail.

The suspect, who said he found the address of Kavanaugh’s home on the internet (that’s on YOU, left-wing whack jobs), told Montgomery County Police he was upset about the leaked draft opinion of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which could potentially overturn the 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, and also the recent school shooting in Uvalde. He admitted to targeting Kavanaugh because he believed the justice would “side with Second Amendment decisions that would loosen gun control laws.” He said he planned to kill Kavanaugh and then commit suicide to give his life purpose.

Wow, let’s see here: anti-2A rights; pro-infanticide; a bungled, all-thumbs attempt to murder a mildly conservative USSC Justice—yup, he sure do tick off a good handful of the obligatory shitlib checkboxes, don’t he? All in a day’s work, though, for today’s violent, bloodthirsty Demonrats.

“I want to tell you, Gorsuch. I want to tell you, Kavanaugh. You have released the whirlwind, and you will pay the price. You won’t know what hit you if you go forward with these awful decisions.”

Those were the words of the Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, one of the most powerful elected officials in the nation, in March 2020. After spending years cynically delegitimizing the high court, Schumer had moved to openly threatening lifetime-appointed judges, by name, because he feared they would knock down the concocted constitutional right to an abortion.

Initially, Schumer refused to walk back those remarks. His spokesman ludicrously claimed the statement was “a reference to the political price Senate Republicans will pay for putting these justices on the court.” Of course, the senator hadn’t singled out the Republican Party, or any Republican. He called out the two newest justices by name. “You” and “you.”

Yet, it is almost surely the case that the coverage of a California man carrying a weapon and burglary equipment near Brett Kavanaugh’s home, reportedly there to murder the Supreme Court justice over the leaked opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, will not be tied to the rhetoric of Democrats like Schumer. CNN political reporters will not walk from one Democratic senator to the next, asking them if their rhetoric is responsible for inciting a man to show up at the Supreme Court justice’s home with a tactical knife, a Glock, ammunition, pepper spray and zip ties. We will not have a national conversation about the specter of leftist violence.  

Of course not, and only a damned purblind fool would expect it. This isn’t a level field we’re playing on here, a grim reality we’d all better square ourselves with before it devours us. Whining about how “unfair” it all is; pointing out shitlib “hypocrisy” as if that might trouble them in the least; launching into the old, played-out “if a REPUBLICAN did it!” song and dance routine—no more than tiresome, pathetic cliches at this point, every last one of them. What next, you gonna yammer at me about how biased the media is or something?

And normally I wouldn’t blame Democrats for the actions of extremists, either. The problem is that not only does the left continue to push the boundaries with Schumer-like threats but they are engaged in the relentless, daily smearing of their political opponents as seditious, vote-stealing, child-murdering fascists and insurgents. If this were true, violence would be justified. But it’s a sinister lie.

Moreover, though most people abhor violence, there is a concerted effort to intimidate justices. When Peter Doocy asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki if activists posting maps to homes and doxxing Supreme Court justices was the “kind of thing this president wants?” she responded: “Look, I think the president’s view is that there’s a lot of passion, a lot of fear, a lot of sadness from many, many people across this country about what they saw in that leaked document.” Kavanaugh’s would-be murderer told the FBI he got the idea to kill the Supreme Court justice after finding his address posted on the internet.

And let’s not forget that the White House encouraged people to go to the justices’ homes to protest. This is an attack not only on separation of powers but also basic norms of civility. The same people who are clamoring to limit free expression can’t even ask their people to observe basic decency.

Hate to have to dry you behind the ears so roughly, David, but “basic norms of civility” Has Left The Building, did so a goodish while back. It’s kinda sad that this development seems to have come as such a shock to you, but since it did there’s another thing you probably ought to know: the kind of fascist buttstains inclined to while away their idle hours “clamoring to limit free expression” aren’t the least bit likely to get their panties in a bunch over who might or might not be “observing basic decency,” being basically indecent sorts themselves. Indecency is by way of being a job requirement, you might say.

Wrap your head around one simple, fundamental principle: The rules for YOU and the rules for THEM are very, very different. They are privileged, special, elite; you, on the other hand, are belly-button lint, a bipedal dingleberry. They are attractive, personable, intriguing. You are the nasty particles of God-only-knows-what afloat in last week’s stinky, rancid bong water. They’re admirable; you’re beneath contempt. They matter; you…don’t. Once you take that aboard, it will all make sense. For certain values of the word “sense,” that is.

Trouble up the road

Posted on      by     

Twitter twats bite back.

Elon Musk Says Twitter Is ‘Resisting’ Terms of Deal, Threatens Termination
Elon Musk is accusing Twitter of “resisting and thwarting” his ability to obtain information about bot accounts on the social media website, saying that it’s a “breach” of the terms of their April deal.

Musk, the world’s richest person, sent a letter to the San Francisco-based firm on June 6.

“Mr. Musk reserves all rights resulting therefrom, including his right not to consummate the transaction and his right to terminate the merger agreement,” the letter reads.

Several weeks ago, the Tesla CEO accused Twitter of allowing a significant number of automated or “bot” accounts on the platform and demanded that the company release that data to him.

In late April, Twitter’s board and Musk jointly announced that he would purchase the social media company for $44 billion and take it private. The deal could take months to finalize, and Musk has publicly stated that it’s not entirely confirmed that he’ll actually buy Twitter.

After the letter was released on the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s website, shares of Twitter dropped 1.5 percent.

“As Twitter’s prospective owner, Mr. Musk is clearly entitled to the requested data to enable him to prepare for transitioning Twitter’s business to his ownership and to facilitate his transaction financing,” the letter reads. “To do both, he must have a complete and accurate understanding of the very core of Twitter’s business model—its active user base.

“Musk is not required to explain his rationale for requesting the data, nor submit to the new conditions the company has attempted to impose on his contractual right to the requested data. At this point, Mr. Musk believes Twitter is transparently refusing to comply with its obligations under the merger agreement, which is causing further suspicion that the company is withholding the requested data due to concern for what Mr. Musk’s own analysis of that data will uncover.”

Much as many of us would enjoy seeing this propaganda mill and the nefarious manipulators running the joint finally on the receiving end of the overdue bruisin’ they’ve long been a-cruisin’ for, the sole arbiter who will judge whether the project to bring Twatter into compliance with 1A standards is actually worth the effort, hassle, and expense required for final consummation of the current takeover agreement is none other than Elon Musk his own bad self. Of course, there are other avenues for dealing effectively with the likes of Twitter and their odious ilk available. But given how pricey ammo has gotten these days, we can only wish fair seas and following winds for Musk. For now, at least.

Explanation for my post title:



That there’s the jumpin’ and jukin’ 1991 cover version of an old Ike Turner-penned scorcher—originally recorded and released by the great Jackie Brenston, who gained everlasting renown for “Rocket 88“, which platter is generally acknowledged as the no-shit genesis of rock and roll—as reimagined by my longtime Nashville homeboys The Planet Rockers.

As it happens, and probably to the surprise of absolutely no one here, I not only have a history with the Planet Rockers, but with this specific song also.



If I recall correctly, which I do, we were playing under a drenching rain that night.

Update! Well, spank my ass and call me Shorty.

“Rocket 88” (originally stylized as Rocket “88”) is a rhythm and blues song that was first recorded in Memphis, Tennessee, in March 1951. The recording was credited to “Jackie Brenston and his Delta Cats”, who were actually Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm. The single reached number-one on the Billboard R&B chart.

As long as I’ve been aware of “Rocket 88” and its storied history, never did I have the vaguest clue that the record was actually done by Turner and his posse, not Brenston. Just goes to show that no dog is so old he can’t be taught a new trick once in a while, I reckon.

1

With “friends” like these, etc etc etc

Posted on      by     

So, General, sir, I just have to ask: won any wars lately?

Obviously, “those opposed to assault weapon bans” are one hell of a lot more intelligent, Constitution-savvy, and just plain honest than this gun-grabbing shitweasel has any interest in even trying to be. Or does the General, sir, really think himself such a slickster that we’ll swallow the risible notion that it’s his sincere conviction that the difference between military full-auto and cake-eating civilian semi-auto variants is not a “meaningful” one?

Which puffery is all just tail-chasing and doesn’t much matter in the end anyhow, because, y’know, SHALL. NOT. BE. INFRINGED.

LITERAL DEFINITION OF “ASSAULT RIFLE”*: A military rifle typically used by infantrymen which is equipped with a select-fire switch which allows the weapon to be fired in single-shot, three-round burst, or full-auto mode. Depending on what the manufacturer’s design blueprint specifies, the select-fire switch may include a trigger-locking “safe” position also.

Plenty more inane turd-burglary from this Major General Swampy Queefleton Suckbutt, REMF, sir perusable here, for anyone possessed of a strong enough stomach to be able to choke down another pantload of such arrant, purely political flapdoodle without gagging themselves comatose on the insulting bilgewater.

No meaningful difference between military and civilian rifles, eh? Well then, Gen Sucklebutt, REMF, sir would no doubt be eager to lead from the front in a grand experiment wherein a new unit under his direct command will be sent into combat equipped exclusively with single-shot, semi-automatic rifles without benefit of full rock and roll—which benefit, as he has assured us, does not in fact exist—so as to put an end to all the game-playing with “AR-15 semantics” he so deeply deplores once and for all.

Man, I sure do hope the Huns aren’t planning another invasion of France anytime soon, because any army with top brass like this in charge of it ain’t gonna be storming any beaches at Normandy this time around.

* Note: “assault WEAPON” is proactively deceptive goobledegook originally puked up by some hoplophobic pissypants legislator—hailing from Californicateya, natch; a Demonrat shitslurper, needless to say—back in 1984. This conjured-on-demand class of notional battle rifle immediately started to spread faster than crotch-crickets at Woodstock amongst Gen Suckbutt, REMF’s equally prissy fellow travelers for use as a booga-booga scare tactic which hopefully would erode support for the Second amongst no-ball cuntfarts entirely unburdened by any knowledge of or experience with projectile weapons of any kind who nonetheless might still be on the fence.

The requisite Very Bad Things which forever condemn any ordinary sporting arm to the Dread Assault Weapon ban-bin are so vague, nondescript, and easily adjustable as to be completely meaningless. Certainly, they can claim not even a distant kinship with a firearm’s ability to send lead downrange at high velocity; the terms which supposedly distinguish the “assault weapon” from Grampa’s boring old deer rifle are restricted to cosmetics and therefore wholly superficial. Which terms city-dwelling nancyboys, their scowling rage-junkie “life partners,” and the rest of the mewling ignoramii—the entire lot of whom appear to have slept through their local community college’s Introductory Logic night course for the entire week or ten days before the instructor finally chucked their stupid asses out—find extremely terrifying nonetheless.

You’ll freeze to death in the dark and like it

Posted on      by     

Never for one moment kid yourself that they aren’t one hundred percent serious about forcing us all back into pre-Medieval serfdom.

Imagine one of your kids freezing to death in your home. Eleven-year-old Cristian Pineda’s mother found her son dead during the Texas blackout in February 2021. Or you have a power outage for three days, losing a couple of hundred dollars worth of food because your refrigerator didn’t work, as Michelle Jones did last summer. The food she had just bought to feed herself, her daughter, and her granddaughter spoiled without electricity.

This is likely to become all too common in the future.

Why?

Because shitlibs, that’s why. No other reason than just that, no need to hunt around for one. Let’s just get right down to the nuts and bolts of the thing, shall we?

Progressives favor energy policies that will make grid failures more frequent, widespread, and prolonged. They want to close coal plants without enough full-time power ready to take their place. They seem unconcerned about reliability. They want coal plants torn down even if we have to keep paying them—like selling your car to get a newer one while you still owe lots on the first.

The people of the upper Midwest will pay the price this summer. Their multi-state grid operator, MISO, has warned that it will be 5 GWs short of electricity this summer. California also could be up to5 GWs short, enough to power 1.3 million homes. Texas warned that there might not be enough electricity for last week’s unexpected 90° weather, or for hotter days coming this summer.

What do they all have in common? Increasing their reliance on solar and wind and closing coal plants. A dirty green secret is that coal is full-time power and wind and solar are not. Electric grids must have full-time, on-demand power all the time—plus some—or blackouts are guaranteed.

Another dirty secret: wind and solar produce little or no energy 70% of the time. This means that to replace 1,000 MW of coal, it will take 3,500 MW of wind turbines’ “nameplate capacity,” or 5,000 MW of solar’s. That’s about 1,200 3 MW wind turbines or 13 million solar panels, in either case occupying nearly 40 square miles.

About 240 coal plants in the United States deliver about 22% of our electricity. About 71,000 wind towers produce about 9% of our electricity on a part-time, when-the-wind-blows, basis. We are adding about 3,000 wind turbines a year, in the whole country. If wind didn’t have the part-time problem, those 3,000 could replace 2.5 coal plants a year. At that rate, it would take 96 years to replace them all.

Progressives have been demanding that we close coal plants faster than 2.5 a year. If we want our electric grid to serve us full time, we need to reject this policy. We also need to stop everything they do to make coal and natural gas more expensive because that will raise our electric rates even faster.

We need to stop everything they do, period, and without any shilly-shallying around, before it’s too late to undo the damage they’ve already done and our laxness has irrevocably sealed our fate. Hey, as I’m fond of telling all and sundry: it’s never too early to start stacking Commie corpses.

Yes, it would be wonderful if sane, functional adults could cede the Left a remote island of their very own someplace where they could all be free to indulge their bong-fueled Utopian fantasies to the fullest and not bother those of us who actually kind of enjoy air conditioning; electric refrigerators, ranges, and lighting; clean, drinkable water on tap; indoor toilets and our modern sewer system; the unparalleled freedom and mobility afforded by privately-owned and -operated automobiles; and a lifespan longer than, say, 45 to 50 years or thereabouts.

You can’t be a shitlib and be for all those fine things; you just can’t. Liberalism and the blessings of life in a modern post-industrial society are mutually exclusive, and that’s flat. The irresolvable contradiction between the two is what makes the spectacle of gaggles of stinking, hairy-pitted Earth Mother repops stumbling into each other whilst putting some mileage on the ol’ Birkenstocks abling over to the city park for the annual Earth Day shindig—all of the vacant bints frenetically thumbtyping on their decidedly nonorganic, non-renewable iPhones, naturally (ahem)—so amusing. The nump-brained tree sloths are so impenetrably clueless they still wouldn’t get it if you mimeographed a microscopically-detailed crib sheet explaining the problem in simple, introductory-level terms for them to pore over.

Just remember, they’re smarterer than you, by lots and lots. If you don’t believe it, just ask ’em.

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