Almost but not quite

Now SWEEPING the nation!

Posted on March 15, 2023March 15, 2023 by Mike

The greatest television show ever created. Well, excepting Firefly, of course.

In the new doc “Anatomy of a Hoax” The Jussie Smollett faked story:

The Osundairo Brother detail what really was Jussie’s plan and why.

They also say they still feel ‘betrayed’ by his hate crime lies
🔗: https://t.co/2W96GU0Zux pic.twitter.com/ezGeA8xXix

— Glock Topickz (@Glock_Topickz)

March 14, 2023

As Ace notes, “Apparently the Osundairo brothers are amusing hosts and naturals on camera.” They are indeed—quite personable, glib, and just damned funny as all hell, as the above vid amply demonstrates. Mo’ bettah:

Brothers in Jussie Smollett hoax break silence, say actor wanted to be ‘poster child for activism’
Abimbola “Bola” and Olabinjo “Ola” Osundairo speak to media for the first time in ‘Jussie Smollett: Anatomy of a Hoax,’ streaming now on Fox Nation

Early in the morning hours of a polar vortex in January 2019, FOX’s “Empire” actor Jussie Smollett claimed two White supremacist Trump supporters attacked him near his Chicago apartment in a racially-motivated hate crime that would soon incite outrage from activists and the media.

It’s the “hate crime” that dominated headlines, but facts proved none of it was true.

In December 2021, the now-40-year-old actor and singer was convicted of five felony counts of disorderly conduct. One year ago, he was sentenced in March 2022 to 150 days in county jail.

Forgive me for saying so, but ol’ Juisseh (hey, that’s the way I’ve always pronounced it, just ’cause I think it’s funnier that way, no other reason) being both black and a rump-ranger, I have a hard time picturing jail as any kind of real hardship for him. A deee-luxe vacation, a rest-cure, more like.

Yes, I know, I know, I’m a homophobic racist bigoted racist H8RRRR.

I DENOUNCE MYSELF…!!!

I DID mention the Osundairos are quite personable and funny, right? Why yes, I believe I did at that.

“You know Eddie Johnson [former Chicago Police Superintendent] said he could tell in the footage that you guys are Black, right?” an off-camera interviewer asked the brothers.

“Really?” Ola asked. “I feel like he’s just saying that… we were in character the whole time.”

“So you think you guys are believable White supremacists?” the interviewer pressed.

“One hundred percent! Look at me,” Bola laughed. Chicago Police released images of the incident shortly after it took place, but Johnson said the initially released image of two silhouettes walking shoulder-to-shoulder down the snowy Chicago street was not the best image they had at the time.

Watch the vid, read it all. Trust me, you’ll be glad you did.

Update! In comments, Aesop says: “Chapelle dealt with the whole incident better in 3½ minutes than the entire woketarded media did in 3½ months, and distilled that @$$hole’s entire career down to a single punchline.” And he’s right about that.

Many thanks for that gem of a find, Aesop.

Auto-escalation

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by Mike

Fear not, America: with “Gunner” Joe Bribem on the job, we’re in the best possible hands. If his steady, sure-handed “leadership” can’t see us all safely through this wartime crisis, then no one can.

BREAKING: Russia Goes Kinetic With U.S. in Skies Over the Black Sea, and the USAF Response Is Unbelievable

The conflict between the U.S. and Russia has just gone kinetic. At least, that is what the first reports are saying out of the U.S. government. But the response is emblematic of how woke the U.S. military has gotten.

Initial reports said that the Russians had “intercepted” a U.S. Reaper drone over the Black Sea. Now, the latest report has it that Russia “collided” with a Reaper drone over the Black Sea. Expect that story to change, as first reports are always wrong.

Here’s what we are being told at this moment, however. CBS News was first out of the gate with news that, indeed, the drone — which can be armed to the hilt — had suffered a “collision” with the Russian military jet.

A Russian Su-27 fighter jet collided with an American MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, the U.S. military’s European Command said. U.S. forces brought down the drone in international waters, European Command said, and the White House called the Russian plane’s intercept of the unmanned aircraft “reckless.”

“Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” U.S. Air Force General James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, said in a statement.

The response from the Pentagon’s Hecker went thusly: “This unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash.” But wait, it got worse.

Global News reported on the Pentagon’s press release about the incident.

In a press release, the U.S. Air Force said that at 2 a.m. Eastern (7 a.m. local time) a Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of the U.S.’s MQ-9 aircraft, which conducts intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It was accompanied by a second Su-27 that wasn’t involved in the collision but that U.S. officials said was also involved in “unsafe” conduct.

“Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner,” the U.S. release said (emphasis added).

If, in fact, things are getting directly kinetic between the U.S. and Russia over the heightened tensions over the Ukraine war, environmental degradation, though important, is the least of our problems.

Gee, I certainly do hope the madman Putin won’t decide to lob a small-to-medium yield nuke right dead-center onto Mordor On The Potomac, atomizing every last sewer-crawling bureaucrat, government “expert,” cretinous career politican, predatory melanin-enhanced gangbanger, and meddlesome FederalGovCo oxygen-thief therein. Why, that would be just awful. Whatever would we do without all those fine, underpaid, hard-working public servants to watch over and protect us?

Please, Mr Putin, sir, don’t throw us into dat br’ar patch, sir. PLEASE don’t.

As I said, though, not to worry; “Gunner” Joe has the situation well in hand, even if it should come to nooklear com-bat toe to toe with the Russkies. He settled their hash but good once, he can do it again.

MajKongsLastRide

No redress, no recourse

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by Mike

In Amerika v2.0, we are well past the point of no return. Which leaves us with only the one question left to be answered.

In the movie The Untouchables, written by David Mamet and directed by Brian De Palma, a streetwise Irish cop named Malone tries to educate a starry-eyed fed named Eliot Ness in the ways of Chicago justice when up against an implacable, deadly opponent like Al Capone. The scene has become justly famous for this line: ““He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

But for our purposes here, what even more important is the exchange between Sean Connery and Kevin Costner that immediately precedes it:

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don’t know how to get him.

Malone: [talking privately in a church] You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Everything within the law.

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people Mr. Ness you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? In a battle between good and evil, with the law having gone over to the side of evil—as it had in the gangland Chicago of the 1920s and ’30s—what are the good guys prepared to do? With the country-as-founded now being shot out from underneath us on a near-daily basis, how do concerned citizens fight back?

Read this—”Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition” from something called the Electoral Integrity Project and weep…

“Integrity,” heh. It is to laugh. And also, weep. “Electoral Integrity” is the very LAST thing these shitweasels really want, or for the matter of it would ever even tolerate.

Some of their thoughts:

The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous. We face a period of contestation stretching from the first day a ballot is cast in mid-September until January 20. The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on “election night” as officials count mail-in ballots. This period of uncertainty provides opportunities for an unscrupulous candidate to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the process and to set up an unprecedented assault on the outcome. Campaigns, parties, the press and the public must be educated to adjust expectations starting immediately.

A determined campaign has opportunity to contest the election into January 2021. We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides. President Trump, the incumbent, will very likely use the executive branch to aid his campaign strategy, including through the Department of Justice. We assess that there is a chance the president will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions – including illegal actions – to defy the popular vote.

“Dangerous” it is for sure. One instant solution is to restore Election Night to its one-day, one-vote place in the proper scheme of things. And note for the record that “an unscrupulous candidate” describes Mrs. Clinton’s churlish and criminal response to her loss in 2016 far better than it does Trump’s. As for defying the popular vote, so what? That vote means nothing until the Left finally passes its National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and thus eliminates the Electoral College by unconstitutional means.

Some of their solutions:

Plan for a contested election. If there is a crisis, events will unfold quickly, and sleep-deprived leaders will be asked to make consequential decisions quickly. Thinking through options now will help to ensure better decisions. Approach this as a political battle, not just a legal battle. In the event of electoral contestation, sustained political mobilization will likely be crucial for ensuring transition integrity. Dedicated staff and resources need to be in place at least through the end of January.

Address the two biggest threats head on: lies about “voter fraud” and escalating violence. Voting fraud is virtually non-existent, but Trump lies about it to create a narrative designed to politically mobilize his base and to create the basis for contesting the results should he lose. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.

Except that politically mobilized Trump supporters didn’t take up arms on Jan. 6, and as for “violence,” the patsy protesters had nothing on the Antifa and Black Lives Matters thugs during the Summer of Floyd of blessed but rapidly fading memory, his work on earth here now done.

And that, as it turned out, was perhaps their biggest mistake. As did Trump himself, they badly underestimated not only the fanatical zeal of their Swamp-dwelling adversaries, but also just how deeply, thoroughly rotten the whole system itself had by then become. It turned out to be their undoing, and who really even knows how many of them are even now languishing in the Amerikan Gulag as a result of that incalculably-costly “misunderestimation.”

Yet most of us continue to believe in America; like the movie version of Eliot Ness, we’ve sworn to do “everything within the law” to try and right the ship of state before, like all previous democracies, it sinks beneath the waves of historical reality. As I often say about the imported “critical theory” Left, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. They won’t give up the fight until one of us is dead.

So then what are you prepared to do?

Not near enough, apparently. Or not yet, at any rate. But we shall see about all that soon enough, I reckon.

Handsome is as handsome does

Posted on March 11, 2023March 11, 2023 by Mike

Naomi Wolfe offers a handsome apology, in full and humble acknowledgement of allowing herself to be played for a stupe.

Dear Conservatives, I Apologize
My “Team” was Taken in By Full-Spectrum Propaganda

The proximate cause of this letter of apology is the airing, two nights ago, of excerpts from tens of thousands of hours of security camera footage from the United States Capitol taken on Jan 6, 2021. The footage was released by House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson [https://www.axios.com/2023/03/08/mccarthy-defends-jan-6-footage-tucker-carlson-fox-news].

While “fact-checkers” state that it is “misinformation” to claim that Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi was in charge of Capitol Police on that day [https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2021/07/27/fact-check-nancy-pelosi-isnt-in-charge-capitol-police/8082088002/], the fact is that the USCP is under the oversight of Congress, according to — the United States Capitol Police: [https://www.uscp.gov/the-department/oversight].

This would be the same Congress that convened the January 6 Committee subsequently, and that used millions of dollars in taxpayer money to turn that horrible day, and that tragic event, into a message point that would be used to tar a former President as a would-be terrorist, and to smear all Republicans, by association, as “insurrectionists,” or as insurrectionists’ sympathizers and fellow-travelers.

Let’s be clear and upfront about something here: it was indeed horrible and tragic, but not at all for the risibly-dishonest reasons many diehard Swamp critters still lamely assert. FACT: four patriotic, blameless Americans were wantonly murdered by the authorities, many others beaten and otherwise physically abused, for the “crime” of daring to exercise their First Amendment right to peaceably assemble to seek redress of perfectly and patently legitimate grievances. Horrible, tragic? You betcher. Alas for us all, it’s a lot more than just those two things alone.

There is no way for anyone thoughtful, even if he or she is a lifelong Democrat, not to notice that Sen Chuck Schumer did not say to the world that the footage that Mr Carlson aired was not real. Rather, he warned that it was “shameful” for Fox to allow us to see it. The Guardian characterized Mr Carlson’s and Fox News’ sin, weirdly, as “Over-Use” of Jan 6 footage. Isn’t the press supposed to want full transparency for all public interest events? [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/live/2023/mar/07/biden-medicare-taxes-desantis-trump-2024-live-updates] How can you “over-use” real footage of events of national relevance?

Sen Mitch McConnell (R-KY), Senate minority leader, did not say the video on Fox News was fake or doctored. He said, rather, that it was “a mistake” to depart from the views of the events held by the chief of the Capitol Police. This is a statement from McConnell about orthodoxy — not a statement about a specific truth or untruth. [https://www.c-span.org/video/?c5060662/senator-mcconnell-calls-tucker-carlsons-depiction-january-6-attack-mistake]

I don’t agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos as depicting “mostly peaceful chaos.”[https://thehill.com/homenews/media/3887103-tucker-carlson-shows-the-first-of-his-jan-6-footage-calls-it-mostly-peaceful-chaos/] I do think it is a mistake to downplay how serious it is when a legislative institution suffers a security breach of any kind, however that came to be.

But you don’t have to agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to believe, as I do, that he engaged in valuable journalism simply by airing the footage that was given to him.

And remember, by law that footage belongs to us — it is a public record, and all public records literally belong to the American people. “In a democracy, records belong to the people,” explains the National Archives. [https://www.archives.gov/publications/general-info-leaflets/1-about-archives.html]

You don’t have to agree with Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to notice the latest hypocrisy by the Left. My acquaintance and personal hero Daniel Ellsberg was rightly lionized by the Left for having illegally leaked the Pentagon Papers. The New York Times was rightly applauded for having run this leaked material in 1971. [https://www.mtsu.edu/first-amendment/article/1435/daniel-ellsberg].

I do not see how Mr Carlson’s airing of video material of national significance that the current government would prefer to keep hidden, or Fox News’ support for its disclosure to the public, is any different from that famous case of disclosure of inside information of public importance.

You don’t have to agree with Mr Carlson’s interpretation of the videos, to conclude that the Democrats in leadership, for their own part, have cherry-picked, hyped, spun, and in some ways appear to have lied about, aspects of January 6, turning a tragedy for the nation into a politicized talking point aimed at discrediting half of our electorate.

Another thing to be clear and upfront about, and to bear closely in mind: Wolf—like Tulsi Gabbard—remains a “liberal” at heart, which can come as no big surprise in light of her chequered past as an “advisor” to both Bill “The Creep” Clinton and Albert “Arnold The Pig” Algore when they, respectively, were running for president. That said, although still not by any means what you’d call red-pilled, she’s at least moving in the right direction for now. And for that, as I’ve argued several times about Gabbard as well, she should be applauded and encouraged, not condemned…at least until True Patriots begin the process of, shall we say, servicing targets, anyway.

The Passion of Big Burly Mike

Posted on March 10, 2023 by Mike

Can you spot the bear-trap the writer of this piece blithely waving away the scarifying possibility of Moochelle running for Prexy in ’24 gets snagged in?

Michelle Obama Is Not Coming to Save the Democrats

I love a good conspiracy theory. Aliens, ancient builders, Bigfoot—I will absolutely click on that headline and read the latest conspiracy, no matter how fanciful or ludicrous. Everyone has a harmless personal foible, right? And in the times we live in now, shadowy government conspiracies and UFOs are no longer just for “The X Files.”

My favorite new conspiracy theory goes like this: the Democrats know they are in big trouble for 2024. They have this addled, dementia-riddled, diaper-wearing octogenarian and his dreadful wife occupying the White House, and he’s become an embarrassment. These days he makes three to four hair-curling, cringey gaffes per week, falls up the stairs to Air Force One every time he tries to trot up them to project American strength and vigor, and has been credibly accused of passing gas in front of the Queen Consort of England. But Democrats can’t abandon him before the primaries because, well, Kamala. So Biden will announce he is running again but will withdraw sometime around the Democratic National Convention so as to clear the presidential field for…

Michelle Obama.

The stench of desperation is hilarious, isn’t it? That’s how bad the field of Democratic presidential prospects is. Democrats must be pretty frantic for someone to have conjured up and floated this rumor. A recent poll indicated 72 percent of Americans don’t want Biden to run again in 2024. Biden will be 82 shortly after the 2024 election. Is this Michelle Obama rumor supposed to give Democrats hope? To keep them from abandoning Biden because just wait, Michelle is waiting in the wings to save their party from Bad Orange Man, or even worse, Ron DeSantis?

Please. I’ll believe aliens taught Bigfoot how to make crop circles in Peru before I buy this one. Michelle Obama hates politics, hates voters, and hates Washington D.C., and not necessarily in that order.

I don’t believe it for a millisecond. Michelle Obama is living her best life right now, the life she has always wanted and felt that she deserved (if her husband hadn’t been a community organizer obsessed with politics who didn’t make any money and forced her to support the family). She’s completely free of the restraint of politics. Now she can say whatever she wants about people she used to have to pretend to like. Polls name her consistently as the most admired woman in America. You think she’s giving any of that up to schmooze and take photos with donors, or hit the campaign trail in Iowa, or spend the night in one-star hotels in Pennsylvania? Not likely.

Maybe so, maybe not. But all the well-known trappings of fame, wealth, and power aside, it would be best not to leave out of our calculations the overwhelming allure of the one enticement that might prove powerful enough to turn even Burly Mike’s big ugly head, creating a 180 degree shift in whatever passes for “thinking” therein, expressible thusly: First Black Female President In US History.

Telltale timeline

Posted on March 9, 2023 by Mike

Commenter regitiger over at Sundance’s hang gets down to the real nitty-gritty.

I think most (not all, but a large number ) of people are totally missing what happened…and why this happened on jan 6.

I am going to try my best to outline the events that day…blast past the commonly held assumptions and get right down to the core corruption.

I will present this as a series of questions and answers.

q1: how do you prevent congress from delaying the certification of state electoral votes?

a: it requires a crisis. A crisis that creates an “emergency”…An “emergency” that invokes special house rules.

facts: remember, carefully…focus please…remember…just moments..literally 3 minutes before two representatives issued a vote for motions to suspend the certification the House members were “informed” by capitol police and other “agents” that a protest was about to breach the chambers. It was at this time that key people: pence, pelosi, schumer, mcconnell can be seen being walked out and escorted from the chamber. This effectively halted the Entire Chamber Process.

q2: why was it necessary to halt the chamber process

a2: the crisis was created to eliminate the motion challenges to halt the certification and to begin voting to look into voting irregularities and fraud.

facts: the two motions were completely legal and constitutional under at least two constitutionally recognized procedures…procedures that would REQUIRE the house to pause the certification and then vote to determine whether the motions of suspend could move forward.

q3: what was so important to refuse this motion and the subsequent votes to suspend the electoral certification

a3: it was important to remove that process entirely and continue the fraud and certify the fraud with no detractors on record. This effectively gives no standing for a scotus ruling appeal! understand this. If those two motions, even just one had successfully been voted EVEN IF THE MOTIONS were DENIED IN VOTE, this gives those who presented them with STANDING FOR A CONSTITUTIONAL LEGAL ARGUMENT BEFORE SCOTUS. Understand this.

q4: could this have been done some other way other than creating a crisis/protest?

a4: unlikely…In order to prevent those two motions, requires that speaker of the house, minority leaders, and the president of the congress (vice president of the united states: pence), to NOT BE PRESENT IN THE CHAMBERS. Once the capitol police and other “law enforcements agents” informed the speaker and these three other individuals, pelosi UNILATERALLY UNDER EMERGENCY RULES, suspended the business of the congress. This protest was necessary ..the crisis was created..because there is no other way to suspend the business of certification UNILATERALLY. By creating a crisis…invokes emergency procedures. No other circumstances other than war or mass simultaneous explosive diaahrea can create such unilateral speaker delivered suspension of the certification.

q5: Why did the motions, once that the speaker RECONVENED congress, move forward back again to the floor for votes? Why were members dissallowed to even consider putting forward ANY motions to the floor in when the chamber business was reopened?

a5: the speaker initiated the NEW sessions under special emergency rules. These rules abandon and make it clear that the ONLY purpose of the new session was to EXPEDITE the certification and dismiss all prior regular session procedural rules. This is why those two motions to table votes to consider a debate and pause to the certifications of state vote electors never happened later that evening when the house business was reconvened!

q6: Other than new rules, emergency rules, what other peculiar things occurred when the speaker reconvened?

a6: members were allowed to “vote” in proxy…remotely…not being present…(you can use your imagination about what conditions were placed on ALL members during this time to prevent anyone from “getting out of line”. Also clearly, it was at THIS NEW SESSION that VP Pence, President of Congress, would also have no ability to even consider pausing the electoral certification…because there was no motions of disagreements on the matter. So in a technical legal claim, he is correct that he had no constitutional authority to address any issues of fraud or doubts about electoral irregularities. But this completely dismisses the FACT that congress created rules in this crisis/emergency that never allowed them to be floored!

understand what happened in jan 6…don’t get hung up on viking impostors, stolen pelosi computers, podium heists, and complicit capitol police.

understand the process and what happened and what WAS NOT ALLOWED TO HAPPEN.

this was a coup….it was a very organized and carefully planned coup. VP Pence without a doubt as well as most members of the house were quite aware of how the certification was going to be MANAGED.

it would require new rules to prevent the debate clause from occurring!

new rules that ONLY AN EMERGENCY CRISIS COULD CREATE!

so they created an emergency.

noting: I understand why many people have great interest in debunking the j6 event…I get that. I think it is important to dissect and examine the events of that day.

but please…step back and understand WHY these things happened…examine the chain of events in congress…why those two motions that would have at least paused the certification THAT WOULD GIVE VP PENCE THE CONSTITUTIONALLY RECOGNIZED POWER TO MOVE TO SUSPEND THE ELECTORAL CERTIFICATION AND THEN EXAMINE THE IRREGULARITIES AND CLAIMS OF FRAUD!

at the very center of this coup stands Pence…the same individual who also spoiled President Trump’s first opportunities in the earlies hours of his Presidency just 4 years prior, when he created and facilitated the removal of LTGEN Flynn. I will not spend much time on this thread explaining why LTGEN Flynn was so important to President Trump and why the IC was so afraid he would have advisory power to the President. That I will leave for another day, another time. But understand this clearly: MIKE PENCE WAS AND IS WORKING FOR THE MOST CORRUPT CRIMINAL TREASONOUS PEOPLE IN GOVERNMENT.

protip: if you really want to get a true understanding of this matter videos of protesters walking in the capitol is not going to address them. Actual video and time line records of events and the specific actions taken by the speaker just moments before TWO MAJOR ELECTORAL ALTERING MOTIONS WERE ABOUT TO BE FLOORED. This crisis was developed just in time with a precise coordination to prevent those two motions to be entered into the chamber record. The two motions do not exist. The emergency powers established in the new session made sure they never could be entered. The emergency powers could never happen without a crisis…

I tried to find a way to just run an excerpt instead of lifting the thing wholesale, but couldn’t without disrupting and diluting it too badly for it to make any kind of sense. Seeing as how I think Tucker’s J6 expose amounts to one of the most important acts of True Journalism that’s occurred in my lifetime, I offer no apology for making that call. This needs, nay demands, the widest exposure we can possibly give it; as a blogger of twenty-plus years’ standing, I am pleased and proud to make whatever little contribution I can to this effort.

Yes, it really is, as I said yesterday, a Big Fuckin’ Deal.

Dr (The) Science gets told

Posted on March 4, 2023March 4, 2023 by Mike

GOD, how I love this.

I met this fun lady at CPAC today. Her name is Melissa Rein Lively. Tonight she met Fauci in Washington DC and took this incredible picture with him.

Everyone is jealous that they didn’t get to do it! 😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/1Hf0LxDwpY

— Ada Lluch 🇪🇸 (@ada_lluch)

March 4, 2023

More at GP.

Last night Arizona activist Melissa Lively and filmmaker Eric Strause were dining in Washington DC when Dr. Tony Fauci entered the restaurant with two bodyguards. It is not clear at this point if these were government-funded bodyguards but they reportedly did have badges.

Melissa posed for a photo with Dr. Fauci and gave him some much-needed feedback. She flipped him the bird.

On Saturday The Gateway Pundit contacted Eric and Melissa. Eric told us they were at the restaurant when Dr. Fauci walked in. No doubt, Fauci was expecting a standing ovation, instead he received the much-deserved feedback. According to Eric, Fauci’s bodyguards told him this was not the place for showing their objection to Fauci’s policies. Eric told the bodyguard, “I was not able to attend my father’s funeral because of this man!” Eric told security, “My father could not take Ivermectin because of this guy!”

Three years after the start of the pandemic we now see that the COVID-19 virus was made in a Wuhan lab funded by Dr. Fauci. Then he bribed scientists to not rat him out.

Today we also understand that Fauci’s policies ruined the economy, ruined business owners, ruined child development, destroyed our personal liberties, and ruined millions of lives.

It’s about time Fauci got a little feedback.

To say the absolute least, yeah; if you ask me, it’s about time the poisonous little homunculus got a damned sight more than just a little momentary discomfort in a public place. He of right ought to be looking at a long stretch in Marion or Joliet, and in a better, more just world he would be. Personally, I prefer he be either drawn and quartered or hung by the neck until dead, dead, DEAD for his heinous crimes. But what the hell, noncorporeal humiliation isn’t a bad first step down the winding, interminable road to justice—particularly since it’s all we’re ever going to get from TPTB, and we all know it is.

Until such time, at any rate, as We The People take matters into our own hands and begin dealing out some true justice at long, long last, not just to Fraudci but to all of his fellow Deep State malefactors as well. Meanwhile, the Hawaiian Good Luck Sign is just going to have to suffice.

State of (perpetual un)readiness

Posted on March 2, 2023March 2, 2023 by Mike

PopMech takes a look at yet another disastrous multi-billion-dollar boondoggle from the once-mighty US military—a bigger one, probably, than even the F35 Turducken.

How the World’s Greatest Aircraft Carrier Became a $13 Billion Fiasco

Can the military save the USS Gerald R. Ford?

Wrong question. The real question is: should it?

The late 20th century was a time of supreme American confidence and rapid innovation. The Cold War was drawing to a close, the digital age was around the corner, and the Pentagon saw an opportunity to capitalize on peacetime and begin preparing for future conflict. With few diplomatic or military distractions, the United States ushered in a revolution in military technology.

Out of that boom period came ambitions for a new class of aircraft carrier headlined by the transformational USS Gerald R. Ford, a ship featuring an expanded flight deck, a boosted power plant, and support for almost two dozen emergent technologies. Expectations were high. The Ford’s nuclear reactor and propulsion system would triple the electrical power of the preceding Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Its state-of-the-art weapons elevators would move 20,000 pounds of munitions at speeds of 150 feet per minute compared with the Nimitz‘s speed of 100 feet per minute. Its new launch-and-recovery system would be able to handle 270 planes in a single day. From bow to stern, the ship’s innovations—designed to save time, costs, and crew—would revolutionize the way the U.S. military built and used carriers. The Ford would be a symbol of American superiority, one that would project power to American adversaries for five decades of dependable service.

Well, they got the “transformational” bit right, anyway; the Ford definitely IS that. It’s just that it’s part of a decidedly wrong-way transformation: from a capable, powerful military—along with fighters that can’t fight; tanks that can’t tank; rifles more prone to jamming than a pimply, teenaged Stevie Vai wannabe at Sam Ash on a Saturday afternoon; and battalions of mincing, simpering dick-choppers who only signed up so they could get their bulbous naughty parts lopped off by an Army surgeon for free—into a hapless, bumbling, incompetent one.

“There was this thinking of, ‘We are so far ahead of everyone else that we can afford to take a strategic pause and take risks on our acquisition and try new and untested technology,’” says Eric Wertheim, a defense analyst and expert with the U.S. Naval Institute, of the nation’s mindset after the Cold War. “And there was this feeling that the rest of the world is at least 20 years behind us.”

But after two decades of development and delays, the audacity that conceived the Ford seemed to usher its doom. Expected to save the military $4 billion during its life span, the Ford has actually cost billions more than initial estimates. First expected to deploy in 2018, it has been projected to deploy as far out as 2024. When the ship reached the Navy after construction, it was already two years behind schedule, with work outstanding on thousands of items. In 2015, Sen. John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy aviator, called packing all that tech onto the Ford “the original sin” that damaged the program.

Even the Navy’s top officer acknowledged the problems that have plagued the carrier. “We had 23 new technologies on [the USS Gerald R. Ford] which, quite frankly, increased the risk of delivery on time and cost right from the get-go,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday at a virtual talk before the Navy League’s 2021 Sea Air Space exposition. “And I think industry’s in full agreement with this: We really shouldn’t introduce more than maybe one or two new technologies on any complex platform like that, in order to keep risk at a manageable level.”

Meanwhile, naval advances by U.S. adversaries have added urgency to the Ford’s troubleshooting. The ship’s critics point to its expanding budget and timetable as evidence that the U.S. military should reconsider developing massive nuclear carriers as a foundational element of its naval program. Military advisor Norman Polmar points out that America’s most recent conflicts in the Middle East didn’t even use the Nimitz class to full capacity. “Look what we did in Iraq,” he says. “We launched [just] 20 or 30 strikes a day from a carrier that has 70 airplanes.” And Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has questioned whether the Ford’s price tag justifies its utility. During a 2021 Brookings Institution discussion, Smith asked if there are other ways “to get unmanned systems closer to the fight that don’t cost $12 billion.”

All part and parcel of the truism that generals and admirals are always preparing to fight the last war, in this case WW2. Out of the myriad mistakes, flaws, and failures of the Ford, this one remains the most jaw-dropping to me.

One standout feature of the Ford—albeit a troublesome one—is its state-of-the-art Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG). Prior to Ford, American carriers used a hydraulic arresting system to slow and stop landing aircraft, but the AAG uses an electric engine and a water twister to accommodate a broader range of aircraft—including unmanned aerial vehicles. Engineering and manufacturing of the AAG began in 2005, with 2009 the targeted end date. But a 2016 Pentagon Inspector General report noted that developmental testing for the AAG would continue through 2018; the system still hadn’t proved capable or safe enough to test on the Ford. Between 2009 and 2012, the AAG’s power conditioning system failed across multiple tests, and both its inverter system and cable shock absorber required redesigns. The setbacks ballooned the AAG’s development cost from $143 million to more than $1 billion, according to a report from Sen. McCain’s office.

(Now-retired Navy captain Talbot) Manvel says he resisted AAG on the Ford as early as 1998, wanting to push it onto the subsequent ships in the class after its design had matured. He had his way until Rumsfeld stepped in with his transformational vision. “This was transformation run amok,” Manvel says.

That it surely was, sir. Which, once the temptation of it is yielded to, is what usually tends to happen.

It all makes for a depressing read for anyone who grew up believing that the American war machine was nigh-invincible, without Earthly peer or parallel amongst its adversary nation-states. That’s simply no longer the case, if it ever really was. Which, given certain harsh realities of life on this here planet, it almost certainly wasn’t.

Democracy, yes?

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike

“Democracy,” NO.

The Façade of Democracy
Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies.
It appears that the definition of “democracy” is rather fluid. In fact, it doesn’t really mean democracy at all. Rather, it is an authoritarian and undemocratic term used by self-interested politicians to defend and promote their own desired outcomes. Last time I checked, violent coup d’état wasn’t emblematic of “democracy.”

The Democratic Party and even many RINOs assign the same undemocratic meaning to their use of the term “democracy” in the United States.

The United States supported the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, which has been called a “Revolution of Dignity.” But American protesters on January 6, 2021, who were overwhelmingly peaceful—the only murder was committed by a Capitol police officer, who shot an unarmed female protestor named Ashli Babbitt—were called “insurrectionists.”

In contrast, cries of voter fraud in the Ukrainian elections of 2004 were met with serious concern by the U.S government. The mass protests were encouraged and supported and the overturning of the Ukrainian election results heralded as a win for “democracy.”

Cries of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election were summarily denounced and dismissed. The United States rushed to declare the 2004 election results in Ukraine illegitimate. The United States rushed to declare the U.S. presidential election in 2020 the most free and fair in our history.

Is America even a democracy?

Of course not; it was never supposed to be, as everyone here will know full well. The Founders, hallowed be their names, hated and feared democracy as nothing more than “mob rule,” and as time has proven beyond all debate, they were perfectly correct to shun it as they did. It amounts to yet another confirmation of their unimpeachable wisdom, which we have ignored to our own profound detriment.

Just as Democrats had no regard for our own election results in 2016, they had no regard for the election results in Ukraine, when they successfully ousted Yanukovych.

The lifeblood of a democracy is free speech and the general diffusion of knowledge, which ensures the voter is informed. Yet the Democratic Party and the FBI colluded with social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the 2020 election and falsely dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.” Was this democratic?

The Democrats continue to pursue their witch hunt against former President Trump in hopes of ultimately preventing him from running for re-election. This effort too is justified with claims of “defending” or “protecting” democracy.

Democracy is a façade in America and when the term is thrown around by Democrats its new meaning is tyranny.

Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies. Democracy is tantamount to destruction and both Ukraine and America are being destroyed. Democracy is under attack; in the name of protecting democracy, of course.

If Democrats succeed in protecting democracy in America, we won’t have any democracy at all.

Well, DUH. For tyrants such as they, that’s a feature, not a bug. For us as well, really, just not in quite the same way or for the same reasons.

Who owns what

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Mike

Ace steps in it, big-time.

Mike Lindell says he will sue Kevin McCarthy for sharing the January 6th video only with Tucker Carlson. He wants a peek too.

My Pillow CEO Mike Lindell says he plans to sue Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) for providing Fox News host Tucker Carlson with exclusive access to footage from the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.Lindell told Steve Bannon’s “War Room” podcast on Thursday that his streaming platform Lindell-TV plans to sue McCarthy, claiming the Speaker violated the First Amendment’s freedom of the press provision and the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause.

The Trump ally said Lindell-TV is “injured by not having access” to the tapes and that the Speaker’s decision represented discrimination.

You know, there is some slight danger that the video could reveal something like camera placements which could, possibly, “compromise security.” It’s laughable to think that a professional journalist like Tucker Carlson wouldn’t be sensitive to that and redact frames that would expose that. Which makes the leftwing scaremongering about it — the claims that Tucker Carlson is going to, and they did claim this, actively assist “terrorists” to breach the Capitol “again” — completely risible.

But the possibility does exist. So you I can understand McCarthy wanting to restrict the release to someone who he can count on to avoid releasing anything that might be a security problem, and not just to anyone and everyone.

I can also understand McCarthy doing what every politician does: Delivering a friendly news outlet an exclusive scoop.

So what is Mike Lindell doing?

Doesn’t matter much what he might think he’s doing; “security,” my baggy white ass. “Camera placement,” forsooth? You MUST be joking. They’re on every damned street corner, hung from buildings, traffic signals, billboards, lampposts, and over dead-end alleyways not just throughout Mordor On The Potomac but in every half-assed urban hellscape across the blighted plain by now.

Bottom-line fact: those cameras were bought, installed, and maintained at whose expense again, now? Oh, that’s right: the taxpayers, that’s whose. Therefore, those cameras and anything captured by them of right ought to be the rightful property of said taxpayers, and Swamp Critter Kevin owes them a full and unrestricted public release of ALL the footage they paid for—full stop, end of fucking story.

Don’t anyone be holding their breath waiting for any such thing, of course; it ain’t gonna happen. There’s much too much ugly J6 evidence incriminating the Deep State there, and we all damned well know it.

Encouraging, if true

Posted on February 18, 2023February 18, 2023 by Mike

Is this something? Or no?

Marines Catch FBI Trying to Sabotage Substation in Idaho, and Kill Them.

Over the last three months, at least nine substations have been attacked in North Carolina, Washington, and Oregon, depriving tens of thousands of people of power, sometimes for several days. Following those attacks, the FBI posted a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest of whoever carried out twin attacks in Moore and Randolph Counties, N.C.

The feds also timidly implicated Trump supporters who oppose the LGBTQ community because the saboteurs struck cities hosting trans-friendly events.

The military now says the FBI should have put the 250K bounty on itself, for all signs suggest corrupt agents perpetrated the substation mishaps.

According to our source, the FBI’s “5th Column,” a growing number of agents working against Merrick Garland and his abhorrent Department of Justice, told Gen. Smith’s office that rogue agents were planning to disable a “power station near Boise” during the Super Bowl, but the tipster didn’t know which substation would be struck. And since Boise, a city with 250,000 residents, and its suburbs had numerous substations, Gen. Smith wanted specifics before committing his Marines to what could have been a wild goose chase. Such an attack would undeniably have made people angry and left thousands without electricity on a frigid night. Although some earlier “5th Column” tips yielded fruitful intelligence—and led to Deep State arrests—others were a bust, a waste of time and resources.

By Super Bowl Sunday kickoff, a Marine reconnaissance platoon had already arrived in Idaho and had scouted five distribution substations within a 30-mile radius of downtown Boise. They decided that anyone brazen enough to assault a utility while the sun still shone would choose a remote location with the sparsest nearby housing. But no such locale existed. The surrounding substations in Boise, Eagle, and Meridian were densely populated, with homes, in some cases, only meters away from buzzing and humming transformers. The platoon commander, unwilling to stretch his forces too thinly, divided the Marines into three 8-man teams, stationing them at substations with the least visible security—chain fences and such—and foliage the agents could use to avoid detection.

An hour into the game, the Eagles were beating Kansas City, but the Marines in Idaho saw no signs of FBI saboteurs. At halftime, as a demonic Rhianna dressed in a crimson bodysuit with a pentagram belt took the stage, an SUV sporting “Trump 2024” bumper stickers stopped beside the gate of the Columbia substation in Meridian. Four men, none of whom looked like feds, exited the truck and approached the locked gate. All wore MAGA regalia—hats and jackets endorsing Trump’s 2024 presidential bid—and one carried bolt cutters. Two had AR-15-style rifles slung across their shoulders.

The Marines challenged the quartet as it snapped the padlocked gate. The intruders were told to stand down and surrender, but one unshouldered his rifle, rocked the charging handle, and leveled the muzzle in the Marines’ direction. He never had a chance to pull the trigger.

The Marines, armed with suppressor-equipped M27 rifles, opened fire, killing the aggressors. Upon searching the bodies, the Marines found several magazines and a belt pouch of C4 explosives, though none of the dead had wallets or identification. They ran a make on the SUV’s VIN and plates, which traced back to a laundromat in Wilmington, Delaware.

The dead, our source said, were fingerprinted, and White Hats with access to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System matched two sets of prints to FBI agents assigned to an FBI office in Spokane, Washington.

So tell me: are we to consider the Marines to be the heroes of the story, or the White Hat FBI people? Oh, and if you’re wondering why you haven’t heard so much as Peep One about this incident from the “news” media, well…don’t.

“We can’t interrogate the dead, but at least now we know the FBI is complicit in the substation attacks,” our source said. “What’s worse, we’ve given the proof to MSM but they refuse to air it, and, yeah, this includes Fox, OANN, and Newsmax.”

Because of COURSE it does. No great surprise there, really. In Amerika v2.0, the revolution will NOT be televised.

Hilariouser and hilariouser

Posted on February 16, 2023February 16, 2023 by Mike

Spy balloons, schmy balloons.

The hot air of spy balloons

Originally, General Milley — who promised to warn Red China if we would sneak attack Beijing — and Biden tried to keep the balloon from the public.

They would have gotten away with it, if not for the meddling Billings Gazette publishing photos of the balloon snapped by that pesky Larry Mayer.

This weekend, it was like a shooting gallery as an embarrassed Pentagon fired 4 shots to take down 3 balloons. Top Guns, our pilots are not.

They fired their guns but the balloons kept a-comin.’ There wasn’t as many as there was a while ago.

One of targets was over Lake Huron, which is next to Michigan and its population of 178 people per square miles (24 times Montana’s density). As Woody Hayes once said in a quote I just made up, “Michiganders are expendable.”

Chairman Xi said the first balloon was his but not the other ones. Xi is right because “the call was coming from inside the house!”

These were our balloons. On August 2, 2019, Lisa Kaczke of the Sioux Falls Argus Leader in South Dakota, reported, “Pentagon launching drug surveillance balloons over Midwest.”

Ooooops. And then there’s this small revelation.

Bottlecap Balloon Brigade – an Illinois hobby group – claims its $13 weather balloon last pinged near Yukon on February 10 – hours before F-22 brought down UFO in SAME area with $400k missile

A mystery object shot down by U.S. fighter jets amid ongoing hysteria sparked by a Chinese spy balloon may have been a $12 inflatable launched by a hobby group in Illinois.

The Northern Illinois Bottlecap Balloon Brigade (NIBBB) reported one of its balloons ‘missing in action’ around the same location – and at the time time – a U.S. Air Force jet downed an unidentified object near Alaska using a $400,000 Sidewinder missile.

NIBBB said its ‘K9YO’ balloon last reported its location shortly before 1am GMT on Saturday, February 11 (8pm EST on February 10), near the coast of southwest Alaska.

Later on Saturday, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau declared an ‘unidentified object’ was downed over Canada’s Yukon territory, several hundred miles from K9YO’s last known location.

Modeling shared by NIBBB shows its balloon was headed in the direction of Yukon before it vanished – and opens up the possibility it was one of the suspicious objects down by the U.S. military.

Hey, fret not, people—Jao Bai-Deng’s crack team of “experts” is ON. THE. JOB—defending US airspace and protecting the American people from mysterious alien incursions!

A shocking revelation

Posted on February 12, 2023February 12, 2023 by Mike

Although the part I find most shocking might not be the one that comes immediately to mind.

In appearances on two Sunday talk shows, House Foreign Affairs Committee chair Rep. Mike McCaul (R-TX) said that China sending a high-altitude spy balloon across the continental United States “was an act of espionage in plain sight” and revealed that the balloon had a greater capability than satellites to gather and collect imagery, and left open the possibility that these signals and images were still transmitted to Beijing even though US intelligence officials claim that they “mitigated” the damage.

On “Sunday Morning Futures With Maria Bartiromo,” McCaul said:

“These spy balloons have great capability to gather and collect intelligence, I would argue moreso than even satellites in the sense that they’re flying at, say, 40 to 60 thousand feet above the earth. The imagery that they can capture and other intelligence data that I can’t be specific about can be captured and then transmitted back to the mothership in Beijing.

“This was an act of espionage in plain sight, plain view of the American people.”

So far, so “well, DUH.”

McCaul’s first statement in the interview was that one of his priorities as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee is to stop the export of American technology to China “that then goes into their most advanced weapons systems” (such as stealth technology, which CFIUS allowed to be sold to a company majority-owned by the Chinese government). Brennan asked if it made McCaul uncomfortable as a conservative “to have government try to control private business investment. How do you do that?” In his answer, we learn exactly why he’s comfortable doing that, and what a massive national security issue it is (emphasis mine):

Well, we have what’s called an entities list. The Department of Commerce had jurisdiction over the office within their — the Department of Defense has one.

We need to harmonize those, make it more security-focused. You know, capital flows is one issue, but technology exports into China that they use to turn — that maybe eventually turn against us, we have to stop doing that.

And I think we can do it by sectors. They do it by companies now. Obviously, they identified the six. I think, shockingly, when the balloon was recovered, it had American-made component parts in there with English on that. It was made — you know, parts made in America that were put on a spy balloon from China. I don’t think the American people accept that.

Bold in the original, not mine. And that’s where the part I found shocking comes in: “American-made component parts”? Really? Man, I had no idea we still made anything at all in this country anymore.

Grey matters

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Mike

Nee-grows are low-IQ, prone to violence, primitive, and have poor impulse control. Yes, it’s all YOUR fault, Kemosabe.

Black children living in poverty face increased instances of stress and trauma that can alter their brain development, a new study found.

Researchers found that increased stressors like economic hardship and systemic racism play a significant role for Black children and can lead to the development of mental health issues as they age, the study said.

The stressors contribute to Black children having less gray matter in their brains, a byproduct of absorbing “toxic stress.” The study defines the stressors as “prolonged exposure to adverse experiences” that lead to excessive stress hormones and “disrupt the immune and metabolic regulatory systems.”

In the study, researchers found that Black children often developed behavioral problems later in life such as PTSD, anxiety and depression. These children also were susceptible to drug and alcohol abuse and suicide attempts and were likely to commit violence, the study said.

Black children showed lower amygdala, hippocampus, and PFC gray matter volumes compared with White children.

Bold mine, to highlight the way CNN just might be reversing cause and effect here, because reasons.

The hippocampus plays a number of crucial roles, including regulating emotions, motivation, hormonal activity, autonomic activity, and memory formation.

Probably the most well recognized function of the hippocampus is its role in learning and memory. Although the exact mechanisms remain somewhat mysterious, it is believed that the hippocampus receives and consolidates information, allowing for establishment of long-term memories in a process known as long-term potentiation (LTP). It also plays a role in spatial memory, allowing us to keep track of where things are, as well as where they are in relation to each other; as such, it is instrumental in the formation of cognitive maps.

There have been numerous reports linking tumors, lesions, and epileptogenic activity in humans within the hippocampus to aggressive reactions, ranging from minor hostility to explosive acts of violence. The hippocampus’ role in mediating aggression and rage appears to be dependant on the region of the structure that is stimulated: activation of the temporal pole, i.e. the region closest to the amygdala, stimulates predatory or fight behavior; while activation of the region closest to the septal pole instead suppresses those impulses.

If any of that behavior sounds at all familiar to you, then you are definitely a RAYCISS™ for sure. Divemedic finds CNN’s conclusions a tad sketchy.

I was with them on the other evidence. Yes, there is evidence that black children are likely to be poor, have incarcerated parents, and lower intelligence. I agree. What they are essentially saying is that blacks are poor, less intelligent, and more likely to be criminals than are whites, and that there is a biological and physiological basis for this. That’s exactly what I have been saying for years. What I have a problem with is the conclusion that is unsupported by any evidence presented by this so-called study- that it’s white people’s fault.

This seems like junk science with no control group and little in the way of actual, well, science. When I was a teacher, had one of my students turned in an unsupported conclusion like that one, it likely would have received a poor grade.

Hey, if it wasn’t for junk science, shitlibs would have no science at all to back up their politically-motivated arguments.

This one’s for EP

Posted on January 27, 2023 by Mike

For reasons which shall soon become obvious.

Go Inside the New Tesla Semi: Features, Screens, Seats, and More

We visited Frito-Lay to find out what the Semi’s interior looks like, and how it drives and charges.

Expect no surprises, that’s my advice. Because it’s gonna shake out exactly as anybody who’s been following this EV foofaraw already knows it must.

Tesla fans with Ruffled feathers over perpetually delayed products can finally Lay off the brand. After much waiting (only four years late), the electric Tesla Semi’s first customer, PepsiCo, has taken delivery of its first examples of the big rig. The beverage and snack food conglomerate’s Frito-Lay division will take center stage in the company’s Tesla truck rollout plans at its Modesto, California, factory and distribution center, so we visited the upgraded 80-acre zero-emissions facility to experience the Tesla Semi firsthand and talk to its drivers about what it’s like to drive.

Frito-Lay’s 15 new Tesla Semis made their debut at an event celebrating the Modesto factory’s transformation into a zero-emissions pilot project for Pepsi as it aims to achieve zero emissions across its operations by 2040. The revamped facility is massive: 500,000 square feet dedicated to turning potatoes and corn into Lays, Ruffles, Doritos, Cheetos, and Fritos chips, powered by a massive onsite solar facility and local renewable energy projects, both backed by 2.7 MWh of onsite battery storage. Helping the factory distribute its snacks throughout the American west are three electric BYD 8Y yard tractors, six Peterbilt 220EV electric box trucks for local last-mile deliveries, 38 natural-gas powered Volvo VNL trucks for long-distance slogs, and of course, six (and counting) Tesla Semis, used for out-and-back trips across the region.

Making “three times the power of the average diesel semi,” according to a media-trained Tesla rep, the electric Tesla Semi effectively sports a lightly modified Model S Plaid tri-motor powertrain spun around backward. The Model S’s front motor drives the Semi’s rear axle, functioning as the “highway drive unit,” while the Plaid’s dual rear motors are mounted on the Semi’s middle axle. These motors feature a Rivian-like clutch, allowing them to be used for acceleration and to decouple once at speed for improved efficiency. Considering the bestselling semi in the U.S., the Freightliner Cascadia, sports 350 hp in its basic form and that “three times” that figure is 1,050, we’re fairly confident in saying the Semi matches the Model S and Model X Plaid’s 1,020 hp, and possibly its 1,050 lb-ft of torque, as well.

As for its battery—well, logic dictates we should look at the Plaid again. The few PepsiCo Tesla Semi drivers present during our visit said the truck has a 1,000-kWh battery pack, or 1 megawatt-hour (MWh), which equals 10 Plaid battery packs daisy-chained together. That jives with Tesla’s claim of 500 miles of range and company chief Elon Musk’s claim of the Semi using 2 kW per mile traveled. In real-world use, Frito-Lay’s drivers told us the Semi’s routes are much shorter. A typical day for them might have them leaving Modesto in the morning with a load of chips (weighing less than the truck’s 82,000 gross combined vehicle-weight rating) and running an out-and-back loop to places like San Jose or Concord, both about 85 miles away.

Hey, that oughta work out great. After all, over my years of driving big rigs, I can’t really recall hearing of ANY trucker EVER being expected to cover more than 170 miles in a single day. But wait, it gets even better still.

The out-and-backs are crucial because at the moment there are few places to charge an electric Tesla Semi. Frito-Lay installed four Superchargers onsite in dedicated “Tesla Semi” parking stalls, all of which feature a unique squarish plug incompatible with any other Tesla we’re aware of. The chargers are capable of outputting 750 kW, far exceeding the 250-kW peak rates of Tesla’s passenger vehicles and existing Supercharger network. That, says Frito-Lay, is good enough to charge its fleet of Tesla Semis from nearly empty to 70 percent in about a half hour (good for 400 miles), and to 100 percent in about 90 minutes.

Interestingly, the four Tesla chargers are positioned in such a way that the Semis must unhitch their trailers and back in to plug into each one’s charge port, which is located on the driver’s side, just forward of the middle axle.

Ohhhh yeah, the truckers are gonna just LOOOOOVE that. “Extended” range, for certain values of the word “extended,” plus the added hassle of having to drop the trailer every time you need to “gas up” the useless hunk of junk too? I ask you, what’s not to like here?

And believe me, hassle it is: first, scramble underneath to pull the handle on the fifth wheel and unlock the kingpin. Then, sweat yourself into a lather winding down the rusty, stiff, recalcitrant landing gear on the trailer. Which in itself can be quite damned hazardous, actually: several years back, my brother knocked himself near-unconscious when a landing-gear handle kicked back on him and whacked him upside the haid. Ended up having to get stitches, that’s how severely it laid him open.

And yes, the same damned thing has happened to me plenty of times too sans the stitches part of it, along with every other unfortunate soul cursed to the trucking life, guar-on-teed. It’s just one of those things you gotta deal with, y’know?

Yep, sounds like those Frito-Lay/Pepsico boys have themselves a lot to look forward to with these fine, fine machines.

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