GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

The leopard polecat never changes his spots

Be it federal, state, or local, Government is a right bastard. You should never, ever trust it, it’s always a mistake.

Liquor Regulators Are Seeking Revenge on Bars That Broke Pandemic Rules
“The people who violated the governor’s mandates and orders should face some consequences,” a Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board member said in 2022.

During the height of the pandemic summer of 2020, the proprietors of the Burning Bridge Tavern worked with local officials in Wrightsville, Pennsylvania, to host a series of outdoor gatherings for the community.

For their trouble, the bar’s owners got slapped with a series of citations by the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board (PLCB), the government agency that oversees and manages the sale of alcohol in the state. The citations were ticky-tack offenses, according to Burning Bridge’s chief financial officer, Mike Butler. Twice, the bar was cited for noise violations because they’d allowed a band playing at the gathering to plug into the tavern’s electricity supply. Another offense occurred when the owners and some family members were drinking inside the tavern, which was closed to the public, during a period when indoor dining was prohibited.

A frustrating situation, but not the end of the world. Burning Bridge’s owners paid the fines associated with the citations and assumed that was that. But then the bar had to renew its liquor license.

Fines, be assured, that amounted to thousands of dollars— dollars already hard to come by in the best of times given the extremely thin profit margins all bars and restaurants struggle with in normal times, orders of magnitude moreso under the draconian and entirely contra-Constitutional FauxVid rules of play.

Not the end of the world, perhaps, but having worked in a good few of them over the years I can tell you with absolute certainty that in the bar/restaurant business there simply ain’t no such thing as “extra money.” But as if all that weren’t enough:

“They denied it. They said, ‘Oh, you’re the guys that got all those citations,'” Butler says. “It was a real gut punch.”

Turns out, over the past two years the PLCB has pushed dozens of Pennsylvania establishments that racked up pandemic-​related citations to sign “conditional licensing agreements” to renew their liquor permits. In some cases, those agreements have forced the sale of licenses—but in most cases, as with Burning Bridge, they’ve added additional conditions to the license that could prevent a future renewal from being approved.

While the PLCB cannot revoke existing licenses, the board is empowered to object to the renewal of a license or to demand the license can only be renewed conditionally. “In extreme cases,” PLCB Press Secretary Shawn Kelly says, the PLCB can force the sale of a liquor license, though the board only pursues that option when “there is an operational and citation history that calls for such an agreement.”

Even though Burning Bridge’s owners weren’t forced to sell their license, Butler says signing the conditional licensing agreement has come with real costs: The bar’s insurance premium tripled as a result of being viewed as a greater risk.

Assuming BBT isn’t part of a bar/restaurant chain, the owners don’t by any stretch have what you might call deep pockets. So taken altogether, the bruising punishment inflicted by the state of Pennsylvania might NOT be “the end of the world” for them, no. But it could very well be the end of their sojourn in the bar biz.

As I always say, seems like there ought to be some way we could thank the “people” responsible adequately for it. I just can’t for the life of me imagine what it might be.

Update! Can’t leave out the closing ‘graph, which sums up the whole contretemps perfectly.

“The feeling was that our government really isn’t working to try and help us,” says Butler. “At this point, it feels like they’re coming after us.”

A-yup. That’s because they, y’know, ARE. You now, and eventually all the rest of us right along with you. Unpleasant as that is to get our heads around, as difficult as it can be for Real Americans naturally inclined to patriotism and faith in their institutions to choke down and accept, that’s the ugly reality nonetheless. The harder we resist admitting it to ourselves, the rougher it’s going to be when we do come around at last.

Which, sooner or later, one way or another, we’re all gonna have to, like it or not. Think of oversized, intrusive, all-powerful government as a sickness with only one effective treatment. It’s some bad, bad medicine—sure to leave a bitter taste that will linger for a long, long time—but before we can hope to be cured, the body politic fully restored to health, a full dose is going to have to be swallowed.

Da girlz can’t he’p it

The article’s title is waaay too close for comfort.

DMV America: The Regime’s Fani Willis Problem, and Ours
The fantastic fall of Fani Willis is one of the great comedies of recent American politics. It’s the flagrant corruption of Hunter Biden, mixed with the stupidity of Jussie Smollett, the courtroom farce of the George Zimmerman trial, and the sky-high political stakes of a U.S. presidential election. It’s the joyous, healthy humor of seeing a wicked, ridiculous person be exposed and get exactly what she deserves.

Right now, it still isn’t certain whether Judge Scott McAfee will actually kick Fani Willis off her own case, but even if he doesn’t, the damage has substantially been done. The tenuous prosecution of President Trump in Georgia has already been badly delayed and discredited, increasing its odds of being tossed by a higher court and the odds of the public simply shrugging its shoulders even if this abortion of a case somehow lurches all the way to a felony conviction. Left-wing anti-Trump zealots are practically begging Fani to step aside of her own volition for the good of the anti-Trump cause.

But they are unlikely to get what they want, for the same reason that this scandal happened in the first place: America’s regime elevated a clown-show affirmative-action incompetent who only cares about herself, told her that she was a big hero simply for existing, and now we are all reaping the consequences.

Follows, a bit of case-bolstering harking back to one Robert Mueller, Establishment Swine Esq, who actually comes off looking pretty good in comparison to these sorry-ass con artists. Then:

Now, take in all of that and go back to the adventures of Flim-Flam Fani.

Willis’s illicit relationship could have easily remained hidden, or at least inconsequential, if she had been even slightly less stupid. But she just could not help herself. It wasn’t enough to hire her lover. She had to make him special counsel on by far her most high-profile case, which would attract by a million miles the most press attention and the most expensive, diligent lawyers. It wasn’t enough to carry on a tryst with Willis. She had to go on one lavish vacation after another with him.

Willis’s excuses for her behavior are the sort that require a lobotomy to accept. Her relationship with Willis was entirely appropriate and aboveboard, yet Willis felt compelled to hide it because, well, *mumble mumble*. Was Willis using her highly-paid lover as a conduit to get those vacations? Not at all. By happenstance, Fani just keeps $15,000 (15 large) in cash in her home at all times for just this sort of thing. And by golly, it turns out Wade liked to do the same thing. How handy!

Good stuff so far, albeit disgusting and dismaying. Next up, a cpl-three more case-making examples—Kim Gardner, Marilyn Mosby, the particularly brazen grifter Tiffany Henyard (regarding whom the author cites a NYPost article I already had sitting in an open tab waiting for me to get around to it myself), Kim Foxx of Justice for Juicy! fame,—before we get down to the real nitty-gritty.

Yes, that Kim Foxx: the one who tried to let Jussie Smollett off the hook, requiring a special prosecutor to swoop in and save the day. When she wasn’t giving favorable treatment to black celebrities, Foxx ordered her minions to avoid cash bail and to only bring felony theft charges against criminals with at least ten prior felony convictions.

So, why would we expect Kim Foxx to hold a fellow soul sista accountable? For that matter, why would we expect anyone on the left to do it?

The modern left has almost wholly abandoned traditional religious faith, but it certainly still has its priests and saints. And the narcissistic message, repeated day in and day out, is that black women are America’s sacred beings. Joe Biden ran on a promise to consider black women, and only black women, for his first Supreme Court pick—93% of Americans need not apply. The result was Ketanji Brown Jackson, who can’t say what a woman is but nevertheless thinks the entire planet should hear every inane thought passing through her head.

As soon as Fani Willis’s own conduct threw the entire lawfare campaign against Donald Trump, years in the making, into doubt, the ethnonarcissist whining came tumbling out immediately: Criticizing a prosecutor for corruptly staffing her loser boyfriend onto a job he wasn’t qualified for was racist!

We’re not even close to rock bottom, either. Remember, as we speak, Kamala Harris is a heartbeat away from the presidency.

I must say, the piece is the most Godawfully RAYCISS!!!© slander of fine, upstanding, successful Blaque Wimminzxx ’n’ shizzle I ever did read.

And some people wonder how it is that the country got itself into the mess it’s currently in. If you’re one of those, you’ll want to read the whole thing for a big, fat clue. “DMV America”? That right there is some truth that really hurts, if you ask me.

Crapola, almost forgot my title-explicating embed.

There, that’s more like it.

Update! CederQ posts one over at Phil’s joint that is equally apropos to the topic at hand, I think.

Heh. Indeed. Two more good ‘uns perusable at the link.

Traveshamockery of “justice”

Not to beat this dead old horse or anything, but I just had to throw in this bit from Steyn’s pre-post-mort because I thought it was just funny as hell.

You might recall that exactly a week ago we linked to Kerry Wakefield’s excellent primer on the trial from The Spectator Down Under. This was Miss Wakefield’s final paragraph:

Given the vindictive USD$83 million damages found against Trump in his case against serial rape accuser E. Jean Carroll, one cannot be optimistic about any jury trial in deep blue Washington DC. But Steyn is going down fighting, and one cannot but admire his guts and brio, even if his bank balance has been cleaned out. Sadly Steyn, representing himself, is now in a wheelchair, having recently suffered three heart attacks. If ever there were a case deserving funding, it is his. The trial continues.

Williams played the Trump card in the final minutes of the trial, linking “election deniers” with “science deniers” and asking the jury to send a strong message to stop attacks on all the other scientists out there:

MR. WILLIAMS: And as you’ve been instructed, if you find punitive damages are appropriate for outrageous behavior, you can set an amount not just to punish, but to serve as an example to prevent others from acting in the same — in a same or similar way.

These attacks on Climate Scientists have to stop, and you now have the opportunity—

MS. WEATHERFORD: Objection.

MR. STEYN: Objection.

THE COURT: Sustained.

MR. WILLIAMS: Sustained? I am saying this heated…

MR. STEYN: My Lord, he’s continuing to talk.

Heh. Good one, Mark.

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“Are we on the doorstep of another civil war?”

A: Probably so, yeah. A better question: Ought we to be? Do our current circumstances require such a terrible, desperate endeavor of us? A: Well, according to the Founders at any rate, indubitably so.

Before I get into my analysis, I want to make it clear I believe that anyone who wants a civil war to happen in the U.S. is dangerously naïve, insane, or working for one of America’s enemies. Imagine a Russia-Ukraine-type conflict in the U.S.

Thanks to Hollywood, most Americans believe that rebellions can be started and won by small ragtag groups of patriots, freedom fighters, insurrectionists, or everyday common folk. All you need are pistols, assault weapons, bows and arrows, and maybe a few Molotov cocktails. Blow up the Death Star, and the problem is solved.

But that is not how it usually works. Revolutions require armaments, soldiers, money, something worth fighting for, and popular support. Unless lives are at stake, few people are angry or committed enough to leave jobs or families to risk going to jail or dying needlessly.

The most daunting task is overcoming the opposition. The weaponry and manpower available to peacekeepers in our country is formidable. This includes the local sheriff’s departments, city police, state police, National Guard, and various federal agencies, most notably the FBI. Plus, in a crisis, these organizations will usually work together. An uprising of twenty, fifty, or even a hundred-plus armed citizens would quickly fail.

Follows, a capsule review of American history, from the Revolution to the Whiskey Rebellion to CW1, even the Weather Undeground, of all things. Then:

You might notice a pattern here. First, important issues divide our country, like independence versus obedience to the king or slavery versus freedom. Then, either a military skirmish occurs before sides get chosen or sides get chosen before the military gets involved. Both the Revolution and the Civil War were started by state military organizations, not by groups of armed radicals.

We are at a similar junction in history right now. Politics has divided the country, and the pivotal issue is unlimited illegal immigration. Few wanted it. No one expected it when he voted for Biden. And now almost no one is willing to pay the price socially or financially to support it.

The White House may have believed that its open border policy would get someone, anyone, to pick up a gun to stop the madness. It would give Biden an excuse to impose martial law, ban assault weapons or handguns, or both. But the horde of right-wing extremists the far-left fantasizes about does not exist.

It seems the administration may have gone too far too fast. The whole country is aware of this issue, and opposition is rising, leading the states to get directly involved. 

The Texas National Guard has been sent to the border to stop the flow of migrants. Roughly half of the states have declared their support for Texas.

If Democrats want to continue unlimited illegal immigration, Biden could nationalize the Texas National Guard, take control, and send it home. But what happens if Texas says no? Would Biden order the armed forces to disarm or attack the Texas Guard? Would the use of the armed forces be legal? Do Democrats care?

History tells us that civil wars happen when our country is divided and the states believe they must get involved. That time may be at hand.

Pray that sanity prevails.

Fair enough. On the other hand, though, it suggests another important Q: If “sanity” necessarily means acceptance of the Superstate status quo, should Real Americans who are seriously dedicated to the Founding principles of ordered liberty, self-determination, and limited government really be praying for it? Viewed in that light, can praying for such a thing even be considered truly sane at all? Or ought it to be thought of instead as what it truly amounts to: surrender?

As I’ve said all too many times over the past cpl-three years, I have no good answers. In fact, I strongly suspect there aren’t any, quite frankly. At this late date, things have gone much too far for any practical, effective answer that any sane soul would think of as “good.” Seems to me that no matter which route we choose, we’re in for some serious trouble, turmoil, tragedy, and loss. Best-case scenario is that I’m so full of shit my eyes are brown, which I do admit is eminently possible. Last I checked, they were still hazel, alas.

Update! The more I think about this sad, sorry situation, the more thoroughly I understand what the old phrase “between a rock and a hard place” means. Verily, it’s a real Hobson’s Choice we’re up against here.

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Knucklebuster blues

Well, although I’ve longed ever since having a limb or three chopped off two years ago to be able to get up and turn a wrench again, I never dreamed my return to the ranks of the Most Honorable and Exalted Order of the Gearhead™ would involve working on a blasted…wheelchair?!?

No shit, folks, Memezapoppin’ is delayed tonight due to the fact that I have just spent the last two hours re-installing a wandering hex-head shoulder bolt that somehow worked itself loose from the left backrest riser—without, thankfully, backing out altogether, hitting dirt, and skedaddling off to someplace betwixt here and Timbuktu.

I guess the stupid thing musta rattled out of its assigned threaded orifice because of excessive vibration from the high RPMs the stroked-out big-block Cobra Jet engine installed on this contraption that I…oh God, I can’t even joke about this shit, that’s how not fuckin’ funny it is.

Yep, it’s a long way from banging up my delicate concert-pianist and guitarslinger hands on Harley V-Twins and beater-classic Fords to rasslin’ recalcitranrt wheelchair hardware, all of it straight down. Mind you, the chair I have is actually a no-shit, for-real racing model: Clinton River’s Tailwind, a sweet $800 dealio which was taken off the market years ago ‘cause some doctor fella got hisself hurt in one, sued the company for 8 million simoleons, and won.

How I got mine was, a close friend of mine is always scouting around at the wheelchair store in CLT—his mom has MS and has been locked down in a chair for as long as I’ve known him, which is a lotta years—and happened to see my Tailwind sitting out by the dumpster in back of the store one day, waiting to be hauled off and scrapped. Shane looked it over real good—knowing a thing or two about a thing or two concerning such things as he does—was aware that I’d be in the market for one once I got out of hospital durance vile, and tossed it into his pickup to bring home for me.

I like the thing, actually; the battery-assist never has worked, since the strange-o battery packs have long since gone the way of the dodo just like the chair itself has. Also, it has no brakes on it of any kind, which has taken a great deal of getting used to and requires much careful forethought and attention.

That said, though, it also has quick-detach main wheels and the seat-back folds down flat, making it a lead-pipe cinch to break down, toss into the back seat of the car, and motor on off when the walls here at home begin to close in on me and I just GOTTA get out and go somewhere…ANYwhere. Which is usually about once a week or thereabouts.

The no-parking-brake thingie, though downright dangerous when it isn’t just an ordinary pain in the ass, admits of a blood-simple, inexpensive workaround which I’ve already worked out in my head and plan to implement as soon as possible, transforming this already-rare wheelchair into a true one-of-a-kind custom build. Someday, it’d be nice if I could figure out a way to do away with the heavy electric motors on each of the main wheels and lighten this little jewel up a bit, but since that’s where the splined shafts of the detachable wheels go in and attach, I haven’t got that one figured out yet in such a way that wouldn’t require full-machine-shop access and some serious fabrication.

What can I say; once a gearhead, always a gearhead, I guess.

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DEFY them

Wayne Allyn Root asks the question that’s on all our minds.

WAYNE ROOT: I Say Out Loud What Others Only Whisper: Is There Any Patriot in America Who Isn’t Thinking Supreme Court Justices are Being Bribed, or Blackmailed?

Well, if there are, there damned well shouldn’t be by now, and the latest betrayal by supposed “conservatives” Roberts and Coney Island Whitefish-Barrett ought to once and for all put paid to it.

This just isn’t normal. It makes no sense. Conservatives have the edge. Not just 5-4…but a safe, overwhelming 6-3 edge. We should be winning every major Supreme Court case.

And yet we keep losing with the most obvious, clear-cut, life-or-death-of-America cases. Cases that should be slam dunks. Cases where it’s so clear that no conservative, or patriot in all of America would vote against us. Cases where a vote against us is a vote for the intentional destruction of America.

Yet yesterday our 6-3 edge at the Supreme Court became a 5-4 loss in the most obvious, simple, clear-cut case in history. Again. Just like Obamacare (twice). Just like allowing illegal aliens to count in the U.S. Census that determines who represents us in Congress.

Yesterday, the Supremes voted 5-4 against Texas and A) in favor of the insane, radical, Marxist madmen of the Biden administration…B) in favor of open borders and against the Sovereignty of the United States of America…C) in favor of the intentional destruction of America…D) against States Rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution…and E) in favor of leaving the American people completely helpless to stop a mass invasion of our country.

Who could possibly vote against the interests of America and a secure border? Who could possibly vote against Texas and ignore States Rights? Who could rule that a state and its legal American citizens have no right to defend against a mass invasion of criminals? Who could possibly vote that as millions of military-age males from Hamas, Hezbollah, MS-13 and our mortal enemy China pour into our border, a state cannot even put up razor wire to try to slow the invasion down?

America-hating Leftists, TreasonCrats, and the fake Uniparty “opposition” in cahoots with them, that’s who—and absolutely, positively nobody else.

Meanwhile, though, the Republic of Texas courageously carries on defending the nation against the vile depredations of its own illegitimate ruling junta.

SHOWDOWN: Texas National Guard Responds to Supreme Court Order by Installing More Razor Wire (VIDEO)
The Texas National Guard on Tuesday responded to the Supreme Court’s order allowing the Biden Regime to cut/remove razor wire installed along the southern border by installing more razor wire.

The US Supreme Court on Monday sided with the Biden Regime and allowed Border Patrol agents to remove razor wire installed on the Texas-Mexico border.

Gov. Greg Abbott (R) previously installed about 30 miles of razor wire at the Texas-Mexico border near Eagle Pass to stop the flood of illegal aliens being let in by the Biden administration.

In October Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton filed a lawsuit against the Biden Regime regarding their cutting razor wire at the border.

This is the 9th time that the Supreme Court has sided with the Biden Regime out of 14 emergency applications.

Texas Governor Greg Abbott and Attorney General Ken Paxton on Monday evening vowed to defy the Supreme Court’s ruling on razor wire at the southern border.

“The Supreme Court’s temporary order allows Biden to continue his illegal effort to aid the foreign invasion of America. The destruction of Texas’s border barriers will not help enforce the law or keep American citizens safe. This fight is not over, and I look forward to defending our state’s sovereignty.” Ken Paxton said.

Good on ya then, sir. Gird your loins, though, because I fear that very, very soon now, the war you’re currently fighting will burst forth from the civilized confines of the courtroom and strictly intellectual/verbal debate and take on a more solid, physical shape. Along those lines, Aesop has some excellent suggestions as to how you might proceed.

Dear Treasonous Traitors: Fuck You. Strong Message Follows.
Since SCOTUS has ruled – beyond and against any legal reasoning worthy of the name – that the U.S. Constitution does not apply to Texas, Texas should ratify that decision and return the favor, in spades.

There should be consequences to ruling a state is outside the protection of the Constitution under which it joined the republic.

All representatives of Texas outside its geographic boundaries should be recalled to the state forthwith.

1) How many divisions does SCOTUS have?

2) Texas should arrest on the spot any federal agent attempting to cut, remove, or displace any obstacle Texas has erected within the state’s boundaries, or otherwise thwart prevention by Texas of the criminal invasion of their state, and hold any such arrestees without bail indefinitely, for insurrection and treason.

3a) Any of them who are current residents of Texas should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of Texas law, in batches if necessary, and imprisoned in the state’s penitentiaries forthwith, for the entirety of sentences received, without any possibility of leniency or parole. If a court decides on the death penalty, a ten- or twelve-place scaffold should suffice, to save time. Pour encourager les autres.

3b) Any of them with residency outside of Texas should be held without trial until the U.S. re-establishes diplomatic relations with Texas. Outside, behind barbed wire, in their underpants, 24/7.

3c) Any military personnel who attempt to enter or leave their bases should be similarly interred as in 3b, but given normal treatment under the Geneva Convention in lieu of formal treaty.

3d) Any personnel attempting to leave military reservations within the state under arms, by land or air, should be exterminated with extreme prejudice, and those bases seized and occupied. As long as they stand down and remain neutral and unreinforced, they should remain unmolested as is. Any act of war upon Texas from such installations in any manner or to any degree voids any such guarantee. If they elect to road march on foot out of state territory, unarmed, and leaving all vehicles and equipment behind, they should be given parole and safe conduct to the state’s borders. Any future return to the state under arms subjects them to immediate execution upon capture.

4) Any other federal agents, officers, or employees, lifting so much as a finger in assistance of the treasonous, seditious, and criminal conspiracy to aid and abet the invasion of the state of Texas, from within the boundaries of the state of Texas, should receive the same treatment. Tears that would be shed over any death, let alone massacre, of federal agents attempting to interfere or resist, anywhere: zero.

As Aesop knows, we are now far along the path to Ft Sumter v2.0, thanks to the usurper-State currently roosting, Nazgul-like, in the dismal swamps of Mordor On The Potomac. It’s all too obvious that FederalGovCo and its orcs will not turn aside or back down, so emboldened and suffused with confidence are they of ultimate victory over We Duh Sheeple. At this late stage of the game, I can descry no likely outcome that can avert massive bloodshed, misery, and woe.

So be it, then. May the authors of this needless calamity—from the highest to the most lowly of them—all have such extraordinary pain and suffering inflicted upon them as to ensure that many, many generations will pass before another such attack on our liberty and Constitutionally-enumerated rights is contemplated again.

Update! Another clarion call to arms is issued, from a source which may surprise you.

Tucker Calls For ‘Men Of Texas’ To Defend The Border
Daily Caller co-founder Tucker Carlson called on the “men of Texas” to protect their state on Monday, following a verdict from the Supreme Court that allowed the Biden Administration to remove border wire.

Carlson took to Twitter to claim “everyone in power” has allegedly “decided to destroy the country” in regards to allowing the border crisis to continue. Carlson additionally questioned where the “men of Texas” were, asking why they were not “protecting their state and nation.”

“So it’s unanimous: everyone in power, from the White House, to the hedge fund managers, to the Supreme Court of the United States has decided to destroy the country by allowing it to be invaded. That leaves the population to defend itself. Where are the men of Texas? Why aren’t they protecting their state and the nation?” Carlson tweeted out.

We shall soon see if the “men of Texas” remain truly men, and if Texas remains truly Texas.

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America’s toxic business culture

I’ve been muttering about where things were headed since the late 80s, when getting an MBA and starting out in middle-management replaced rising through the ranks from the factory floor to eventually land in the executive suite as the primary model for success. And now, well…here we all are, staring at the pluperfect example of that lamentable development: Boeing.

Boeing was once a well-run engineering company that became very profitable from its well-engineered products. It is now a poorly-run manufacturing company being managed in the manner taught in elite MBA programs, placing an emphasis above all else on cost control and expense reduction.

It is also a company whose current version of its workhorse product, the 737 Max, continues to have catastrophic in-flight failures.

Part of the 737 Max fleet has been grounded, again, this time after a door plug came off the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines airplane while in flight. Back in 2018 and 2019, there were two fatal 737 Max crashes, both apparently related to poorly designed and programmed flight stabilizer systems.

There is so much more that needs to be said about the toxicity of the “slash and cut your way to increased profit” culture that is learned at business schools, but I’ll briefly summarize that putting the “Chief Cost Cutter” at the helm of a corporation is just as ridiculous as putting the Accounts Payable Manager or Facilities Manager in charge of all operations. They’re all important roles, but you would not have the entire company focus almost exclusively on just one of those facets. Yet too many modern executives have a monomaniacal obsession with cutting costs and expenses, which causes neglect of innovation, quality, safety, and new product development, if not outright hostility toward those critical areas. It also causes a loss of important talent whose legacy knowledge has a value that can’t be quantified on a financial statement.

Throckmorton goes on to cite, at length, a seminal Atlantic piece which appeared in the wake of the 2019 crash, to wind up thusly:

If I can make a quick side note, the only people more destructive in corporate C-suites than Ivy League business school graduates are General Electric alums. They tend to bring a cult-like fanaticism for the idiotic business fads that ultimately destroyed GE, never understanding that the success of GE in the 1990s was despite those awful gimmicks, not because of them, and that the subsequent destruction of GE as a successful company in the 21st century was largely because of all the gimmicks that came to define GE’s culture.

Right now, there is much well-deserved mockery of Boeing and Alaska Airlines for how their focus on DEI and LGBTQ has distracted them from manufacturing and operating airplanes that don’t fall apart mid-flight. I have no doubt that if Alaska Airlines spent more time inspecting its airplanes rather than decorating them in rainbow colors and putting on drag shows, this latest incident would not have happened.

But neither would it have happened if Boeing was still a company run by engineers, rather than being a company run by MBAs who will gladly sacrifice quality and safety to temporarily goose the bottom line.

Quelle surprise, that a communist-run nation should lose touch so completely with its capitalist roots.

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Devastated, distraught, destroyed

Posting for tonight (maybe longer, it’s too early to say) is gonna be delayed a bit, due to the awful fact that, after getting back home from a long afternoon of schlepping my brother around all over CLT on a quest for Freightshaker parts, I found one of my feline foursome, Mr Bunny Fluffster—so named by my daughter Madeleine because, even not long after he was born, she noted he had, and I quote, “big bunny feet!” Plus, he was, y’know, fluffy—which he still is, actually, although he did eventually grow those big ol’ bunny feet of his into proper proportion with the rest of him.

He must have gotten out through this open vent hole in Madeleine’s bedroom closet, I figger. Usually the door to that room stays closed, but as she was here over the weekend it’s been open; we had covered that vent hole with doubled-up cardboard and Gorilla tape, but either the tape let go—unlikely, I think, since Gorilla tape has never failed me before—or the cats worried at it and worried at it until it finally gave up the ghost.

Either way, my sweet little Bunny-boy is outside in the cold, where he has never been before, and I’m worried sick about him. So I’ll be headed to the front door, where I set out a small dish of dry food and water for him, and calling for him every few minutes, probably all night long unless by some miracle he shows up before too long. So if posting here is tardy or even nonexistent, well, now you know why.

My blog-bud KT ran a pic of baby Bun-Bun on the AoSHQ Pet Thread a while back, one of my all-time favorite kitteh pictures; in the photo, Bun is the grey and white bicolor kitten in the driver’s seat, with his brother Sluggo sprawled out on the hood.

Cute little booger, no? Here’s one taken just last week, of my two good boys cuddled up together on the bed as sister Precious wonders what the heck is going on.

All four feline Musketeers were born five years ago on Easter Sunday; their mama, Fearless, was probably nabbed by a coyote just after they’d been weaned. There was a fifth kitten in the litter, which was adopted by Brack’s little sis Lauren and is living large with her and her husband Jem.

Although it might seem sort of a trivial thing to be bothering the Almighty with, you better believe I’ve been sending up the prayers for Bunny’s safe return in job lots over the past hour or so. You critter lovers will readily understand my anguish; non-critter people never will.

The power of prayer update! YESSS YESYESYESYESYES!!! After Barry’s comments-section suggestion to put some wet food outside to entice him, I set the two-chambered dish he and Precious eat their evening wet-food treat from (with his side still full, natch) out by the door with the other goodies. A bit over a half-hour passes, and I go to call for him again. This time, Sluggo and Precious were sitting at the door so close their noses were practically touching the glass, tails switching madly back and forth: clearly, there was something out there that had caught their attention completely. 

I roll up, open the door, and lo! All the wet food, all the dry food, and about half the water were gone! Fearing it might have been et by a damned raccoon or some other neighborhood outdoor cat, I started calling for Bun one more time, still not daring to hope. Then: a scratchy, soft little “meow” from off to the right side of the deck that I knew could have but one source! Sure enough, Bun-Bun hopped onto the deck from the right, took a long, yearning look at his joyously-relieved Daddy, then looked past me through the open door where all the warm was, as well as his three anxious siblings gathered behind me. I backed out of the doorway, called to him again, and hey presto! He dashed back home to us.

After the four-legged chums had all touched noses in glorious reunion, Bunny-boy beelined for the dry food dish and ate his fill while I sat by and rubbed his back, shoulders, and head, that internal cat-motor running smooth as fine silk. I could maybe be more delighted, but at the moment I sure don’t see how. Barry, many, many thanks for the suggestion, it sure enough did the trick.

All’s well that ends well update! Well, THAT sure didn’t take long.

Snapped just now with my phone, from in front of my desk. That’s a warm, cozy, happy boy, right there. I’m pretty damned happy my own self, I must say.

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1

After the Day Of When, what?

Shitstorm a-brewing, full steam ahead!

How Many Load-Bearing Walls Have to Come Down Before America Collapses?
Imagine a big, beautiful house, but it has a maniacal group of squatters living in it. They take sledgehammers to load-bearing walls, carelessly tinker with the wiring, and make no real effort to fix things.

If the roof gets a leak, they let it go. If there’s a crack in the foundation, they’re more likely to hit it with a sledgehammer for fun than to repair it. If they’re going out of town when there’s going to be a cold snap, they leave the water running and don’t worry about whether the pipes freeze or not. Maybe a couple of them will board up a broken window or slap some duct tape on things when they’re sober and bored, but there’s no organized plan to hold everything together.

What do you think that house is going to look like a few years down the road? Better question, what do you think our country is going to look like a few years down the road?

Granted, it takes longer for a country to break down than a house, but it does all the same. In fact, if you’re middle-aged or older, you could probably reel off half a dozen ways the house we have today is vastly inferior to the one we had just a few decades ago.

This is not a coincidence. It’s not bad luck. It’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve done a lot of damage to our home, and we’re no longer even going through the motions of trying to keep it in good repair. We still have a roof over our heads for the moment, but we are certainly no longer on track to have a home we’re going to want to leave to our kids.

In John’s piece he cites an earlier one by Insty, wherein we find this:

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing. One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse. They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.

When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn’t work. But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?

Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump. What happens?

Half the country – maybe more – will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn’t follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat. They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.

And they will be right. And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.

Oh, it’s sad all right, but that ain’t all it is. Not by a long yard, it ain’t. Need more specifics before you can take alarums warning of impending national catastrophe seriously? Ragin’ Dave offers a few.

It’s going to get worse, before it gets worse
Someone points out that we’re already in a recession, even if nobody wants to admit it.

Let’s take a look at three key areas.

If honest numbers were being used, they would show that GDP growth has been negative for almost the entire time that Joe Biden has been in the White House. That would indicate that we are at least experiencing a recession.

And if honest numbers were being used, they would show that the unemployment rate in this country is sitting at about 25 percent right now.

Needless to say, that is absolutely horrible. And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would still be in double digit territory even though it has come down a bit. The official numbers that the government gives us are designed to make us feel good about things. But at this point things are so bad that the charade is falling apart.

Food costs are up. Energy costs are up. Housing costs are through the damn roof. If I didn’t already own property up where I live I’d be screwed because I couldn’t afford to purchase it today, and I made far more in my last year of military service than I did when I purchased the property back in the early 2000’s.

And the people with their hands on the levers of power are either in denial about everything, or they’re just flat out lying to you and shoving as much lucre into their bank accounts as they can before it all comes apart. You know it, I know it.

Just on housing costs alone I don’t see how we come out of this without some sort of massive collapse. When the average family cannot afford a home, there’s no incentive to keep pushing forward.

From where I sit it looks to no longer be a matter of if, but of when. Although it probably won’t matter all that much to us once when arrives, for the nonce the question Glenn suggests remains a stimulating topic for consideration: is all this disaster, loss, and grief being brought down on American heads because our so-called leaders are incompetent and/or stupid? Or is this being done intentionally, with malice aforethought?

Y’all already know which side I come down on there, no need for me to belabor the point; many years of close examination of all the available evidence leaves me confident enough in my conclusion that, for once, I won’t proffer the obligatory “but I could be wrong” disclaimer this time. Whatever the case may be, though, it’s clear that we’re fast approaching the point where stopping them in their tracks by any means necessary—ANY means—will become not just a desirable, wise option but an absolute imperative, a matter of survival, quite literally.

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In the bleak midwinter

Kunstler brings the DOOOOOOM in his year-end review/2024 preview combo, and It. Is. EPIC.

Do You Dare Even Look? — Forecast 2024
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men…strong men bring good times…good times make weak men…Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out…topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op…the global mass vaxx campaign…the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans…the broad-based censorship operations…the capture of the news media…and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

And with that, we’re off on a railway ride to Doomsville for an unflinching look at where and how the impending trainwreck might occur. A couple more bits ‘n’ pieces of dis ‘n’ dat before I tell you to go read all of it.

The Energy Picture
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

How the hell could any but either the most insulated (ie, Mordor on the Potomac orcs) or oblivious (ie, any random shitlib Karen or Ken you run across in your daily round) NOT have noticed? Onwards.

Civil Strife and the Election
Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate…whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

As I’ve said more than once, the “election” will indeed happen. Why on earth wouldn’t it? They’d do themselves way more harm by cancelling or postponing it than they would just going ahead and keeping the scam going as is. The whole sorry charade is working out quite nicely for them, as well it might be after all the years of work getting the fraud engine dialed in and tuned to run smoothly. Throwing all that away would achieve but two things, neither of which the Power would find desirable:

  • It would pull the rug out from under the VOTE HARDERER Republicrat© politicians, pundits, and citizenry who still so fervently Want To Believe, all of whom make up such an important part of Team Status Quo
  • It would once and for all blow the lid off the quaint, ever-more-feeble delusion that We The People still have any say whatsoever in how we are governed ruled, and by whom; despite all their best efforts, there are still hundreds of millions of guns in private hands out there, so God only knows where that ugly relevation might possibly lead

If we know anything about The Enemy by now, it’s that he is cunning, amoral, and above all patient. A long-term plan he conceived, implemented, and nurtured for nigh on a century is now VERY close to full and final fruition, and they’re all of a sudden going to lose patience now? Sorry, I just can’t see it. Anyways, as I said above: go check out the rest. It makes for some pretty grim reading, but is all the more accurate for that.

Oh yeah, about my post title: as my fellow Christmas music aficionados will know, it’s the title of a lovely Song O’ Teh Season which reminded me that I yet have two more videos to put up for y’all—one I only recently discovered, the other a fantastic rendition of an old favorite—which I will get to anon.

Update! In the “Civil Strife and the Election” category: Mark Steyn sees the writing on the wall, mentions the unmentionable.

The lone hyperpower is not quite a one-party state, but it is a one-party Deep State. In 2016, while everyone was shrieking about foreign interference in US elections, there was sustained domestic interference in US elections – courtesy of the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane and all the rest. But, in those bygone days, it was still necessary to do it sotto voce – offshoring most of the dodgier bits to friendly Five Eyes guys, such as the Australian High Commissioner in London.

Unfortunately for Peter Strzok et al, they underestimated the scale of the challenge. So they were obliged to spend the next four years subverting the so-called head of the executive branch – again, mostly on the sly.

But they’re doing it openly now. They’re using anything to hand – civil suits, criminal prosecution, executive authority, whatever it takes. It’s ever more brazen. In the preferred cliché of the age, last time round it was the quiet part, now it’s out loud.

We are a little over ten months to what’s still quaintly called “Election Day”. Does this seem like the behavior of people who, come Tuesday night in November, will be willing to lose a democratic vote?

In my bestseller After America, I quoted the late Pat Caddell’s observation that it is not a good thing to tell the people that there are no peaceful means of effecting meaningful course correction – not in a land where half the people are disinclined to go along with open borders, Chinese domination, grade-school transitioning and all the rest. If voting doesn’t change anything, you are setting up pre-revolutionary conditions – assuming for the purposes of argument that, in the panopticon state of 24/7 high-tech surveillance, our rulers haven’t already priced that in, and figured it’s no longer possible.

Nevertheless: In Colorado and Maine, in Georgia and New York, the permanent state is telling you that, in the interests of “saving democracy”, there isn’t going to be any “peaceful transfer of power”. The talk-radio guys with the butch bumper music and the easy-listening opinions could at least stop trying to pass this off as “politics”.

I repeat: why WOULD they cancel or postpone the 24 “election”? In dystopian tyrannies such as Amerika v2.0—(mis)ruled by ruthless, reckless, amoral swine hidden behind stone walls, concrete barriers, electrified fences, and armed security squads—even when The Power loses, it still wins anyhow. As the hoary old stage aphorism has it, the show must go on…and it will. Until one day, all of a sudden-like, it doesn’t.

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An Establishment of Religion

Now that the Constitution has been well and truly cast onto the junkheap, Amerika v2.0 definitely has one, and you damned well better like it. Y’know, or ELSE.

We Actually Do Have an Established Religion, and That’s Not Good

“Not good,” is it? *checks contacts on phone, checks again, checks again* Say, anybody out there got the FBI on speed-dial, perchance? I have a hot tip on a ÜberUltraMegaMAGA domestic terrorist I need to tell ’em about.

America has no established religion, which is undeniably true and a peculiar stroke of genius of the Founding Fathers in preventing the hegemony of one religious system over the others. Yet even without an established religion, the United States has always stood for certain values, notably for its own republican form of government. And today, we have an entirely different kind of established religion, which, while unofficial, is most definitely established.

President Woodrow Wilson was among the first to see this as practically a religious crusade of its own. In April 1917, as he called for a declaration of war against Germany that got the U.S. into World War I, Wilson sounded much like a Christian missionary without the Christianity: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

A century after the Wilson administration, the U.S. is exporting not democracy, but the Left’s ideology. Our established religion in the United States as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century is Leftism’s contemporary sexual obsession and confusion, contempt for masculinity, erasure of femininity, obsession with racism real and imagined (mostly the latter), and all the rest. Today LGBT pride flags are proudly (of course) displayed at U.S. embassies around the world, there are openly “gender fluid” and transgender government officials, and officials at the highest levels, including the president of the United States himself, heap fulsome praise upon Leftist societal and sexual fads.

The Biden regime was establishing a religion for his people in exactly the same way that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380: as Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization details, he was rewarding the orthodox and punishing the heretical and their institutions in ways that would make the heresy less appealing and put it on the road to extinction.

Biden’s leftism isn’t generally recognized as a religion, but it very much is one, as can be seen all over, for instance in the transgender pronoun fantasies and hunt for heretics who dare to “misgender” a particular fantasist, and the fervor with which supporters of abortion vowed to fight against all restrictions to the practice after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But since this secular ideology is not understood to be a religion, it is not seen as an established creed in violation of the First Amendment, as it would be in a sane polity. If it were, then the solution to it would also be found in the First Amendment, in the prohibition of such an establishment, and provisions such as school lunch money being withheld from schools that refused to indulge insane gender faddism would be seen as establishing a religion and accordingly ended.

America today, however, is a long way from being a sane polity.

Said a mouthful there, Robert. Even though America’s Greatest President, Calvin Coolidge, labored mightily to undo them, with fair success, so many of the ills which still plague us today can be traced directly back to America’s Most Evil President, the thoroughly loathsome Woodrow Wilson (the rest of the major ones are on FDR). All of which presents us with a kinda-sorta chicken-or-egg conundrum: did Progressivism drive the polity insane? Or did a not-sane polity drive America That Was into the arms of Progressivism? Either way, t’ain’t funny, McGee.

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2

Best think again

During Sporty Time, one can reasonably expect that the cops and/or soldiery will join up with the side of Righteousness and refuse to shoot their fellow Americans at the behest of an illegitimate, tyrannical government, right?

Right?!?

Yeah, about all that.

As if. The civilians who were threatened with force, or subjected to force, by American troops would like to have a word:

  • 1791: The Whiskey Rebellion
  • 1863: The New York City Draft Riots
  • 1877: Great Railroad Strike in 1877
  • 1932: The Bonus Army
  • 1957: Desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas
  • 1962: Desegregation of the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi
  • 1963: Desegregation of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama
  • 1965 March from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama
  • 1967 Detroit Riots
  • 1967: Newark Riots
  • 1968 King assassination riots in Chicago, Baltimore and Washington, D.C.
  • 1970 New York City Postal Strike in 1970
  • 1980 Cuban Refugee Crisis
  • 1989 Hurricane Hugo
  • 1992: Los Angeles Riots
  • 1993: Branch Davidians in Waco

As long a list as that is, DM still left off a few, to include Kent State in 1970 (“four dead in Ohio,” as sung/groaned by execrable über-shitlib Neal Dung) and the 5-0 bombing and burning of the MOVE HQ in Philly in 1985 which destroyed a city block entire, among others.

Update! DM commenter Big Ruckus D nails down the grim, gruesome reality.

And note that presently there’s all this talk of the invaders being tapped as new troops in exchange for citizenship. I maintain they don’t even need to recruit those, as there are plenty of bonafide Americans already serving who will obey an order to fire on other American civilians, and I suspect there are many who will do so with a certain amount of relish. The idea that wouldn’t happen is a pipe dream, and flies in the face of observable human nature. The only rights anyone truly has are the ones they are willing to kill a motherfucker who is infringing on them over. Everything else is mere words on paper and mental masturbation to guard against acknowledging unpleasant realities.

Pretty much, yeah. Tonight’s Eyrie outing, to be posted in a short (so it is written, so it shall be done), touches on this, if somewhat obliquely.

PC über alles

Oh, this is bound to end well.

The country currently is in the throes of an epidemic of mass insanity and irrationality. The manifestations of the disorder are too numerous to cite, but the explosion of the DEI plague being pushed by the government, many businesses, and the intellectual pigmies in most of the media, must be included in any list of the most egregious. As currently advocated and practiced by our leftist “elites,”1 it is incompatible with rationality, common sense, and morality, among other things, and, as the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Supreme Court, have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution.

There is a brand of this particular wokeness that is relatively unknown to the general public, but that is particularly irrational and dangerous. It is the Federal Aviation Administration’s relatively young DEI mandates. These Biden/Buttigieg DEI commands now apply to the employment of FAA air traffic controllers in an insidious way, a way that threatens the safety of our skies and of anyone who flies.

The FAA has eagerly embraced the extreme DEI strategies that are now oh-so-popular in “progressive” leftist and socialist circles. On its webpage, the FAA clearly sets out how it will discriminate against the wicked white males. As this article will show below, it does so by seeking to employ people who are clearly less qualified than the general applicant pool. Less qualified, that is, unless you believe that the average applicant suffers from, for example, a “severe intellectual disability.”

The FAA makes clear the tribes that it includes in the Diversity Nation: It touts that it specifically “targets” for “special emphasis,” in both recruiting and hiring, people with disabilities in “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

Wait. It gets worse. Such disabled applicants get even more special treatment because they are eligible for preferential hiring. The FAA calls this “On-the-Spot hiring.” That is exactly what it sounds like – the FAA admits that it is a “non-competitive hiring method.” They are eligible for this non-competitive hiring even if their intellectual or psychiatric disability is “severe.”

The FAA does not attempt to hide its present and future discrimination. It pronounces, “Diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.”

It is no such thing. In truth, forced “diversity” conflicts with said mission, directly and flatly contradicts it, impedes it, ensures that it can only result in total, abject failure.

And its justification?

The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.”

But nowhere does the FAA explain how hiring ATCs with, for example, “severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities” will enhance its mission of securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers and others.

No, it most certainly does NOT make any sense at ALL. “Reflects the nation it serves”? What muttonheaded folderol. ATCs, among many others employed in similarly essential and demanding fields, must be no less than EXCEPTIONAL—orders of magnitude above the normal run, and just never you mind about what the goobermint falsely insists “the nation it serves” wants or needs. The ATC’s job requires extraordinary intelligence; intensive training and re-training; constant focus and close attention to detail; unflagging ability to remain cool, calm, and collected under extreme pressure; tireless physical endurance; adequate flexibility and mental agility to cope with sudden unanticipated problems; and/or distraction due to severe fatigue and unrelenting, constant stress, both of which are integral, baked-in-the-cake aspects of the job.

In October’s Halloween post I mentioned my friend David’s dad, Charles Black, who served several terms as mayor of Mount Holly. As it happens, Mr Black was an ATC at the old Charlotte-Douglas Airport for twenty-some-odd years until he retired and eventually decided to run for mayor. He patiently but cheerfully regaled us bothersome neighborhood young ‘uns who were curious enough to ask with tales of his worthy occupation again and again, interleavened with stories of his experiences from late 1944 through to the end of the war flying B-17s in the ETO.

The thing I most remember Charlie Black emphasizing in those conversations what amounted to an ironclad law of Air Traffic Control, a risk that just came along with the job: should the ATC ever fail to live up to those rigorous standards during a control-tower shift—even once, even momentarily—people would die. In job lots, usually. MANY people. Period. Fucking. DOT.

So yeah, let’s just do away with niggling irrelevancies such as being qualified, competent, and physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to handle this supremely demanding job, so’s we don’t harm anybody’s self-esteem. Instead, let’s place many tens of thousands of lives every single day entirely into the hands of:

  • Droolcases
  • 65-IQ mouthbreathers
  • Retards
  • The deranged and/or pathologically unbalanced
  • Illiterates
  • The blind, deaf, halt, and/or lame
  • Miscellaneous other subnormals

I assume irredeemable drunks, heroin/meth/PCP spike-jockeys, welfare layabouts, habitual felons, and the stubbornly-recidivist homeless are also included on the FAA’s most-desired-hires list, although I didn’t bother to verify it. All in the name of making the Differently Abled© feel better about themselves. Which, mind you, has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with “securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers et al.” Thus do “liberal” imbeciles grant themselves another opportunity for smug self-congratulation celebrating their manifestly-superior empathy, righteousness, compassion, and pragmatic-problem-solver skills, and straight to hell with those uncaring troglodytes stuck with living in Earthly reality.

One can only sit back, stunned, and marvel at the absurd impracticality, the fathomless arrogance-in-ignorance, the illimitable self-regard of these gormless morons. Sit back and marvel, that is, while we wait for the big jetliners to start colliding and dropping onto houses, highways, and urban areas, creating fiery maelstroms of needless carnage and destruction nationwide as the resultant body-count soars to previously unimaginable heights. As bright ideas go, prioritizing political correctness in blinkered contravention of observable real-world strictures to such an insane extent as they’ve done here has to set an all-time record for the Reality-Based Community of some kind or other.

Free investment counseling: The canny market speculator will invest every free penny he can, immediately, in graveyard acreage, casket and headstone manufacturers, funeral homes, and related mortuary services. Once the changes in FAA hiring policy take effect it’s a can’t-lose investment strategy, sure to yield tremendous returns for brokers, their clients, and day-traders who are astute enough to boldly seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Yeah, great plan there, shitlibs. I’m confident giving complex, intellectually-challenging, technically-advanced positions to random feebs who can’t possibly do them will work out just fine for all involved parties, whether on the ground or high above it. Not that I was likely to anyway at this late date, but this preposterous, dangerous move puts the (dunce) cap on it once and for all: much as I’ve always enjoyed flying, I would rather gargle diarrhea than ever board a commercial aircraft again. In my future travels, if any, I’ll either walk, hitch-hike, or just spit on my ass and slide.

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1

Leftards to Normals: drop dead!

I repeat: Take. Them. At. Their. Word. And govern your response accordingly.

They Might Want You to Eat Bugs, But They Would Prefer You Weren’t Here at All
Back in January, I did a story on Jane Goodall. Someone I thought was the epitome of the schweet, uber feminine British flower, who spoke softly and risked her life nobly doing things like saving chimpanzees.

A heroine of my youth. Who just wishes there were less of us ruining the world she loves.

“We cannot hide away from human population growth, because it underlies so many of the other problems. All these things we talk about wouldn’t be a problem if the world was the size of the population that there was 500 years ago.”

That infamous little snippet was from a discussion at a WEF gathering. The same WEF/Davos conferences for which Klaus Schwab has now removed all the videos that were once available to skewer them with on Twitter. It turns out the most elite, richest, and privileged geniuses among us have very thin skins when it comes to the peasants using their own self-congratulatory recordings to eviscerate their big plans and mock them mercilessly.

But the fact of the matter is, they don’t like us very much and would be thrilled to have fewer of us both to control and despoiling their precious Gaia. Life would be better all around.

Proponents of the idea that the world would be a better place sans a significant amount of the current population have a name unto themselves – it’s “Malthusians.” It springs from a late 18th, early 19th Century English economist named Robert Malthus, who believed that over-population was literally the bane of the Earth.

Dishonorable mentions for Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ idiot Michael Mann and overpopulation sub-genius Paul Erlich follow, a trio sans brio who, between them, share the inglorious distinction of having been conclusively proven all wet more times than the separate-but-equally-wrong unholy triumvirate of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin has. Then, Beege provides a link to the coup de grace for the whole sorry crowd.

If by fiat I had to identify the most consequential ideas in the history of science, good and bad, in the top 10 would be the 1798 treatise An Essay on the Principle of Population, by English political economist Thomas Robert Malthus. On the positive side of the ledger, it inspired Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace to work out the mechanics of natural selection based on Malthus’s observation that populations tend to increase geometrically (2, 4, 8, 16…), whereas food reserves grow arithmetically (2, 3, 4, 5…), leading to competition for scarce resources and differential reproductive success, the driver of evolution.

On the negative side of the ledger are the policies derived from the belief in the inevitability of a Malthusian collapse. “The power of population is so superior to the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man, that premature death must in some shape or other visit the human race,” Malthus gloomily predicted. His scenario influenced policy makers to embrace social Darwinism and eugenics, resulting in draconian measures to restrict particular populations’ family size, including forced sterilizations.

Science writer Ronald Bailey tracks neo-Malthusians in his book The End of Doom (St. Martin’s Press, 2015), starting with Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 best seller The Population Bomb, which proclaimed that “the battle to feed all of humanity is over.” Many doomsayers followed. Worldwatch Institute founder Lester Brown, for example, declared in 1995, “Humanity’s greatest challenge may soon be just making it to the next harvest.” In a 2009 Scientific American article he affirmed his rhetorical question, “Could food shortages bring down civilization?” In a 2013 conference at the University of Vermont, Ehrlich assessed our chances of avoiding civilizational collapse at only 10 percent.

The problem with Malthusians, Bailey writes, is that they “cannot let go of the simple but clearly wrong idea that human beings are no different than a herd of deer when it comes to reproduction.” Humans are thinking animals. We find solutions—think Norman Borlaug and the green revolution. The result is the opposite of what Malthus predicted: the wealthiest nations with the greatest food security have the lowest fertility rates, whereas the most food-insecure countries have the highest fertility rates.

Among a plethora of other examples, Ehrlich’s famous losing bet springs immediately to mind:

The Simon–Ehrlich wager was a 1980 scientific wager between business professor Julian L. Simon and biologist Paul Ehrlich, betting on a mutually agreed-upon measure of resource scarcity over the decade leading up to 1990. The widely-followed contest originated in the pages of Social Science Quarterly, where Simon challenged Ehrlich to put his money where his mouth was. In response to Ehrlich’s published claim that “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000” Simon offered to take that bet, or, more realistically, “to stake US$10,000…on my belief that the cost of non-government-controlled raw materials (including grain and oil) will not rise in the long run.”

Simon challenged Ehrlich to choose any raw material he wanted and a date more than a year away, and he would wager on the inflation-adjusted prices decreasing as opposed to increasing. Ehrlich chose copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten. The bet was formalized on September 29, 1980, with September 29, 1990, as the payoff date. Ehrlich lost the bet, as all five commodities that were bet on declined in price from 1980 through 1990, the wager period.

No more snow; London and NYC underwater no later than 1990/2000/2005/2010/2020 etc etc due to rising sea levels caused by melting polar ice caps/glaciers; nonexistent global warming; the hoary old “peak oil” myth; unbreathable air; acid rain; mass starvation across the developed world; killing floods, drought, tornadoes, and hurricanes all inexorably worsening, year after year; calamitous shortages, scarcity, impoverishment, famine, and war—only shitlib Chicken Littles could be wrong again and again and again about absolutely everything, and yet still unblushingly insist that they’re the smartest people in the room anyhow…no matter what room they happen to be in at the time.

Funny, innit, how all these disparate problems always seem to have the selfsame solution: more government, less freedom, more sacrifice and deprivation, more want. For YOU, that is, not for them. Never them, perish the thought. Why, one could almost be forgiven for wondering whether they might be wrong about that, too. But nah, that couldn’t be, it’s unpossible. Right?

RIGHT?!?

6
1

On laying hose

So you think you want to be a fireman, eh kid?

The hose that runs from the fire hydrant to the fire truck is called supply line. Most supply line is 3 inches or more in diameter, and in Central Florida, it’s usually 5 inches. (Orlando uses 4 inch, but that is because they typically have fire hydrants that are close together).

First, a bit of engineering.

The reason for this is hydrodynamics and friction loss. The average water main pressure is about 65 psi. At 1,000 gallons per minute, a 3 inch hose loses 80 pounds of pressure every 100 feet of hose length due to friction between the moving water and the hose itself, while a 4 inch diameter hose loses 20 pounds of pressure, and a 5 inch hose loses only 8 pounds. That means, if you want longer hose lays with high flow, the larger the diameter of your supply line, the better.

There is a lot of math involved in being the driver of a fire engine. You need to be able to calculate your friction losses in your head, rapidly, and remember that the lives of the guys in the burning building depend on you getting it correct. When you are flowing 2,000 gallons per minute through half a dozen different hose lines at 2 in the morning at a burning strip mall isn’t the time to realize that you are math deficient.

5 inch supply line has what is called a “sexless coupling” meaning that there is no male or female end, the couplings are interchangeable (butbutbut WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER 872+ GENDERS?!?—M). This allows you to start laying from either the fire to the hydrant, called a reverse lay, or from the hydrant to the fire, called a forward lay. There are advantages and disadvantages to both, but we won’t talk about that in this post.

My fire truck carried 1200 feet of 5 inch diameter supply line. That means with standard hydrant pressure, I could get a bit more than 800 gallons per minute into my engine without having to put another fire engine at the hydrant to boost pressure.

A whole bunch more fascinating stuff regarding what-all you need to know but almost certainly don’t when it comes to how fires are fought nowadays is included in this must-read post from Divemedic. Even if you never cared anything about being a fireman when you grew up—I didn’t, I admit, nor about being a cowboy, although being an astronaut did sound pretty cool—this stuff is just too good to miss out on reading, and you shouldn’t. There’s a video too, just for additional incentive to go check it out.

Back when I was working at the H-D shop, my boss Goose wanted desperately to be a fireman, but after failing the dummy-drag test three times he finally had to give it up as a lost cause. Goose practiced and strength-trained for months and months—and being a former USMC F4 mechanic, you know he wasn’t lacking in either intelligence or iron-willed determination—but in the end he’s a small, slight fella and those damned dummies are damned heavy. In fact, I think the dummy actually outweighed him by about twenty-thirty pounds.

At any rate, from hearing Goose talk about it, I probably know more than the average bear about what it takes to be a fireman, but even so DM still covers things I never heard about before.

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