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Crashing the Party

Posted on June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Mike 2 Comments

An in-depth look at my main man, Ron DeSantis.

At Yale, DeSantis majored in history and played on the baseball team, in the outfield. In the Yale tradition, the team never had a winning season while DeSantis was there. (“Pretty sure we were the worst team in Division One,” one of his teammates told me.) In his senior year, he was among the best hitters, batting .336, and was elected captain. His former teammates’ recollections are sharply divided, but nearly everyone I spoke with remembered him as singularly focussed, with little time for parties or goofing off; he worked several jobs to help pay his tuition. “Ron was a bit of a loner, not a social butterfly,” Dave Fortenbaugh, a former teammate, told me. “He spent a lot of hours in the library.”

Some recalled that DeSantis was so intensely focussed that he wasn’t much of a teammate. “Ron is the most selfish person I have ever interacted with,” another teammate told me. “He has always loved embarrassing and humiliating people. I’m speaking for others—he was the biggest dick we knew.” But the same teammate praised DeSantis’s intellect. “This is the frustrating part. He’s so fucking smart and so creative,” he said. “You couldn’t even plagiarize off his work. He’d take some angle, and everyone knew there was only one person who could have done that.”

After graduating, with honors, DeSantis taught history for a year at the Darlington School, a private institution in Rome, Georgia, before enrolling at Harvard Law School; a friend told me that he’d been inspired by the movie “A Few Good Men.” In the film, Tom Cruise plays a judge advocate general—a Navy attorney—who defends marines accused of a deadly assault at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Base. With the war in Iraq still raging, DeSantis, too, became a judge advocate general. He was posted to Naval Station Mayport, near Jacksonville, and also to Guantánamo, where he dealt with detainees. A colleague who served with DeSantis remembered, “Ron was a voracious worker, and he worked at phenomenal speed. He was a superb writer, especially for his age.” Even then, his ambition seemed consuming. “Ron’s a user,” the former colleague told me. “If you had utility to him, he would be nice to you. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t give you the time of day.”

In 2007, DeSantis deployed to Iraq as a lawyer for seal Team One, which was conducting operations in Ramadi. The seals have a reputation for being secretive and insular, but DeSantis enjoyed their company, his father told me: “He worked out with them.” DeSantis briefed the seals on rules of engagement—when they could shoot, how they should treat prisoners. “Of course we were worried about him,” his father said. “Ron told us he was just in one place, in Ramadi, but afterwards we found out that he’d been moving all around the area, from city to city, with the seals. It really upset my wife.”

Back in Florida, DeSantis started dating Casey Black, a television news reporter for WJXT, in Jacksonville; in 2010, they were married. Not long afterward, a seat opened up in the Sixth Congressional District, south of Jacksonville Beach. In 2012, DeSantis entered the race.

DeSantis campaigned on smaller government and lower taxes, arguing to overturn Obamacare and eliminate entire federal agencies. “My mission was largely to stop Barack Obama,” he told a crowd later. As the campaign got under way, DeSantis published a book titled “Dreams from Our Founding Fathers”—a swipe at the President’s memoir. For a campaign book, it’s unusually wide-ranging, with carefully argued sections on the Federalist Papers, the Progressive Era, and the leftist theoretician Saul Alinsky. The basic contention, though, would have been familiar to followers of Barry Goldwater: “The conceit that underlies many of Obama’s policies and his allies is that virtually any issue, from the waistline of children to the temperature of the earth, is ripe for intervention of expert (and progressive) central planners.” DeSantis’s book was largely ignored—he once told a crowd that it was “read by about a dozen people”—but his message resonated in the Sixth District, one of the most conservative in the state. He won the election, and was reëlected twice by wide margins.

In Congress, an institution where seniority matters, DeSantis had little time to make a substantive impact. Theatrically, though, he created an impression. He helped found the Freedom Caucus, an invitation-only club of hard-right conservatives, and he was among the Republicans who took the government to the brink of default by refusing to raise the national-debt ceiling. Many people worried that the move would harm the government’s credit rating and the country’s economy. Even John Boehner, the House Speaker, opposed it. In response, DeSantis joined a group of Republican congressmen who threatened to remove Boehner from his post. “There were governing conservatives and shutdown conservatives,” David Jolly, a congressman from Florida who served with DeSantis, told me. “Ron was a shutdown conservative.”

Many of DeSantis’s colleagues remember him as remote. A former member of the Florida delegation told me, “He always had his earbuds in, to keep people away.” Others, like Jolly, had a more temperate view. “He’s a little reclusive, a bit of an odd duck,” Jolly said, “but he’s just incredibly disciplined.”

For anybody who’s as fervent a DeSantis fanboi as I am, this is one heck of an absorbing article. For those of you who aren’t necessarily so solidly in the DeSantis camp just yet, there’s a lot in it you’ll enjoy nonetheless. Caveat: since it’s the New Yorker we’re talking about here, be prepared to pull your hip waders all the way up to your chin; you’ll be wading through a veritable Okeefenokee Swamp of liberal bullshit and wouldn’t want to get yourself coated from top to toe in the nasty, stinky ichor. Exhibit A:

For decades, the Democratic Party had commanded a majority of Florida’s registered voters. But the state was changing, as Trump’s election helped energize a shift in political affinities. The Republican Party’s rank and file became increasingly radical, and G.O.P. leaders appeared only too happy to follow them. “There was always an element of the Republican Party that was batshit crazy,” Mac Stipanovich, the chief of staff to Governor Bob Martinez, a moderate Republican, told me. “They had lots of different names—they were John Birchers, they were ‘movement conservatives,’ they were the religious right. And we did what every other Republican candidate did: we exploited them. We got them to the polls. We talked about abortion. We promised—and we did nothing. They could grumble, but their choices were limited.

All those stupid Trumpians, just useful idiots waiting to be exploited by the more intelligent “moderates” whose sole ambition upon gaining office is to betray the drooling schmucks who vote for them as reliably as yesterday’s sunrise, regardless of how many GOPe knives they’ve had to pull from between their shoulder blades over all those years of Old Yeller-style loyalty. “Increasingly radical,” “batshit crazy”—by which they mean “actually conservative,” “principled,” and “enthusiastic.” Do please note that, as with every Establishment Media propaganda outlet, the New Yorker will never allow the words “radical” and “Democrat” to appear in the same sentence. Exhibit B:

“So what happened?” Stipanovich continued. “Trump opened Pandora’s box and let them out. And all the nasty stuff that was in the underbelly of American politics got a voice. What was thirty-five per cent of the Republican Party is now eighty-five per cent. And it’s too late to turn back.”

“All the nasty stuff that was in the underbelly of American politics”—you listening out there, Joe and Jane Lunchbucket? Because as far as Uniparty factotums are concerned, they’re playing your song with the above condescending tripe. Now if all you McDonald’s-eating, WalMart-shopping, God-bothering, Coors-Lite-slurping, burger-grilling, New Yorker-ignoring, blue-collar-working mouthbreathers would kindly just lock yourselves back into Pandora’s box again, we can get back to ruling you disgusting fatbody boobs, as is our Divine Right.

“Nasty stuff” let out by Trump, to the undying mortification of Beltway Bandits one and all—that would be what Real Americans know as simple, common-sense, Constitutional conservatism. Y’know, revolting, freakishly depraved scrapings from off the distended American underbelly such as, oh, say, religious faith; a strictly limited central government; an abiding respect for tradition, family ties, and our shared American heritage; independence of mind and of spirit; a natural, unpretentious sense of patriotism, duty, and pride in American strength and success.

If you can overlook the obnoxious current of petty, supercilious conceit and effete urban sanctimony that runs through this entire piece like a strong shore-side undertow, there really is a great bounty of information to be found here, and much to be learned from it. There’s an irritating trend I’m noticing more and more of lately, however: the self-evident Establishment Media campaign to gin up some real hostility between Trump and DeSantis, a transparent ploy intended to dilute and deflect the burgeoning opposition to the Conqueror Left’s long, victorious march by pitting the movement’s two most important leadership figures against one another. It’s another dismaying example of The Enemy’s unswerving focus on retaining the initiative via keeping its Offensive squad always on the field, while the Deee-fense stays on the sidelines riding the pines. That’s been a brilliantly successful game plan for the Left over recent years, notching win after unanswered win for Team Tyranny. Hopefully, both Trump and DeSantis are savvy enough players not to let themselves be taken in by it this go-round.

The New Yorker, casting about for an effective weapon to wield against a suddenly rising political star they clearly fear and loathe, expends a ludicrous amount of effort and column-inches on slamming the Florida Governor’s appropriately liberty-oriented Chinky Pox response. In this long piece they trot out the very same litany of distortion and escalating fabrication that permanently obliterated the public’s trust in its governmental, health care, and national-media institutions, in hopes that they’ll work equally well to discredit DeSantis’s staunch resistance to permitting Florida to lapse into panic-driven medical tyranny on his watch.

Alas for them, there’s something those poor media dears just aren’t seeing, and the irony of it is hilarious.

As the death toll mounted, he was mocked by critics as “DeathSantis” and denounced by the mainstream press. “Any public distrust of this administration has been well-earned,” the Miami Herald editorial board wrote. “We can’t trust the governor with our lives.” A former political adviser with knowledge of the covid response told me that DeSantis was unfazed: “We were getting crucified, but to him it was just noise.” DeSantis revels in defying what he sees as a corrupt and self-satisfied liberal establishment. Those who work closely with him say that he is unique among elected officials in his disregard for public opinion and the press. “Ron’s strength as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck,” a Republican consultant who knows him told me. “Ron’s weakness as a politician is that he doesn’t give a fuck. Big donors? He doesn’t give a shit. Cancels on them all the time.”

Maybe you ink-stained wretches should sit down for this staggering revelation, but you’ll be seeing a whole lot more disregard for the press henceforth, and not just from DeSantis either. There are uncounted millions of us out there who have been waiting for years—decades—for a leader who shares our disgust with the corrupt and self-satisfied liberal establishment to come along, one with the cojones to revel in defying the sorry bastards.

DeSantis might be “unique among elected officials” in his disdain for the liberal press, but that attitude is universal among MAGA people, America Firsters, Trump supporters, and DeSantis fans. Trust me, whenever Ron or his press secretary, the seriously awesome Christina Pushaw, take off the gloves to throw some bare-knuckles haymakers at liberal-media glass jaws, there are hordes of DeSantis People cheering him or her on. When some press-gaggle carbuncle waxes all butthurt over not being treated quite as deferentially as His Royal Carbuncleness had come to expect, whereupon Our Boy refuses to be intimidated by the wormy likes of him, throws press-room politesse to the wind, and doubles down on his verbal Alpha strike instead, our delight in Da Guv soars to new heights.

See, it’s like this: we don’t like you cringing hyenas one jot or tittle more than Ron DeSantis does. The more openly he hates you, the more we love him for it. It’s why any of your number still foolish or delusional enough to imagine himself a respected and admired Hero Of The Proletariat™ is going to suffer a terrible shock any minute now, a powerful enough one to potentially stop his heart for good. Because any minute now, it’s going to be brought home to the fool that, when Trump characterized the shitlib media as not merely a nuisance but in fact a deadly enemy of the Republic, We The People agreed completely with his assessment. We’d realized it already, and were glad that somebody finally had the guts to come right out and speak the plain truth without any of the usual hemming and hawing around.

We are legion. We are fed up. And we can only be pushed so far before we start to push back. The meteoric rise of Ron DeSantis is but the barest beginning of it. And the harder shitlibs weep and wail about what a mean old poopyhead Fascist he is, the harder we will laugh at their absurd melodramatics, and the bigger our army will become.

Truth will out has outed

Posted on June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Mike 3 Comments

A week that has made history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts from the manifesto:

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

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

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

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

Consider this your call to action.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Another opinion released

Posted on June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Mike 3 Comments

This one is sure to be of interest to everyone, since it comes from a renowned, widely-respected, and highly-regarded Constitutional law scholar and all. I mean, we’re talking here about a man whose words on the topic have for many years carried one hell of a lot of weight, and rightly so.

Joe Biden said he is “deeply disappointed” with the Supreme Court’s decision Thursday to strike down a New York law that restricted access to concealed carry permits of handguns, saying in a statement that it “contradicts both common sense and the Constitution.”

Oh, shut the fuck up, you old fool. Like you have the vaguest clue about either one of those two things, or ever did have your whole squandered life long.

In a statement released hours after the Supreme Court released its decision, Biden expressed his deep disappointment in the ruling, and said it should “deeply trouble us all.”

The statement continues:

In the wake of the horrific attacks in Buffalo and Uvalde, as well as the daily acts of gun violence that do not make national headlines, we must do more as a society — not less — to protect our fellow Americans. I remain committed to doing everything in my power to reduce gun violence and make our communities safer. I have already taken more executive actions to reduce gun violence than any other President during their first year in office, and I will continue to do all that I can to protect Americans from gun violence.

I urge states to continue to enact and enforce commonsense laws to make their citizens and communities safer from gun violence. As the late Justice Scalia recognized, the Second Amendment is not absolute. For centuries, states have regulated who may purchase or possess weapons, the types of weapons they may use, and the places they may carry those weapons. And the courts have upheld these regulations.

I call on Americans across the country to make their voices heard on gun safety. Lives are on the line.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, also condemned the ruling, calling it a “dark day” for New York that “is sending us backwards.

Hochul stated when the 2nd Amendment was written, U.S. citizens only had access to muskets and that she was “prepared to go back to muskets” through gun regulations.

Fuck you, liar. US citizens at that time had “access” to all and every type of weapon, exactly as the Founders intended, up to and including privately-owned artillery pieces. An interesting little tidbit you may not have known about until right this very minute:

Even in 1934, when Congress responded to media-hyped Prohibition and Depression-era outlaws such as the Dillenger gang by regulating machine guns, suppressors, short-barreled rifles, and short-barreled shotguns under the National Firearms Act, they kept artillery pieces fully legal and free to own without Uncle Sam getting involved. Ironically this meant that for three decades you could buy a functional military surplus field gun, cash-and-carry, but had to pay a $200 tax and undergo a background check process to get a .22LR suppressor.

That “loophole” was eventually closed.

It was in 1968, that the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act, introduced as H.R. 5037 by U.S. Rep. Emanuel Celler (D-NY) and signed by President Lyndon B. Johnson (D), regulated most “destructive devices” with a bore over .50-caliber. This meant that modern artillery “such as bazookas, mortars, antitank guns, and so forth” were placed under ATF restrictions in a kind of retroactive addition to the NFA. Before that time, you could buy surplus hardware such as working Boys and Lahti anti-tank rifles at local outlets, cheap.

With all that being said, modern breechloading artillery is still available in the “Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” provided it is registered with the federal government and properly taxed. Still, legacy artillery systems like muzzleloading black powder field guns, such as Hamilton and Madison would be familiar with, do not require tax stamps.

For now, anyway.

Honestly, I had no idea that a fella could legally buy himself a breech-loading field piece to this very day. Then again, familiar as I am with what the tax-and-fees bite amounts to for Class III (ie, full-auto) rifles and subguns—HELPFUL HINT: as high as balls on a giraffe, as Goose likes to say—I can just imagine what you’d have to shell out for FederalGovCo’s permission to park a breech-loader out on the front lawn. Be that as it may, it’s nice to know they’re still legally allowed, even if they’re priced well out of my personal reach.

Better yet is knowing how batshit-apoplectic the ongoing legal availability for private purchase of a nice Napoleon, Howitzer, or 24-pound siege gun would make Plugs Biden if he only knew. Which, you can be sure he doesn’t. Somebody oughta mention it to him over porridge one morning before the addle-pated old fart goes down for 9AM nappies. The grand mal flailing and flopping about as a result would surely be the most epic and hilarious to date, which is really saying something.

Ain’t it funny, though, how shitlibs from sea to shining sea have suddenly conjured in themselves this awed reverence for the sanctity of States’ Rights and the unchallengeable primacy of State over Federal Law after oh, about a century and a half or thereabouts of reflexively dismissing such notions as peurile claptrap, antiquated bosh of the purest ray serene. But hey, whatever gets you through the next fifteen minutes, eh, Proggy?

Headlines from a better world

Posted on June 24, 2022June 24, 2022 by Mike 1 Comment

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

Nancy Pelosi announces 38th impeachment proceeding against President Trump.

Unemployment reaches 0% for first time in history, stock market gets so high they have to add another digit to the counter.

Trump holds ecumenical church council to unify all the denominations under the true gospel of Jesus Christ.

Ukraine invades Russia.

United States purchases Greenland in tremendous deal.

Americans save $1600 on July 4 BBQs.

American troops pulled from Afghanistan in careful, strategic, slow withdraw; 0 Americans stranded; utopia breaks out.

New York Times publishes article explaining why $1/gallon gas is bad and racist.

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

President gives coherent speech.

Everyone who ever took their kids to a drag show arrested.

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

SHALL. NOT. BE. ETC ETC ETC

Posted on June 23, 2022June 24, 2022 by Mike Leave a comment

It’s not that Leftards don’t get the 2A—don’t understand it, can’t comprehend what it so clearly and unequivocally says, what it so clearly and unequivocally means. It’s that they DO understand all those things perfectly well, and the knowledge burns them like fire.

It couldn’t have been more perfect than Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas penning the definitive decision that the right to carry guns on one’s person for self-defense is inherent for all Americans.

First of all, Thomas has been after the court to take up more gun rights cases. He used his considerable influence with Chief Justice John Roberts to continue looking for gun rights cases to take. The New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc., et al. v. Bruen and the state of New York was the obvious choice. Remember, the state of New York, before Thursday’s decision as a “may issue” state, read the tea leaves and tailored its law after the federal courts were prevailed upon to take the case.

Second, Thomas is the one who assigns the decisions when the conservatives are in the majority due to his seniority on the court, according to former federal prosecutor Andy McCarthy. Thomas assigned himself the task of writing for the majority opinion. This may explain why he chose Justice Samuel Alito to pen the other hot button decision of the court this session, the Dobbs abortion case.

Thomas left no doubt that there shouldn’t be a test to determine if one should be permitted to carry a gun. Concurring opinions by Justices Roberts, Kavanaugh, and Barrett made clear that this doesn’t mean the right is unfettered, but that justices must apply strict scrutiny to any decision about it, as all civil rights cases must be considered.

Thomas wrote, “the constitutional right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not ‘a second-class right, subject to an entirely different body of rules than the other Bill of Rights guarantees.’ McDonald, 561 U. S., at 780 (plurality opinion). The exercise of other constitutional rights does not require individuals to demonstrate to government officers some special need. The Second Amendment right to carry arms in public for self-defense is no different. New York’s proper-cause requirement violates the Fourteenth Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens with ordinary self-defense needs from exercising their right to keep and bear arms in public.”

New York and other “may issue” states require persons who want to carry a weapon to demonstrate a need with which the state agrees. And Thomas, noting that Heller had already decided this issue, blew that up for good, saying the two-step balancing test required by the state was “one step too many.” Indeed, the one test he endorsed was the historical “traditions of the American people…[which] demands our unqualified deference.” When was the last time you heard someone in the federal government say that?

Can’t recall hearing such a ringing endorsement of bedrock American principle since Ronald Reagan, maybe even longer. But how perfectly fitting that this full-throated affirmation of American rights and liberties should come from the greatest of all Supreme Court Justices, the brilliant and indispensable Clarence Thomas, may God bless and preserve him.

Alito stood up tall, proud, and righteous with some worthy remarks of his own.

In light of what we have actually held, it is hard to see what legitimate purpose can possibly be served by most of the dissent’s lengthy introductory section. Why, for example, does the dissent think it is relevant to recount the mass shootings that have occurred in recent years? Does the dissent think that laws like New York’s prevent or deter such atrocities? Will a person bent on carrying out a mass shooting be stopped if he knows that it is illegal to carry a handgun outside the home? And how does the dissent account for the fact that one of the mass shootings near the top of its list took place in Buffalo? The New York law at issue in this case obviously did not stop that perpetrator. What is the relevance of statistics about the use of guns to commit suicide? Does the dissent think that a lot of people who possess guns in their homes will be stopped or deterred from shooting themselves if they cannot lawfully take them outside? The dissent cites statistics about the use of guns in domestic disputes, but it does not explain why these statistics are relevant to the question presented in this case. How many of the cases involving the use of a gun in a domestic dispute occur outside the home, and how many are prevented by laws like New York’s?

The dissent cites statistics on children and adolescents killed by guns, but what does this have to do with the question whether an adult who is licensed to possess a handgun may be prohibited from carrying it outside the home? Our decision, as noted, does not expand the categories of people who may lawfully possess a gun, and federal law generally forbids the possession of a handgun by a person who is under the age of 18, and bars the sale of a handgun to anyone under the age of 21. The dissent cites the large number of guns in private hands—nearly 400 million—but it does not explain what this statistic has to do with the question whether a person who already has the right to keep a gun in the home for self-defense is likely to be deterred from acquiring a gun by the knowledge that the gun cannot be carried outside the home.

And while the dissent seemingly thinks that the ubiquity of guns and our country’s high level of gun violence provide reasons for sustaining the New York law, the dissent appears not to understand that it is these very facts that cause law-abiding citizens to feel the need to carry a gun for self-defense.

They don’t care about any of that, any more than they do about the Constitution, the sacred American birthright of individual liberty, or any other of the fundamental things that made us the blessed, extraordinary nation we once were. The only thing the Left knows is that they HATE guns; they fear them viscerally and irrationally, and the idea of any ordinary American citizen owning even one gives them the shivering fantods. Ace lays the whole thing out for us:

Alito also says this:

Like that dissent in Heller, the real thrust of today’s dissent is that guns are bad and that States and local jurisdictions should be free to restrict them essentially as they see fit. That argument was rejected in Heller, and while the dissent protests that it is not rearguing Heller, it proceeds to do just that.

I think that’s less snarky than simply accurate: lefties think guns are bad and so don’t care if any anti-gun law is actually effective in reducing crime. They think that any burden on gun ownership is a positive boon, whether it helps the crime rate or not, because guns are bad and gun ownership should be discouraged by any penalty or harassment the state can dream up.

The left is forever caught unprepared to answer the basic question, “But how does your proposed gun control law affect the crime that just happened, that you say you’re proposing this gun law to prevent?”

It’s because none of this is about stopping gun crime; it’s just about stopping guns.

Annnnnd bingo. Really, we can reduce it down still further: it isn’t about guns, specific gun-control legislation, school shootings, or crime. Ultimately, what it all comes down to is the same old thing it always does with shitlibs: CONTROL. The Left has no control to exercise over gun owners, who well know what they are, despise them for it, and will cheerfully go well out of their way to make sure Lefty doesn’t ever forget it.

Gun owners believe in an unalienable right to private ownership of firearms expressly bequeathed to them by the Founders, as delineated in the Constitution they wrote for the purpose. They fully intend to protect that right for themselves and their posterity, which is best done by the exercising of it. Gun owners do not give a fat rat’s ass for what Progressivists may think or feel about this.

The supreme indifference of gun owners for shitlib opinion as they happily go about taking fullest advantage of what it means to be a real American galls Leftists horribly, all the more so because they can easily see this for the upraised middle finger waved in their general direction it so truly is. Any day shitlib snouts are being rubbed into a stinking, steaming pantload of all-American FUCK YOU!™ is a good day for our battered but not quite beaten nation.

This would be one of those days.

Update! Just gotta include this:

Happy 74th birthday to Justice Clarence Thomas. pic.twitter.com/Qog5jdMHnt

— Miles Commodore (@miles_commodore) June 23, 2022

Many, many happy returns to you, sir.

The Blueing of America update! The most encouraging thing I’ve seen in a long, long time.

Swiped from WRSA.

I for one welcome our new AI overlords

Posted on June 13, 2022June 13, 2022 by Mike 9 Comments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Via BCE)

Be afraid—be VERY afraid

Posted on June 11, 2022June 11, 2022 by Mike 2 Comments

Correia knows wassup.

The ugly truth the beltway can't grasp, it isn't that regular America doesn't care about Jan6. It's that they hate you for making their lives miserable, so when they saw you cowering, they thought good, now they know how it feels to be afraid.

— Larry Correia (@monsterhunter45) June 10, 2022

Good indeed, and dead on the money, but it could be better. Personally, I want ’em not just afraid, but MORTALLY TERRIFIED. And I want their terror to be completely justified, the validation stamp renewed every single fucking day.

You hearing me, Congresscrawlers?

America won’t be America again until every lower order life-form in DC wears an expression like that whimpering pillowbiter’s on his mug all day, every day.

Priorities

Posted on June 11, 2022June 11, 2022 by Mike

Tucker nails it clean and tight yet again.

You know it tells you a lot about the priorities of a ruling class that the rest of us are getting yet another lecture about January 6th tonight from our moral inferiors, no less. An outbreak of mob violence, a forgettably minor outbreak by recent standards, that took place more than a year and a half ago, but they’ve never stopped talking about it.

In the meantime, in the 18 months since January 6, gas prices have doubled. Drug ODs have reached their highest point ever. The U.S. economy is now careening toward a devastating recession at best and scariest and least noted of all, this country has never in its history been closer to a nuclear war.

Yet the other networks can’t be bothered to cover any of that tonight. Instead, they’ve interrupted their regularly scheduled programing to bring you yet another extended primetime harangue from Nancy Pelosi and Liz Cheney about Donald Trump and QAnon. The whole thing is insulting.

In fact, it’s deranged and we’re not playing along. This is the only hour on an American news channel that will not be carrying their propaganda live. They are lying, and we are not going to help them do it. What we will do instead is to try to tell you the truth. We’ve attempted to do that since the day this happened.

We hated seeing vandalism at the U.S. Capitol a year and a half ago, and we said so at the time, but we did not think it was an insurrection because it was not an insurrection. It was not even close to an insurrection. Not a single person in the crowd that day was found to be carrying a firearm – some insurrection. In fact, the only person who wound up shot to death was a protester.

She was a 36-year-old military veteran called Ashli Babbitt. Babbitt was just over 5 feet tall. She was unarmed. She posed no conceivable threat to anyone, but Capitol Hill Police shot her in the neck and never explained why that was justified. Those are the facts of January 6, but since the very first hours, they have been distorted beyond recognition, relentlessly culminating with last night.

Last night, CBS Nightly News told its viewers that insurrectionists at the Capitol on January 6 “caused the deaths of five police officers.” That is a pure lie. There is nothing true about it, and they know that perfectly well.

Well, duh. Lying is their usual MO, nothing more than SOP for them. It’s how they do their job; more to the point, it’s what they consider their job to be. They’re not wrong, either, seeing as how they’re propagandists rather than actual journalists.

Here’s reporter Bob Costa, who should be deeply ashamed to say something this dishonest.

ROBERT COSTA, CBS: Thursday’s primetime hearing will take Americans back to January 6, when an estimated 2,000 rioters breached the Capitol building, causing the deaths of five police officers.

It’s hard to believe he said that. Rioters cause the deaths of five police officers. You just heard CBS News tell its viewers that. This must be the big lie theory. The more bewilderingly false a claim is, the more likely you will be to believe it. Apparently, that’s what they’re betting on. In fact, precisely zero police officers were killed by rioters on January 6, not five, none. Not a single one. So, how’d they get to five? Well, CBS is counting the suicides of local police officers that took place after January 6, in some cases, long after January 6.

The lies go on copiously unspooling from there, perhaps more of them and more egregious ones than you already knew about. Carlson covers one hell of a lot of ground here, skewering a whole slaughterhouse’s worth of shitlib sacred cows, and you should definitely read the whole thing. I can’t resist including his deft gutting of Ms Lindsey Graham:

In fact, Lindsey Graham, violence worshiper to the end, said that his only regret was that the Capitol Police didn’t shoot more Trump voters in the neck and kill them. “You’ve got guns, use them,” Graham said. So here you have a sitting U.S. senator, a Republican, urging police officers to shoot unarmed Americans, many of whom were ushered into the Capitol building by law enforcement.

Miss Lindsey reminds me a lot of a discarded, jizz-leaking condom I saw worming disgustingly around in the breeze on the beach at Coney Island once. Although, in xhrzhm’s defense, the gasbag IS well-known for running his yap a lot without really meaning a word he says. The thrilling conclusion:

We are not defending and would never defend vandalism, violence, rioting. We disapproved of it when it happened. We disapprove of it now, all riots, not just this one. But this was not an insurrection.

But, you know what will get you to insurrection? If you ignore the legitimate concerns of a population, if you brush them aside as if they don’t matter when gas goes to $5 and you say “buy an electric car.” When cities become so filthy and so dangerous that you can’t live there, when the economy becomes so distorted that your own children have no hope of getting married and giving you grandchildren, when you don’t care at all about any of that and all you do is talk about yourself, nonstop – you might get an insurrection if you behave like that, speaking of insurrection.

In such circumstances, you SHOULD get one; in fact, in the explicit opinion of our Founding Fathers, you MUST.

As I’ve said before here, it’s a curious kind of “insurrection” when the purported “insurrectionists” forget to bring any guns along with ’em to the party. The silver lining to the whole shit circus? This beautiful, beautiful photo:

Crawl, Congresscritters, crawl. I’ve loved that pic since I first saw it, and I’ll love it forever. If nothing else, it’s proof positive of just how easy it would be to mount a real insurrection—against such craven, pussified opposition as that, how could it not succeed? Those overprivileged sissymaries would be too busy shitting themselves and begging for mercy to offer much in the way of effective resistance.

Statesmen? Don’t make me laugh. Consider the above picture the “Now” portion, of which the following would be the “Then.”

The great General Washington — *What a REAL President looks like, which is easy to forget nowadays*

One of these things is not like the other, eh? Some call it “progress,” but be damned if I ever will.

You’ll never get mine

Posted on June 10, 2022June 10, 2022 by Mike

Not one more fucking inch.

We’ve compromised our Nation and ourselves into a semi-Soviet, woke, ‘through the looking glass’, turning our children into travesties of human beings, and now are seriously talking about giving the Communists what they need to finish the job, namely, disarming the American public.

THIS is the way to stop ‘mass shooters’: Carry, Practice. Carry. Practice. And, if that time comes, ‘Take Out the Trash!’

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer announced Tuesday that he is going to give a bipartisan group of Senators more time to work out how many of our constitutional rights we will lose.

How many? Nah, it’s just the one, actually—the same one it always is, and always has been. As the Duke of Wellington said at Waterloo, they’re coming at us in the same old style. But at long last, it is imperative that Real Americans foresake General Picton’s advice and not meet them in the same old style anymore. The tit-for-tat, proportionality über alles method has permitted them to advance so far that the 2A has been very nearly extinguished as a practical matter, so it’s time and past time for a newer, more defiant and bellicose approach. Unless we swap the kid gloves for a set of knuckledusters with a quickness, all will be lost, and that right soon.

How magnanimous of the Leader. He and the Dems are apparently not in any rush to institute a laundry list of Second Amendment infringements. Why should they be? Each day that goes by their lapdogs in the mainstream media make their case for them. Even FOX News has joined in. FOX’s news actors positively gushed Tuesday over Matthew McConaughey’s recent guns-are-bad performance. “It was so emotional,” one of their vacuous news actors muttered.

And hey, it’s NEVER a bad idea to base national policy purely on emotion instead of reason, logic, and the fucking US Constitution, right? Not that the Democrats would agree, natch—their entire policy platform has been based exclusively on emotion since the mid-60s, if not longer.

Enough is enough.

I am sick of watching our gun rights being bartered away by RINOs, Quislings and traitors, none of whom speak for me. None of whom understand guns. None of whom have likely even fired a damn gun. And, quite frankly, I don’t care which liberal Hollywood actor they drag in next to buttress their case.

We have nothing to gain by entering into discussions with the gun banners. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Conversely, we have everything to lose. Our team should immediately walk away from the table. It’s not like we’re going to get anything from the talks. The gun banners expect us to willingly give up some constitutional rights. They won’t give up anything. This is not even an actual discussion. It’s a strong-arm robbery.

DINGDINGDINGDINGDINGDING WE HAVE A WINNAH! I swear, the above paragraph is so chock-full of rich, buttery goodness you could get fat from reading it.

Instead, we need to hold the line. We need to understand that the Uvalde killings weren’t caused by you or me or the guns in our safes. They weren’t caused by the NRA, the GOA, the SAF, the USCCA or by the scores of state-level gun-rights groups. Neither were the killings the fault of the gun or the gunmaker. The madman was at fault, may he continue to rot in hell.

Correct as far as it goes, which isn’t quite far enough. The madman, directly, yes. Indirectly, the societal rot carefully seeded, nurtured, and brought to full emetic flower by the Evil Left. WE understand this perfectly well already; THEY may or may not, but will never, ever admit the inescapable truth therein, lest their ongoing program of tyranny, subjugation, and untrammeled power suffer for it.

The gun banners excel at instituting a sense of mass guilt whenever one of these atrocities occurs. Unfortunately, many of our lawmakers buy into it and surrender our rights as a result. There are a lot of slices of bread on the table right now – expanded background checks, RKBA infringements for 18-20-year-olds, waiting periods and a national Red Flag law. The gun banners are salivating. I say we put them on a carb-free diet.

Carbs, my squinted eye. The only thing that will work is to put them on a hot-lead diet, as we all damned well ought to know by now. These filthy, conniving shitweasels must never again be treated with as if they were anything other than exactly what we know them to be: liars, manipulators, sneak-thieves, and amoral opportunists with less probity and abstemiousness than a rabid wolverine in rut. Henceforth, the only thing they should ever get from us is the backs of our hands—quite literally, in a way they’ll never forget.

Chuckles Schumer and his fellow Uniparty grubworms think to take guns away from blameless American citizens who have done no wrong whatever, do they? Let them try, then.

Bring it, motherfuckers. Let’s just see what it gets you in the end.

(Via WRSA)

Trouble up the road

Posted on June 7, 2022June 7, 2022 by Mike

Twitter twats bite back.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Explanation for my post title:

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

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

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

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

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

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

Elongate!!!

Posted on May 20, 2022May 20, 2022 by Mike

So of course the shitlibs are now trying desperately to gin up some kind of sex scandal they can use to lay Elon Musk low, the cheeky iconoclast having proven to be completely impervious to everything else they’ve tried so far to bring him to heel and put him back in his proper place. To wit:

Elon Musk announces he’s voting Republican and the next day the media is calling him a sexual predator.

— Christian Walker (@ChristianWalk1r) May 20, 2022

Bless his heart, he doesn’t seem to give a fart in a whirlwind about any of that horseshit, either:

Finally, we get to use Elongate as scandal name. It’s kinda perfect. https://t.co/qSNH7lsn72

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 20, 2022

Between Musk, DeSantis, Tucker, Trump, and a handful of others, we’re living in what could fairly be thought of as a Golden Age for smacking libtards around and making the whiny douchenozzles cry, and I for one am loving it. As Glenn quips: When you’re targeted by a clown show, the only proper response is to point and laugh. Most satisfying of all is the way they react when they get their noses tweaked like this, losing it completely in paroxysms of spluttering, stammering rage. Being aggressively taunted, disregarded, and openly made sport of—especially when it’s coming from the kind of people whose habitual passivity, obsequiousness, and reflexive assumption of the defensive crouch they’d long since come to take for granted—is such an alien sensation for them they simply can’t help but blow their stacks every time it happens to them anew.

OOOOOOPS!

Posted on May 20, 2022May 20, 2022 by Mike

Quite possibly the most hilarious Freudian slip in all of recorded history.

Former President George W. Bush: “The decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq. I mean of Ukraine.” pic.twitter.com/UMwNMwMnmX

— Sahil Kapur (@sahilkapur) May 19, 2022

On Wednesday, former President George W. Bush made an unfortunate slip up during a speech condemning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Bush was discussing democracy’s importance and the threats it faces in the U.S. and abroad when he made a gaffe that has since captured a significant amount of attention.

“In contrast, Russia elections are rigged,” said Bush. “Political opponents are imprisoned or otherwise eliminated from participating in the electoral process. The result is an absence of checks and balances in Russia and the decision of one man to launch a wholly unjustified and brutal invasion of Iraq – I mean, of Ukraine.”

Bush then laughed it off, shrugging as he said “Iraq, too” under his breath.

“Anyway– 75,” said Bush, making a joke about his age.

By way of useful comparison, please note that the current illegitimate White House occupant has been attached like a remora to the Deep State teat for half a century, is three years older than Bush is, and beclowns himself far more severely than Bush’s little brain fart above multiple times every day.

Origins of Empire

Posted on May 19, 2022May 19, 2022 by Mike

It’s a Progressivist thing.

It may prove in this momentous decade that the American Empire falls. But take heart, because the fall of the empire — aren’t all empires finally a bundle of conceits destined to collapse? — may lead to the revival of the American Republic.

The visions of empire and republic are as starkly different as George Washington and the founders were from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. Much of what constitutes the “American Empire” is a product of progressive doctrine. It was about domestic imperialism perhaps far more than American global dominance. Restoring the republic should be welcomed by citizens dedicated to our nation’s founding principles.

We’re reaching a culmination. The left’s decades-long march through America’s institutions succeeded. They control government, corporations, health care, sciences, media, arts and entertainment, education, nonprofits, sports…right down to the Boy and Girl Scouts. They seek to consolidate their control in a handful of larger institutions (government and corporations, principally). An American “reset” is a precursor to a global reset, per the lunatic vision of Klaus Schwab and his acolytes.

(As an aside, pray tell, what is it with Germany that it periodically spawns apocalyptic and/or messianic figures like Marx, Nietzsche, Hitler, and now this dangerous utopian, Klaus Schwab?)

If you’re feeling surrounded, don’t. There are many more of us than them. The unbelievable major serial failures of the Biden administration (who bats zero?) are waking up a broader slice of the public — waking them up through mounting costs (inflation and energy), uncertainties (crime and the border), and flagrant attempts in schools to sexually debauch our kids (Biden’s handlers support this effort), among other wanton offenses.

The progressive worldview, as translated through governance and cultural dictates, is collapsing. Progressivism is daily revealing itself as, yes, power-hungry, incompetent, ineffective, but also dark. The end of empire isn’t likely to finish with a whimper. It’ll be calamitous, confrontational, and just plain nasty. The elites won’t go gentle into that good night. They’ve far too much riding on outcomes.

No one should expect any different from them, either. All animals are most dangerous when they’re wounded.

A conversation with Sarah Palin

Posted on May 18, 2022May 18, 2022 by Mike

Salena Zito checks in with a REAL maverick, as opposed to the phony-ass John McCain variety.

Sarah Palin Dishes on Trump, Her Congress Run, and Love With Ron Duguay
She declared her run for Congress on April 1—just weeks after visiting New York City to pursue a defamation suit against the New York Times.

“When I announced, I said, ‘Alaskans, if you hire me, I would love to work for you. I will go to Washington, D.C., and I’ll represent you,’ not really considering all the politics involved because as the days go on, you realize, ‘Oh my gosh. OK, here comes the political machine,’” she said of the reactions to her announcement.

Since her resignation as governor in 2009, Palin has become a powerful force in the conservative populist movement—first dubbed the Tea Party during the 2010 midterm elections. She has since served as a Fox News contributor, hosted several outdoor lifestyle shows on the Sportsman Channel, and written the memoir Going Rogue: An American Life, which spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list in 2009. She also endorsed former President Donald Trump’s run in 2016 before the first caucus primary votes were even cast.

Besides her son Trig, Palin said the rest of her children are now living all over the place. Eldest son Track, 32, is a father of three who still resides in Alaska. Bristol, 31, is now a mother of three and owns a real estate company in Texas. Willow, 28, and her husband, Ricky, are the parents of twins and welcomed their third child on March 30; they also recently moved to Texas. Piper, 21, is in college in Arizona. Palin herself lives in a home not far from her father, Chuck, in the suburbs of Wasilla, the fourth-largest city in Alaska, about 40 miles from Anchorage.

Meanwhile, Palin and her husband of more than 30 years, Todd, 57, quietly divorced in the spring of 2020. Palin said she found out in 2019 that her high school sweetheart—with whom she eloped in 1988—wanted out of the marriage via an email from an attorney.

The pain and shock of the divorce are still evident. “It was the most earth-shattering, bizarre thing I could have ever imagined and it kind of remains so,” she told me.

While they share custody of Trig, she said it’s the only connection remaining between them. “He spends his time with his girlfriend whom he’s had for some time now..,” she says as her voice trails off, adding, “She lives down in the lower 48, so he spends a lot of time down in the lower 48.”

Since the divorce, Palin said, she hadn’t even thought about dating again until this winter, when she went to New York for the defamation case she filed against the New York Times for falsely claiming in a 2017 op-ed that her political rhetoric led to a mass shooting.

She called up a longtime friend, retired New York Rangers star Ron Duguay, because she figured he knew New York well enough to be her Gotham fixer—and a romance suddenly took off.

She lights up when she talks about Duguay, who played with the Rangers from 1977 to 1983, saying she finds the relationship “safe and comfortable.”

“Ron is the first person that I’ve ever even talked to about a lot of this personal stuff. So, it’s been helpful and refreshing to have Ron to talk to about not just politics, because he’s got more common sense in his little finger than the collective in D.C., but just about life,” she said.

Good for her. I’ve liked Palin ever since I first heard of her during her days as governor, and I still do. In fact, she’s got a lot in common with Trump when you think about it: a populist, an outsider, as fanatically, rabidly hated by the GOPer/NeverTrumpTard ilk as she is by the Demonrat Left, and for some of the exact same reasons. Palin is about the only contemporary American politician I can think of offhand who’s been as relentlessly hounded, investigated, slandered, and just generally pecked-at by the hellhounds of Old Media as Trump himself has, another thing they have in common. Only that one, they both probably wish they didn’t.

As for Sarah’s fake-Right detractors, far from harming McCain in his doomed-from-the-start ’08 Prexy run against shitlib dreamboat Barry-Bob Hussein Obloobaloobo as they so like to whine, the only point at which McCain even so much as managed to pull even with Jugeared Jesus in the pre-election polling was right after Palin was announced as the Veep pick. The brief boost with which she gifted the universally-disliked asshole McMaverick lasted a few days, maybe a week or so, after which the sleazy RINO prick’s lizardly snout quickly sank right back beneath the surface of the Swamp muck, never to come anywhere near parity with Obongo again.

One thing that makes seeing the pseudo-Right reminded of that reality such a pleasure is that it’s so easy to see how much it annoys ’em. They, like the insufferable McCain, have never stopped blaming Palin for McStain’s inevitable defeat, a comforting lie which McLame clung to desperately until the frabjous day he finally joined the Choir Invisible. Blame Sarah! was an endlessly-running loop of bitter pissing and moaning which only served to underscore several of the many reasons Juanny Mav been so widely disliked for so many decades: his piss-poor character; his unrestrained egotism; his complete lack of any sense of loyalty to anyone or anything but himself and his own selfish interests.

So yeah, you go, Sarah. Nothing but the best to you from here, ol’ girl.

Call to arms

Posted on May 14, 2022May 14, 2022 by Mike

Kevin Downey has had it.

The Left Wants Us Dead. Stop Praying for Them, Start Buying Ammo for Self-Defense.
How can we beat a domestic enemy with hugs? We can’t. They want us dead, yet many conservatives and Republicans would rather turn the other cheek than curl up their fists and punch back.

When Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot isn’t busy ignoring the daily “festival of lead” that slaughters mostly black people in her city, she is calling for gay people to grab their guns.

The problem isn’t that the left likes to attack conservatives. We KNOW that. What we need to realize is that we can’t pray our way out of this violence, and apparently Antifa is too stupid to learn any lessons from Kyle Rittenhouse.

That’s because there was no follow-through in the wake of Rittenhouse’s heroic deeds, so why would the violent Left worry? To the eternal discredit of Our Side, their self-assurance has so far been eminently justified.

Now is a good time to tell you (and the FBI) that, unlike Mayor Lightfoot, I am NOT suggesting you shoot people. What I AM saying is we need a new plan, and that plan MIGHT involve punching a purple-haired freakshow in the face. We are dealing with toilet humans who have never been held responsible for their actions. Defend yourselves.

Any plan that does NOT involve “punching a purple-haired freakshow in the face” as an absolutely minimal opening gambit, escalation to follow forthwith, is a waste of fucking time. They’ve been allowed to get away with far more than they should’ve already; keep on with the self-restraint and forebearance and things will only get worse.

Though I am a “weapons guy,” I am not paid to say this. I’ve never even held a non-lethal Hero 2020 gun—though I hear it shoots exploding pepper balls at a rate of 100 mph. Ouch, that’s gotta smart. I can’t imagine how much that peppery goodness hurts the eyes and noses of genderless Antifa gals who believe kicking you into a coma is his/her/its RIGHT.

Nor can I. But it sure is a lot of fun to try, ain’t it? Okay, no more snide parenthetical asides from here on out, so’s y’all can take in the full impact of what he’s saying.

It’s time to scrape the communist barnacles off of our nation. We live in a country where leftist failures like Lightfoot can call for violence and not get punished. Hundreds of liberals are allowed to illegally protest outside of the homes of SCOTUS justices, but YOU will end up on an FBI domestic terrorist list if you dare attend a school board meeting and question the Marxists who are indoctrinating your kids.

For the last two years, we’ve seen BLM and Antifa pull innocent people from cars and pummel them in the name of blatant racism George Floyd and get away with it. We watched Kyle Rittenhouse go on trial for clearly defending himself against the brownshirts. Things are going to get worse before they get better.

I can’t be the only person who is sick of watching peaceful, patriotic Americans getting their heads smashed by the Democrats’ personal brownshirts, even though Biden claims they are a “myth.”

If you decide to carry a weapon to defend yourself, make sure it is legal where you live. The left is eager to send us to prison for as long as they can for any reason. Ask the peaceful J6 protestors who are rotting in federal jail.

And don’t count on the police to help you ward off Biden’s bolshies. Almost half of Antifa/BLM had their charges dropped after they violently gutted Portland. Some got arrested and returned to riot the same day.

The commie push is on. I just want the good guys to be ready. Defend yourselves. They want you dead.

That they do. They’ve certainly told us so enough times, explicitly and unequivocally. In fact, they’ve done a lot more than just that—they’ve already murdered scores of us, maybe hundreds, since 2020’s Summer O’ State-Sanctioned Leftist Violence got the whole shitshow underway. High time we started taking them at their word, I think, and give ’em some of their own back whenever they decide to dash out into the streets and start acting all frisky.

Kev’s pepper-spray-gun recommendation is a fine one, I think. I myself hugely enjoy the edifying thought of those purple-haired, nose-ringed, gender-befuddled rage junkies clawing furiously at their eyeballs, desperately trying to tear them from the sockets so as to make the ouchee go away. Weeping copiously; great ropey threads of snot, tears, and drool cascading over their double chins, down their necks, and up under their black 6X-Lg T-shirts. Blubbering and gibbering incoherently at what for most of them will be a completely new experience: being on the receiving end of some actual, meaningful, in-your-fucking-face resistance for once. All that good stuff, y’know?

So yeah, let the games begin, I say. Until it’s time for the shooting to commence, which I don’t think it is just yet although it’s almost here, let’s arm up with something non-lethal but still agony-inducing and get this party started, yo! None of us ought to be standing around with our thumb up our flue waiting for some semi-sentient commie pudhead to get the first lick in, either. I urge one and all to keep your nonlethal weapon of choice IN YOUR HAND, not tucked away in a pocket, at all times when in the presence of The Enemy, and to put said nonlethal weapon of choice to good use at the first intimation of aggression presented by your swinish foe.

As is Downey, I am beyond sick and tired of seeing yet another one of Ours hitting the ground in a fetal ball, helpless as a newborn kitten under a brutal gang-boot party instead of baring his fangs, standing his ground, and lighting into the Fascist filthbags with every potential instrument of mayhem he can lay hands on, giving Biden’s Brownshirts a serious dose of what-fer with blatant intent to inflict grievous bodily injury in full effect. All others of us in the vicinity who aren’t already similarly engaged themselves will be expected to wade in and lend a hand as well. The mere thought of standing idly by while a brother has his ribcage stove in for him by a pack of urban jackals cringing behind black bandanas and hoodies ought to damned well be anathema to us from now on, a shameful thing that just isn’t done.

The Hells Angels have a bylaw that’s as old as the M/C itself, which requires one hundred percent participation of all members present in any kind of fracas, brouhaha, or dustup in which a fellow Red & White is involved. The H/As ain’t known for losing very many of these all-out brawls, either, being wise in the ways of close-quarters physical combat. Our Side must emulate this thrice-worthy example.

When you think about it, it wasn’t all that long ago when providing assistance to someone being unfairly set upon by clearly dishonorable attackers was part of a Code of Manly Honor reverenced by every self-respecting specimen of true American manhood. That code is still a perfectly good one; it wasn’t because of anything wrong with the Code that it was cast aside by a more effete and pussified generation of “American” “men.” No, the flaw wasn’t in the Code, but in us.

We’d all be much the better off for it, both our individual selves and the society at large, by reinstating that Code now and striving to uphold it each and every day, teaching our sons to hew to it themselves when they come of age. Just doing that will bring us a long way towards restoring this disintegrating society—turning it from the dangerous, festering cesspool the Left has made of it back into the kind of place where decent, upstanding folk would be proud to live once more.

Dennis Hopper, American icon

Posted on May 11, 2022May 11, 2022 by Mike

Just so’s you know, I freely admit that I’m running this as an excuse to repost this most awesome Nicholson/Hopper duet from Easy Rider at the end.

I’ve always loved Dennis Hopper and found him to be a kindred spirit. He embodies American consciousness without a shred of sentimentality. We see in him a mixture of rebelliousness, sorrow, loss, and even grace. But more than anything, we see American restlessness. Although he is most known for his films, both as a director and actor, Hopper’s talent was also visible in his photography. After his career had a bit of a downturn in the 1960s, Hopper’s then-wife, Brooke Hayward, gave him a Nikon camera for his 25th birthday.

Hopper’s photography oeuvre covers only the years 1961-1967, which is short chronologically speaking, but the creations that came out of restlessness transcend time. Hopper himself didn’t want to have anything to do with the pictures and put them away in a vault. “I was trying to forget…,” he said, “the photographs represented failure to me. A painful parting from [daughter] Marin and Brooke, my art collection, the house that I lived in and the life that I had known for those eight years.” Still, the photographs continue to live as artifacts of America’s past, separated from Hopper, the man, but bound to Hopper, the artist. His own view of their existence and status as photographs is almost irrelevant because of our gaze into the world he has recorded.

Hopper’s photographs, particularly in this collection, In Dreams, are a window into the soul of America during the 1960s. We see street scenes of Los Angeles: people frozen in time, sitting, standing up, looking into the distance of their own lives, or just staring at the passing dog. We see a close up of hands writing; jazz musicians in a smokey club; streets in rearview mirrors offering both a reality and an illusion of our strange world; George Segal and Sandy Dennis in 1965, a year before the release of Mike Nichols’ adaptation of Edward Albee’s 1962 play, “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?,” standing among the broken nude statues, embodying innocence not unlike their characters, Nick and Honey, in Nichols’ film.

We see Brooke Hayward in a grocery store, pushing a cart somewhat sadly, lost in her secret thoughts; a couple in a kissing booth; a girl in a rearview mirror driving to God knows where (a job? Seeing a friend? Or is she running away?); a cocktail party where a kiss between a man and woman appears seemingly from nowhere (Are they strangers? Friends? Lovers?).

We see the filming of Henry Hathaway’s 1965 western, “The Sons of Katie Elder.” Hopper does not discriminate and sees everyone as a human being, not in their respective societal or film roles. Hathaway and John Wayne are in the middle of a scene with Wayne pointing at something out of frame. There is a calmness, steadiness, and stability, but also the bubbling of creativity. I am drawn to these images precisely because they point to a time and a place when even the possibility of steadiness and masculinity was present in the culture. Things are getting done and life keeps moving forward.

In the collection, there are even self-portraits, in which we see Hopper’s need to be seen, a rebellious streak, and over the top self-importance. But there is also a certain sensitivity that only comes from someone who has the soul of an artist. They are the most dreamy of all. Is this how Hopper saw himself at the time? He is hovering like a ghost of America past and present.

On one occasion, Hopper’s daughter Marin, reflected: “My father, Dennis Hopper, believed that being on the road in search of something was very American. You had to keep moving forward no matter what. Ride into town, gunfight at high noon, then off into the sunset.” Hopper represented—and even in his death, represents—not simply the one American dream, whatever it may have been or whatever shred of it is present now. Rather, he represents American dreams—lives lived on the photographic paper, on the celluloid, and in the American desert of desires.

Okay, I take it back; the article is good enough to serve as its own justification, no excuses required for running it. Same-same with the vid, actually.

Update! So the whole Hopper trip got me to rooting around here and there, which eventually landed me on this incredible site covering all things Easy Rider. Captain America and Billy’s route to Mardi Gras is mapped out, literally; the entire movie is posted; there are then-and-now pics of some of the locations where scenes from the movie were shot, among other way-cool stuff. No foolin’, gang, this is one hella-awesome website for any Easy Rider fan.

Another idea whose time has surely come

Posted on May 11, 2022May 11, 2022 by Mike

Retroactive abortion.

My guess: we’re nearing the end of America’s Christian patience for being snookered, gaslit, lied-to, bamboozled, and mind-fucked, especially as our nation gets gang-raped by the Party of Chaos. Perhaps the solution is to go a little further down the Roe v Wade path and make abortion fully retroactive, a new and innovative way to “cancel” lives whose obnoxious presence in the world is a menace to the human project. Declare the likes of AlMay and NiJank retroactively “unborn,” erasing their privilege to appointed office. The wire coat-hanger probably will not avail in this procedure.

Oh, that’s all right, a decently-zeroed .308 caliber rifle damned sure will.

Meanwhile, several Supreme Court justices are under siege in direct contravention of 18 U.S. Code § 115 — influencing, impeding, or retaliating against a federal official by threatening or injuring a family member. The authorities are permitting angry mobs to moil freely outside the Justices’ houses, while many January Sixth “insurrectionists” rot in the DC jail into a second-year on misdemeanor charges that the authorities refuse to adjudicate — meaning that there is no authority in Washington, DC, only a nameless, lawless simulacrum of it as conceived, say, in the spirit of Franz Kafka.

Hope abides that the November elections might set up a correction to much of this madness. The release on Saturday of Dinesh D’Souza’s documentary 2000 Mules does not provide a whole lot of encouragement about that. The Party of Chaos still has its apparatus of ballot fraud in place all over the country and nobody seems to know what to do about it (though the remedy is pretty simple and straightforward: in-person voting with voter ID).

Please permit me to commend the aforementioned .308 caliber rifle to your attention as a most excellent alternative.

The evidence of drop-box video and smart-phone tracking of the 2020 ballot-stuffers in several states is right there and nobody in American life appears to be equipped to do something about it. The necessary equipment consists of two plum-sized glands generally assigned at birth to persons of the male persuasion. Perhaps, along with refrigerator condensers, the supply line for that is broken.

But first, of course, before the scheduled midterm elections there are roughly six months of nice weather to get through, meaning conditions that are favorable for action in the street, starring the shock troops of Progressive Wokery. Depending on where you live, maybe that’s another reason to feel those old heebie-jeebies creeping in on little spiders’ feet.

Speak for yourself, Bill. What I’m sensing is more of a steadily-increasing disinclination among Real Americans to just sit passively back and put up with such arrant nonsense this go-round, watching helplessly as American cities burn and the police sit on their hands and do nothing. I’m thinking this might possibly be where that good ol’ standby, the .308 caliber rifle, might just be brought into play. We have no effective way to predict when the point will be reached, but sooner or later enough becomes enough, all patience has been exhausted, and sleeping giants will be awakened and rise up in wrath.

BREAKING: DeSantis right again!!!

Posted on May 11, 2022May 11, 2022 by Mike

No news there, really; he almost always is.

Ron DeSantis: Requiring Permits for Concealed Carry is ‘Subcontracting Your Rights’
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) is warning that requiring a permit for concealed carry subcontracts out constitutional rights to the whims of the person approving permit applications.

News4Jax noted that DeSantis described the concealed permitting process on Tuesday as a “licensing scheme” run by people who can take away your license if they so choose. The Governor made clear he wants to replace the permitting system with a constitutional carry framework.

Precisely so. As I always say: any time you must apply to the government for official permission and a license to exercise something you’ve deceived yourself into thinking of as a “right,” what you actually have is by definition not a right, but a privilege.

Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried is the individual who oversees concealed permitting in Florida. She is also a Democrat candidate for governor in the state. Fried responded to DeSantis by calling the push for constitutional carry “absurd political pandering from the governor of a state that has experienced some of the worst mass shootings in our country’s history.”

DeSantis also spoke about concealed permitting over the weekend, alluding to “the official in charge of these permits” but not calling out Fried by name.

The NRA quoted DeSantis saying “the official in charge of these permits doesn’t support Second Amendment rights.”

Right again, Ron, and it’s high time somebody found the intestinal fortitude to point it out, obvious as it is to some of us. The truth is, NO Demonrat supports the private ownership of firearms, contra whatever brazen lies they feel they must puke up during “election” season. Reflexive opposition to what the plainspoken, easily-understood language of the 2A says is a core prerequisite for acceptance as a Democrat Party candidate for elective office, any breach of which is grounds for immediate and summary expulsion.

The New New Right

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Mike

Bret Stephens—stale, stuffy, irrelevant, and insufferable as is typical of his type—asks (and answers) the most meaningless question I can think of right offhand.

What is conservative?” columnist Bret Stephens asked in Tuesday’s New York Times.

Who the fuck cares? Also: who the fuck thinks there could ever be a worthwhile answer to be found in, of all places, the NYT, ferchrissakes?

“It is,” he posits, “above all, the conviction that abrupt and profound changes to established laws and common expectations are utterly destructive to respect for the law and the institutions established to uphold it — especially when those changes are instigatedgggggzzzzzzxxxsknxxxxzzzz…”

Night-night, sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs etc.

Stephens was responding to the broad conservative and Christian excitement that America’s extreme abortion regime might finally be struck down by the Supreme Court; but Stephens might as well have been writing about J.D. Vance’s hard-fought Tuesday night victory in Ohio’s Republican primary. Or Blake Master’s primary race to represent Arizona. Or Tucker Carlson’s intellectual ascendancy. Or the rise of a young and invigorated American New Right.

Stephens is wrong, of course. Conservatism isn’t remotely about process: It’s about traditional wisdom and values; it’s about conserving things of generational, transcendent value.

It means understanding that man is fallen, and society must protect families, workers, traditions, and, yes, the unborn from being wiped aside; oppressed from above.

It means conserving the truth — the truth about men and women, the truth about the unborn, the truth about human equality, and the necessary limits on government power.

That’s not to say there isn’t still an important place for process: In a civilization governed by prudent and benevolent institutions that buttress and strengthen traditional wisdom and values, process protects those cherished things from rapid change.

In a world governed by imprudent and vindictive institutions, however, that claw, gnash, and tear at traditional wisdom — that usurp traditional values — the “process” merely fools us into believing that what these institutions are doing is normal, when in reality it is profoundly abnormal.

I can’t honestly say I care all that deeply about “conservatism” anymore, if I ever truly did. What I DO care about is America as the Founders envisioned it. I care about the values codified in their Constitution, which I do believe remains far and away the most brilliant, visionary, and timeless document on what does and does not constitute a legitimate government of, by, and for a free people, along with the Declaration, the Federalist Papers, and the correspondence shared between several of the key figures most responsible for creating them.

I care about the fact that those men, those precious and incomparable documents, and the government they bequeathed to us have all for many decades been under relentless assault by vermin unfit to clean the privy stall of giants among men like, say, Washington, Jefferson or Adams with their own tongues. I care that these vermin have succeeded so wildly at besmirching so much that was good in the world, bringing Virtue to Her knees in the muck and mire. I care about stopping these vermin. I care about ridding this land of them, as near to permanently as may be. I care about punishing them, by the harshest and most extreme measures imaginable, pour encourager les autres.

I like JD Vance, and I do not give a tinker’s damn whether Bret Stephens and the rest of his ivory-tower ilk thinks he’s a “conservative” or not.

He’s a man who doesn’t “care if Google is a private company, because they have too much power; and if you want to have a country where people can live their lives freely, you have to be concerned about power — whether it’s concentrated in the government or concentrated in big corporations.”

He thinks our corporate overlords would happily satiate us with whirling gizmos and gadgets while capturing our culture and selling us out to China. This places him directly at odds with tired, established Republicanism, which would prefer to slander the ghost of Ronald Reagan while they simp for corporations that work to undermine our national economy, our traditions, our families, and even our children’s sexuality.

Vance is also a man who doesn’t “really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another,” and thinks “it’s ridiculous that we are focused on” their border over our own.

Far more than Ukraine, he cares “about the fact that in [his] community right now, the leading cause of death among 18- to 45-year-olds is Mexican fentanyl.” This places him directly at odds with all of established Washington, where $5 billion for our country’s border security is too much to ask, but politicians crow about sending six times that amount to defend the sacred territorial integrity of another’s.

Vance is a man who thinks, “If any of us want to do the things that we want to do for our country and for the people who live in it, we have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.”

“So much of what we want to accomplish,” he recognizes, is “…fundamentally dependent on going through a set of very hostile institutions, specifically the universities, which control the knowledge in our society, which control what we call truth and what we call falsity, that provides research that gives credibility to some of the most ridiculous ideas that exist in our country.”

This once again places him directly at odds with Washington, which every years sends billions in federal aid to colleges and universities, with nary a whimper of a fight.

More broadly, “Vance,” Harpers editor James Pogue writes, “believes that a well-educated and culturally liberal American elite has greatly benefited from globalization, the financialization of our economy, and the growing power of big tech.”

“This,” he continues, “has led an Ivy League intellectual and management class…to adopt a set of economic and cultural interests that directly oppose those of people in places like Middletown, Ohio, where he grew up.”

In other words, Vance knows what time it is.

It’s an excellent piece; you’ll want to read all of it, I assure you.

Electric bricks

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Mike

We used to have a fine old term for this that got used quite a bit back in the 70s: planned obsolescence.

None of these are old cars. In fact, the oldest Spark is younger than the average non-electric car currently in service as a daily driver, which is about twelve years old. Most of these with many more years of useful service left, because they don’t have battery packs that cost more than the car is worth (by then) to replace.

Which is a built-in problem for all electric cars. Some may recall the case of the irate Finnish man who TNT’d his not-very-old Tesla Model S when he found out that replacing its dead battery pack would cost him on the order of $20,000.

But at least a replacement battery was still available.

Without that, you’ve got nothing – no matter how much you’re willing to pay for it. And unlike non-electric cars, there is very little you can do about it – other than eat the loss and move on to the next one. This is because an EV’s dead battery pack is not like a non-electric car’s failed transmission or engine – or even both, together. In the case of the latter, it is almost always possible to swap in a used or remanufactured/rebuilt transmission or engine – and drive on. It is not possible with electric cars for which there aren’t any replacements available, new or used.

And even if the original manufacturer no longer makes new replacement engines/transmissions for a given IC car, these can usually both be rebuilt at a price that’s worth the doing. Electric car battery packs, once dead, are throw-aways – just like the dead battery that no longer powers your sail fawn. At which point, you throw away the sail fawn.

The electric car, too.

The difference being you probably paid a lot more for the electric car.

Interestingly, there has been little-to-no coverage in the general or even the automotive press about this business. It’s interesting – because you can imagine the uproar that would arise if any other barely ten-year-old car was no longer supported by its manufacturer – and had a built-in design feature that assured it would be rendered useless years before it reached the age of the average non-electric car currently in service.

Of course, the reason for the absence of such coverage is because it might call attention to the shorter useful lifespan of electric cars, due to the shorter useful life of their battery packs relative to the useful life of an IC car’s engine or transmission. These are expected to last at least 12-15 years – and most last longer. If they fail sooner, the car – and its maker – gets a well-deserved reputation for shoddiness and most people will avoid buying a car made by that maker.

It is discharge-recharge cycling that ages a battery. Especially “fast” charging. You can limit the damage by not “fast” charging – and not discharging – the EV battery. But then the EV isn’t much use, is it?

No such issue exists with non-electric cars in that driving down to fumes in the tank has no effect at all on the useful service life of the vehicle. A non-electric car that’s 15 or 20 years old holds as much gas in its tank – and travels just as far – as it did when it was new. An electric car’s battery pack is unlikely to be capable of holding the same charge it could when new when it is ten years old – and maybe sooner.

And if there’s no replacement battery available – or it costs more than it’s worth to replace it – the car is useless.

Many people will find out about this after they bought an EV. It probably explains another interesting thing about EVs that the general press (and the automotive press) haven’t covered much, which is that a large percentage of first-time EV buyers didn’t buy a second one.

Yeah, well, you know what they say about “fool me once, fool me twice.” Guess that smug, superior feeling an EV owner gets from knowing he’s being a good, obedient little shitlib and Doing His Part to help save Gaia only goes so far when, after being a full-time pain in the ass the whole time he’s had it, his little toy strugglebuggy shits the bed for good at the exact same time his neighbor’s Focus or Elantra is only just beginning to hit its stride.

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