GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

Peak irony?

Or peak idiocy? Yet another occasion when we must embrace the healing power of “and.”


Ms Murray asks a few pertinent questions, then hips us to the bottom line.

Haven’t we all seen diesel-powered trucks deliver diesel-powered generators, to charge dead E.V. batteries?

How does a company get the lithium to build the battery? Diesel earth-moving machinery of course.

What happens when freezing temperatures cause an E.V. to break down? What kind of tow truck comes to the rescue?

When exposure to salt water causes a dangerous malfunction and the car rolls backward into a bay, what kind of vehicle pulls the car up from submersion?

Funny enough, after I posted that video, someone in the comments (shockingly) missed the irony, making this statement:

How is this ironic? There’s [sic] only a handful of EV semis on [the] road as of right now. How else are the cars going to make it to their destination?

Yes, there are “only a handful of EV semis” on the road because they can’t even come close to what diesel haulers can do. In a free market, when an idea isn’t good enough for consensual adoption, or costs more in dollars than the value it brings to the table… you find yourself in a reality in which “only a handful of EV semis” are found clunking across the road at any one time. (And, they are only there because of large infusions of taxpayer cash to prop up this bad idea.)

The world runs on oil, the only truly renewable source of energy, and one that doesn’t have to rely on another source of energy to make up for shortcomings.

Annnnd bingo. ‘Nuff said.

Update! Oh, and about that minor little “freezing temperatures” business.

Blue Cities Went All-In for Electric Transit, But the Buses Couldn’t Handle the Cold
Virtue-signaling liberalism is fighting another losing battle with reality.

On Wednesday, the Minnesota-focused news outlet MinnPost reported that several of the state’s largest cities have encountered significant obstacles in their quest to achieve planet-friendly public transit.

Frigid temperatures and a myriad of other problems have plagued Duluth and the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul during their transition to zero-emission buses.

In subzero conditions — a staple of Minnesota winters — electric buses operate at only a fraction of their supposed 150-mile capacity.

Drew Kerr, spokesman for Twin Cities Metro Transit, explained that charged buses travel far shorter distances than manufacturers advertised.

“Using garage chargers alone, electric buses can remain in service for 70 to 75 miles before needing to return to the garage; with on-route chargers, electric buses were scheduled to be in service for up to 90 miles before returning to the garage,” Kerr said.

Duluth spokesman Dave Clark noted that the city has experienced significant problems with charging stations.

“They would fail. They would not perform. They would experience malfunctions, glitches. They were extremely problematic right out of the gate,” Clark said.

As anyone with even half a lick of fucking sense would expect, there’s much, much more at the link. In the sagacious words of Thomas Jefferson: It is error alone which needs the support of government. Truth can stand by itself. Smart man, that Thomas Jefferson.

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A matter of life and death

Ever wonder why moronic shitlibs hate fossil fuels so desperately? Wonder no more, friend.

We Can’t Let Fossil Fuels Die Because They Keep Us Alive
It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity.

This is my first Christmas without my dad. As hard as it is for me and my siblings, it’s harder still for our mother, who is having her first Christmas since 1963 without him. Dad’s days in the hospital and subsequent death ushered in a wave of emotions, memories, and ponderings about heaven, sin, salvation, and for me, fossil fuels.

The last item in that list may sound strange, but let me explain. As an advocate for the energy industry, work follows me everywhere, and I love it because I love what I do. But fossil fuels are not just my life, they are life-giving and life-sustaining.

After his heart attack, Dad had a cardiac catheterization to assess the damage to his coronary artery. A hollow, plastic tube was inserted through the groin. Then, guided by the doctor, it traveled through the blood vessels, sending back data and information. In this procedure, the plastics are made of oil. The needle is forged to the finest of points by heat produced from coal. The medicines used to prevent infection are petrochemicals likely made from natural gas. Right there: fossil fuels.

A stent was also implanted to keep the blood flowing in a collapsed artery — thinner than human hair, hollow, nontoxic, noncorrosive, flexible, and 100 percent made from oil.

Medicines, IV bags, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, the port in his arm, the numerous beeping machines — in every corner of Dad’s hospital room were products of abundant natural resources, which professionals deploy daily to save lives and heal patients. And we take it for granted.

Those advocating for a “green transition” never tell us what the plan is to make needles and bedpans once we “phase out” of fossil fuels. What is the replacement plan for plastic, rubber, cement, steel, and the millions of products they create?

Perhaps I thought these things sitting in Dad’s hospital room to distract myself from the heartache. Perhaps I think these things because it is my job. Either way, I know the world is not ready for fossil fuels to lose this battle. It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity — a dignity that elevates us above the harshness of nature and cruelty of illness or allows us to cleanse ourselves from the sweat of labor. 

We do not talk about the “then what” after fossil fuels are eliminated. But I assure you, life as we know it would be absolutely, categorically impossible without them.

For you and me, sure. For them? Never. Or so they think, at any rate. All just part and parcel of being what Lenin termed a “useful idiot,” see. And if we hated Normals have to keel over and drop dead en masse so’s they can feel all smug and sanctimonious about themselves and their “noble” Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ works…well, so much the better, then. For these assholes, that’s a feature, not a bug. This gem, which ran over at the Eyrie with this week’s Screamin’ meemie Monday post, is worth another look, I think.

Yes indeedy-dew. Or, as Glenn has long maintained: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Call it Reynold’s Law, p’raps.

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Walk gently on Mother Earth

CHRIST, what a muttonhead.

Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make.

Yes. Yes, you absolutely should, immediately. Every minute you dither makes Mother Gaia cry, you know.

Four years ago, during a Zoom work meeting, a colleague who lives in London told me she’d decided to quit flying on airplanes. She simply couldn’t stomach the cost to the climate. Due to her decision, she said calmly, she would probably never visit the U.S. again. My heart skipped a beat.

Her choice seemed so extreme. She shared it with me casually in the context of conversation, without a trace of judgment or moralizing. Still, I felt shocked and inexplicably a little defensive—but also intrigued. At the time, I traveled by air as often as ten times a year for my work as a journalist and to see family members strewn about the country. I couldn’t imagine my life without flying.

But my colleague’s comment lodged in my mind as a beautiful and challenging seed. Over the next few years, it cracked through the concrete of what had been, until then, a completely unexamined belief in my inviolable entitlement to flying. When the pandemic arrived, grounding travelers and shrinking international air travel by 60 percent in 2020, I began to see that significantly reducing air travel—or even giving it up altogether—was absolutely possible.

Rare individuals have chosen not to fly for ethical reasons for decades, but in the years leading up to the pandemic, the smattering of outliers coalesced into a movement. It took root most quickly and deeply in Sweden, which in 2017 became the first country in the world to establish a legally binding carbon-neutrality target—a year before Greta Thunberg began protesting in front of its parliament. In Swedish, the movement became known as flygskam, which translates to “flight shame,” a term commonly attributed to Swedish singer Staffan Lingberg, who gave up flying in 2017.

The number of people pledging to stop flying grew so much that Swedish air travel declined 5 percent between 2018 and 2019, and the movement strengthened in other parts of Europe as well. In the U.S., the flight-free movement, in the form of groups like Flight Free USA and No Fly Climate Sci, has been slower to spread but is growing. This year, Flight Free USA, for example, is on track to see the largest number of pledges to stop or minimize flying at 436. By comparison, tens of thousands have pledged in Europe over the past four years.

Well, an admiring pat on the head for all those Neo-Luddite lackwits, then. But y’all should by no means stop there. Ditch your cars, your houses, your modern appliances, any clothing you didn’t sew with your own two pwecious widdle hands. Throw out your computer, your tablet, and your sail foam, all of which are made of plastic derived from *gasp!!!* fossil fuels. No more mass transit, either, most of which consists of either gas or diesel-engined buses or electric trains and/or subways which rely on a mostly coal-burning power grid.

Squatting in your dark, freezing-cold cave to cook over an open fire? Perish FORBID! When I think of the miasma of planet-killing pollutants spewed into our fragile atmosphere by such unnecessary indulgences, I can but weep. Small-scale agriculture? Non: cow farts, plus plants have feewings too, you know. Composting? Nein: that is just soooo 2010; you should be scooping, bagging, and eating your own poo like more enlightened pyrsynz are doing. Travel/commuting by horseback? Nyet, nyet, NYET: animal cruelty, you heartless, soulless monster, amongst a whole slew of other objections.

Criminy, but these navel-gazing, sanctimonious handwringers really make my hair hurt sometimes.

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What if they gave a war and nobody showed up?

If you lie to them repeatedly, they won’t come.

The foreign policy elite has sacrificed so many lives for so little justification. More than 7,000 service members and nearly 8,000 contractors died in combat after 9/11. An incredible 30,000 have committed suicide over the same period. Officially, some 52,000 were wounded in combat, many grievously. However, Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs reports that the real number “is exponentially larger,” given other injuries in theater and conditions diagnosed after returning home. Finally, hundreds of thousands of foreign civilians died in the misguided conflicts, innocent casualties of U.S. hubris and folly. 

It is one thing to risk your life and health for America. But to instead die in such foolish wars? And to have your sacrifice so shamefully wasted? Patriots should preserve their lives for something better.

So far, the military has no answer to the dearth in recruits. The services are simply muddling along, considering small fixes to significant shortfalls. Adding recruiters and hiking pay are obvious steps. Reaching younger Americans and adjusting military routine to modern youth culture are others. Decreasing disqualifications and increasing physical fitness would increase the recruit pool. Retaining more existing personnel would reduce the need for new recruits. So would hiring laterally for specialty roles and introducing robots. Such efforts should help at the margin. Even so, however, they are unlikely to fill personnel gaps in the thousands. 

The most important problem is that nothing has changed with U.S. foreign policy. Indeed, today’s potential wars are becoming more deadly. “We have strike groups, aircraft carriers with a Marine Expeditionary Unit outside Israel now,” observed Justin Henderson, a Marine Corps recruiter. He added, “We’re funding two wars, but we’re actually boots on the ground, drones above Gaza. So we’re already involved in there—and we’re not sure what’s happening in Taiwan. So this is a very tumultuous time for us, because we don’t know what’s going to happen.”

No, we don’t. Yet nothing good is likely to come from being involved in so many of the world’s incendiary confrontations and conflicts. Washington continues to ask young Americans to risk their lives here, there, and everywhere for no good reason.

Uncle Sam’s determination to be forever entangled in foreign wars is a very good reason not to join the armed services. The best way to solve the recruitment problem is to end frivolous interventions on behalf of peripheral interests. The armed services’ essential task is defending Americans—not sanctimonious Euroweenies, kleptocratic Saudi royals, well-heeled South Koreans, indifferent Taiwanese, and endless others. 

If the infamous Blob, as the foreign policy establishment has been called, refuses to abandon its determination to dominate the globe, it almost certainly will have to impose conscription. However, a return to the hated practice would foster resistance, intensify partisan polarization, and spur social conflict. Moreover, coercing service would reduce the quality of the U.S. military, hiking indiscipline, reducing retention, and draining morale. Doing so might put more people in uniform, but far fewer would want to be there and prepared to give their all in combat, especially in the frivolous interventions of late. 

The Washington War Party continues to spend wildly to dominate the globe, threat of national insolvency be damned. However, the challenge of finding young men and women willing to act as sentinels for a conflict-filled global empire is proving more daunting. If Americans increasingly refuse to serve, the Pentagon will have to do more than the policy equivalent of adjusting the deck chairs of the Titanic. Republicans and Democrats alike might have to again put America’s defense first.

Yet another lesson of history our damned-fool political “leaders” refuse to learn: as a nation staggers, weakens, and eventually collapses, its military does also. It’s a truism that has held up unfailingly throughout the history of human civilization; in fact, it’s how third-rate powers are made. For more information, please see Once-Great Britain, Moslem-conquered France and Germany, and the other sick men of (Western) Europe.

If you’re currently serving in the armed forces: get out, any way you can, by hook or by crook. If you’re thinking seriously of enlisting or signing on for another hitch: don’t, just…DON’T. Amerika v2.0 is in no way worth your blood, sweat, toil, and sacrifice, much less your very life. The civilian “leadership” despises its own soldiers; the majority of our pig-ignorant population loathes the soldiery in general as violent, thuggish knuckledraggers, the warrior spirit which animates and inspires any soldier worth his salt as the outdated creed of bloody-minded losers—the combination of which two represents a threat to all they consider good and decent.

The title of the article asks, “Why join the military?” The way things currently stand, I can’t think of one good reason any sane, sensible person would.

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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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“This isn’t science. It’s fraud”

Quelle surprise.

With only 9 months of reporting data, NOAA was already able to announce “Hottest Year Ever.” But to be fair, they knew well in advance that their data would show 2023 to be the hottest year ever, not only because NOAA “adjusts” much of the data they gather, but even more shockingly, because they fabricate much of the rest of the data inputs from decommissioned stations!

Meteorologist John Shewchuk has been researching NOAA’s hundreds of “ghost stations.” These are climate stations that were once in operation, but aren’t any longer. They might have been removed, or maybe they just quit operating and were never repaired, but NOAA continues to fabricate estimate temperature data for these formerly operational stations.

It gets even worse. As I’ll show in just a moment, aside from the fabricated reports from the USHCN ghost stations, NOAA adjusts the actual readings from stations that are still functioning, to support the climate hoax.

The table immediately below from the Belle Glade station is much simpler to read than it looks, and it reveals both types of fraud that NOAA is committing: 1) the adjustment of temperature data; and 2) the fabrication of temperature data.

In blue is the actual Raw data produced by the Belle Glade station until it went dark in 2005. Each row represents a year, for instance the first year is 2000. The 12 numbers that follow are the 12 average monthly temperatures for that station, shown as Celsius x 100. Therefore, the average temperature in January 2000 was 25.12° Celsius. In February 2000 the average temperature was 25.50° Celsius. (-9999 means that no reading was recorded.)

Below that table in red is the official NOAA temperature data, where two things stand out.

1) NOAA has adjusted the actual Raw data. That 25.12°C temperature for January 2000 was warmed up to 25.21°C. February 2000 was similarly adjusted from 25.50°C to 25.60°C.

2) Despite Belle Glade going offline in 2005, NOAA continues to report temperature data for that imaginary station. The “E” by the temperature indicates that this is an estimated temperature, however, that estimate is still included in the official temperature record.

With NOAA’s history of anti-scientific fraud, it should be assumed at this point that any data NOAA publishes is a fabrication.

My previous documentation of NOAA’s fraud was the progenitor of a commenter’s quote that gave birth to Throckmorton’s Razor and Minuteman’s Corollary:

Throckmorton’s Razor: “Assume that any authority which has previously provided false data is always acting dishonestly.”

Minuteman’s Corollary: “Discount everything a liar says in his argument, even if it may support your position.”

NOAA has so thoroughly compromised its integrity with its pattern of politically motivated fraud, that not only do I not believe its reporting of temperatures or tropical storm wind speeds any longer, but I don’t even trust it to accurately report the dew point. Every piece of weather data produced by NOAA should be assumed to be fraudulent.

It most certainly should, right along with any and every other syllable shat forth from any and every FederalGovCo “scientist,” “expert,” or spokescritter’s filthy maw. It’s a sad, sorry state of affairs, and an awful fix for Real Americans to find themselves in, but it also happens to be the plain and simple truth.

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Where Trans madness ends up

Actually, that’s not quite right either; it isn’t going to end at all, at least not until it’s officially legal for “people” to marry animals.  Yes, that will mean that Christian churches (but not mosques; NEVER mosques) will be forced to perform marriage ceremonies for them, after which all congregants will have to rise to their feet and cheer in jubilation as the happy couple (almost certainly both males, or pseudo-“males” who have had their tits sliced off) lies down on the altar to consummate their holy matrimonial union by enthusiastically butt-fucking each other half to death in front of their appalled, coerced audience.

Think I’m being hyperbolic, do ya? Give it another five to ten years. At MOST.

Hundreds of people who identify as dogs gather in city center: ‘Call animal control’
They’ve got a bone to pick.

A pack of dog-identifying humans has prompted calls for “animal control” after footage of their Berlin meet-up went viral.

An estimated 1,000 people who prefer to be recognized as not humans, but canines, organized a gathering at the Berlin Potsamer Platz railroad station in Germany, communicating only by howling or barking at one another.

Online, critics jeered at the trans-species folk, some offering to put the herd’s “canine instincts” to the test:

“Just abandon them in the Siberian tundra and let them survive with their canine instincts.”

“I don’t see anyone smelling the tail of others.”

“Call animal control and give them their rabies doses.”

“Can you imagine when they all have to defecate?”

“But if they identify as dogs, why do they put on masks?”

“When I wear my costume I feel I’m no longer human,” Ueda, 32, previously told the UK Times. “I’m free of human relationships. All kinds of troubles, related to work and other things — I can forget about them.”

But animal-like behavior has been fetishized as a BDSM kink known as “puppy play,” where participants, usually men, are equipped with muzzles, collars or leashes and behave like a dog.

Some OnlyFans models have become mutts to rake in the big bucks, finding that the canine behavior is especially lucrative.

In 2020, adult content creator Jenna Phillips revealed she raked in $10,000 per month just for acting like a pooch — collar and all.

“It’s insane,” she said at the time. “I never thought my weird dog kink would be looked at by a broad audience, or that so many people would like/care about it. It still blows my mind.”

Emphasis mine, because she’s perfectly correct: insane is EXACTLY what it is. The difference now is that used to be, we locked up the demonstrably insane in lunatic asylums to prevent the harm they might cause to others, themselves, and/or society at large. Today, we’re required to declare “Pride” months for them, attend their parades, allow them to proselytize our children, and not just tolerate them but stand up and applaud them as courageous “heroes.” DM has questions:

Can they be prohibited from restaurants? Will they be required to get rabies vaccines? Will I have to walk them on a leash? Scoop their poop?

A: Yes. Yes, you most certainly will. The last bit, anyway. That, and much, much more—and worse. The other two three, absolutely not. That would be WRONG, see.

Most importantly, if I kill someone and can prove that the person identified as a dog, I can’t be charged with murder, right? At most, animal cruelty…

Of COURSE you can. In fact, as J6 shows, you won’t even have to sardonically suggest it for them to toss you right into the Amerikan Goolag indefinitely.

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Truck THIS

Is this post related to the one immediately below? Oh, you just bet your numb ass it is.

Truck This: Why I’m Leaving the Long-Haul Industry
I’ve been a truck driver for over 20 years. I suppose I always knew I would be, ever since that career day in the third grade when among all the kids dressed like doctors and baseball players, there I stood dressed like Jerry Reed from Smokey and the Bandit. Pop culture in the 80s painted the picture of truckers as rugged men, wild and free, burdened by nothing except their own wanderlust. That romanticized version of the American truck driver still lingers in the back of my mind, but in recent years the burden of government regulation has proven to be greater than my desire to see what’s over the next hill.

Oppressive regulation in the trucking industry has been around almost as long as the iconic chrome bulldog on the hood of Mack trucks. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Federal Motor Carrier Act (FMCA) of 1935 during his first term. This gave the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), an agency originally formed to regulate railroads, the authority to regulate the burgeoning business of moving goods by tractor-trailer. The ICC ultimately decided which companies could haul certain goods, for whom, where, and what they could charge. The ICC even decided if new transportation companies could enter the market by requiring eager upstarts to prove their services were “needed.”

The only exemptions to these laws were in the agricultural sector. FDR and his horde of central planners did not want to cause an increase in food prices during a time when many Americans were already struggling to put food on the table. Nevermind the tacit admission that the FMCA would raise prices on all other goods. This exemption had its own unintended consequences. While independent drivers, commonly referred to as wildcatters in driver slang, were not subject to the price floors previously mentioned, they were limited to hauling only agricultural goods. This limitation caused a significant logistical dilemma for wildcatters delivering in industrialized parts of the country, and is largely responsible for the mythos of the outlaw trucker we all know today from music and film. Whether in an old country song from Red Sovine or Kurt Russell’s character in Big Trouble in Little China, such renegades are almost always hauling agricultural goods.

Thankfully, a trend towards deregulation began in the 1970s, and the cesspool of cronyism and perverse incentives created by FDR was substantially reined in with the FMCA of 1980. This is why we now see hundreds, if not not thousands of company names sprawled along the sides of 53-foot trailers. Granted, we still have the ICC, though today it is known as the Department of Transportation, and any truck driver that has had to spend 10 hours at a scale house without a shower or a hot meal over a minor infraction of hours of service rules (another specter of the FMCA of 1935) will tell you it remains quite burdensome. But things are still better than they used to be.

Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.

Odd, innit, how so much of the intrusive, meddlesome legislation that still hobbles ordinary workaday Americans to this very day originated with über-Left/liberal FDR—scion of one clan amongst several of a de facto if not de jure American Royalty class, a class which to this day we flatter ourselves does not, indeed cannot, exist—who is still worshipped by contemporary shitlibs as if he were some kind of demi-God.

The author goes on to discuss electronic logs, the godawful Regen/DPF devices, and speed governors, soon to be inflicted on big-rig jockeys nationwide by our know-nothing DOT czar Pete “Penelope” Buttplug, before arriving at his grim but inevitable conclusion:

However well-intentioned these rules and regulations might be, it’s clear that no one is consulting with the long haul truckers about the totally foreseeable bad outcomes. The great problem with all central planning is that regulators lack local knowledge, and are not inclined to speak to the people living with the consequences of their decrees. Probably because we would tell them what idiots they are.

The last two decades I’ve spent traversing this beautiful nation have, by and large, been a wonderful experience. I have countless stories to share with other drivers over a cup of coffee at my favorite fuel stops or with my more stationary friends over a cold beer. I wouldn’t trade the things I’ve seen, the binds I’ve been in, or the successes I enjoyed, for anything. But the burden that has been laid on these old tired shoulders by bureaucrats and central planners has become more than I’m willing to bear. I’ll always yearn for the open road, but now I’ll have to satisfy that wanderlust in my pick-up truck. I’m pulling the parking brake on this Peterbilt for the last time.

Having spent well over twenty years myself as a freight-humper (ie, loading-dock ape) and -hauler, whose younger brother still slaves away in the industry*, I can understand the sentiment—although I must disagree vehemently with the risible notion that restrictive edicts that destroy livelihoods, erode liberty, and ruin lives are in any way “well-intentioned.” On the face of it, they cannot possibly be any such thing, being just one part of a well-established historical pattern that has never ended well for hoi-polloi kulaks such as truck drivers.

* When his dispatcher can even find any work for him, which has dried up almost completely thanks to the Biden Economic MIRACLE!©

2
3

An idea whose time, apparently, has come

Via KT, this little slice of sarcastic slapback is too funny.


Heh. But hey, as a Person of Color myself (ALL the colors, not just the shitlib-sanctified blacque or brown), I support this. Why not? After all, it won’t be much longer before FederalGovCo will be requiring every child be tattooed at birth anyway. Y’know, with the Mark.

2

America That Was: what happened?

From Dream Factory to Dystopian Nightmare.

America was once the world’s dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, computers and robots as humanity’s great helpers, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction, from The Jetsons to Star Trek, would become fact.

But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in technological progress and economic growth, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: AI that will take all our jobs if it doesn’t kill us first, nuclear war, climate chaos, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same mistakes and pushing a pro-progress future into the realm of impossibility.

As with almost every problem in the Western world, if you want to find the roots of what Pethokoukis calls the Great Downshift there’s but one place you need to look: cherchez le shitlib, mon frere. Sounds like another likely candidate for Mike’s Iron Laws, I believe.

3

Adams, NYC, and illegal aliens: the TL;DR version

ADAMS, on being forced to live up to his burg’s “Sanctuary City” status: YOU’RE GONNA DESTROY NEW YORK SHITTY!!!

NYC SHITLIBS, on being recently forced, over a couple of months, to deal with the merest fraction of the veritable tsunami of illegals towns like El Paso have had to cope with every single day, for decades: WAAAAAHSTOPSTOPSTOPYOU’REHURTINGMEEEEEEE

100 MILLION+ REAL AMERICANS, in response to all this weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth:


Heh. But by all means, y’all just keep right on voting D卐M☭CRAT, y’hear? All of us out here in Flyover Jesusland don’t mind the rib-cage injuries we sustain from laughing at your self-inflicted wounds, just so’s you keep the top-notch comedic entertainment coming.

4

Good. And. HARD

Reading these next two maddening stories, I’m more convinced than ever that no one has ever understood democracy as thoroughly as did HL Mencken. First up, a little Maui Wowie.

After President Joe Biden traveled to Maui and all-too-typically cited his own personal history in order to comfort the grieving residents of the island, where at least 115 people have been declared dead from the fire that engulfed the town of Lahaina, he was blasted on social media for his colossal insensitivity.

“Hearing you talk about your house that had a little fire, you ‘almost lost your house and your Corvette,’ there were children that were incinerated to ash, you f***king old man, you vile human being,” one man said in a viral video.

“You’re so out of touch with the common man, you don’t even know how to speak to them,” he continued. “The only way you think you can establish commonality with them is to lie, ‘The same thing happened to you no matter what the tragedy is.’ He referenced Biden attempting to commiserate with Gold Star Moms who lost their son in action by citing his son Beau’s death from brain cancer: “Your son wasn’t killed in action, by the way,” adding furiously, “Your house didn’t burn down. Your children weren’t burned to death.”

“How dare you get up there and speak this way?” he snapped. “Your job is to go there and assuage them in a way that you talk to them about their loss, that you can’t imagine what it’s like, that you can’t imagine what it’s like never to find the bodies of the poor children who were sent home from schools. They died alone! Alone. In fear. Without their parents or guardian. The most abhorrent thing happened. You’re a disgusting, despicable bastard.”

“You ‘almost lost your cat?’ Go f*** yourself,” he concluded.

Yeah, I’d say SOMEbody ought to go fuck themselves for sure and certain. I’m just not entirely sure it shouldn’t be the whole goddamned kit and kaboodle of them. Lots of other Twitter X rips on the soulless, senile old fraud included with the article—all of them coming from the overwhelmingly liberal populace of a West Pacific island chain that “voted” for none other than Pedo Jaux Buyem in 2020 by well over 63 percent, and has reliably pulled the lever for D卐M☭CRATs in every “election” since said islands inexplicably became a state.

Not that the guy’s wrong in anything he says about Buyem, mind, be he the typical Islander shitlib or no. Hey, there’s bound to be three or four Hawaiians who ain’t, right?

In our next example of getting exactly what you voted for, and richly deserving it, the “good people” of Oakland are declaring themselves fed up too.

Sick and Tired in Oakland
The city’s NAACP chapter calls out its political leaders to do something about an “intolerable public safety crisis.”

On July 27, the Oakland NAACP published a scathing letter decrying the city’s failure to keep its vulnerable communities safe from persistent violence from high-risk offenders.

“Oakland residents are sick and tired of our intolerable public safety crisis that overwhelmingly impacts minority communities,” the letter begins. “There is nothing compassionate or progressive about allowing criminal behavior to fester and rob Oakland residents of their basic rights to public safety. It is not racist or unkind to want to be safe from crime.”

The NAACP called on Oakland to declare a “state of emergency” due to the untamed spiral of crime. “Murders, shootings, violent armed robberies, home invasions, car break-ins, sideshows, and highway shootouts have become a pervasive fixture of life in Oakland,” the letter warns.

Indeed, much of the crime data support the NAACP’s portrayal of disenfranchised and increasingly endangered Oakland residents. The most recent week’s Oakland Police Department statistics show that violent crimes have risen (year to date, compared with last year) by 18 percent, while overall crime is up 28 percent. The recent trend represents a major reversal from a few years earlier. Between 2012 and 2018, the city reduced gun violence by 50 percent, aided by its Oakland Ceasefire program, which implemented strategies such as “focused enforcement” involving the highest-risk individuals. In the first two years following the George Floyd uprisings, however, homicides rose 17.6 percent.

Oakland has seen radical shifts in its police department in recent years. The department is down 100 officers, according to Councilman Noel Gallo, though the NAACP states in its letter that various experts view the department as short as many as 500 officers from optimal levels. (The force’s current size is 734 officers).

Uh HUH. SO, how’s that “defund the police” bushwa you demanded not so long ago working out for ya then, idiots? From where I sit, it looks to be working out exactly as the more intelligent among us said it would from the start—and then got denounced by you as RAYCISS!!!!™ for having the outrageous temerity to say so right out loud.

I gravely doubt if a single man Jack of these maleducated ignoramii—whether they’re breathing through their mouths in Hawaii, Kalifornia, Chicago, or NYC—has even the vaguest clue who HL Mencken was, but they could all benefit from boning up on him. Because being the irascible, curmudgeonly visionary he was, he foresaw every bit of this horseshit long, long ago.

Civilization, in fact, grows more maudlin and hysterical; especially under democracy it tends to degenerate into a mere combat of crazes; the whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary. Wars are no longer waged by the will of superior men, capable of judging dispassionately and intelligently the causes behind them and the effects flowing out of them. The are now begun by first throwing a mob into a panic; they are ended only when it has spent its ferine fury.

As democracy is perfected, the office of president represents, more and more closely, the inner soul of the people. On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire at last and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule—and both commonly succeed, and are right.

Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.

Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.

Liberty and democracy are eternal enemies, and every one knows it who has ever given any sober reflection to the matter.

Democracy turns upon and devours itself. Universal suffrage, in theory the palladium of our liberties, becomes the assurance of our slavery. And that slavery will grow more and more abject and ignoble as the differential birth rate, the deliberate encouragement of mendicancy and the failure of popular education produce a larger and larger mass of prehensile half-wits, and so make the demagogues more and more secure.

An honest, reasonably intelligent soul might wish to try argue that he’s incorrect about any of that, but I can’t for the life of me see how he’d go about it without beclowning himself spectacularly in the doing of it.

Working as intended update! Joe Mannix makes an excellent point.

As the details about the disastrous Maui fire continue to unfold, many people are left wondering how the hell a foul-up this spectacular is possible. How did everything go so wrong at every level of the response? Why did Maui have to wait for water authorization? Why were the emergency sirens not activated? Why was traffic allegedly blocked from leaving on the only good road out? Assuming that all of what we’ve heard is true, how did so much go wrong?

I think that the sad conclusion is that, in reality, nothing went wrong. Not officially. Everyone likely followed every guideline, rule, regulation and requirement. Procedural compliance was probably quite good. What apparently nobody did, however, was the single most important thing: think. The environment in which they operate has been designed to eliminate the need to think and ensure compliance instead.

The purpose of the rules laid down in such great volume for so long a time is to obviate thinking. You don’t need to think if there’s a rule to cover whatever it is you need to do. Follow the rules, comply with the procedures, adhere to the regulations and you will achieve your goal or at least be shielded from any poor consequences. Nobody is to blame, because the rules were followed. The rules are there to act as a substitute for thinking. Robotic adherence to the rules – and striving to have a rule for all things – is awfully bad in situations that even slightly deviate from the context envisioned by the rulemakers.

Juat another of the many wonderful attributes of kakistocratic bureaucracy run amok. For certain values of the word “wonderful,” that is.

WHO’S not helping again, now?

STRONG HINT: It is NOT Jason Aldean.

The latest headshaker is Kathryn Jean Lopez tut-tutting that “Jason Aldean Isn’t Helping,” presumably by not being the kind of cerebral invertebrate that some at NR confuse with being a proper conservative. WFB went to Ft. Benning to become an Army officer and fight Nazis; the current NR leadership seems committed to fighting against anyone else on the Right man enough to fight back. A song hailing communities that come together to defeat crime and chaos? Apparently, that is not who we are. Oh, well, I never. That sound you hear is my pearls being clutched.

The current incarnation of National Review generally offers readers a conservatism that demands we use our inside voice, placing form – “Jason Aldean is so mean!” – over substance. The substance includes defeating evil when it comes for us, sometimes using violence. But apparently, this is too real. Well, it’s real life for millions of us. Theory is fun, but sometimes you gotta throw a punch. WFB got that. These guys and gals don’t.

It’s sad for me. Like most cons of my generation, notably Rush, I subscribed to National Review back in the day, and it was vital to shaping my thinking. You whippersnappers do not understand what the 80s were like for real conservatives. Sure, the music was awesome, as were the clothes and movies and all that, but if you were a committed conservative, particularly in the hinterlands, you were often alone. NR coming in the mail was my lifeline to an ideology that America embraced but barely understood. You could not go online and get a thousand different conservative views, or turn on your AM radio and get any at all. Buckley’s publication was it, and that is why its fall to effete establishment mewling is so painful.

There are still some people on NR worth reading and who I will not embarrass by listing. I read and like their work even when I disagree, and disagreement is good. But this pervasive vibe of prim submission is something else. I could fisk through Lopez’s sorry take on “Try That In A Small Town” to explain why no, it is not bad to protect your home from rampaging criminal scumbags even if you have to use violence. But I should not have to. That is a self-evident truth. Lieutenant Buckley knew that – he famously once threatened commie-symp Gore Vidal that “I’ll sock you in the…face” if the leftist weasel called Buckley a Nazi again.

I am at a loss as to why Kathryn Jean Lopez fails to understand this. Being a conservative does not mean being a pacifist, though that pacifism does not appear to extend to Ukraine, only to Americans defending themselves. It is of a kind with NR’s tendency to embrace a neutered, weak conservativism that offends no one, defends nothing, and always goes down in defeat. But it is not the only kind of conservatism now. We have an alternative. There is the muscular conservatism of the Reagans and Trumps and DeSantises, and then there’s whatever dog’s breakfast the new NR seems intent on serving up.

Kinder, gentler, a thousand points of light. To again evoke the 80s, gag me with a spoon.

The problem is not that Ms. Lopez does not appreciate Mr. Aldean’s tune but that she does not appreciate Mr. Aldean’s people. One of the great problems with conservatism, or rather with the intellectual conservative elite, is that so very many of them have never been in a fight punched in the mouth.

Fixed it for ya, Kurt ol’ buddy. Onwards.

In the real world, most of us have. But NR conservatism grows within the DC/NY hothouse; the idea of it outside in the real world where today’s conservatives live would make one of those hilarious fish-out-of-water movies where the guy in a bow tie from the Big City has to milk a cow. I’m not saying you must tromp through the woods stalking deer to be a con – post-Army, my idea of outside recreation is sitting on a lounge having someone bring me G&Ts – but it helps to get out a little and visit America and meet some Americans.

Yeah, like NRO’s effete limo-libs and faux conservatives have the slightest interest in rubbing elbows with THOSE people. “Not our sort, dearie!”

Elsewhere, Demo Don Surber lays into K-Lo even more unsparingly, leaving nothing but a quivering, gooey mess in his wake.

She objects to the video showing violence.

Conservatives object to the violence shown in the video.

K-Lo wrote, “Part of the reason some conservatives are defending the song is that there is plenty of other music that is violent that doesn’t get pulled by anyone. The healthy answer isn’t to add more anger and violence. Some of us are old enough to remember former second lady Tipper Gore, a Democrat, and former secretary of education William J. Bennett, a Republican, warning us about sex and violence in music and video games. They were right. And it’s only gotten worse since then. No small part of the reason that young people find themselves getting abortions is that the music they listen to insists that aggressive sexuality is the only way to have a relationship with someone of the opposite sex. Then if they are not having sex, TikTok videos tell them the solution to their normal middle-school awkwardness is puberty blockers and surgery. Our culture adds cruelty to life that is already challenging.”

I am not really sure how a song that condemns urban violence connects to TikTok, abortion, and transgendering but she is agreeing with Tipper Gore, which is always a sign that a writer works for National Review.

K-Lo’s call for singing about virtue and not violence is dime-store National Review virtue signaling. The liberals-have-a-point mentality of its writers do the opposite of enhancing their argument because I always wonder when they will admit conservatives have a point too.

And we do. The point of Aldean’s song is that no one is standing up to the rioters and the looters. Someone should.

It is easy to take potshots at someone liberals have attacked. It takes true courage to defend not only Aldean’s right to free speech but what he is saying. Aldean wants to end urban violence. K-Lo just wants to please her oppressors on the left.

This is not just about winning. This is about survival. Once again, the choice is simple and once again, National Review made the wrong choice.

Bang, zoom, to the moon with ye, K-Lo and your fellow NRinOs! More still from Evita Duffy-Alonso:

Perhaps Lopez doesn’t know what it’s like to witness Marxist looters and arsonists descend on a small community. I, however, saw this firsthand while reporting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, during the 2020 riots. There was no time to instill “hope” and “love” into the hearts of leftist criminals. Everyday citizens were forced to fight tooth and nail for their lives and livelihoods.

After the shooting of Jacob Blake, Black Lives Matter and Antifa rioters from blue cities like Chicago and Portland swarmed the city. Outnumbered local and state law enforcement only had enough manpower to protect public buildings in the town’s center, leaving citizens’ homes and businesses at the mercy of the mob.

Meet Chuck, the owner of a tire shop who spent every night on his roof, gun in hand, guarding his business. To the rioters, he said: “Come to my shop and I’ll blow your heads off.” On the second night of rioting, I witnessed dozens of men like Chuck standing in front of their homes and businesses with guns and baseball bats, ready to defend themselves.

Perhaps Lopez would argue 2020 was an exception, but the physical threat of leftism is felt every day, making Aldean’s song all the more pertinent. Take, for example, the horrific 2021 Christmas parade attack in Waukesha, Wisconsin. In a city not far from Kenosha, convicted felon Darrell Brooks Jr. plowed through parade-goers in his vehicle, with the criminal complaint saying he drove in a zig-zag to hit as many people as possible.

Even though Waukesha is a small city with a community-oriented atmosphere, its people were not immune to the disastrous crime policies of Milwaukee. Aldean’s song is a powerful anthem for these casualties of Democrat disorder and violence. It’s a statement of agency and strength in the face of real-life threats to countless American lives.

Democrats have essentially declared war on the homeland, and in the face of this imminent danger, people have a right to defend themselves. The reality is love and free hugs won’t protect anyone from Molotov cocktails, free-roaming violent criminals, mob looting, and professional Marxist rioters and arsonists.

Nailed it clean and tight, I’d say. The point about those who live in smaller towns and rural areas not being immune to the lawless disorder in a given state’s more populous urban war-zones, as well as their unalienable right to defend themselves, their families, and their hard-earned homes and property is especially well-taken.

Okay then, let’s just do a final tot-up of the things 2A people are NOT permitted to do with those icky, dangerous firearms:

  • Cannot use them for hunting, because PETA might object
  • Cannot use them for self-defense against rioters, looters, and arsonists, because NRinOs might object
  • Cannot use them as the Founders did—to throw off a tyrannical government and reclaim their natural rights—because that would just be WRONG, don’t you dare even THINK about it!

Far as I know, that leaves us with one (1) acceptable use for firearms: storing them in perpetuity inside a locked, heavy-steel gun safe, with trigger locks in place, ammo (if any) for them to be kept in a separate secure space. IF, and only IF, there are no (NO) children up to age thirty-five (35) within fifty (50) yards of it, that is. To further ensure safety for one and all, all keys to aforementioned gun safe must be kept in a vault provided for the purpose, at a reasonable monthly rate, at your local police department headquarters.

I was about to ask why the NRinO assclowns and their ilk even bother to speak out in defense of the 2A anymore, but then it hit me that, not having looked in on their websty in quite a long while now, I have no idea whether or not they actually DO defend it anymore.

2

No fate

But what we make. So far, we seem to be making a piss-poor job of it.

Recently, I was asked to make the “pessimistic case for the future.” I present instead more of a “pessimistic take on the present.” The future, while imminent, is obscure. The present, by contrast, is knowable. This is also not so much a “case” replete with exhaustive evidence—there isn’t space for that, nor is there a need—as a quick tour through our present hell. No one who thinks “everything is fine” will be persuaded otherwise. Those who see the seriousness of our problems hardly need proof. Nor have I made any attempt to be evenhanded, much less philosophically detached. My account is perforce one-sided. I hope it is wrong.

Alas, all evidence to date indicates that it isn’t. In fact, seeing as how this is Michael Anton we’re talking about here, one might reasonably assume that it’s all dead accurate; with him, that’s practically always the case. In this essay, Anton breaks his arguments down into sub-categories, which for purposes of this excerpt I’ll present as is, formatting intact (ie, italics). No better place to begin than the beginning, right?

The Constitution Is All but Dead

We Americans are supposed to govern ourselves via a constitution that rests on a specific understanding of natural right (right and wrong, good and evil, better and worse exist by nature) and natural rights (government’s job is to secure people’s God-given rights to life, liberty, property, etc.). The Constitution specifically declares and delimits the purposes of government and its powers, and it specifies how we the people choose the officers of the state, who are supposed to exercise those powers.

We still choose, sort of, but that hardly matters, because the people we nominally elect do not hold real power. And when they do, they often use it for unconstitutional ends. America’s real rulers are not the constitutional officers we nominally elect, and certainly not the American people, whom our understanding of political legitimacy asserts to be sovereign. They are, rather, a network of unelected bureaucrats, revolving-door Cabinet and subcabinet officials, corporate-tech-finance senior management, “experts” who set the boundaries of acceptable opinion, and media figures who police them.

Add to this the routine, repeated violations of our explicitly guaranteed rights—Big Tech censoring free speech, big cities denying the right of self-defense, the government itself violating the right to be secure in one’s person, home, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures—and it becomes more than a stretch to describe the United States as any longer a “constitutional republic.”

We Have Two-Track “Justice”

How the same offense is treated by our “justice” system depends on who’s committed it and, often, for what purpose. At the upper strata, compare the treatment of Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and Andrew McCabe with that of Roger Stone, Paul Manafort, Steve Bannon, Carter Page, and Michael Flynn. Clinton illegally hid, and then deleted, her proprietary—and classified—communications from government records. Comey and McCabe orchestrated the Russia Hoax and lied about it. None of these three was even charged.

The latter five have all been hounded by the state—some convicted and imprisoned, all at least bankrupted and defamed. Their crimes, to the extent that any were even committed, were all much less serious than those of the regime darlings.

Compare the treatment of the Jan. 6 protesters with the total impunity granted to the summer 2020 rioters. One example: Two lawyers, literally caught throwing Molotov cocktails, were given slaps on the wrist. Meanwhile, Kyle Rittenhouse was charged with first-degree murder (one of six charges) for shooting two deranged thugs who were in the process of trying to kill him. All over the country, and especially in blue-ruled precincts, acts of self-defense will get you arrested, jailed, and possibly imprisoned. Meanwhile, in the Black Lives Matter era, so long as the perp is the correct race or acting in a sanctified cause, violence and arson are excused.

Skipping a couple categories down, we come to what I consider to be the most condemnatory, troubling, and just downright infuriating of the entire lot.

We’re So Blinkered by Ideology that We Can’t—or Won’t—Apply Obvious Solutions to Simple Problems

The same way we don’t lock up criminals because “racism,” there is almost no end to the sensible things we refuse to do, and the stupid things we eagerly do, because of ideology.

The United States is presently in the midst of our worst energy crunch since the 1970s. Instead of expanding supply, we are constricting it. Why? “Climate change.” But nuclear would generate energy without carbon emissions. The same people who say no drilling also say no nuclear. Why? Supposedly, because the plants themselves and the waste they generate are “unsafe,” though nuclear power has a near-perfect record in this and nearly all countries. (The real reason is to force everyone to don the hairshirt.)

Our drug problem is fueled by Mexican cartels that cross our border with impunity. But we don’t secure the border because “no human is illegal.” Monkeypox is transmitted at homosexual orgies. We won’t close bath houses because “love is love.” But we will close churches, gyms, and restaurants over Covid. That’s an emergency!

“WE’RE so blinkered”? As Tonto said to the Lone Ranger, whatchoo mean WE, white man? The shitlibs own that one lock, stock, and barrel. Which of course Anton knows, as the above-cited examples demonstrate without explicitly spelling out.

By the end, each of Anton’s sub-cats tie in together to present a scarifying portrait of where we now are, with seriously ominous indications of where we might be heading. Essentially, he uses interlocking bricks to construct an unassailable wall of logic and observation as deftly as a Master Brickmason. For instance, the connection betwixt “We Prioritize “Diversity” Over Mission and Performance” and “Our Military Doesn’t Win” is readily apparent, with the first being a primary reason for the second. It’s a blunt-force yet subtle strategy of argumentation that even TeeWee lawyer Perry Mason could only shake his head in awe and admiration at, being fond of the same sort of thing himself.

Most condemnatory, depressing line of all has to be the one which caps off the mercifully-concise “Nothing Works Anymore” sub-cat: “The whole country is becoming the DMV.” To which the response can only be: ouch. Also: YIKES!

Much, much more yet to this typically top-notch article, of which you should definitely read the all. Adapted from Anton’s contribution to Encounter Books’s Up from Conservatism compilation, it’s as comprehensive, unflinching, and clear-eyed an examination of the roots of our woes as can be imagined. From the EB website’s book-blurb:

The Conservative Establishment’s consensus of the past two generations has almost totally broken down. Conservatism was unable to stop or even slow the Left’s rolling revolutions in nearly every sector of American society—from classrooms to boardrooms, from the military to the culture at large. The Left has successfully transformed the nation over the past few generations, racking up victory after victory, with no clear end in sight. This is not sustainable for the country or the constituency represented by the Republican Party. For the Right to have a serious future, it needs to rethink its positions and think more deeply about the essential policy questions which will define the future of the country: race, men and women, sexuality, religion, the economy, foreign policy, and other major issues. This collection of essays, written by some of the Right’s most interesting thinkers and practitioners, seeks to reframe the ideological and policy direction of the American Right.

Can’t find a whole lot to argue with there, other than to say I’m extremely doubtful that “think(ing) more deeply about…policy questions” will ever avail us much. When you get right down to the nut-cutting, it amounts to putting the policy cart before the ideological horse.

The conflict presently before us doesn’t primarily revolve around “policy,” but fundamental beliefs. Unfortunately, we find ourselves smack in the middle of a struggle involving ideologies which are entirely incompatible, one insistent on totalitarianism and absolute, unchallenged State power over the individual, the other on ordered liberty and the right to be left alone to live as one chooses, within certain constraints to which both parties are in agreement.

There can be no reconciliation of the two, no satisfactory compromise, no middle ground. As pretty much all of 20th-century history more than adequately demonstrates, whenever and wherever the Leftist glioblastoma is permitted to metastasize and flourish within a liberty-oriented body politic this conflict is made inevitable. One side must win, the other must lose. Once the victor has been determined, “policy” will necessarily flow from there.

1

Free speech ain’t free

A whole hatful of quotage, forsooth.

Commenting on the recent decision of Judge Doughty in Missouri et al vs. Biden, columnist Patrick Lawrence wrote recently,

A lot more people now stand to see that a bitter war in defense of their constitutional rights has to be fought. And it will be evident to a lot of these newly aware people that this nation’s most powerful newspapers and broadcasters are complicit in a liberal authoritarian attack on the rights that reside in American law.”

But there’s nothing to suggest that people are waking up or actually see that. Judge Doughty’s opinion granting the preliminary injunction said: “the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history.” The 155 page opinion details what various Executive Branch agencies and high level government officials from the White House on down were doing not only to suppress Free Speech, but to punish anyone who had the temerity to speak out against Gummint policy and official narratives.

The sad truth is that most people are not really very interested in the subject, the relative few who are interested are too lazy to make much of an effort to inform themselves, and even fewer still (if any) are willing to “pledge their lives, their fortunes or their sacred honor” to do anything about it. 

That’s why what is happening is happening! “The most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history”? Who cares? The general reaction to it – or to the Fifth Circuit’s decision Friday is pretty much a big yawn.

Oh, I’m afraid it’s a good bit worse than that, seeing as how with every passing day it becomes more apparent that most people, far from not caring, are actually, literally opposed to freedom of speech, as well as to freedom more broadly. Thus is the near-total success of the Left’s laborious implementation of Gramscian Long March theory confirmed. Now, brace yourselves for that potpourri of quotes I mentioned.

So there’s the answer to Patrick Lawrence. As with Ukraine, most people are blissfully unaware of what is really going on and/or just do not care. 

Much as it pains me to quote Harry Truman, Judge Doughty quoted from Truman’s Special Message to Congress in 1950 in the conclusion of his July 4th opinion. It’s worth repeating:

“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one place to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.”

Later, in the same message, Truman concluded:

“We must, therefore, be on our guard against extremists who urge us to adopt police state measures. Such persons advocate breaking down the guarantees of the Bill of Rights in order to get at the communists. They forget that if the Bill of Rights were to be broken down, all groups, even the most conservative, would be in danger from the arbitrary power of government.”

And what would Oliver Wendell Holmes say? Maybe he’d say it is time to bring home our troops from Europe and start fighting right here at home for the Constitution of 1787 and the Bill of Rights. We won in 1783, maybe we could do it again.

Maybe. Then again, though, I wouldn’t be holding my breath waiting for it if I were you. As with most precious and worthwhile things, freedom doesn’t just fall into our laps like manna from heaven. Those who want it must go out and take it for themselves, then guard it, jealously and ferociously, forever afterwards.

(Via WRSA)

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