Hard times in the land of plenty

Tyranny comes to your house

Posted on July 25, 2021July 25, 2021 by Mike 16 Comments

It’s roosting on our friend Wes’s doorstep even now.

Yesterday a news headline came to my attention that will affect mine and my families lives.

Charlotte hospitals announce mandatory COVID vaccine requirement for all employees

Charlotte hospital systems Atrium Health and Novant Health will begin requiring all workers get the COVID-19 vaccinations, hospital officials confirmed Thursday.

Atirum Health will require all workers — including remote workers, physicians, medical residents, faculty, fellows, trainees, contractors, medical staff, students, temporary workers and volunteer staff — to get vaccinated or have an approved medical or religious exemption by Oct. 31.

And Novant Health will require the same for all of its employees, contractors, vendors and students by Sept. 15.

My wife is a NICU Nurse and a damn good one. She loves saving babies. She doesn’t want to take the jab and refuses to take this experimental poison.

The fight it seems has now landed at my door. Will anyone help me? Or is it just my problem since your lives aren’t affected by this decision. I’ve got many friends whose wives are nurses and I heard from many of them yesterday. “What do we do?” was the question I was asked. The first option is to try for the religious exemption. Not sure how that is going to go over though with over half of their staff trying to claim it. Hospitals already don’t have enough staff for their patients, what happens when they lose even more staff due to the refusal to take their mandated poison? The second option? Well let’s just say they hope we don’t have to go there. Honestly though, the second option for me is the first, if you know what I mean.

The time to throw down draws near. Sooner or later it’s going to affect us all. All major employers will end up mandating the poison as a condition of employment, due to pressure from TPTB. Or how about if you have to have it to collect Social Security, unemployment, or just being a government employee. I’m tired of waiting for trouble to come to my door. Sadly they are slowly but surely backing good people into a corner. Trouble is here America, and 99% of the people have no clue how bad things can and will get.

Wes is one of a handful of blogosphere colleagues and allies I regularly correspond with; I know him as a good guy and consider him a friend, although we haven’t met face to face. The predicament he now finds himself in is extremely upsetting, even moreso since he’s also literally a neighbor of mine, located no more than 15-20 miles from where I live. Troubling doesn’t even BEGIN to cover it.

And that’s only the personal side of all this. Bottom line is, there’s some seriously unsavory shit going on, and it is now or soon will be on everyone’s agenda, not just one poor ol’ blogger and his spouse. The Überstate’s (Not)Vaxx goon squads are out and about, and they’re all around us. No matter who you are, no matter where you are, they’re coming for you. As Wes said, they are slowly but surely backing good people into a corner.

By now y’all know what I always say about these malefactors: They will not stop; they will have to BE stopped. As they relentlessly, arrogantly snatch all other options away from us one after another, we will soon find ourselves left with but one last, desperate resort. I don’t have to tell you folks what that is. I don’t know what I can possibly do to assist Wes, what any of us can do. What I DO know is that the inflection point, the hour of decision, is nigh upon us all. And none of us—not Wes, not me, not you —should have to face it alone.

Spicy time cometh, and that right soon. Gird your loins, people. Be ready.

Breaking down the breakdown

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike 2 Comments

As I’ve said in a different but very much related context: a process, not an event.

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

We’ve seen this movie before; we already know how it ends, or we should. Yet somehow, a great many of us seem unable—or unwilling, perhaps—to learn.

No, we won’t be getting those flying cars either

Posted on July 18, 2021July 18, 2021 by Mike 5 Comments

The future ain’t nearly as bright as it used to be.

When I was born in 1971, we were just two years removed from the first manned moon landing. There would be a total of six manned landings, all by Americans, from July of 1969 to a a few weeks before my first birthday. I was born at the peak of the age of space exploration. As a kid I remember watching the shuttle launches and I recall pretty vividly the Challenger disaster in 1986 while I was at school. Growing up we watched Star Trek on TV and saw Star Wars, E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind in the theater. It seemed to us that we were on the cusp of exploring space, a new age of discovery where humankind would escape the bonds of earth, conquer the stars and perhaps even make contact with aliens! The future was bright.

As a child in the 1970s and 80s, 2020 seemed like a long way into the distant future and while we couldn’t predict what that would bring, it was assumed it would bring a progressively better society and that space exploration and great technological achievement would make life immeasurably better. Colonies on the moon and even Mars were just assumed to be the natural near-future next steps.

Instead we get billionaire vanity projects.

Space is no longer the final frontier, at least not for the bulk of humanity. It will become the playground for the ultra-wealthy. According to Space.com, seats on Branson’s Virgin Galactic will run around $250,000 each. There are lots of people who can afford that but the vast majority of humanity will not. As chaos descends on the world, can we be far from seeing space colonies where the wealthy can flee from the devastation? The proles will be ordered to drive tiny electric cars to “save the environment” while the ultra-rich blast off on huge rockets to take selfies in space, just like we will be told to eat the bugs to reduce our climate footprint while the rich eat steak.

That starry eyed kid I used to be in the 1970s is facing the ugly reality of life in the 2020s. It isn’t a bright future for humanity but a slow war of attrition that a small cabal of elites are winning.

I don’t dream about space travel anymore, I just dream of a future where my family will be left alone. Even something that simple seems as fantastical as exploring the stars.

The Once-Great Nation status inflicted on us by the revanchist Left is not all it’s cracked up to be, not by a long yard. The ironic thing is that once we’re all fully and firmly settled in and resigned to a third-world lifestyle, they’re the ones who are going to be most miserable living it. Pretty much everything that makes Proggie’s preferred big-city, citizen-of-the-world living arrangement so appealing to him—high-tech personal electronic gadgetry; reliable and affordable household electricity, powering advanced appliances and conveniences; ubiquitous Internet access points, most of them free of charge; ethnic restaurants; a fulsome glut of entertainment/nightlife choices; trucked-in fresh fruit and vegetables, &c—will assuredly NOT be available in the dismal Neolithic-era civilization they so shrilly advocate.

As always, Leftist useful idiots blithely assume that they’ll be exempt from the privation and disaster created by their ideological and political preferences—that their delusional self-definition as the Good, Smart, and Moral Ones forever immunizes them against the consequences of their own unworkable stupidity. Our only consolation is that, as they find themselves blindfolded and marched over to be put against the wall and shot down like dogs—UNEXPECTEDLY!!!™—the looks of shock and disbelief on their once-hopeful faces are always priceless. Happens every time.

Love Desire wins!

Posted on July 16, 2021July 16, 2021 by Mike Leave a comment

The mopping-up phase of the Culture Wars is upon us, when the victors walk the field shooting enemy wounded.

Some still have hope the war can be won, as seen in this headline: “Christopher Rufo says he’s outmaneuvering ‘hostile media’ on [Caucasians Require Termination]: Most people ‘on our side’”.

Rufo is right the majority of people are against teaching Caucasians Require Termination (CRT), but that counts for little, because in wars the side with the more powerful weapons win. Teachers unions, for instance, have already vowed to continue promoting the evilness of whites in spite of any rules against it. True, the baizuo pushing this might come to grief when it is realized they are white, too, but for now, they are triumphant.

All rulers and Experts say “Diversity is our strength”. There is no state more conducive to turmoil than Diversity. And maximal Diversity is CRT.

Think on it. There isn’t any major entity, from religion to education to business to government, that is not now in the hands of the Enemies of Reality. Their victory would now be complete were it not that the victors are a minority of persons. And because Reality must continuously be fought. You will have to repeat forever, and with great force, that men can be women or it will soon be disbelieved.

The 2020 election functioned as a tearing down of the Berlin Wall, a visible symbol of the futility of continuing the war. Regular readers will recall how we tried to fight the Fortifying, as they victors called it. But we lost. The truism that history is written by the victors will apply here, and has been applying to our memories for some time. The statues of great men like Lee fall to the cheers of Desirists, to be replaced by those celebrating the wastes of society.

Some, like Ed West, are painting the end of the war as not much more than a regime switch. When Reality ruled, busybody aunts, the Karens of their day, kept public morality in line. Now, with Desire the soon-to-be-victor, busybody aunts, the Karens of our day, will perform the same duty. This is nothing more than the commonplace observation that women in societies do most of the morals policing.

He says, “The revolutionaries were always going to create new rituals, new speech codes and new forms of censorship. England has changed a huge deal since our great victory in 1966, but in many ways it has barely changed at all.”

Of course it is true that public morals will be monitored and maintained. That is a constant. Somebody’s beliefs must be imposed and others’ shunned, canceled, or even censored. It’s that the wrong side’s views are now imposed.

West is right, however, when he explains how moral relativism was one of the weapons of war wielded with great success by the Desirists. “Relativism is a position you employ when you’re weak, to be abandoned when you win.” It is more than clear that it has been abandoned in their victory. The woke are all vehement moralists.

We know that we have lost because their morality has become official. Yet we also know that we cannot accept it.

So how to fight? First, save yourself and your family. Then think about your neighbor. Then think about your neighborhood and village. Then think about your county, then your state or region. Worry last about the country as a whole. As they move towards nationalizing everything and then toward supra-state governance, there will be less and less you can do about the state anyway.

Do you really think they’ll let you vote your way out of this at the national level?

Those still foolish or blind enough to believe that the systemic corruption of our “elections” only began in 2020 (CLUE: it did not) notwithstanding, it’s plain to more sentient types among us that free, fair, and honest US elections have long since been no more than a myth—a comforting fantasy naifs cling to as a toddler does his passie, his teddy bear, and his blankie. Of all the aphorisms, folks sayings, and old saws in existence, there’s probably none more apposite to Amerika v2.0 than this one: If voting could really change anything, it would be illegal.

The unbridgeable abyss

Posted on July 12, 2021July 12, 2021 by Mike Leave a comment

The parable of the wolf and the dog is entirely too apt.

French poet Jean de la Fontaine elegantly illustrated the human condition through his Fables, one of which named “The Wolf and the Dog” involves a famished wolf who spotted a well-fed guard dog and conversed with him, since the dog was too healthy to be an easy prey.

The guard dog tells the wolf to leave the forest and come work for the dog’s masters in return for abundant food, shelter, and the occasional pat on the head. The wolf seems almost convinced but then notices the dog’s collar.

“What is that?,” he asks the dog.

“Oh, that,” says the dog. “It’s just my leash… my masters tie me up when they don’t need me to guard their livestock.”

The wolf is horrified: “You mean you are not allowed to run the hills and go wherever you like?”

“Well, no, but what’s so important about that,” says the dog. “As long as I’m fed, sheltered and looked after?”

And the wolf replies as he backs away, “I don’t mind spending some of my days on an empty stomach and would never surrender my freedom for any treasure.”

There are two kinds of people whose respective worldviews clash for dominance: those who value the immaterial and those who value the material. The latter seems to be the more popular side.

T’was ever thus, and t’will ever be. Now perhaps more than ever it’s crucial for Team Liberty to keep that inescapable reality in mind; it’s just part of the human condition, really, and the abyss it represents will forever yawn before us. Big-picture-wise, it all boils down to the eternal conflict between A) the fearful Many, who are eager to place their fates in the hands of (what they hope will turn out to be) a benelovent master; and B) the doughty Few, who prefer to seek their own path, run their own lives, and forge their own destiny with as little interference from or supervision by official authority as possible.

It is virtually impossible to argue with the pro-vaccine passport people and vice versa because we simply are two distinct kinds of people and such people cannot agree on anything because their priorities are radically different. Those against the vaccine passport and microchips inserted in our bodies are merely arguing for individual freedom and the right to be free to make decisions concerning our own bodies.

These people (the pro vaccine passport types) do not want to consider that the passport is a proxy, a method to filter out the compliant from the non-compliant, most probably for later punishment by this world’s corporate overlords. Those obedient will have their vaccine passport to show and will be left to placidly graze the corporate fields of consumerism.

At the same time the passport will serve to designate those who do not carry it as de facto diseased, to be avoided, shunned, and persecuted, even though no proof exists that they are either ill or are voluntarily spreading any disease. If you do not have a vaccine passport, you are a criminal. Period.

Our corporate overlords assume we are just like them, evil inside and out, and intent on harming others by spreading contagious illnesses like Covid.

Disagree. I think they perceive us not as “like them” at all, but simply as sheep to be herded, corraled, and sheared. I strongly doubt there are many, if any, of those corporate types who aren’t fully awake to the Fauxvid scam by now. Make no mistake, folks: as with their government partners in crime, the “concern” of those corporate overlords in no way involves keeping anybody from harm. It’s about keeping everybody corraled, submissive, and under their control.

Found via a commenter here, who quips “I am a trans-vaxxite. (I am not vaccinated but identify as vaccinated. And if you do not like it, you are a trans-phobe. Let us use their methods against them.)” Heh. I’m with ya all the way on that one, Alex.

Carpe De Nation

Posted on July 10, 2021July 10, 2021 by Mike

Kunstler would kind of like his country back.

Something tells me there are still too many sane people with a sense of humor left in this tormented land for the flunkies of “progressive” Wokery to achieve the total control they seek over the hundred-million, give or take, who are starting to think: Y’know, I’d kind of like my country back. And what country was that? It was the country we were before the Intel “Community” took over, in the service of an utterly corrupt political elite running the system like it was their personal cash register.

About that country I would like back… for starters, the country that valued the rule-of-law. Yes, I know, that’s awfully high-toned — the rule of law — as if one is invoking some clichéd bronze blindfolded babe in a negligee, hoisting a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. I’m thinking, rather, of a flesh-and-blood judge, perhaps a corpulent fellow with bad knees, of, say, the DC federal court, who would dare to throw out the malicious political prosecution of figures like General Flynn or the journalist Julian Assange… or an FBI that would make a criminal referral for sedition against Senator Mark Warner… or a newspaper editor who might be interested in the connection between Marc Elias’s Lawfare outfit at Perkins Coie and the Central Intelligence Agency. One could go on endlessly with the pungent hypotheticals. So much evil mischief has not been seen in one polity since Berlin, 1938.

Anyway, the country we live in now no longer observes the rule of law because it has become a security state like the former Soviet bloc states, with a rogue Intel “Community” that has hijacked the truck that the wheels of justice run on. Here’s a thought: do we know for sure whether the CIA might have been involved in the late, lamentable 2020 election? Wow, that’s outside the box! But, hey, why not? Think of all the fakery they are so capable of engineering, and consider how avid they were to get rid of that pain-in-the-ass Donald Trump (who wanted to get rid of them!), and also consider that there is really no check on their activities whatsoever because the supervising authorities are 1) Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee (bwaha!), and 2) the aforementioned seditious scoundrel Mark Warner’s Senate Intel Committee. These two are so owned by the CIA that they must have a standing weekly TGIF session to peel grapes for the C-suite at Langley.

Some savvy 2020 election skeptics are pointing at China as possibly having interfered in the election that installed their pre-paid errand-boy “Joe Biden” in the White House — but what if the real action was actually closer to home? And why wouldn’t the CIA queer the election and then set up China to take the blame, since China is already in America’s dog-house for gifting the world with SARS-Covid-19 and its lovely variants? Just wondering… just asking… maybe the thought has crossed your mind, too.

Have you groked that the virus affords such wonderful opportunities for exercising state coercion over a spooked public? Just yesterday, Sec’y of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra declared that it is, “absolutely the government’s business to know who’s been vaccinated.” Of course, it’s as much the public’s business to know what the correct figure is for Covid cases and deaths, as well as adverse mRNA reactions and deaths. And, just for instance, two counties in California recently revised down their overall case numbers for the whole virus melodrama by 20 percent — so many cases were just hospitals gaming the federal bureaucracy for higher subsidy pay-outs keyed to the virus. And, after a month of getting bashed around for lying about this and that, America’s chief Covid-19 health officer, Anthony Fauci (“The Science”) has gone back on cable TV telling the country to “get over it.” Their vax “hesitancy,” he means. Why would anyone besides the sebaceous Chris Hayes on MSNBC believe him?

Another feature about the country I would like back is the freedom to live without the harassment of Woked-up useful idiots working day and night to destroy the very meaning of language while hustling American culture, tradition, and heritage into its “anti-racist” gas chamber.

Yeah, well, hate to have to bring it up and all, but there’s only one way THAT is ever going to happen; as has been demonstrated for us time and again, ad infinitum ad nauseum, they’re never going to stop. Which brings us back around once more to the ultimate question: exactly how much DO we want our country back, anyways?

SO, how’s that globalism working out for ya, anyway?

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Not too good.

So, have you heard about the massive international shipping crisis coming out of China, and the accompanying shortage of overseas shipping containers?

Actually, I have, lots of times—seeing as how my brother hauls containers out of Charleston and Savannah for a living, and calls me about five-six times a day, five and sometimes six days a week, to yell about one dipshit “good enough for gummint work” problem or another he’s currently dealing with while he’s sitting in endless lines at the port waiting to get either a container or the chassis the container sits on to pull back to NC. He’s been particularly perplexed over the sudden scarcity of both containers and chassis lately, and we’ve spent a good bit of time on the phone trying to suss out what the reasons for that might be.

Turns out, it’s a pretty complex problem.

Freight shipping is in the midst of a unique and unusual predicament. An unforeseen cascade of events caused by the pandemic has us facing a worldwide container shortage crisis. It’s a crisis because the lack of containers has a ripple effect down entire supply chains, disrupting trade on a global scale.

As the pandemic spread out from its Asian epicentre, countries implemented lockdowns, halting economic movements and production. Many factories closed temporarily, causing large numbers of containers to be stopped at ports. To stabilize costs and the erosion of ocean rates, carriers reduced the number of vessels out at sea. Not only did this put the brakes on import and export, it also meant empty containers were not picked up. This was especially significant for Asian traders, who couldn’t retrieve empty containers from North America.

Then, a unique scenario developed. Asia, being the first hit by the pandemic, was also the first to recover. So while China resumed exports earlier than the rest of the world, other nations were (and still are) dealing with restrictions, a reduced workforce and minimal production.

A consequence of this is that almost all of the remaining containers in Asia headed out to Europe and North America, but those containers did not come back quickly enough. Massive workforce disruptions due to coronavirus restrictions in North America affected not only ports, but cargo depots all across the country as well as inland transport lines. Without adequate staffing, containers started to pile up. As borders tightened, customs became more complicated to clear as well, worsening congestion. In addition, there were rapid shifts in tradelane demands that were challenging for carriers to adapt to.

Now, that seems a little odd, since it doesn’t explain why containers and chassis would be so difficult to find on the US East Coast at all. In fact, the central premise of the article seems to completely contradict the issue my brother has been dealing with every day, for a cpl-three months now. But attentive readers can pick up at least one solid hint from the piece, involving what happens when instant despots—Just add Covid!!™—start behaving as if economies as sprawling as ours can be stopped and started as easily as flicking a light switch on and off, with no unanticipated ill effects.

Maybe Buck’s next link can clear things up a little further.

Never before has the humble ocean shipping container been this important to American business. If you can’t get one, you can’t move your international cargo — and supply has never been tighter. The cost of global trade is now contingent on how many containers exist, where they are and where they aren’t.

How many containers exist is controlled by China. Virtually every ocean shipping container in the world is built there.

Just three Chinese companies account for the majority of production, with Chinese factories now building more than 96% of the world’s dry cargo containers and 100% of the world’s refrigerated containers, according to U.K. consultancy Drewry.

Ahh, the Dinks, then. Quelle surprise.

Buck has plenty more along these lines, but the above ought to provide sufficient confirmation that allowing FederalGovCo to incentivize nominally American corporations to stab their employees in the backs with their own weaponized tax dollars via relocating virtually all US manufacturing to Red China might not have been such a hot idea after all. His closer:

I’ve got a simple idea that can mitigate a whole lot of these problems. Products that are to be sold in the USA can also be manufactured in the USA. Once manufactured, they won’t be impacted by exotic new virus outbreaks in China, or by a lack of Chinese containers, or by backups in Chinese ports, or even by the ick factor of China’s slave labor.

Even if manufacturing is simply moved from China to other countries, it is way past time to disengage from China.

Do I even need to remind anyone that Trump had made a pretty good start on that during his term, having already secured agreements with major US firms to either keep domestic plants running that they had been planning to shut down, or to build new facilities here? Of course, we all know how that ended up.

No Sooner Is Trump Out Of Office, Ford Is Switching US$900 Mln Investment From Ohio To Mexico
The Ford Motor Company has backed out of a pledge to invest US$900 million in an assembly plant near Cleveland, Ohio and will instead switch production to Mexico.

In 2019 – when Donald Trump was president – Ford had promised to invest in the factory in Avon Lake, which employs 1,700 workers producing the Ford E-series van and Super Duty pickup truck.

As a lifelong Ford fanatic, you can easily imagine how I felt about that. Bastards.

Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Mike

The small-business levee is dry.

Lockdown proponents across the media are smugly patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that stay-at-home policies didn’t harm the economy. Try telling that to the millions of small-business owners who were irreparably damaged by prolonged and irrational restrictions.

With many big corporations deemed “essential,” and a stock market propped up by the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to see economic strength and miss the glaring weaknesses.

While Walmart and Target continue to beat earnings expectations, small businesses struggle to survive. Nearly two-thirds of them are hitting only half or less of their pre-lockdown monthly revenue levels, according to Alignable’s June Road to Recovery report.

Then there are the businesses that never recovered at all. The Biden administration recently projected that more than 400,000 small businesses have closed permanently, but that’s likely a massive underestimate: Already by June 2020, the Hamilton Project had counted 400,000 closures. Opportunity Insights data, meanwhile, show that by the end of May 2021, there were 38.9 percent fewer small businesses open nationwide than at the outset of 2020.

Small business forms the US economy’s backbone, accounting for more than 99 percent of all business entities, and before 2020, around half of growth domestic product and jobs.

And these businesses bore the brunt of lockdowns. The Alignable report found that 37 percent of small businesses couldn’t pay their rent in full and on time. Millions of small-business owners have six-to-seven-figure debt liability, much of it personally guaranteed.

And as if lockdowns weren’t enough, those small firms desperately trying to save their businesses now can’t find workers, thanks in large part to government interfering in the labor market via enhanced unemployment benefits and direct stimulus payments that incentivize not working.

If the government actively set out to reward big businesses and punish small ones, how would it look any different?

This is an American tragedy. Small businesses provide economic freedom for tens of millions of people.

Which ought to make it crystal clear why it happened. We’re looking at an American tragedy right enough, but killing off small business isn’t all of it. The incremental erasure of entrepreneurship has been ongoing for years now, and is but a single component of a much larger tragedy: the end of America That Was itself.

Understand: whether it’s automobiles, single-family homes, Christianity, honest elections, speech, guns, or small businesses, there is absolutely NO aspect of freedom and self-determination they won’t try to undermine, discredit, and ultimately do away with.

Update! A small-business story that ain’t nothing but pure-tee, hunnert ‘n’ ten proof America, in all the very best ways.

BUCKSTOWN, Pa.—The Duppstadt’s Country Store, sitting high on a plateau along the Lincoln Highway between Stoystown and Reels Corner, has served Somerset County residents and weary travelers since 1903. When you open the heavy wooden door and hear it creak with age, you get the sense you have entered somewhere special.

Not because it has stayed frozen in time, but because it has stood the test of time—surviving all the winds of change while adjusting and prevailing through every decade it has stood on its perch.

From Civil War veterans stopping on their way to Gettysburg to celebrate the anniversaries marking that pivotal battle to the World War I troops on their way to the 10th Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard headquarters for Company C before heading to areas of conflict to today’s young families shopping for necessities, this place has seen it all.

It was here both shoppers and the owners saw Flight 93 pierce the clear blue skies on September 11, 2001, shaking the ground under them when it slammed into a field just over the hill in Shanksville.

Anyone in the store that day or next door at the Lincoln Cafe diner stood momentarily frozen at the sight of the black smoke rising from the crash. Many of those same people then rushed in their cars to the fire stations where they volunteered and were the first on the scene to help a clearly helpless situation.

The Duppstadt family is the third family to own the store since it opened in 1903, according to Mike Duppstadt, one of five siblings who co-owns the business. This store was started by the Williamson family, who operated it for a while before Jack and Helen Spangler bought it and called it the Clover Leaf Farm store. Duppstadt’s parents bought it in 1971 from the Spanglers.

As I speak to him, Mike is sitting outside the store on a long wooden bench with his sister Michelle. All five siblings have full-time jobs outside of the store. He is a contractor, she is a nurse, and they rotate shifts working at the store along with nieces and nephews.

Next door, his wife Robin and their daughter Kate are handling the kitchen of the Lincoln Cafe diner. The family just bought it in March. The cheeseburgers are arguably the best you’ll ever find, and they’ve added a bakery case in the front of the diner with sugary raised donuts that are divine.

I just bet they are at that. Somehow back in my frequent endless rides through backroads Pennsylvania, I missed this little store, but Salena Zito’s article almost makes me want to get back out on the road again for a visit. Read on, it’s good stuff.

Final stages

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

Or, if you want to be a bit more prosaic about it: death throes.

The events at the spa were bad enough. The attack by AntiFa, and the subsequent actions of the police in 1) refusing to defend the peaceable protestors and 2) arresting a man who dared to defend himself make it plain that Los Angeles, California is about to collapse into complete chaos – and it might take the whole state with it.

The Golden State is the chief “produce cart” of these United States. Imagine it as a “failed state” in which there is no order and no safety. Be quick about it; soon you won’t need to imagine.

The lesson in this “should” be “obvious.” Sadly, it isn’t.

Throughout the nation, public order is breaking down. I can hardly name a city of significant size where Black Lives Matter and AntiFa don’t run rampant. Municipal police departments are either indifferent or impotent. Though there haven’t yet been many, reports of home invasions by those forces are making honest, peaceable Americans fearful about their own homes. As for urban commercial districts, I hardly think I need comment.

Los Angeles may be the forerunner of a complete social collapse from coast to coast. The consequences will include food shortages, loss of electrical power, unavailability of fuels, disruption of the roads, open gang violence, and many other things. If you think having the kids confined to the house this past year was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet – and I hope you never do, though in my view the portents are grim.

The following is from a novel-under-construction:

“Public order is a matter of public will,” Merrell said in his most famous first-term address. “We have lacked the will. We dislike to compel immigrants and the young to conform to the norms of public decorum. We dislike to demand that public charges aim for self-sufficiency and make an honest effort to achieve it. We dislike to budget for law enforcement. We dislike to see armed men who embody the authority of the law patrolling our streets. We dislike to erect and staff prisons. We especially dislike to clear the streets of vagrants and idlers by force, or to hold parents responsible for the deeds of their miscreant children. Yet these measures, not ‘tolerance,’ nor ‘leniency,’ nor ‘understanding,’ nor ‘compassion,’ nor ‘community service,’ are the ones that will mitigate our problems with poverty, vagrancy, vandalism, and more serious crimes.”

Would anyone care to argue with John Merrell?

Remember the immense improvement in the condition of New York City when Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent forth its police to enforce all the laws, including the ones pertinent to “quality of life?” You don’t have to be that old to recall those years. Giuliani’s success in making the Big Apple a pleasant place to live, work, and shop was why he acquired the sobriquet “America’s Mayor.” Contrast the Giuliani years with those of the odious crypto-Communist Bill de Blasio.

I remember it quite well; as it happens, I moved to NYC for the very last thrashing about of the Dinkins mis-administration, and the difference when Giuliani took the City Hall reins was impossible to miss. There’s really no credible way to deny that the man singlehandedly saved NYC from itself, although certainly there are plenty of fools who tried then and still do today.

Of course, since I lived on the LES the professionally designed and printed posters plastered all over downtown featuring a pic of Rudy with a Hitler-style brush moustache and thinning combover, denouncing him as a “Nazi” and “literally Hitler,” were equally impossible to miss. Alas, New Yorkers have for many years been people who simply don’t understand what’s good for them; like a child balking at the taste of his medicine, they’d just as soon stay sick, thanks.

There is only one issue that matters in the elections of the years before us: law and order. No candidate who refuses to make that his one and only priority should receive even a single vote. Unless and until peaceable Americans are once more able to go about their lives without fear, this nation will come ever closer to chaos and disintegration. Whether anything could be reclaimed from the wreckage is dubious.

The traditional norms of public deportment, from the prohibition of violence all the way to standards of decency, must be enforced humorlessly and without exception. Nothing else will serve. What people choose to do in the privacy of their homes is of no moment.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. But nobody should be laying down any significant sum betting that it’s at all likely to happen. The chaos, division, and strife sown by the Evil Left has been working way too well for them to expect they’d dream of tolerating such a thing. There’s only one effective way to deal with their recalcitrance, a macabre last resort that we’re all perfectly well aware of. They seem bound and determined to leave us with no other choice but to kill them off in job lots—and with every passing day, I grow more convinced that they ought to get their wish.

Patience will out

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

An (eventually, ultimately) optimistic take from Robert Gore.

The trial for Derek Chauvin and the lack of one for the Capitol Hill policeman (name still unknown) are another reminder—not that any are needed—that savages aren’t fair. It’s pathetic and ludicrous to expect an appellate court to grant Chauvin a new trial, although it would have ample grounds to do so in anything resembling a fair judicial system.

It’s like saying, “Wait until 22 and 24!” or, “Wait until the Arizona vote audit!” after last year’s blatant election theft. The savages have instituted corrupt arrangements that will enshrine their power in perpetuity. Expecting them to tolerate anything that would jeopardize those arrangements is like expecting water to run uphill. Fair or even quasi-fair elections would threaten their power. They are, like fair trials, but a memory.

Savages beget savagery and nothing else, until they are stopped or they stop themselves. Don’t count on them recognizing the production—a civilized and thereby forbidden act—and the producers—civilized and thereby forbidden people—that keep them fed and alive. And don’t count on them not making your weaponry, your last line of defense, a use it or lose it proposition.

They recognize no limits, certainly not the constraints imposed by reality. They may have to lay waste to the world before whomever remains of the honest and productive realize that their lives are a defend them or die proposition. For decades, America’s rulers and their accomplices have said about the enemies of the day: they only understand force. It’s projection, ascribing to others one’s own motivations. They’ve dressed it up in all sorts of verbiage, from Make the World Safe for Democracy to We’re All In This Together, but force is what they understand and to which they’ll always resort. The only thing that will stop them is superior force more competently wielded.

Government of the savages, by the savages, and for the savages doesn’t have much to draw on, and decades of propaganda have told savages to look to the government for every need. Vegetarian stew in every pot, two Teslas in every garage, paid for diplomas on every wall, a band-aid for every scratch, and a kiss for every boo-boo are just the minimum of what they’ve been told to expect. If they don’t get them it’s the selfish civilized’s fault. But who will they blame when the selfish civilized skip town or quit? And who will feed them?

The separatists will have the productive capabilities. Many of the country’s honest entrepreneurs (as opposed to its crony socialists) have already migrated. They will also have military expertise, especially after the savages eliminate retrograde rightwingerism and transform the US military into the most diverse, empathetic, and politically correct conflict resolution force the world has ever seen. (Oh, how the world trembles!) Notwithstanding the many thanks they’ve received for their service to the savages’ government, many veterans will join the civilized.

After last year’s mostly peaceful riots and the January 6 Insurrection That Nearly Overthrew The Most Exceptional Government In History, many savages bought firearms for the first time. Unfortunately for them, there’s a big difference between buying a firearm and knowing what to do with it, and most of that knowledge (and millions of firearms) are on the side of the vets and the civilized.

Many of the vets have also received on-the-job training in guerrilla warfare, against which the US government is batting zero. The government has many scary weapons, but it has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep such weapons out of the hands of its adversaries. Perhaps the separatists will prove as clever and capable as the Vietnamese, al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, and Iraqis and other groups have been at capturing US government weaponry. Notwithstanding their diversity, empathy, and political correctness, the conflict resolution forces would then find their weapons turned against them.

At this point, imagination is far more important than a deer-in-the-headlights’ fixation on present realities, because those realities are changing so quickly and chaotically. When the ground is continuously shifting under your feet, you can’t know where you are with any certainty. Your chance of saving yourself depends on knowing where you want to go and having an idea of how to get there.

Skepticism about imminent revolutionary change is understandable, but often betrays a misunderstanding of how revolutions in politics, science, culture, art, philosophy, learning, and all other fields of productive human endeavor work. The explosion visible to all is almost always preceded by a long, burning fuse visible to few and understood by fewer, only generally apprehended after the explosion.

The burning fuse in this case is the awesome force of decentralization sweeping the planet; the revolution is actually well underway. Centralization is a legacy idea and government is its legacy institution. After centuries of centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government failures, and after the failure of the most centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government in history, legions of intellectuals of impaired intellect and infinitesimal imagination still hail or fear a centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical global government. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there trying to institute such a government, but they’re building a three-foot-high wall of beach mud and sand against a tidal wave.

That wave will arrive, of that there can be no doubt. Afterwards people will point to some contemporaneous event as the catalyst, but the catalysts have been accumulating for decades, their leitmotif decentralization. Multi-volume sets could be written about them all.

Don’t get too attached to today; tomorrow it’s gone. The questions that will emerge from the chaotic maelstrom: Freedom or tyranny? Civilization or savagery? Anyone who chooses civilized freedom is going to have to fight for it, but it’s a fight that can and will be won.

We can but hope…and prepare, plan, and load magazines.

I preminisce no return of the salad days

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

Another Ironbear masterpiece of commentry that needs to be moved out front here.

There is no going back. We live in post-America now, and have for quite some time. We can’t go back to the America of the Founding any more than we can go back to the bright, shiny, thriving, hopeful and optimistic America of the ’50s. There is no time machine that will take us there.

Conservative thinkers like Smith, Codevilla, and the rest err in thinking that there is somehow some way to dismantle and excise the degeneracy of Progressivism while keeping the worthwhile parts of what Codevilla calls “Republican America”.

There is not.

Post-America is not going to somehow revitalize and go back to being America. We’re in the degenerate phase of a decadent civilization, and, to date, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a degenerate civilization that has reversed course and revitalized into a thriving, growing, and vital civilization.

Breakup and partition is inevitable at this point. Empires always fall apart.

What grows out of that is no more going to resemble the America of George Washington than the Western Civilization that grew out of the breakup of the Roman Empire resembled Classical Rome.

The primary question at this point, and the one that thinkers like Smith and Codevilla refuse to face squarely – because that would require admitting that they’re spinning their wheels – is whether the breakup and collapse will be slow and gradual over centuries like Rome, or fast and bloody like Yugoslavia.

I don’t believe that quick and peaceful like Czechoslovakia or even the Soviet Union is in the cards for us.

The secondary question is: What comes next? What grows out of rubble?

Smith and Codevilla can’t answer that for the same reason I can’t: the caterpillar can’t envision the butterfly.

Yup, that’s about the size of it. I myself am frequently guilty of using phrases like “restoring America” and the like, despite knowing that such a thing not only won’t happen, it in fact CAN’T happen. We’re walking on uncharted and extremely dangerous ground now, and the destination is uncertain at best.

Unacceptable, intolerable

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

It’s time, and past time, to start offing fascists.

Antifa is currently attacking protesters at the Korean spa in California that allowed a biological male customer to flash their penis at women and girls because of their “gender identity.”

Among those attacked by the militant leftists, so far, include a woman, a journalist, a preacher and a Latino couple.

A video of an outraged woman confronting the staff at Wi Spa in Los Angeles about the naked man walking around in the women’s changing room went viral last week.

Following the video going viral, a protest was planned at the spa for July 3. It began peacefully, with protesters defending the privacy and rights of women and girls on one side of the street and Antifa on the other.

It became violent when Antifa crossed the street and began assaulting the protesters.

Naturally, the violent pAntiFags were verbally haranguing the normal, sane citizens for being “transphobic,” “homophobic,” and all the rest of the usual Leftard horseshit throughout.

The line from WW2-era Naziism to Amerika v2.0’s present-day Left runs straight and true, with the differences between the supposedly less-radical Democrat-Socialist Party and its own Waffen SS stormtroopers being ones not of kind but of degree. These scum have all but overrun America That Was, burrowing into every institution, civic organization, and neighborhood and working tirelessly to destroy them all from within. If however many Real Americans are left don’t want to see the Leftyfascists accomplish their deadly mission in full, they must resolve to do whatever it takes to stop them before it’s too late.

We are at war. Not rhetorical war, not a “war of ideas,” not “cold” war—REAL war, war to the knife. And, as the great Nathan Bedford Forrest knew: war means fighting, and fighting means killing.

Estimates of the body count from last year’s rioting range between 25 to 60 deaths, the ones I’ve seen. The January 6th protest saw poor Ashli Babbitt brutally murdered by a fascist pig who is being protected by the State, and who will never face justice for his crime. The Enemy has gone way, way, WAY beyond claiming “first blood” against us. We’ve all seen way too much of this shit by now. From here on out, anytime one of these fascist beatdowns does NOT wind up with at least one pAntiFa goon lying dead in the street, Real Americans must count it as a tactical defeat.

Enforced insanity

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

You will be made to go insane.

A few snapshots from the past few years:

In 2015, a famous male athlete puts on a dress and make-up. He then declares himself a female. Despite the athlete not having undergone “sex re-assignment surgery”, our cultural overlords immediately announce their agreement: the dress and make-up have indeed made the male a female. Not just a “female in spirit”, but an actual female.

Time magazine then proclaims the athlete its runner-up “Woman of the Year”. Glamour magazine goes all the way and proclaims him its “Woman of the Year”. Social media bans anyone who dares refer to the athlete by his original male name, uses male pronouns to refer to him, or in any way affirms the immutable reality of biological sex. At the same time, politicians begin passing laws to enforce the new orthodoxy.

The message was sudden, but clear: We must believe a lie. We must speak a lie. We must make ourselves unknow that a person’s biological sex is an unchangeable fact of nature. We must believe that a male who amputates his penis and testicles has thereby turned himself into a female—as opposed to just a male without a penis or testicles. We must believe that putting on a dress vaporizes, or at least renders meaningless, the sexual identity encoded within every cell of our bodies. We must believe that gender dysphoria never really existed, and that instead, a kind of spirit possession is at work. The idea is that a male or female soul—through some sort of never-explained cosmic mix-up—winds up trapped in the wrong body. What sounds like the premise of a bad ’70’s Disney movie is now the One True Truth.

In short, the message was, and still is, we must adopt beliefs about biological sex which, only a decade ago, mental health professionals would have deemed proof of psychosis. Now, we’re supposed to remain unbothered as those same mental health professionals demand we adopt their new psychotic vision. They demand we parrot the lie they all know is a lie. Insanity is the new sanity. Falsehood is the new truth. Bullying is the new compassion. State-enforced delusion is the new science. Magic is the new physics. Fantasy is the new reality. Man is the new woman, and woman is the new man.

Hate for the constraints of human biology has only spread since Bruce turned into Caitlyn. Just a few days ago, for example, the Miss Nevada USA pageant decided to crown a biologically male contestant. Kataluna Enriquez reportedly has completed her surgery—but again, all that “sex reassignment surgery” is, is the amputation or mutilation of sexual organs. Because that is true, the phrase “sex reassignment surgery” is itself a transparent lie. You can’t “reassign” or change biological sex. You can amputate a penis and testicles. You can amputate breasts, and remove a vagina and a uterus. You can flood bodies with lab-created hormones. You can wear make-up or dresses, top hats or tuxedos. But what you can’t do is change sex. In fact, you can’t even erase the effects of male sexual maturation decades later.

All fine and well, all perfectly true, and all anathema to the Madhouse Left. But to what end? What’s behind all this lunatic zealotry?

This sounds like a contradiction. It isn’t. It perfectly expresses a core driver of Wokism: a seething, pathological, violent, sociopathic, hate of everything that is: all truth, all reality, all nature, all existence, all constraint, all law, all sense, all decent aspiration, everything. This is far beyond mere antinomianism. For the Wokists, whatever is must be extinguished. This is what their all-consuming hate requires.

Meeting the new standard of pseudo-piety requires nothing less than our own self-induced insanity. Failure to self-induce insanity gets you “disappeared” from social media, fired, or physically attacked. At this rate, who can doubt the attacks could escalate into the murder of political dissidents? Not that the Wokestaat will do that directly (by the way, I just made up the word “Wokestaat”). No, they’ll just use their street thugs as proxy exterminators—just as they use Antifa and BLM rioters as proxy chaos agents, social media as proxy censors and spies, and mainstream “news outlets” as a proxy propaganda arm.

Chuckle if you want, but Wokism is the official religion of the United States government. And like all fanatics, there’s nothing the Wokists won’t do to force their stupid, pernicious ideas on to everyone. That includes every form of carrot and every form of stick.

Well, we all already knew how ludicrous their claim to exclusive membership in “the reality-based community” always was. Funny how you don’t hear them making that claim much these days, from which one might be inclined to draw some unflattering conclusions about them. But is that really all there is to this? Is there even more lurking just underneath the surface lunacy to be revealed? Might their agenda go much beyond driving us all as batshit nuts as they are themselves? Three guesses.

According to Victor Davis Hanson, the Biden Administration and the Democrats who run urban hotspots of crime cannot deal with the exploding violence rationally because they are too encumbered with ideological baggage. Their political outlook forces them to look for alternative explanations for a breakdown that can only properly be analyzed by those who are not wearing blinders.

Such commentators recognize the magnitude of our crime problem. But they also perhaps unjustifiably assume that the Democrats are headed for disaster by not addressing it. For me, however, it is not clear that Democratic politicians are being irrational when they trot out specious solutions. Let me start from an opposite premise, namely that everything the present administration is allowing to happen, and which creates chaos and aggravates violence, is aimed at increasing its control. Democratic policies follow Thomas Hobbes’ definition of power, as an ability to do those things necessary “to obtain some future apparent Good.” That obvious “Good” in this case is to establish the Democratic Party as the one national party, which can go on ruling indefinitely and make the electorate an accomplice in its drive for total power.

From that perspective, Biden, or whoever pulls his strings, and other Democratic luminaries are doing what is necessary to further their power grab. The “disorder” or “crisis” at the border, which the Democrats have done nothing to stop, is clearly meant to increase the size of the Democratic electorate, starting with turning Texas blue. Getting rid of the filibuster, packing the Supreme Court, and nationalizing elections with the passage of HR 1 are all efforts to achieve the same end: empowering the Democrats and reducing their often-minimal opposition to total impotence.

The steps taken to increase urban crime and then to ban weapons that have little or nothing to do with the crimes in question belong to the same design. The Democrats have been actively promoting civil unrest since last summer, when they defended Black Lives Matter, raised millions to bail out the apprehended vandals, and, in the cases of Kamala Harris and Maxine Waters, incited further criminal activities.

It’s not as if the Democrats are clueless about what’s going on or are blinded by ideological passions. They have used violence to propel themselves into power by blaming Donald Trump for what they themselves abetted.

Ahh, the same old thing these whackadoos are always grubbing for more of, then: power, and control.

“Can Radical Federalism Save America?”

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Worth a try, of course. But doubtful. Very, very doubtful.

Eminent conservative thinker Angelo Codevilla had an article titled “To Rescue a Nation” last week at the American Mind that’s very much worth reading. To save the republic means ending the escalating tensions and conflicts precipitated by growing divisions. A radical approach is necessary.

To allow divergent peoples to peacefully coexist and find some commonality of purpose so the nation may survive, differences must be accepted and governance made to conform to that reality. To achieve that good result, Codevilla asserts that we need a “radical de-centralization” or, as might be said, a radical federalization of the nation. It’s the remedy for saving the country from disunion or tyranny. But is this worthy goal achievable?

Almost certainly not. At this point, whether it’s even desirable or not is eminently debatable. There’s a certain inconvenient reality the more reticent and respectable commentariat overlooks that undoes every argument they try to make: the nation is ALREADY split, in every truly meaningful sense. The divergence of political ideology, ambition, and intent has widened into a yawning chasm. It is a gap that can no longer be bridged. The point is moot; tyranny is already in place, and the only thing disunion lacks is an official, de jure proclamation of it.

The arguments proferred by authoritarian Leftists—who loathe the Founders’ conception of what constitutes just and legitimate governance to their very marrow—and those of Real Americans—who revere those noble principles, mourn their loss, and wish to see them restored to their rightful primacy—are wholly intractable. Tyranny and liberty are incompatible; sooner or later, the eternal conflict between them will be resolved. History shows that it will not, it cannot, be done peaceably unless one side acquiesces. The author knows this as well as the rest of us do:

We’re tempted to say that Codevilla’s vision aligns the nation more closely with its inception, with the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union — at least in that spirit. A looser federation of states and enhanced localities with Washington more focused on core functions — national defense being preeminent – would boost chances of the United States continuing as one nation.

But there’s a sticking point, and it isn’t trifling. In fact, for the nation’s elites (the oligarchs — Codevilla uses that descriptor, too) and the left, radical decentralization is precisely what they oppose. Whereas republican America would, and portions of Woke America may, welcome a significant decentralization, which amounts to a policy of “live and let live,” a radical centralization of the nation is what oligarchs and the left seek.

The oligarchs do so, principally, for power that leads to wealth. The left, which holds to Marxism, lusts for power and seeks wealth but also craves control over lives. Marxism — not judged by its blarney, but by its practice – demonstrates that it’s about hierarchy, concentrations of power, and control — not of an authoritarian stripe, but a totalitarian one, as history makes abundantly clear.

Today, these anti-liberty factions are playing a zero-sum game, and they’ve given no indications that they’re willing to compromise or are open to realignments of government that thwart their aspirations.

Which is precisely the tack Team Liberty must now take also. It was the starry-eyed “willingness to compromise” and blasé acceptance of “realignments of government that thwart their aspirations,” combined with their fatally-mistaken granting of an undeserved assumption of honest intentions and fair-mindedness to the Left that got us all in this mess.

Alas, this is where I must part ways with the author, who otherwise seems to grasp our conundrum more acutely than most.

Codevilla says that to rally and lead a national movement a galvanizing figure must emerge. He doesn’t appear to be keen on Trump, because he believes Trump is too self-focused. Here we disagree. Trump has largely galvanized Red or republican America. As president, despite relentless hostilities, he accomplished for the nation. He drew large audiences, in person and across mediums, including last Saturday night at an Ohio rally. Yet, the organization behind Trump has been inchoate and most often ad hoc. Trump may be the General Washington republican America needs. What he requires are able lieutenants who can effectively organize behind him.

In a word: NO. Trump’s time has passed. He had his opportunity, and whatever may have motivated him to do so, he failed to seize it. He may or may not have some part to play in what’s to come, I really couldn’t say. But he has shown himself to be a far less effective champion than Real Americans had hoped. Love him or hate him, when the rubber met the road he took his foot off the gas and stalled the car. I can no longer see him as the man to get the motor running again and drive us on to where we need to be.

With the closer, the article gets back in track.

A critical consideration is that the oligarchs and left would offer robust counters to republican America’s “defensive” offensives. The stakes are sky-high for them. We must grasp the nature of the enemy.

Men and women, bent on domination, and in many cases, with years of sweat equity invested in achieving their aims, aren’t going to be quickly deterred. They will fight and fight hard. As we saw during the Trump presidency, they have no compunction about using false accusations and illegality (Russia Collusion hoax), destroying reputations, brazen disinformation (the January 6 “insurrection”), resorting to election chicanery, stoking public fear as a means of manipulation (COVID lockdowns), and loosing Antifa and BLM to incite riots. Exposed in 2020 was the ugliness and, in fact, ruthlessness, of anti-liberty factions. They can get uglier and more ruthless without a doubt.

And they will. None but a fool could have any doubt about that by now. As has been more than amply demonstrated, they intend to rule. There is no length to which they won’t go to make that happen—none. Will we let them?

Which isn’t an argument against fully joining the fight and committing to nothing less than total victory. Republican America has plenty at stake, too: the rule of law and liberty. It’s simply to impart the understanding that in war — cold, hot, or somewhere in-between — it’s best to anticipate a greater intensity of conflict for a longer duration than decent people would hope, particularly when wars are civil in nature.

The status quo is unsustainable. The question is, can republican America win the day, ushering in a fundamental decentralization of the nation, thereby permitting divergent peoples to share one nation, bound by some traditions and some shared beliefs and aspirations? Perhaps. Or will this clash between very different worldviews lead to the permanent partition of America? Or will it boil down to a zero-sum game, with one or the other side prevailing? Much awaits future events.

There should be no further discussion of whether “republican American” CAN win the day. It’s deflating, demoralizing thumbsuckery, and we can no longer afford to indulge in it. “Republican America” MUST win, and that’s flat. No matter what it takes, no matter how distasteful the actions required of us, the alternative is far too terrible to contemplate.

Courtroom wrangling, legislative mucking about, the strongest imaginable words, idle daydreams of a way out that doesn’t involve resorting to violence against an enemy that has already done just that—none of these, alone or combined, are anywhere near sturdy enough tools to wreak a reconciliation between two adversaries whose commitment to diametrically-opposed beliefs is unswerving. He who flinches from battle has already lost the war. Try as we might to find another path, throughout human history it has always come down to the same, simple equation: One side must win. One side must lose.

We MUST not lose.

An encouraging word

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Since I couldn’t make it work as a comment over at Expat’s joint, I’ll just post this here and hope he sees it:

“A single grateful thought toward heaven is the most perfect prayer.” — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

One of the best, most profound quotes I know of. Hang in there, ol’ son. Long as you’re still breathing, they haven’t beat you yet.

Losing faith

Posted on July 1, 2021July 1, 2021 by Mike

I hate to say this, I swear I do, but sometimes I really wish that Trump would just shut the hell up already.

Trump issues statement on Gen. Milley; calls him liar, trying to ‘impress radical left,’ calls for resignation
Milley later issued an embarrassing and groveling apology for walking at my side to St. John’s Church, which far-left rioters almost burned to the ground the day before. Instead of denouncing the rioters, he denounced himself—a humiliation for our Military. A year later even the Fake News had to admit that their Lafayette Square narrative was a giant lie. Milley, once again, looked like a fool.

Now, in yet another desperate ploy to impress the Radical Left and keep his job, Milley made-up a false story that he yelled at me in the Situation Room. This is totally Fake News. If he had displayed such disrespect for his Commander-in-Chief I would have fired him immediately.

To further ingratiate himself with Biden, progressive Media, and the Radical Left, Milley went to Congress and actually defended Critical Race Theory being shoved down the throats of our soldiers. This Marxist, racist anti-American propaganda has no place in our Military—I banned these training programs, now Biden and the Pentagon have resumed them. As soon as possible, Congress must defund this racist indoctrination.

Gen. Milley ought to resign, and be replaced with someone who is actually willing to defend our Military from the Leftist Radicals who hate our Country and our Flag.

Understand: there’s no love lost for Milley around these parts—NONE. Not for him, nor for any other of the Politicized Perfumed Princes of the Puzzle Palace. I deeply respect America’s true and faithful warriors, however many of them are left after the recent purges, and hold them in the highest esteem. The wretched, backstabbing Blue Falcons of the higher command echelons—Milley, Austin, and the rest? Eh, not so much.

All that said, there’s a leeeeetle problem with Trump’s richly-deserved condemnation of the Wokester rumpswab Milley. At this point, it should be simplicity itself to guess what it is.

Trump Appoints Gen. Mark Milley Chairman Of The Joint Chiefs Of Staff
President Trump made the announcement via Twitter on Saturday.

“I am pleased to announce my nomination of four-star Gen. Mark Milley, Chief of Staff of the United States Army — as the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, replacing General Joe Dunford, who will be retiring,” Trump wrote. “I am thankful to both of these incredible men for their service to our Country! Date of transition to be determined.”

Trump will attend the Army-Navy football game on Saturday afternoon. On Friday, Trump said he is nominating William Barr for attorney general, and Heather Nauert for U.N. ambassador.

“Ought to resign,” eh? Please tell me, if you can: WHY THE FUCKING FUCK did you appoint the lousy bastard in the first gott-damned place? Or, since you DID appoint his worthless ass, why did he not get the old heave-ho at the first intimation of his clearly duplicitous nature, something that became apparent pretty early on? What the hell ever happened to all that “I’ll hire only the best people” bushwa, anyway?

I know, I know. Trump was naive; he was too trusting; he was in over his head; he had no idea how bad things really were in the Swamp; he was beset on every side, had no support, all that. So stipulated.

BUT.

He was also President of the United States of America. That is NOT a purely symbolic office. While he was certainly hampered and hindered by all the Deep State anklebiting, he was by NO means without recourse, power, ability, or options, not at any point. No President is. Previous ones cleaned Executive Branch house upon first taking office as a matter of course, putting their own people in place throughout. Hell, his odious predecessor did that very thing. Trump swore all along that that’s what he would be doing.

But somehow, incomprehensibly and to not only his own but the nation’s detriment, he didn’t. Worse, even after repeated betrayals he allowed the selfsame scoundrels who had put their knives in his back to keep their cushy sinecures. Which only enabled them to do it again, and again, and again. The only one I can recall him firing right offhand was Comey, and that was well after the damage had been done.

No, don’t tell me why Trump couldn’t have fired these snakes-in-the-grass; he damned sure could have, and he damned sure should have. I don’t care to hear any more about why he couldn’t; what I’m interested in now is why he didn’t. Sure, the media and Demonrats would have screamed blue murder over it. So fucking what? They were going to anyway, and did, and still are.

Whatever the reason, if any, Trump passively let his enemies have their way with him, never lifting a finger to do what so obviously needed to be done: get rid of them. This out-of-character passivity not only cost him the Presidency, it may yet land him behind bars. Complaining about them now, saying they “ought to resign,” when he could have and should have taken action when he had the chance, is starting to sound too much like sniveling for my comfort.

Remember, this is the guy who for years hosted a highly successful and quite popular TeeWee show called The Apprentice, whose first-order raison d’etre was that on each episode…TRUMP WOULD FIRE SOMEBODY’S ASS. So we know that handing out the ol’ pink slips was not something he was ever reluctant to do.

Until he became President.

I still don’t think Trump is stupid. Nor is he weak, timid, indecisive, or incompetent. So I can come up with no reasonable explanation for the failure to exercise his clear prerogative as head of the Executive Branch to remove disloyal underlings who were openly defying and undermining him—many of whom were hired or appointed by him in the first damned place—and installing more trustworthy replacements willing to respect him personally and cooperate with him professionally. It’s beyond baffling.

What the hell is going on here, exactly?

(Via Bill)

DOOOOOMED!!!

Posted on June 29, 2021June 29, 2021 by Mike

Everybody got their last will and testaments current and their life insurance paid up?

Top experts have likened the COVID-19 “Delta Variant” to the common cold and hay fever. This comes as people like Anthony Fauci, Boris Johnson, and the WHO are pushing for more social distancing, lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccinations.

Experts in the United Kingdom have compared the symptoms of the COVID-19 “Delta Variant” to that of hay fever and the common cold, according to various reports. The new strain has reportedly been the cause of 99% of all new COVID-19 cases in the UK. “The main symptoms of COVID-19 appear to have changed — with headaches and sore throats now more common than fevers and coughs, according to a warning by UK experts,” noted the New York Post.

Dr. Fauci continues to assert that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the US to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19,” which reportedly has accounted for 20% of all new COVID-19 cases in the United States. Fauci maintains that COVID-19 vaccines can protect people from the “Delta Variant,” adding that young, unvaccinated people are “more vulnerable than ever.”

However, many Americans are skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccinations they’ve received amid reports of the “Delta Variant” infecting individuals after they’ve been fully vaccinated. As was reported by the Wall Street Journal, “About half of adults infected in an outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19 in Israel were fully inoculated with the Pfizer Inc. vaccine, prompting the government to reimpose an indoor mask requirement and other measures to contain the highly transmissible strain.”

On May 13, Joe Biden told America to “get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do,” prompting hundreds of millions of Americans to eventually receive their COVID-19 vaccines.

I will not comply, and you and your grubby little bureau-stooges can all go fuck yourselves. Preferably, with something razor sharp, rusty, and very, very girthy.

Welcome to the party, pal

Posted on June 29, 2021June 29, 2021 by Mike

Wait, you’re just realizing this NOW?

Fox News Host Tucker Carlson Reveals NSA Conducting Surveillance on His Electronic Communication, Texts and Emails
As disturbing as this statement is, considering the prior admissions of warrantless wiretapping by the FBI using the NSA database, this does not come as a surprise.

Remember, for five consecutive years the U.S. intelligence community has admitted to the FISA court they continually conduct illegal searches of U.S. citizen data, using the NSA database, and they admit to illegally extracting information which is illegally shared with interests outside the intelligence community.

Tonight on Tucker Carlson the Fox News Host outlined how an NSA whistleblower contacted him and told him the NSA was conducting electronic surveillance of his communication. To verify the authenticity of the claim the whistleblower told Carlson what the content of his private text messages and emails contained. While alarming in part, again this should not be surprising.

None but a complete fool could be surprised by it. Tucker isn’t stupid enough not to also realize that it’s hardly just him under the constant, microscopic scrutiny of the Surveillance State. They’re spying on every last one of us—every move we make, every word we speak, and every breath we take, every minute of every day. Something to think about while you’re partaking in the mandatory festivities in celebration of ‘Murrcafreedom!!™ on the Fourth.

Update! Well, this should certainly allay any suspicion out there.

“Tucker Carlson said that the NSA is spying on him. Is the administration aware of any espionage or listening efforts on US citizens by the NSA, and is Tucker Carlson one of them?” a reporter asked (hapless, in-way-over-her-head Bai Ding junta PR flack Jen—M) Psaki.

“Well, the NSA has, I think you are well aware, everyone’s aware, everyone on this plane is aware, I should say, is an entity that focuses on foreign threats and individuals who are attempting to do us harm on foreign soil,” Psaki responded. “So that is their purview, but beyond that I would point you to the intelligence community.”

Hey, makes perfect sense to me. Case: CLOSED! Now back on your heads, everybody.

Updated update! More slithering around straight from No Such Agency, any of which Tucker ain’t having.

Tucker Carlson slammed the National Security Agency (NSA) for their cryptic statement regarding his claim that they were monitoring his electronic communications. “We made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission… Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that,” said Carlson.

After the NSA released a cryptic statement regarding his allegations that they were illegally spying on his electronic communications, saying that the agency “may not” spy on American citizens without a court order, Carlson slammed the agency for not denying that they were reading his private emails.

“We made a very straightforward claim: NSA has read my private emails without my permission,” said Carlson. “Tonight’s statement from the NSA does not deny that. Instead, it comes with this non-sequitur: Tucker Carlson has never been an intel target.” Carlson explained that, in a heated discussion with the NSA, they repeatedly denied that they spied on him, but also repeatedly demurred when asked how his whistleblower knew the contents of Carlson’s private emails.

Carlson also bashed the White House for refusing to admit that the NSA was illegally monitoring his electronic communications. “The Biden administration just ignored this story, they did not deny this story. They can’t. They know that it’s true,” Carlson said. “Here’s what to notice – no denial. Of course she’s (Psaki) right that the NSA is chartered to spy on foreigners, not on Americans, that’s illegal, and yet the NSA does routinely spy on Americans.”

“They won’t call it spying, that’s exactly what it is. Millions of Americans, and sometimes it does it for political reasons and everyone knows this. Everyone, including sitting members of the Intel Committee. Some of them are paranoid about their own communications, that’s true. In Washington this is just considered fine, but it’s not fine. It is dangerous and it is wrong,” said Carlson.

It is. But it is also a fact of life in Amerika v2.0, and will assuredly not stop because of something so trifling and irrelevant as the law.

Unrecognizable America

Posted on June 28, 2021June 28, 2021 by Mike

This one has so many tasty lines in it it’s hard to choose which ones I’ll be stealing for future use. A couple of them might even need to go into the sidebar’s Notable Quotes section, that’s how good they are. But then, it’s Steyn, so that comes as no big surprise.

It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.

Think of it. Your daughter has been training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.

We traditionally think of France as being a bit screwy, but today there are French intellectuals who regard themselves as hardcore leftists and yet who think America has gone bonkers on this transgender issue. President Macron himself has said that American wokeness is an existential threat to the French Republic, and he even found bureaucrats in France’s education bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree, but there are apparently a few in Paris.

If you look further east in Europe to the lands that were once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which still function as conventional nation-states calculating their best interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is being exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S. where we have to put the stake through these ideas.

Not to be too pedantic and literal and all about that last metaphor, but you can’t put a stake through an idea. You have to put a stake through the people who promulgate the idea, before the toxic thing takes hold so deeply it becomes damned near impossible to uproot, like the noxious, strangling weed it is.

Getting back to the southern border, it perfectly symbolizes the bifurcation of our society. We’re told there’s a health emergency. We’re told we can’t open our businesses or attend weddings or funerals. Yet at the same time, every day, thousands of people pour across the southern border, test positive for COVID, and are then driven to a nice hotel and put up there at taxpayers’ expense.

It’s also interesting to compare the southern border with the northern. Prior to the pandemic, when the border with Canada was open, my kids had their Kinder Eggs confiscated by the Department of Homeland Security when we would cross the border going south into Vermont. Kinder Eggs are chocolate eggs with a kid’s toy inside. They are sold in Canada, but they are banned in the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration calls the toy a “non-nutritive embed”—and that’s good enough to send Homeland Security agents swinging into action! There is always a big crackdown before Easter on Kinder Eggs. So at the northern border there are lots of things, down to Kinder Eggs, that are illegal. But at the southern border you can come in with pretty much anything you want, including COVID. Why is that? It is because some groups serve the needs of the ruling class and others don’t. License is extended to the former and not the latter.

People ask me, “Why are you going on about Kinder Eggs? They’re not important. It’s more important that so-and-so is up two points in Iowa and three points in New Hampshire. That could be a real game changer.” To which I answer no, that’s not how it works. If they take the small freedoms away from you, whether it’s the freedom to eat Kinder Eggs or to enjoy a high pressure shower, you will lose all the larger freedoms, which is the world we’re in now.

I used to get occasional pushback when I’d talk about rights. “Rights are abstract things,” people would say—“they don’t have anything to do with our real lives.” Well, after the last year, we know they have everything to do with our real lives. When you’re told you can’t open your hair salon, when you’re told you can’t have family or friends over for dinner, when you’re told you must wear a mask in your own garden, there’s nothing abstract about it. This is where all the stupid Kinder Egg laws have been trending for years. And it’s why we need to push back.

President Macron of France is not my favorite chap—he’s a sinister globalist for one thing. But he made an admirable stand when he announced that not one French statue would be taken down and not a single French street name would be changed, because they are all part of French history. And “Bingo!” as Peter Navarro likes to say, the statue toppling and street-name changing in France went away. Why can’t American conservatives show that kind of strength? The Senate Minority Leader says he personally would not be bothered if the historical names of U.S. military bases are changed. The editor of National Review says that he wouldn’t be bothered about taking down Confederate statues. But of course it doesn’t stop there—now they’re going for all the statues. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley, and on and on. The point conservatives need to grasp is, unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, don’t surrender anything.

I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.

Although it’s always a worthwhile endeavor, I’d say all this has gone way too far for reclaiming the language to be of any substantive help. In the end that’s basically just a mental exercise, and fixing this squalid mess, I’m afraid, is going to require MUCH more drastic measures—physical ones, IYKWIMAITYD.

Hangin’ at the spa

Posted on June 27, 2021June 27, 2021 by Mike

S’cuse me while I whip this out.

A number of female customers of a luxurious Los Angeles spa were outraged after the staff did not intervene when a man who thinks he’s a woman displayed his private parts.

“That’s traumatizing to see that,” one lady said.

Rilly? Traumatizing?!? Jeez, lady, but that seems a bit much to me. I mean, rude, sure. Inconsiderate, obnoxious, offensive, all fine. Mind, I’m not advocating, minimizing, or excusing the dude’s actions. But any grown woman who sincerely does consider the sight of unexpected public pecker traumatizing might need to get herself some help for that. I mean, come on—as if she’s never seen a schlong before?

Granted, the egregious flashing of weinage in inappropriate settings is unacceptable, of course. But if there’s anything here for a normal, healthy, adult female to be “traumatized” by, it’s an obviously mentally-disturbed, possibly even dangerous, weirdo running around loose in public, getting his sicko jollies at the disturbance he created.

Thankfully, somebody had the wherewithal to lay down a little common-sense factuality.

One spa worker explained that California law allows the man to use the women’s spa — because of his sexual orientation.

“What sexual orientation,” the female customer shot back. “I see a dick. It lets me know he’s a man. He is a man. He is not a female.”

At some point a woke male customer interjected himself into the conversation and lectured the biological woman about transgenderism. But that lady was not in the mood.

“He is not a female, sweetie,” she replied. “You’ve got a man with a penis talking about he’s a woman. He’s no woman. There’s no such thing as transgender. He’s got a dick.”

Nothing but 24-karat solid-gold truth, right there. How bizarre that our society has been dragged so far into PC degeneracy where daring to say such things aloud is considered hateful, bigoted, even illegal in certain quarters. The spa staff was likely terrified of being arrested, prosecuted, and doing time themselves had they dared to utter a single syllable of reproach against the pud-pulling sicko, and had damned good reason to be. THAT’S what we all oughta be concerned about, seems to me, and to heck with feeling all “traumatized” over the mere sight of unexpected goob.

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