Meltdown? What Meltdown?

Capsule summary

Posted on April 25, 2024April 25, 2024 by Mike Leave a comment

A Sarcastica sum-up.

The Repubs continue to threaten us with a loss in November to a senile clown with their circular firing squad and other antics ………3 Soros backed Negroes with a combined integrity of a street corner heroin dealer are prosecuting persecuting (like him or not) our former President like third world shitholes do, while the media cheers them on for ratings and future lucrative book deals…………our coward-and- chief, who spends more time at home (where not subject to official call and visitor logs) than he does in the oval office, can’t regularly make it past 12 noon without a visit from Dr. Feelgood (yeah I said it) shits his pants and lies his ass off and has gone to shouting like a South American dictator about his opposition on the campaign trail………..we are being reassured of the fact throwing $80K a year at an elite institution of higher learning can produce just as many idiots as intelligent people…………and let’s not forget 185 pound trannies beating up 15 year old girls in their own school restrooms. But if all that doesn’t make you want to drink yourself into a stupor, Taylor Swift’s new album is being criticized for being poorly written……….OH THE HUMANITY!

BUT, on the upside, congress agreed to throw away send out more of your tax money and the Ukrainian civil service employees are assured of their 4 weeks of paid vacation and Zelinsky’s ol’ lady can take her regular summer Paris shopping trips.

That about covers it, I believe.

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“Higher” “education”? In a pig’s eye

Posted on April 23, 2024April 23, 2024 by Mike 1 Comment

Another plainspoken, common-sensical missive from the febrile mind of Mike Rowe, whose Twitter/X/Whatthehellever feed I am pleased and proud to subscribe/follow/whatthehellever. It must seem to him at times as if he’s just screaming at a wall with his writing—a despairing, draining feeling of ultimate futility I’m all too familiar with myself after twenty-some-odd years of throwing this stuff out there to little apparent good effect. However, some things simply gotta be said, no matter what. To my mind, even if it changes nothing, merely annoying the shitlibs and pissing them off makes the endeavor well worth the effort.

For a guy who runs a foundation that sends young people to trade schools all over America – trade schools where I’m pleased to report, no one is calling for the extermination of Jews – today’s headlines are once again offering another excellent reason to consider redirecting…

— The Real Mike Rowe (@mikeroweworks)

April 22, 2024

Once again, I’ll circumvent the “Read more” clickbait for y’all’s convenience with a little C&P action.

For a guy who runs a foundation that sends young people to trade schools all over America – trade schools where I’m pleased to report, no one is calling for the extermination of Jews – today’s headlines are once again offering another excellent reason to consider redirecting whatever financial support you might earmark for the Ivy League, to the mikeroweWORKS Foundation. Why? Because the Ivy League has truly lost its mind.

Consider the latest madness at Columbia University, where the president, Minochuhe Shafik, has announced a new round of remote learning – effective immediately – in response to a noisy rabble of thugs and bullies calling for the eradication of Israel.

If I had a kid at Columbia, I’d be livid. It’s simply mind-boggling that the president of this university would rather consign her students to another crucible of remote learning, than permanently expel the protesters. I mean, seriously, what does it take to get expelled from Columbia? These creeps are on camera, literally screaming into the faces of Jewish students.

“They yelled at us to go back to Poland, said we have no culture, and chanted, ‘Strike, strike Tel Aviv,” said one terrified student. Followed by, “Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” “Go Hamas, we love you, we support your rockets, too.”

In a now-infamous image, one demonstrator appeared before a group of counter-protesters holding Israeli and American flags with a sign pointing in their direction that read, “Al-Qasam’s next targets.”

That’s what you get for $68,000 a year at Columbia – an administration who cowers in the face of thugs and bullies, and a university president who would rather make your kids try to learn off campus, than take a truly hard line with those students calling for the murder of Jews. For the love of God, expel them. Calling for murder is not protected speech.

In the meantime, mikeroweWORKS is accepting applications for our next round of work ethic scholarships. Deadline is the end of the month. It’s worth noting that the careers we’re training people for cannot be taught, or preformed, remotely. It’s also worth mentioning that we accept donations year-round and spend the money we take in with great discretion. You can apply for a scholarship, or donate, at http://mikeroweWORKS.org.

Excellent questions, excellent advice, bluntly expressed with nary a trace of flinching, prevarication, or weasel-wording throughout. Good on ya, Mike, and keep up the fine work.

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Another day…

Posted on April 22, 2024April 22, 2024 by Mike 1 Comment

…another looney-tooney “transgender” attempted murder.

School Ignored Trans Student’s ‘Hit List, Leading to a Bloody Beat-Down
“I’m gonna murder you,” shouted the trans-identifying student at Pennbrook Middle School as the 13-year-old blindsided a 12-year-old girl last week and bashed her skull repeatedly with a Stanley cup (ie, a Thermos—M). The victim had to be hospitalized, her scalp stapled back together, and she had to go through a concussion protocol, according to police.

It’s about as horrible a middle school assault as can be imagined, not in the least because students and staff alike were well aware of the perpetrator’s “hit list.”

The Daily Mail reported Monday that another 12-year-old female student — remaining anonymous because of her age, like the victim and the thug — made a public statement that “she and two fellow students filled out paperwork explaining what they knew was going to happen if nothing was done and said that she was warned ‘watch your back’ at lunch.”

“You could’ve stopped it,” she said. “It was five hours from when I told you it was going to happen. I don’t get how you couldn’t have stopped that.”

“We had to watch [the victim] taken out with blood dripping down her face and I will never forget that! Laying in bed last night I just kept repeating it in my head.”

Reportedly, she was next on the hit list — the one the school did nothing about except to tell the “trans” kid’s potential victims, “Don’t worry about it, it’s not gonna happen.”

Let’s talk for a moment about the so-called “trans” phenomenon we’ve seen explode these last few years.

NononononoNOOO, we shouldn’t. In fact, we mustn’t, not for any reason whatsoever. That would be WRONG, see.

So naturally, the vicious anti-“trans person” H8RRRbigot author then goes on to do precisely that, the “transphobic” sumbitch. Why, it’s an act of actual, literal genocide, that’s what it is! Probably another of those vile, vicious, H8ful Trump-suckers, I bet.

If these deranged mutants keep it up with the batshit-insane mayhem—which they will; the voices in their heads seem to require it of them, while Leftard chaos-pimps stand up and cheer, denigrate the brutalized victims, or at best maintain strict silence—one has to wonder how much longer it’s going to be before these twisted maniacs wind up with some real, bona fide hatred and retaliatory violence to contend with. For the nonce, it’s as our blog-buddy of twenty-mumblemumble years’ standing Stephen concludes, in response to yet another explicit threat of freakshow-violence against specific cis-het oppressors:

But don’t worry. He won’t actually hurt anyone. Right up until he does.

Pretty much, yeah.

Update! At the “Thermos” link above, Ace coins a term I expect will come in mighty useful for saner sorts going forward, regrettably: “Transgender Rage.”

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John Cougar Melonhead upbraids concert audience, hilarity ensues

Posted on April 16, 2024April 16, 2024 by Mike Leave a comment

Just in case y’all were wondering what a dick with ears looks like, here ya go.

I met Mellancamp a few times & EVERY-TIME he was an asshole! And this was long before politics were even a thing to most of us. https://t.co/rcGDxXV3aI

— Brad Doty (@braddoty18)

April 16, 2024

What a pissy, smug bitch the little runt is. Jack and Diane, my chapped ass. Whether they know it or not, he did the audience a favor by walking off in a snit, sparing them from having to endure any more of his shitty music.

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Boeing: What happened?

Posted on April 14, 2024April 14, 2024 by Mike 1 Comment

From a half-century as one of the world’s premier, most respected aircraft manufacturers to…well…

Meme purloined from the awesome Ken Lane. Now to the who, what, how, and why of it.

Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

That move, also, didn’t work out so well for the now-floundering aerospace company. The story details a toxic mish-mash of Wokesterism, the rise of a know-nothing MBA class, and a creeping, not-my-problem/not-my-fault corporate blame-shifting culture that replaced the former all-American can-do, git-er-done spirit which may well prove fatal to the once-mighty Boeing…and probably should, frankly.

It’s a sign o’ the times in Amerika v2.0, by no means unique but an increasingly commonplace story—and an extremely sad one.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

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Your feel-good video of the…um…welllll….

Posted on April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 by Mike 2 Comments

EVER, I’d say.

If you don’t particularly feel like watching the vid—which, you really, really, REALLY should, it’s a joy and a wonder to behold—this meme sums it up quite nicely:

Nicely, and word for word, also. Excellent work, Ms Williams, ya done good.

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The Biden Economic MIRACLE!© continues apace

Posted on April 10, 2024April 10, 2024 by Mike

Our ol’ buddy Stephen illustrates how it works with a, err, distasteful anecdote.

BIDENFLATION: Now Is When We Sit in the Dark and Eat the Canned Meats
So how bad are things, really, here in the real world?

Let me tell you another patented VodkaPundit True Story™.

The details are all correct and I haven’t even bothered to change the names because none of us were all that innocent.

Thirty-mumble years ago, I might have made a drunken 2 a.m. munchies run to the Safeway in Arcata, Calif., with my best friend, RJ, and the college girl roommates we were dating. RJ, for reasons best left unexplored, picked up a can of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product — and then dared me to read the label.

I can never resist a dare but, this once, I wish I had because “Partially defatted beef fatty tissue” are words seared into my brain to this day.

No, we did not buy or eat any of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product. We weren’t that drunk. At 22 and working only part-time, we weren’t even that broke.

But in Presidentish Joe Biden’s America, canned meats are flying off the shelves like rarely before.

While the New York Post didn’t mention Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product by name, the paper did report on Tuesday that “demand for cheap canned meats like Spam and Vienna Sausages is surging,” according to grocery chain execs.

“Spam is a regular item again,” Bronx grocery store owner Miguel Garcia told The Post. “I’m selling them at a discount now because I’m buying more.” He’s even set up showcases at his Foodtown, Keyfood, and Met Foodmarket locations for inexpensive items like Spam, Libby’s Corned Beef, and Chef Boyardee Spaghetti & Meatballs because demand is up 10%.

Garcia said his average sale is now $15, down from $20 at the end of last year because customers are choosing cheaper items.

These are the expectations baked into the shopping habits of everyday Americans after three years of Bidenomics.

And Zee Bugz, too, Steve, don’t forget Zee Deeelishious Bugz!

What a world we’ve let them make for us, eh?

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Damn fools about it

Posted on April 10, 2024April 10, 2024 by Mike

As Wellington said after Waterloo: “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Or, as WC Fields said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There’s no use in being a damn fool about it.”

S’truth. And yet.

Woke Extremist Minneapolis City Council Demands $30.60/Hour Minimum Wage for Uber and Lyft Drivers; Uber and Lyft Both Announce They Will Abandon Minneapolis
Faced with public anger about driving out the popular ride-share services, the woke extremists of the city council say they may delay when the order goes into effect.

But they’re only doing that to allow other ride-share companies — are there any? — to enter the Minneapolis market.

By the way, I base the headline claim of a $30.60 per hour minimum wage on the city council’s demand that drivers be paid a minimum 51 cents per minute when ferrying passengers.

California recently imposed a $20/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. There’s now a $16/hour minimum wage for all other jobs.

Companies immediately began firing workers and closing down stores.

A pizza chain announced the closure of five stores in California.

Analysts forecast that this law will gift California with increased unemployment for years.

That’s putting it in the best possible light.

And there you have it. As Billy Pilgrim said: “All this happened, more or less.” And so it goes.

Animals

Posted on April 9, 2024April 10, 2024 by Mike

Sadly, all too many of us seem terribly confused of late as to who the enemy really is. PRO TIP: it is NOT Israel and/or ((((Dem pesky JOOOOOOZ!!!))).

“A Palestinian writer”
The above tweet from Amnesty International is still up. In case it disappears, here is the text:

Amnesty International
@amnesty
The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after 38 years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life

From amnesty.org
Last edited
6:39 PM · Apr 8, 2024

The tweet calls Walid Daqqa “a Palestinian writer”, as if he had been imprisoned for his writings – as if he were the sort of prisoner of conscience on whose behalf I used to write letters on that special blue Air Mail paper, back when I was a member of Amnesty International.

To be fair, although you would never guess it from their tweet, the linked article by Amnesty does make perfunctory mention of the non-literary crime that caused Walid Daqqa to be put in prison:

On 25 March 1986, Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah, then 24, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In March 1987, an Israeli military court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.

Perhaps concerned about her wordcount, Amnesty’s writer, Erika Guevara-Rosas, did not say much about Moshe Tamam. She cited Walid Daqqa’s youthful age at the time, 24, but did not see fit to say that his victim Moshe Tamam was just 19. And she skips over some relevant details in that brief word “killed”. Daqqa and his PFLP comrades did not just kill Moshe Tamam, they tortured him to death. They gouged out his eyes and castrated him. Then they murdered him.

Sick fucks. But, if we can tear ourselves away from weeping, wailing, and gnashing our teeth for the “over 30,000 innocent civilians” Hamas speciously claims have been killed by the IDF in Gaza—FOR NO REASON, THE INHUMAN BRUTES!—for just a moment, it’s plain that the loathsome Walid Daqqah is hardly an outlier, a grotesque exception, but perfectly typical of his vile cohort.

Hamas Treats Captive Israeli Women as Animals — for ‘All Are Ridden’
The Hamas terrorists behind the Oct. 7, 2023, jihadist raid literally view their female Israeli captives as horses and other animals — to be “ridden.”

During a recent press conference, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari stressed that Hamas members could be heard in their own (now captured) recordings referring to their female captives as sabi (or sabiya), an Arabic word that in Islamic jurisprudence refers to non-Muslim female slaves, whom Muslim men could freely copulate with — in a word, concubines (see here for more on sabis).

Sex slavery is not only an ironclad aspect of Islam; it is a reflection of “piety,” as well captured by a 2015 report:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old [non-Muslim] girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

“He said that by raping me,” recalled the 12-year-old, “he is drawing closer to God.”

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” explained another girl, aged 15. “He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal.’”

Seeing rape as a pious gesture is only one of the “oddities” of Islamic sex slavery. In the same press conference, Hagari said that “Hamas treated young women…like animals” and that one terrorist could be heard describing “a woman as a noble mare.”

No doubt, to most (non-Muslim) readers, references to Israelis as animals are a mere reflection of Hamas’s contempt for its “infidel” victims, nothing more.

Mind you, this mind-bending abuse is NOT to be inflicted on Israeli women exclusively, nor even on Jewish females more generally. No, this bestial savagery is Koran-endorsed treatment for ALL “infidel” women, all over the world, as non-Islamic nations inevitably are brought under the sway of Mooselimb rule.

As the article describes, for Moslem males raping “infidel” women of any age is not only permissible, it is actually commendable, taking on the aspect of an act of religious devotion—a divine gesture of pious, reverential obeisance to their fucked-up Murder God.

I repeat: SICK. FUCKS.

Anyone who sincerely believes that ((((Dem JOOJOOJOOJOOOOZ!!)))) are the primary problem confronting Western Civ is refusing to see the forest for the trees, sorry. Hell, most American Jews are more or less atheists anyway—call ‘em JINOs, perhaps, Jewish by ethnic inheritance rather than avowed faith—not being religiously observant, nor even somewhat interested.

No, the primary problem is that, by a huge majority, the religion practiced by American Jewry is liberal/Leftism. Don’t ask me why that is; given, y’know, pretty much all of recorded history, I find it quite perplexing myself.

Be that as it may, though, the essential fact remains: even if you exterminated and/or expelled every last Jew in the US tomorrow—the secular, the way more conservative Orthodox, the ultra-hardass Lubavitchers* alike—you’d be astonished and dismayed the day after that by how very little change would’ve resulted from your longed-for Final Solution. Alas, appalling numbers of shitlibs/Progressivists/Leftards/whatever would remain, along with all the strife, trouble, and woe they cause.

In a nutshell, then, what the Hebe-hatin’ Right are fond of deploring as “the Jewish problem” is not, in fact, much of a problem at all. It’s merely a distraction, a sideshow which draws attention away from the Main Enemy: collectivism, Statism, Leftism, whatever label you wish to slap on it. And, of course, the jihadist plague the Leftards have imported and encouraged, which now flourishes in our very midst.

It beggars belief that the memory of 9/11/01 could have been as thoroughly expunged from American minds as this nonsensical folly suggests. The disgraceful embrace of the plethora of preposterous, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories on the subject must have been more widespread than sensible sorts feared.

Islam is no more compatible with ordered liberty, individual self-determination, and the rest of our Founding principles than liberal/Leftism is; they are diametrically (triametrically?) opposed, eternally in conflict, irreconcilable and antipodean in both practical and philosophical terms. Lose sight of that fundamental home truth, and you will surely lose everything ere the end.

* As it happens, I lived amongst the Lubavitchers my last cpl-three years in NYC; in fact, the apartment we lived in was over a shul, owned by a young Lubavitcher congregant named Mike to whom the building had been passed down as sort of an early, pre-death inheritance from his father. What a trip the Lubavitchers were, with the big hats; the long, heavy black overcoats worn year-round, even in the stifling August heat; the payess, which are those funny-looking spiral locks hanging down like overgrown sideburns or something; the rocking, swaying, and bobbing as they read from the Tanya, prayed, and sang their, uhhh, hymns (?) out on the sidewalk after synagogue let out. Strange stuff indeed for a Carolina boy who had only ever known one (1) Jew his entire life before traipsing off to NYC, definitely. Really nice folks once you got to know ‘em, though

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SHOCKER: Big-talking tough guy not so tough after all

Posted on April 7, 2024April 7, 2024 by Mike

Mouthy illegal alien whines like the little punk-ass bitch he is, in what has to be the feel-good interview of the year.

‘Migrant influencer’ who encouraged squatting whines to NY Post that he’s a victim of ‘persecution’ in jailhouse interview
Cry me a Rio Grande river.

The jailed Venezuelan “migrant influencer” who viciously mocked America to his 500,000 TikTok followers and urged border crossers to “invade abandoned houses” now misses the glorious liberties he enjoyed in the US – whining to The Post this week that “I miss my freedom!”

Leonel Moreno moaned that he is a victim of unjust “persecution” Wednesday during a 30-minute-long video televisit from inside Geauga County Jail in Chardon, Ohio.

“I came here to the United States because of persecution in my country … But they’re doing the same thing to me in the United States – persecuting me,” Moreno, 27, wailed.

“It’s all misinformation in the media about me. They’re defaming me. They’re misrepresenting me in the news … I am a good father, a good husband, a good son, a good person, humble, respectful to people who respect me,” continued Moreno, who spoke only Spanish and hid his face from the video camera’s view for the duration of the interview.

“I miss my entire life – I miss my freedom!” he cried.

With Moreno out of the frame, the camera showed inmates in blue-striped jumpsuits sitting at five silver metal tables through a glass window. At one point during the video visit, five scowling inmates looked in his direction, with some indecipherably shouting at him.

“What is happening?” Moreno could be heard muttering to himself.

“I am afraid they’re going to kill me. They’re coming for my life – anyone!” he said.

Moreno said he’s been in touch with his wife, Veronica Torres, since he’s been locked up, and insisted The Post contact her so she could “charge” an undisclosed sum for a “good interview” with him. The Post does not pay for interviews.

Immigrant and Customs Enforcement fugitive operations officers cuffed Moreno in Columbus, Ohio on March 29 – nearly two years after he and Torres illegally crossed the southern border into Eagle Pass, Texas on April 23, 2022.

He was allowed to stay in the country on a Biden administration-approved parole scheme — but then failed to appear for required check-ins with immigration officers, according to ICE.

But Moreno insisted he was thrown in the clink because of his inflammatory social media videos – and ironically vowed to use the First Amendment to fight any charges.

“If Leonel Moreno commits a crime or something then they would be right, but it’s because of my work, so this is unfair…Social media is my job.

“If I want to say something now, I can’t say it…We’ve become an oppressive country instead of a free country where we can express whatever is in our hearts…The United States was created to be that, not to oppress,” he said.

Get that word “we” out of your mouth, wetback. This is NOT your country, you do NOT belong here, and the 1st Amendment does NOT apply to you.

Deport his ass immediately. Then, if/when he slithers back over the border again, he should be shot dead while “resisting arrest.” That oughta settle his hash pretty nicely, I think.

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Fast food holocaust

Posted on April 6, 2024April 6, 2024 by Mike

I repeat: WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE FORESEEN…

California’s new $20-an-hour fast food minimum wage law poses headaches for school districts: ‘Harder to hire’
California’s new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers won’t just impact consumers who have to pay higher prices for menu items, but it could also make it more difficult for some public schools to retain low-paid cafeteria staffers.

Cash-strapped school districts in the Golden State could be forced to compete with billion-dollar corporations such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut parent company Yum! Brands for food service workers who are badly needed in California.

The state – which became the first in the country to guarantee free meals for all students regardless of income – will distribute 70 million more meals this year compared to 2018, according to education officials in Sacramento.

Actually, the lunch-line-ladies angle I hadn’t consider myself before—but then, I ain’t the one in charge of decreeing absurd minimum-wage hikes for low-to-no-skill-required jobs, either. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest:

Mod Pizza closes 5 California locations as $20-an-hour minimum wage law takes effect
A popular West Coast pizza chain shuttered five of its California locations shortly before the state enacted its new minimum wage law this month that raises fast-food workers’ pay from $16 an hour to $20.

Mod Pizza — which has 500 locations across the US and Canada and has been dubbed “the Chipotle of pizza” — abruptly closed up shop at its location in Clovis, near Fresno, two weeks ago, according to former employees.

“It just kind of seemed like the right timing, two weeks before all of the fast food locations in California got that increase that we closed,” one fired worker, who was among 15 that were let go, told Fox 26 TV on Tuesday.

The law, which went into effect on April 1, has been blamed for ballooning menu prices at major fast-food chains like Burger King, as The Post reported.

The ex-worker said that while he initially supported the idea of an increase in the minimum wage, it may have come at too steep of a cost.

“For the extra money, yeah,” he said. “I mean, nobody is going to turn down a raise, but at the end of the day, with repercussions like this, was it worth it?”

I dunno, you tell me: was it?

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Lefty douchebaggery too Lefty-douchebaggy to know it’s Lefty douchebaggery

Posted on April 5, 2024April 5, 2024 by Mike

Cliff’s Notes version: I don’t like cruises much, so if you do you must not be as smart as I am. The pluperfect example of what a friend of Glenn’s aptly dubs “Lefty douchebaggery.” No excerpt, because I’m so far past caring about what these assholes think and say I didn’t even bother reading it.

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Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen…?

Posted on April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by Mike

Mike’s Iron Law #635: If you make the cost of doing business too steep, it will close.

Fast food workers blindsided by sudden closure of Fosters Freeze in Lemoore
LEMOORE, Calif. (FOX26) — Employees at Fosters Freeze in Lemoore are out of a job.

Assistant General Manager Monica Navarro says she was called Monday morning by her boss who was at the restaurant to open, only to find the locks were being changed.

Please do note the insert that immediately follows the above for a strong hint as to why this entirely UNEXPECTED!© tragedy might have come to pass.

[RELATED] New $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in California set to start Monday

Bold in the original, entirely dispositive, and hilarious.

Navarro said she thought it was an April Fools joke.

“I was so caught off guard. We had no type of notice, no type of warning either. I mean the owner had told me happy easter,” she said.

And she wasn’t the only one.

“We had gotten a text in the group chat that we were shutting down, and I completely thought it was an April Fools joke,” said former employee Jason Boado.

After learning it was real, she drove to the restaurant on Hanford Armona Rd, where the owner was handing out final paychecks.

Navarro says the owner, Loren Wright, had previously told her the $20 minimum wage increase for fast food workers was going to be really hard on him.

Navarro says she started working three years ago and worked her way up to assistant GM.

She is a full-time student at Fresno State and was planning to work there until graduation.

She was excited about the wage increase and felt like she was stabbed in the back for not getting any kind of notice.

Bold mine this time, likewise dispositive, and hilarious. From that, one could be forgiven for jumping to the invidious conclusion that Fresno State students might not be all they should in terms of general intelligence and aptitude for deductive reasoning.

In a text from Loren Wright, he stated that he couldn’t survive the mandated wage increases:

I tried to the end to try to figure out a way to make it work. Last thing I ever wanted was to close down,” he said. “By Friday night I knew I was most likely not gonna be able to stay open but I didn’t want to ruin their Easter Sunday. Small businesses can’t survive a 120% plus min wage increase over the last 10 years. We are all more broke than we were 10 years ago its clear raising min wage isn’t helping….I am sad to see my employees off, and sad to see lemoore off. This location has been in business for 35+ years and lemoore has been such a good place. It’s painful to realize that raising min wage and regulating fast foods are putting people put if business but that is the path california leadership has taken. Thank u to my staff for everything and thank u lemoore for all the support over the years.”

“Now they’re getting laid off. They’re losing their jobs,” restaurant owner Angela Marsden told Fox News host Dana Perino. “Gavin Newsom, I hope the United States is watching. I hope he never becomes president. This man is destroying California. I don’t understand why people can’t see that he’s the biggest trickster of all time.”

As if it was only Gruesome Newsome we need to be worried about. Sadly, though, in Amerika v2.0 Newsome is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle.

7

2

Who knew, indeed

Posted on April 1, 2024April 1, 2024 by Mike

Apropos one of the memes from Margolis’s Meme-manic Monday email, to which I am a subscriber, which I’ll append at the end of this post so’s none of y’all will miss out.

Going electric requires electricity. Who knew?
A lead article in the sober-sided New York Times is seldom funny. Yet ‘A New Surge in Power Use is Threatening US Climate Goals’ earlier this month cracked me up. Check out this sternly dramatic first paragraph: ‘Something unusual is happening in America. Demand for electricity, which has stayed largely flat for two decades, has begun to surge.’ Personally, I’d have headlined that article ‘Well, duh’ – perhaps with the subhead ‘Aw, shucks’.

Lo and behold, when you push people to electrify everything in their lives – cars, cookers, heating systems – while bribing them to go all-electric with lavish government subsidies, it turns out they use more electricity. Who would have thought? I guess this is why we need all those brainiac experts to analyse the ultra-complicated technical details of environmental policy.

One such expert worries in the Times: ‘The numbers we’re seeing are pretty crazy.’ America’s paper of record warns that in the past year the nation’s utilities have nearly doubled their estimates of how much more power they’ll need to provide in the next five years, during which an extra California’s worth of demand will be dumped on the US grid. So allow me to lead you through all the ‘well, duh’ bullet points of this hugely entertaining piece.

Electric vehicles need electricity. Surprise! Apparently simply stippling the landscape with new EV chargers, which Joe Biden’s farcically titled Inflation Reduction Act is meant to finance, isn’t quite enough. Gosh, darn it. Nobody pointed out that the chargers have to be connected to actual electricity. So far, it looks as if no one in government has worried about where it will all come from. Oh well. That’s understandable. These important people have so many other weighty matters on their minds.

Burning fossil fuels to not burn fossil fuels is a tad inconsistent. Utilities all over the US are busy building gas-fired power plants to meet rising demand for electricity, when the whole point of this exorbitant energy ‘decarbonisation’ is to stop burning the likes of gas. The Times calls it an ‘ironic twist’ that the demand for electricity from green technology is imperilling the whole point of green technology, but I call that instead ‘wholly foreseeable’. And I call this comical: one Kansas utility is keeping a coal-fired plant online that it had planned to retire – the better to power a giant EV battery factory.

Lots more to this one too, read all of it. Being a Spectator UK article it’s paywalled, although for some reason the link got me access to the entire article just this once. If it doesn’t work for you, try running the URL through either 12ft Ladder, archive.is, or the venerable Wayback Machine, that orta do the trick. If all else fails, simply disable javascript in your preferred web browser’s settings until you’ve finished reading; JS is how these paywall nuisances work in the first place.

Oh yeah, almost forgot the meme:

Of course, as CF Lifers already know, it IS “just pretend.” The stupid, self-defeating EV push isn’t really about Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ or anything else but what it always and forever is; say it with me one time, people: Power, and Control. Personal vehicles are the front-line face of liberty and individual autonomy, and FederalGovCo hates that kind of thing to the very marrow of its bones.

3

1

Key Bridge: can we rebuild it?

Posted on March 28, 2024March 28, 2024 by Mike

No. No, we cannot.

Here’s the million-dollar question nobody is asking about the Baltimore bridge collapse…
The recent bridge collapse in Baltimore is an absolute nightmare, and our thoughts are with the victims and their families during this incredibly tough time. Beyond the heart-wrenching loss and the basic “whys” everyone’s dealing with, there’s one crucial question not many are asking: Can America rebuild the bridge?

Oh, America could have, probably. Amerika v2.0, though? Not a hope in Hell.

Sure, it might seem odd to wonder about our capability to build a bridge in 2024, but sadly, it’s a valid concern these days. When you consider how our nation is faltering under inept globalist rule, dragged down by dangerous DEI agendas that place “charity” over excellence, and watching the decimation of hardworking middle-class America, the question isn’t just rhetorical—it’s a stark reflection of our abysmal current reality.

Revolver has been calling attention to this decline in American society for quite some time, starting from when Biden first introduced his “infrastructure bill.” Fast forward three years, and here we are: bridges collapsing, roads deteriorating, and let’s not even dive into the chaos unfolding in our skies or the sorry state of our airports. Meanwhile, as China makes serious strides forward, it feels like we’re just spinning our wheels, stuck in neutral. It’s a stark contrast that highlights where our priorities have been misplaced and the need for a serious reevaluation of how we invest in our nation’s future.

The scary part is this: as we’re facing our own decline, other nations are advancing. The recent Baltimore bridge disaster could have been an attack, a result of DEI-related incompetence, or something else entirely. What’s clear, though, is that America is showing signs of wear and tear, and our focus shouldn’t be misplaced on absurd “pet projects” like electric cars or gender transitioning. It’s time to return to the fundamentals: roads, bridges, and airports, and see if we can spark that long-forgotten American “can do” spirit again. God knows we need it badly.

PRO TIP: We won’t. In fact, even if over half the country wasn’t vehemently, violently opposed to the whole “can-do spirit” concept, we still couldn’t. It isn’t a matter of “sparking” anything, but of recovering the skeletal remains from their long-since abandoned, musty crypt and bringing them back to life again. All the advanced tech, government financial largesse, and PC die-versity in the known universe can’t turn the trick.

Back in the mid-90s, when my friend Pfouts and I would go out for our regular Saturday strolls around lower Manhattan, he would sometimes shake his head ruefully and say, “Y’know, if New York had to build the subway system today, it couldn’t do it.” I never questioned him on that; all one had to do was take a quick glance at everything around him and see that Chris’s gloomy assessment was in no wise overly pessimistic or cynical, but in fact perfectly accurate.

Again: this was back in the mid-90s, mind. The situation both in NYC and the rest of the “nation” has certainly not improved any since those days.

All Senile Jaux’s angry yelling to the contrary notwithstanding, the EPA “environmental impact” study alone for any such FSK reconstruction project would take five or ten years and hoover up billions of dollars, and that’s before the first girder or I-beam is purchased and put on indefinite back-order while Baltimore waits for it to be shipped from China. Bottom line?

To ask the question is to answer it.

6

Category: Meltdown? What Meltdown?

Capsule summary

“Higher” “education”? In a pig’s eye

Another day…

John Cougar Melonhead upbraids concert audience, hilarity ensues

Boeing: What happened?

Your feel-good video of the…um…welllll….

The Biden Economic MIRACLE!© continues apace

Damn fools about it

Animals

SHOCKER: Big-talking tough guy not so tough after all

Fast food holocaust

Lefty douchebaggery too Lefty-douchebaggy to know it’s Lefty douchebaggery

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen…?

Who knew, indeed

Key Bridge: can we rebuild it?

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