Just a reminder: today’s Substack column was actually posted yesterday, early instead of the usual late-or-even-totally-forgotten-about. Tenk Yew.

A rare treat this week for Eyrie subscribers: after waking up needing to pee, then knowing I’d be unable to get back to sleep right away, I whipped up a stiff pot of Java and got to work on tomorrow’s Substack post. Having completed the thing early, I then decided what the hey and went ahead and posted the thing a day in advance. No need to thank me, gang, I’m a giver like that.

Entitled “The wit and wisdom of Erma Bombeck…plus, ALIENS!!!”, the topic is one you decrepit oldster-types among us will likely recognize right off the bat with a warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia. Younger CF readers, if any, won’t know what or who the hell I’m talking about. Which beings us right to our appetizer ‘graphs.

What terrible things it says about how very far our society has fallen that Erma Bombeck’s gentle humor would be incomprehensible to contemporary “Americans,” the timeless perspective therein either disdained as “dated” and therefore irrelevant or just condemned outright as being the product not of insight and intelligence, but of some nebulous, unspecified form of “bigotry” and/or “privilege.”

Said insights and humor were once universally understood and appreciated in America That Was, just part of our shared cultural experience. How very sad that today they come across almost like bizarre artifacts from some far-distant alien planet, transported to us across galaxies in a funky flying saucer.

Which, natch, is where those aliens I mentioned before come into the picture. Whether you’re at all cognizant of Erma Bombeck and/or believe in beings from another planet or not, this is one my better pieces yet, or so I believe, of which you should definitely read the all.

Update! Taking advantage of an old man’s habit of insomnia to muck about with the Substack CP a bit, in this case by inserting a couple pre-formatted “Subscribe now” buttons in the Bombeck post. I’d LOOOVE to be able to find some way of altering font sizes within otherwise-normal text and such, but thus far no joy with that one.

Pay no attention to me, folks, I’m just playin’ around here.

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Time once again for The Monday Substack Thang: “In praise of…wait, WHAT again, now?” Wherein we lament the loss of…of…well, after working on this post a good chunk of yesterday and today, I can’t even bring myself to type it again. The springboard for all this grief and mourning is another characteristically excellent (if UNEXPECTED!) outing from our compatriot Eric Peters, who successfully unearths the Devil in the details, then re-plants it good, deep, and HARD. A taste:

The dealer was familiar with my dad’s habit of cruising around various car dealerships of a Sunday afternoon with the fam in tow, just doing a casual looky-loo type thing without any serious intent at all of allowing himself to be talked into a purchase. Additionally, he’d never been in the least susceptible to the impulse-buying phenomenon, particularly not when the “buy” in question was an exorbitantly-expensive 4-5 thousand dollar (!!!) luxury automobile.

What with all that, plus the dealer’s foreknowledge of my pop’s devotion to the Blue Ovals, this [EXPLETIVE DELETED] was no way no how gonna sell itself. So the proprietor went straight for the jugular with the ol’ hard-sell:

Y’all just take this low-mileage, well-cared-for beauty on home for an extended test drive; bring it back in, say, no sooner than three weeks or so. Here’s the keys.

And we did that thing.

Read on for the gripping—if not exactly so UNEXPECTED! as all that—denouement.

Update! Eyrie post has now been updated with some Bonus Content you’ll almost certainly find…dare I say it…UNEXPECTED!

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Friday’s Substack-a-palooza is up. Titled Pardonnez Trump, this one laughs away the ludicrous notion that Bribem, or any other D卐M☭CRAT for that matter, might ever seriously consider “pardoning” Trump (kinda tough to pardon someone who isn’t guilty of one damned thing) in the interest of saving the nation. Excerpt:

What you ought to fear much more is that “the part of the country that still loves Trump…” will instead not do a damned thing more than sit on its fat ass and complain on the Innarnuts about it. As dreadful a prospect as civil war and violent, bloody revolution no doubt are, the dissolute and degraded complacency that would render Real Americans passively inert whilst the Neo-Marxist mob subjugates them and destroys the very concept of Law And Order itself will bring about a nightmare far more iniquitous and enduring than even civil war ever could.

It is to laugh. As if there has, for years if not decades now, been the slightest sign that they’re even capable of acting wisely, or that they understand what “acting wisely” might consist of, or have any regard for that at all.

Read the rest, subscribe for free, or select one of the pay-sub options to comment. Y’all know wassup.

The Monday Eyrie post has gone up a day late due to my recent calamitous loss of Internet access, but it can in no way, shape, or form be considered a dollar short. Entitled “Fake phony frauds,” this one covers plenty of ground: from limousine-liberal Bruce Springsteen, to Bob Grant, to Curtis Sliwa, to disgusting blob Al Sharpton, difficult though it might seem to discern any connection betwixt such a, ummm, diverse cast of characters. Preview ‘graphs:

Ah, how well I remember hearing Curtis Sliwa nail infamous shitstain Al Sharpton to the wall on the Bob Grant show with a tape Sliwa had recorded at now-defunct Freddy’s Fashion Mart up in Harlem, featuring the bloated, Marcelle-grease-stained bottom feeder calumnifying “white interlopers” and urging his biddable, low-IQ followers to violence.

Said incitement bore deadly fruit when a mentally-disturbed spook-a-loo and “protest” attendee finally heeded Sharpton’s blatant call to action, walking into Freddy’s carrying a full gas can and a loaded .38 and shooting several people in the course of burning the place to the ground, and leaving several corpses in his wake. Sharpton, of course, had denied ever saying anything at all in his daily “protests” that could possibly be construed as incitement to violence, which was just a bald-faced lie. 

And then Sliwa and Grant played, over and over again, the tape which exposed Sharpton as the liar, agitator, and all-round scumbag he always had been. It was beautiful, is what it was. It was beautiful, is what it was—a golden radio moment those of us who were around to hear it will never forget. SIDE NOTE: It was Sharpton’s use of a bullhorn to amplify his exhortations to violent action against Freddy’s that inspired Paul Shanklin to have Conk Boy always speak through one in his note-perfect parodies for the late, lamented Rush Limbaugh show.

And if that doesn’t constitute enough enticement to get you clicking on over to read the rest, I don’t know what on Earth might be.

Update! Humble thanks yet again to CA over at the indispensable WRSA, who has once again blowed up the ol’ Eyrie hit counter with a link, in the process including a most apposite quote:

If you aren’t stopping by Mike’s alternative station on a daily basis, you are missing a lot.

And that’s from a guy who firmly believes (or wants to believe, more likely) that his life was saved by the line from Thunder Road, “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pullin’ out of here to win”.

That would be the Springsteen song, not the classic Robert Mitchum flick, which is going to require another liberal dose of palate cleanser, I’m afraid.

For those who didn’t know already, Thunder Road was pretty much a Robert Mitchum joint entirely: he wrote the script; wrote and sang the title tune; produced it via his production company DRM; and cast his son James as his own character’s younger brother after Col Tom Parker had scotched Elvis Presley, for whom Mitchum had originally written the part. The movie also features a star turn by the delectable Keely Smith, who also sang the movie’s main theme, the haunting “Whippoorwill.”

Keely Smith, a most toothsome babe if I ever did see one, rose to stardom as the confection her real-life husband Louis Prima spent the majority of his onstage time mugging, clowning, and generally hamming it up around, to her bored, eye-rolling indifference. To wit:

Not the best example of what I was talking about, perhaps, but whatevs, I just like the song. There are better examples out there, if you care to look ‘em up. The Prima band was blessed not just with the enormously talented Smith and Louis himself, but with one of the all-time great sax players as well:

Sam Butera (August 17, 1927 – June 3, 2009) was an American tenor saxophonist and singer-songwriter best noted for his collaborations with Louis Prima and Keely Smith. Butera is frequently regarded as a crossover artist who performed with equal ease in both R&B and the post-big band pop style of jazz that permeated the early Vegas nightclub scene.

Butera was born and raised in an Italian-American family in New Orleans, where his father, Joe, ran a butcher shop and played guitar in his spare time. He heard the saxophone for the first time at a wedding when he was seven years old, and, with his father’s encouragement, he began to play.

Butera’s professional career blossomed early, beginning with a stint in big band drummer Ray McKinley’s orchestra directly after high school. Butera was named one of America’s top upcoming jazzmen by Look magazine when he was only eighteen years old, and, by his early twenties, he had landed positions in the orchestras of Tommy Dorsey, Joe Reichman, and Paul Gayten.

As the big band era wound down and heavy touring became less common among jazz musicians, Butera re-settled in New Orleans, where he played regularly at the 500 Club for four years. The 500 Club was owned by Louis Prima’s brother, Leon, and it was this connection that led him to his much-heralded Vegas-based collaborations with Prima and Smith.

Prima transitioned from big band to Vegas somewhat hastily, having signed a contract with the Sahara without having first assembled a back-up band. From his Vegas hotel room, Prima phoned Butera in New Orleans and had him assemble a band posthaste. Butera and the band drove from New Orleans to Las Vegas in such a hurry that they had not taken time to give their act a name. On opening night in 1954, Prima asked Butera before a live audience what the name of his band was. Butera responded spontaneously, “The Witnesses”, and the name stuck.

Butera remained the bandleader of The Witnesses for more than twenty years. During that time, he performed with Louis Prima and/or Keely Smith on such Prima-associated songs as “That Old Black Magic”, “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody,” “Come on-a My House,” and “I Wan’na Be Like You” (from Disney’s The Jungle Book). Richard and Robert Sherman, composers of the songs for the Disney animated film, agreed to cast Prima, Butera and their band after executives from the Walt Disney Company urged them to travel to Las Vegas to witness the band’s live act in person.

Butera is noted for his raucous playing style, his off-color humor, and the innuendo in his lyrics. The arrangement he made with Prima of “Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” has been covered by David Lee Roth, Los Lobos, Brian Setzer, The Village People, and Big Bad Voodoo Daddy. In addition to his accomplishments as a saxophonist and composer, Butera is widely regarded as the inspiration for the vocal style of fellow New Orleans-born jazz singer Harry Connick, Jr.

There, see what I was talking about when I mentioned all those great music-biz stories the other day?

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PHEW! Okay, the Friday Substack has gone live at last. Titled “The sanction of the victim,” this one’s a lengthy treatise on exactly that, kicking off with some quotes from the redoubtable Ayn Rand. Those salutary musings are immediately followed by the usual hot-mess eructation of offensive, obnoxious, and hate-sodden prattle for which I have become so justly renowned. Such as:

Thus is the inevitable question presented: Was Ayn Rand prescient, some sort of predictive genius? Or was she merely talented enough to recognize and expound (at great length!) on the fairly mundane, perhaps even puerile, conception of eternal ideals as the harbingers of eternal conflicts: between liberty and tyranny; between the meddlesome busybody and the independent-minded individual desirous only of being left alone; between over-powerful government and certain of its own subjects?

In each of those cases, the critical factor is the sanction of the victim. Throughout the ages, that is what determines the final outcome. Regardless of our sophistication, our astonishing technological advancement, and our societal wealth, present-day Americans cannot expect to be treated otherwise by history. Should the current melancholy trend of blithe disregard for the most basic natural rights in combination with sheep-like docility and obedience continue very much longer, the task of reclaiming those abandoned liberties and fundamental rights will go from “difficult” to “utterly impossible.”

I don’t even have to say it by now, do I? Y’all just go ‘head on and do it, then.

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Today’s Eyrie peroration— “In praise of teachers?”—has just been posted. This time out, we delve into the wildly overblown lionization of teachers as “heroes”—which gross mischaracterization cheapens the word and amounts to an indirect insult to, as the post has it, “those who pull people from burning buildings or dodge bullets on the battlefield”—and the damage such a stretch has done to society at large. A taste:

I well remember, during the dark, dismal days of the Great Scamdemic Lockdown, being greatly annoyed by all those “Heroes work here!” signs all over the place exalting essential workers ordinary Janes and Joes—from hospital staff to the most humble WalMart employee—for the saintly sacrifice of just, y’know, doing their jobs. Fine folks? Of course, most of them anyway. Heroes? Well, no, not exactly, not quite.

Funny, innit, how most if not all of our seemingly-insuperable contemporary predicaments share a common solution—ridding ourselves of the plague of Progressivist locusts that is devouring our society. Seems as if there ought to be some action Normal Americans could take to resolve the situation in their favor and re-balance the scales, so to speak. If we could only figure out what *cough-cough FUMIGATION cough-cough* it might be.

Read of it, gang, for It. Is. Good. Hell, at one point I even work in a little sympathy for the modern primary-school teacher’s plight, believe it or not.

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Friday’s Substack has been posted—“Excuses, excuses,” a dissertation on the Transgender Jihad and its unwholesome ramifications, concluding with a hate-laced diatribe about our supposed “domestic migration crisis.” Appetizer ‘graphs:

The Welsh’s terror at living in the nightmarish, intolerant hell of Texas is nothing but vapor and paranoia, all hat and no cattle as a native Texan might put it. To date, there is absolutely NO record of LGBTQXXXZYXP39+++etc Persons Of Penis being slaughtered wholesale by marauding bands of Lone Star H8RRZZZZ™ looking to bathe in the blood of gender-confused lunatics—NONE.

This auto-generated fear is as phantasmagorical as the “genocide” supposedly being carried out even now against such mentally-disturbed people across the nation, and is based on the same idea: that merely refusing to stand up and cheer for their pitiable delusion is the exact same thing as wreaking violence upon them. And that’s just contemptible, self-serving nonsense.

On the other hand, the harassment and hatred endured by the Kohls for having the heartless temerity to fly a US flag outside their humble Kaliforny abode is all too real, as anybody who’s ever been visited in the middle of the night by hordes of bullhorn-toting, torch-bearing pAntiFa and/or Burn Loot Murder rioters or had their car vandalized in a public parking lot because there was a Trump sticker on the back bumper can truthfully attest.

One of these things is NOT like the other. Indubitably, definitionally, and demonstrably, one of them is REAL. The other, not so much.

Read, subscribe, all that schtuff. Try it, you’ll like it.

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Monday’s Substack offering, Empire, falling, is now live and kickin’ in its stall. It’s the dreaded Independence Day musing I mentioned earlier today, including a wee mite of digression into ancient CF history which is bound to edify and delight you CF Lifers who were hanging out at this hogwallow back then. To wit:

Fact is, it really is difficult to know where we are in America today. As you CF Lifers will recall, this blog was born in the immediate wake of the 9/11/01 atrocities; the domain name was registered on 9/14, if I remember right. Being a complete newcomer to this whole “blogging” phenomenon, I had no clue about the dominant bloggerware systems back then—GreyMatter, Moveable Type, etc. No clue? Hell, I didn’t even know such things existed in those earliest days.

So I whipped up a design for this crazy new trip I was embarking on over the next two days; Adobe GoLive (version 4? Or 5, maybe?) was my WYSIWYG web-design weapon of choice in those Aulden Thymes. The very first CF posts went up on 9/16/01. I had screenshots of that first effort stored on one of my old Macs, but alas, they’re gone with the wind now.

The one thing I know for sure: the America we lived in then bore little, if any, resemblance to the one we’re living in today. It’s incredible to realize just how drastically the US has changed in such a relatively short span of time. In fact, I doubt that there’s been any other twenty year span that DID see such radical, sweeping change to both the nation and its culture in our long history, with the Civil War v1.0/Reconstruction era being a possible exception.

Amazingly, it ain’t all gloomy and doomy, even managing to conclude on an at least somewhat optimistic note. You know what you must do, Glasshoppa.

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Friday’s Substack column—”You’re here, we ain’t skeered, get used to it”—is now up and running. It’s a tirade on the Transgender Jihad, and the likely result of this daylight barking madness. SPOILER: it ain’t gonna be pretty, people.

Keep fucking around and you’re gonna find out, freaks. And when you do, a whole lot of others are gonna be taken down right along with you. When the Saxon at last does get his hate on for reals, there aren’t gonna be very many of them who are all that interested in differentiating betwixt the Quick and the Dead, I’d bet.

Which, truth to tell, I can’t quite say I’m as bereft as JJ is regarding that prospect. Far as I’m concerned, while they may not themselves be hurling open threats in the teeth of parents who simply prefer that their children not be raunched up the fudge tunnel like those openly participating in the Transgender Jihad have, by their silence the less radical Left types (if any) still make themselves at best complicit in this most unwholesome of trends.

So be it, then.

As is mentioned at the close of the Eyrie post, there will be an update later so as to bring a very-much-related Brandon Smith dissertation into the mix, which I will notify y’all of as and when. Til then, hit the link and partake of it.

Update! The above-mentioned Eyrie addendum-slash-update has been all taken care of, via the judicious application of a little linky self-love.

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Our weekender Substack crack-dose is now live and roaring for attention. Titled “Secession tour de force,” this installment constitutes an extended run at the legendary Michael Anton’s recent Asylum piece exploring the contemporary to-and-fro’ing over what’s looking more and more like an issue Americans will be wrangling over until the heat death of the universe, if not longer. Try a little on for size:

And there you have it: the whole danged Liberty vs Tyranny issue, boiled down to its constituent parts in just three short sentences. 53-foot trailerloads of compelling if unsettling reading left yet, incredible as that may seem, touching on All The Things—from ethnic cleansing to white supremacism to Neegrow reparations (ie, Dollars for Darkies) to Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ to Stalin and Pinochet and, momentarily, Tucker Carlson, before Tom finally says fuck this shit, throws up his hands, and shags his happy ass on back to the good ol’ Republic of Texas.

Like I said, it’s a long ‘un, but seeing as how this is, or soon will become, one of the most urgent, impactful debates of our time, its pivotal nature nicely balances out any objection to the length of the piece. With this magisterial, thorough, and timely work, presented in a conversational rather than a professorial tone, what Mike Anton has done is provide us with a quite useful, readily comprehensible study guide which adroitly explicates every angle, every historical predicate, every position, and every possible motivation and/or rationalization driving said debate, on both sides.

Like Anton’s, my own stab at this beast is long, but I think you’ll find it well worth your time and attention, as is Anton’s. As I’m so fond of saying, go ye and read of both of them, for They. Are. Good.

The Monday Substack, “Reinventing the Republic,” has now been posted. This installment discusses the Five Ws as related not to a principle of journalism, but to the hijacking of a once-free nation by Progressivists, and to the Constitution they’ve defiled and discarded. To wit:

The Constitution is no more than a document—mere words on paper, expressing certain ideals that, until relatively recently, most Americans claimed to revere. It has no power of its own, no practical or corporeal means of enforcing the ideals it proposes. Reasonable, aware Americans ought not to expect it to; they are the ones charged with the duty of protecting and enforcing it, not vice the versa. It cannot defend itself, it must be defended.

This is tacitly confirmed by the simple fact that many, many of us have sworn an oath to do precisely that: upon enlisting in the military, joining the police force, or accepting elected office as what used to be called a “public servant.” Every last one of them swore that oath completely aware of what it meant, as should those of us who did NOT swear any oath. OUR duty is to see to it that those who did, most especially the elected officials, are held rigorously to account for fulfilling it. Ignoring, shirking, or otherwise failing to uphold this solemn and sacred responsibility, then, cannot fairly be taken as an indication that the Constitution has failed us, but rather that we have failed the Constitution.

Until that solemn and sacred duty is reaffirmed, taken seriously, and fully and firmly upheld, all efforts undertaken by freedom-oriented Americans who prefer properly limited government—“election” campaigns, peaceful protest, indignant op-eds, lawfare—will continue to be frustrated. Said Americans will have no hope whatever of prevailing in the gloomy twilight of the eternal struggle against tyranny and despotism.

I’m right, and you know I am. Go ye and read all of it—no subscription necessary to read, paid sub required to comment, y’all know the drill.

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Today’s Eyrie screed, “A crisis of conscience,” is now available for your perusal, consideration, commentary, and…ummm, convenience. Read the thing to learn why I just stuck that “convenience” sub-clause in; it may seem like something of a non sequitur, but it ain’t, there’s a reason for it. A taste:

Like it or not, the underlying issue always comes back to the same thing, in my view: to defeat them, we must become more like them. No, by that I assuredly do NOT mean adopting their beliefs, their views, their abominable totalitarian political agenda, Heaven forbid. What I DO mean is adopting their will to win; their tactics; their readily-discernible eagerness to get down in the gutter and fight dirty—most of all, perhaps, their absolute willingness to identify us not as their countrymen with whom they have minor differences of opinion, but as blood enemies. As in fact not merely mistaken but actively, willfully evil.

Thus it is, then, that we arrive in the exact same place as did the Founders in their own day: forced all unwilling to grapple with a most unpleasant choice, one which no sane person ever wants to have to make. No more than a slogan in the beginning, thought to have its origins with the minuscule and entirely irrelevant American White Supremacist cohort, the following phrase eventually hardened into a truism which cannot long be sidestepped: there is no political solution to the problems caused by politics.

Go ye and read of it, as per usual. I gotta say, I’m rather proud of my closing ‘graph, which I think elegantly poses the ultimate question of not just this, but every age since American’s Founding in which men have yearned to live free and unfettered by the chains of government tyranny.

Update! Just received email notification that TL issued the post a “Like,” because of course he did. Thanks, old friend; I might have come off all flippant about it just then, but it really does mean a lot to me, all my kidding around aside.

Monday’s Eyrie effort is now online and in full effect, in which we cover EV mandates, whether or not they’re actually necessary, and what might explain the frenetic push for their adoption, as well as a certain 800-pound gorilla in the room that no one wants to talk about. As is always the case, it assuredly is NOT what they tell us it is. A wee dram of a taste:

EVs: who needs ‘em?
Nobody, really. But then, you have to understand what the undisclosed function of the useless toys is: bolstering the smarmy self-righteousness of urban “liberals,” granting them permission to endlessly congratulate themselves for how deeply, deeply concerned they are about “saving the environment.”

Read, subscribe, comment, etc. Y’all know wassup by now.