Bah! – Page 24

“FLY, you fools!”

Posted on December 12, 2022December 12, 2022 by Mike

Looks like a lot of San Franciscans have been heeding Gandalf the Grey’s urgent admonition to the other Nine Walkers from the Bridge of Khazad-dum, right before he smote the Balrog and descended into the deepest pits of Moria along with his foe.

Why no one is buying downtown San Francisco’s luxury condos

Underneath the headline is a photo taken from one of those luxury high-rise apartments, overlooking what was once one of the most physically-glorious cities in all the world, now tragically reduced to a shit-encrusted, unlivable pit of despair, blight, and iniquity by decades of ultra-liberal misrule.

These days, a luxury high-rise in downtown San Francisco with units that appear to be mostly empty isn’t an uncommon sight. As a cooling real estate market continues to impact the city, downtown condos might be some of the hardest-hit properties around.

Patrick Carlisle, Compass’ chief market analyst, said that while economic headwinds are affecting real estate markets everywhere, downtown San Francisco’s condo market has been hit especially hard.

“That market has been hit hardest in the city,” Carlisle told SFGATE. This is due to a few different factors, he said, one being the mass abandonment of downtown office spaces since the start of the pandemic.

IE: all part of The Plan, then.

Speaking of tech workers, Carlisle said the uncertainty brought on by mass tech layoffs has also affected property sales downtown. He added that an increase in homelessness and crime in downtown areas has affected the “quality-of-life ambiance” for people in those areas, presumably buyers who are reluctant to live among the city’s unhoused populations.

This condo market, Carlisle said, is separate from the luxury condos located in areas like Russian Hill, Nob Hill, Pacific Heights and the Marina District. Condos in these areas tend to be built in older, smaller buildings located in less urban neighborhoods and have taken much less of a hit than their glossier counterparts downtown.

“The downtown market has been hit much, much harder than the luxury condo market in these older neighborhoods,” Carlisle said. “I’m not saying there haven’t been effects in places like Russian Hill and Nob Hill and Pacific Heights because there have been. The market has softened there also, quite significantly, but not to the degree that the downtown market has.”

According to a recent report from Compass, the median sales price of a two-bedroom condo in downtown areas has dropped by 16% since 2021, compared to a 7% drop in the price of two-bedroom condos outside of that area. The report also states that condo inventory in this area is more than twice as high as the rest of the city — which explains the seemingly empty high-rises looming everywhere downtown.

In October, one 45-story luxury high-rise made news after it was revealed that only 13 of its 146 units had been purchased in the two years they’d been up for sale. Rumors that Steph and Ayesha Curry had purchased a unit at the property, named the Four Seasons Private Residences, turned out to be false. The development features units that range from studios to $49 million two-story penthouses.

Ah well, “what goes up must come down” still applies, I guess.

Despite these trends, Carlisle said that for some, this downturn may act as a chance to purchase a condo at a lower price.

“Of course, there are people who see this as an opportunity to get a good deal,” Carlisle said. “There are condos selling in the newer luxury developments in the South Beach and Yerba Buena areas at large discounts from what people paid for them three, four years back. You know, we’re talking gorgeous units with spectacular views in ultra-luxury buildings.”

Views that also feature feces-strewn, used-needle-clogged streets and sidewalks; reeking stewbums, junkies, thieves, and miscellaneous thugs; and the ever-dwindling handful of affluent, smarmy shitlibs stubbornly determined to ride the SF disaster out to the bitter end somehow.

Yeah, thanks but no thanks, bub. Having been to SF many times on tour with the BPs over the years, I loved the place for its beauty and once-myriad charm, but no longer. I wouldn’t go back there now if I was being paid by the hour, and obviously I am by no means alone in that sentiment. It’s truly sad, a latter-day American disgrace, that’s what—a pluperfect example of what inevitably results each and every time shitlibs are allowed to run things.

(Via Stephen)

2

Speaking out both sides of their mouths

Posted on December 11, 2022December 11, 2022 by Mike

The Jews have an excellent word for this sort of thing: chutzpah.

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” said Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.

“You want to pay dividends, pay dividends. You want to pay shareholders, pay shareholders. You want to get bonuses, do that, too. You could do all of that and still invest more. We are asking you to increase production and seize the moment.”

The Biden adviser’s comments will spark a reaction in the US shale sector, which has complained about mixed signals from a White House that has called for more fossil fuel output while also talking of cutting demand and speeding up a shift away from oil and gas.

But Hochstein denied any contradiction, saying the US could “do two things at the very same time, ensuring we have enough [oil] supply for a strong global economy, while accelerating the energy transition”.

Hochstein also criticised ExxonMobil’s $50bn share buyback scheme, announced last week — a payout chief executive Darren Woods recently described as returning some money “directly to the American people”.

“The only thing worse than announcing a share buyback, is to say that is how you’re giving profits back to the American people,” Hochstein said. “If you want to give back to the American people, invest in America, its workers…increase production, [make] the United States less dependent on other countries.”

Funny, but I seem to recall the US having become effectively energy independent thanks to a certain previous President’s removal of the FederalGovCo noose from around the neck of the fossil-fuel industry, resulting in much lower gas and oil prices for ordinary Americans than they’ve suffered under ever since the Presidency was usurped—a most felicitous development that Pedo Joe undid completely, before lunchtime, on his very first disastrous day of besmirching the Oval Office. Rick Moran dispenses with this Biden-junta douchewad’s transparently self-serving codswallop.

Here’s where the lack of cognitive skills comes to the fore. In the first six months of the Biden administration, the president was running around the world gleefully telling anyone who would listen that he was going to end fossil fuel use. And yet, Amos Hochstein, President Biden’s international energy envoy and chief energy advisor, is railing against Wall Street and shale oil companies for not ignoring the president’s promise to destroy them and going ahead to drill, drill, drill, anyway.

“I think that the idea that financiers would tell companies in the United States not to increase production and to buy back shares and increase dividends when the profits are at all-time highs is outrageous,” said Hochstein. “It is not only un-American, it is so unfair to the American public.”

Said the number one cheerleader for destroying the oil and gas industry in America.

This guy can’t even walk and chew gum at the same time, and he’s telling us that the government can both destroy the fossil fuel industry and require it to do its bidding on increasing supply?

The U.S. is in the very best of hands.

For selected values of the word “best,” I suppose. Somebody needs to explain to this asshole what really IS “un-American,” what really IS “unfair to the American public.” You’d think he’d recognize those things when he sees ’em, from long familiarity and a lifetime’s experience with them. Apparently not, though.

1

Just another phony war

Posted on December 11, 2022December 11, 2022 by Mike

For Aesop: seen this one yet? Asking for a friend, that’s all.

Merkel Spills Beans on How U.S. and NATO Partners Planned War in Ukraine Against Russia

It is becoming irrefutably clear that the United States and its NATO partners have been planning for many years for the current war in the Ukraine against Russia. That fact makes the prospects for peace all the more elusive. How to negotiate with a mindset that is so deeply invested and ingrained with belligerence?

Western governments and media accuse Russia of “unprovoked aggression” against Ukraine and are clamoring for Moscow to hand over eye-watering financial compensation as well as face war crimes prosecutions.

The bitter irony is that the war in Ukraine, which is dangerously escalating and could spiral into a nuclear cataclysm, was sown by the United States and its accomplices. It is the West that bears ultimate responsibility for this abysmal situation, not Russia.

Former German Chancellor Angela Merkel (2005-2021) is the latest Western source to come clean or let their guard down. She disclosed in a recent interview with Der Spiegel the real roots of the war.

Merkel’s reprehensible revelation is inadvertent. She refers to appeasing the Ukrainian regime as a way to eventually build up its fighting strength against Russia. She invokes this reasoning as a way to justify why she objected to Ukraine’s earlier membership of the NATO alliance in 2008. The fact of membership wasn’t wrong, it was just a matter of wrong timing, according to Merkel.

As respected independent military analyst Scott Ritter points out, Merkel also knew that the Kiev regime installed by the CIA-backed coup d’état in 2014 was not interested in a peaceful resolution of the civil war in that country.

The unspoken policy in Berlin was all about buying time for the anticipated aggression against Russia. This was in spite of the fact that Germany along with France was supposed to be a guarantor of the Minsk peace agreements negotiated in 2014 and 2015.

In other words, Ukraine was primed for war against Russia from 2014 onwards.

Merkel’s admission is therefore really a confession of Western duplicity towards Russia, as Ritter astutely notes.

Plenty more at the link, all of it damning for the unabashedly evil Western manipulators running this whole shitshow. While I do have sympathy for the workaday Ukrainians suffering through this, I still don’t give a rat’s patoot about the fate of Ukraine’s current kleptocracy, given how it has functioned for many years now as basically a Democrat Party ATM. And though I harbor neither affection nor allegiance for Pooty-Poot (as the ridiculous George W Bush called him), if he takes Zelensky and his corrupt cabal down hard, I won’t be shedding any tears over it.

(Via Dave Renegade)

1

Gird them loins

Posted on December 11, 2022December 12, 2022 by Mike

Yes, they ARE coming for your guns. ALL your guns.

Biden’s Nauseating Hypocrisy On Guns Takes a New, Dangerous Turn
From the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms…

“Joe Biden’s world-class hypocrisy is on full display, and it has taken a dangerous turn, in his trade of a notorious Russian arms dealer for Brittany Griner,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said today.

Biden’s swap of Russian arms dealer Viktor Bout—known as the “Merchant of Death”—for Griner this week has brought expressions of outrage and astonishment. The jailed basketball gold medalist is one of two Americans who have been held by the Russians. The other is Paul Whelan, a U.S. Marine Corps veteran who was imprisoned four years ago on espionage charges, and remains in Russian custody.

“It is simply mind-boggling that Joe Biden could release the world’s most dangerous arms trafficker while at the same time continuing his crusade to disarm American citizens,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “The hypocrisy is staggering.”

Following the midterm elections, which will result in a Republican takeover of the U.S. House in January, Biden re-energized his call for a ban on semiautomatic firearms. He hopes to rush through legislation before Republicans take control, which will doom his anti-gun agenda, Gottlieb said.

And with at least 12 to 15 Vichy GOPe swine perfectly willing to “work across the aisle” with “our friends and colleagues, the Democrats” to vote with the gun-grabbers, nobody ought to be putting too much faith in the wafer-thin House majority to save their 2A bacon. Again: TINVOWOOT, people. If you really want to restore American liberty, better be prepared to fight for it, to die for it, and yes, to KILL for it. Because you’re for sure and certain gonna have to. T’was ever thus.

1

Pedophile story hour

Posted on December 9, 2022 by Mike

Maybe it’s time we just start calling a spade a spade here.

The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, and self-control. But the fruit of public libraries is faux diversity, drag queens, and rejection of the sexes — which is why the taxpayer-funded cesspools are “not interested” in giving Kirk Cameron a storytime slot to read his new children’s book on the fruit of the Spirit to kids.

The actor, writer, and producer “has not gotten a single ‘yes’ from the 50-plus public libraries his publisher has contacted so far,” Fox News reported in a Wednesday exclusive. According to Cameron’s publisher and Fox’s scouring of the libraries’ websites, “Many of the same libraries that won’t give Cameron a slot…are actively offering ‘drag queen’ story hours or similar programs for kids and young people.”

It’s not only drag queen story hours, where adult men derive pleasure from strapping on prosthetic breasts, painting theatrical contour all over their masculine faces, and sporting fishnet tights for an audience of children. These libraries reportedly host queer book clubs, a series called “Every Month Is Pride Month,” and so-called “get free help” events where attorneys and other volunteers help patrons fill out legal paperwork to change their names, record themselves as the opposite sex (or sexless entirely), and alter birth certificates, Social Security cards, driver’s licenses, IDs, and passports. But if you want to read to kids about gentleness, goodness, and kindness, it’s a hard no.

The self-important and self-appointed “principled conservatives” have expended much energy lecturing right-wing culture warriors who resist this debauchery. When conservatives took offense at libraries using their tax dollars to sponsor sexualized events that spit in the face of their deeply held religious beliefs, The Principled Conservatives™ were there with a finger wag and a condescending, First Amendment! Tsk! Viewpoint neutrality!

Barring people from doing sex shows for kids in publicly funded venues is not against the Constitution, and it’s specious to argue that if you insist there are constitutional limits on speech and this is precisely one, that you’re somehow a proponent of “big government” or “against the free market.” There is no free market for children. And there are ways to establish reasonable and constitutional limits on speech — such as withholding government funding from events and venues that peddle books and activities about sex for children — something many conservatives are striving to do even if the self-described principled wing is too lazy or too cowardly to do that intellectual and ground-game work.

At this point, the only way Cameron stands a chance of equal access to public libraries across the country is if he dresses up like a prostitute, gyrates around a reading room, and prods children to shove singles in his underwear.

The thing people like Cameron — or Jack Phillips or Barronelle Stutzman or Lorie Smith — understand but many establishment Republicans and “principled conservatives” don’t is that the left hates us and all the values we claim to be conserving. They don’t care about playing by a certain set of rules because their method is lawlessness (see: unpunished Black Lives Matter riots, brazen election meddling, illegal student loan bailouts, or unconstitutional vaccine mandates, to name a few). They scoff at viewpoint diversity because their aim is groupthink (consider: Big Tech suspensions for dissenters on a number of topics, or mass firings of health-care professionals who held unfavorable opinions about the jab). And they laugh at appeals to the First Amendment because they abandoned it long ago.

As my colleague John Daniel Davidson recently wrote in these pages, “[A]ccommodation or compromise with the left is impossible. One need only consider the speed with which the discourse shifted on gay marriage, from assuring conservatives ahead of the 2015 Obergefell decision that gay Americans were only asking for toleration, to the never-ending persecution of Jack Phillips. The left will only stop when conservatives stop them.”

Standing athwart history, yelling “stop” — or “viewpoint neutrality” or “free speech” — might have been enough to preserve liberty in the ’50s, but it’s almost 2023. If you want to know how well it’s working today, ask Kirk Cameron.

Or, y’know, anybody else who’s been paying attention and has even half a lick of sense.

1

Lockdowns forever, forever locked down

Posted on December 9, 2022December 9, 2022 by Mike

There is only one recourse now.

Civil Disobedience Starts Here

As COVID-19 cases increase, the Los Angeles County public health director is threatening – yes, that’s the right word – another indoor mask mandate. It’s a hob-nailed boot on the neck. Angelenos need to resist, for themselves and the rest of the country.

“As COVID cases and other viruses continue to rise, the Southland is inching closer to a mask mandate,” the Los Angeles CBS affiliate reported Sunday. Barbara Ferrer, the county director of public health, who is not a physician, not a nurse, not even a paper shuffler at a doctor’s office, but a social welfarist, said last week that “masking” is one of several “commonsense mitigation strategies” that “remains a very sensible approach.”

Do please note that “and other viruses” business. That’s what’s known in poker-playing circles as a “tell.” If I need to explain to you just what I mean by that, you aren’t tall enough for this ride, and should leave immediately to go seek out something to read that’s more your speed.

Don’t mistake mask mandates as harmless cases of officials acting in an abundance of caution or just covering their backsides, as government always does. Mask mandates are open displays of outright meanness, a manifestation of authoritarian urges to control others. There is no data, no reputable research that tells us mask mandates works.

In fact, the data tells the opposite. Yet officials such as Ferrer and the Sacramento schools chamberlains are insisting that masks must go back on. It’s no coincidence that the madness is starting in a state where personal freedoms are routinely tread upon as if they’re gifts that can be handed down by the government rather than God-given.

People who think this way are dangerous.

Only as dangerous as We The People permit them to be, and not a jot or tittle more. Never, ever forget that.

But what about those N95 respirators recommended by Washington? What if everyone wore one of those? First, if we did, we would look like monsters from a cheesy apocalyptic science fiction movie and yet at the same time like a herd of faint-hearted cowards. But foremost, they don’t work, either.

“Researchers at Canada’s McMaster University … found no statistically significant difference in protection between” the cloth coverings that “offer ‘the least’ protection and N95 respirators,” Just the News reports.

More than two years of experience clearly indicate that “Masks Still Don’t Work,” says the headline of an article written by Jeffrey Anderson, former director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Justice Department, posted in City Journal in August.

“The best scientific evidence continues to suggest that masks don’t work,” says Anderson. “Meantime, the public-health establishment continues to ignore that evidence. Public-health officials also remain almost completely blind to masks’ profoundly adverse effects on human interaction and quality of life.”

As I have vehemently insisted from the very start of this shit-circus, it really shouldn’t matter to any Real American who values what pitiful, tatterdemalion shreds of freedom he has left whether they “work” or they don’t. There can be but one and only one issue here, one central criterion that of right ought to override absolutely every other concern: FREEDOM.

That was made manifest from the way we saw petty would-be despots, from Mordor On The Potomac all the way down to the smallest of podunk town councils, jump with such alacrity on the opportunity to rescind American liberty at all levels, with no Constitutional authority to back any of it up, ostensibly based on a “science” that was clearly anything but, spewed all over the landscape by bureauweasel “experts” who were no such thing.

How can there be a grand American experiment in freedom, a future for widespread human liberty if freedoms can be suspended at whim, wrecking the trajectory toward a non-coercive society and taking progress back to another time?

Officials, elected and unelected, have to be reminded they work within limits. If it gets a little ugly, then so be it. Freedom has its enemies and they can’t be allowed to plow at will through our lives. Don’t put on the mask.

Gott-damned skippy, right down the line. And should they persist anyhow, then it’ll be time to start shooting motherfuckers in their fucking pinched, sallow faces.

So fucking be it.

5

Doing in diesel

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

As fossil fuels go, it just might be the most “problematic” of them all.

The $5.25 Per Gallon Canary in the Coal Mine

There may not be a shortage of diesel fuel yet but there is something else that amounts to the same:

Unaffordable diesel.

A gallon currently sells for about $5.25 per gallon on average.

Interestingly, this is about $2 more per gallon than the current cost of a gallon of regular unleaded. The Biden Thing has succeeded in temporarily tamping down the cost of the latter by draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – but diesel prices have not come down appreciably from their spring/summer high of about $5.70 per gallon.

Diesel cost less than half as much two years ago – just before the Biden Thing was selected president.

If you have a diesel-powered car (such as the excoriated-anathematized VW Jettas, Golfs and Beetles equipped with the TDI engines you can’t buy anymore) with a 15 gallon tank, you’re currently paying about $80 to fill ‘er up.

That’s not very affordable.

But not many people are driving diesel-powered cars – chiefly because the car companies haven’t been selling them for about seven years now, ever since the federal government sicced itself on VW for selling them. In italics to emphasize the true nature of VW’s “crime,” which was not “cheating” on government “emissions” certification tests anymore than Matt Strickland’s restaurant, Gourmeltz, was Hut! Hut! Hutted! the other day for supposedly selling alcoholic beverages without an ABC permit.

Alternatives always present problems for those who do not want others to have alternatives.

And now, they don’t.

Diesel-powered vehicles are problem vehicles – from the point-of-view of those pushing the electrification of vehicles. Not only because they go farther than gas-powered vehicles and much farther than electric vehicles – but particularly because it is possible to keep them going independently of a centrally controlled distribution apparatus.

Gas-powered vehicles require gasoline to keep on going. If there’s none at the pump, it is hard to refine your own. Gas does not store very well for very long, either.

Actually, it used to, but not since FederalGovCo foisted the ethanol-based shite on us all, which worthless crap will reliably convert itself into so much sugary glop in about, oh, an hour and a half or thereabouts.

So even if you thought ahead and stored 50 gallons in a drum for just-in-case, its shelf-life is limited.

Electricity is hard to generate independently in the quantity needed by electric cars. Even on 120v grid power, it takes a day or more to instill a charge in a 400-800 volt electric car battery. If the grid goes down, it will take much longer – unless you have a seriously mighty solar array on your roof or on your backyard.

Diesel, on the other hand, stores almost indefinitely. And many diesel engines can burn bio-diesel, which is “diesel” not made from petroleum. It is made from vegetable oil, animal fats and restaurant grease. In other words, almost anyone can make it.

Themselves.

This presents a dangerous alternative to those pushing “electrification,” which is really more about centralization.

Annnnnd BINGO. In other words, for our Deep State lords and masters, this is really about exactly what it’s always about: Power, and Control.

Update! Ernie drops a most interesting and informative comment.

Eric, you have a bit of a technical error. Natural fuels are refined using fractional distillation, the light stuff comes off first, then some gasoline, then kerosene, then progressively heavier grades of fuel oil, down to bunker fuel and asphalt/tar. In a barrel of crude oil there is inherently a lot more diesel fuel of various types than gasoline. Diesel fuel is inherently far more abundant and used to be far cheaper than gasoline- thus its use in heavy haulers like rigs, trains, and ships.

Also, old school mechanically injected diesels are inherently cleaner than gasoline engines until the 90’s closed loop engine management. As usual, pinheads saw occasional puffs of soot and assumed they had to be dirty, leading to a lot of prejudice against Rudolph Diesel’s “black mistress.”

Man, I’m so old I can remember back in the Olden Thymes of the late 70s/early 80s, when diesel was in fact so much cheaper than regular gasoline that people all over the country were dumping their old rides for diesel cars because of the savings they could realize from making the switch. My, how times have changed.

2

Cruisin’ for a bruisin’

Posted on December 3, 2022December 3, 2022 by Mike

Achin’ for a breakin’.

Activists Empty Tires on Dozens of SUVs in NYC

My grandmother used to tell me, “you can say almost anything you want as long as you say it respectfully.” That’s not entirely true for a bunch of reasons, but it can apply to specific situations. For instance, this group of climate “activists” deflating tires on SUVs in Brooklyn may have the right message, but delivering it through hundreds of flat tires is more likely to end in violence than any meaningful change.

It damned well ought to, far as I’m concerned. In fact, it must—because unless and until such blatant, brazen criminality DOES spark violent retribution against these supremely self-righteous, out-of-control brats, it will continue indefinitely.

It’s important to note that while its actions could be perceived as vandalism by more persnickety SUV owners, it’s not calling for members to slash tires.

Pure bollocks, every single syllable of it. I assure you, it is NOT important to note any such thing. Well, unless you’re the kind of cowed, docile queef who doesn’t mind having to shell out for a tow-truck to haul your humble-victim ass to someplace with compressed air to reinflate your tires, that is.

The site details how to empty a tire using a small lentil or bean screwed under the valve stem cap and does not outline or encourage permanently damaging the tire. It’s possible – likely, even – that the SUV’s wheel or other components become damaged in the process, but the group is at least not openly calling for damage.

Don’t give a fat rat’s ass. By imposing real costs in time, hassle, effort, and cold hard cash, they’re DOING damage; whether they’re “calling for it” matters not one iota. Hopefully, one of the little twerps will soon find himself lying on the sidewalk slowly bleeding out after having been on the receiving end of a solid dose of some righteous hot-lead therapy, administered by a thoroughly pissed-off workaday schlub who’s finally had enough of this shit being imposed on him unasked-for.

I keep on saying it, and it keeps on being true: the sole reason garbage like this is occurring nowadays is because the perps have been allowed to get away scot-free with it for too long. Put an end to that, and you’ll solve the problem immediately. Not before.

6

Facts: FACED

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Mike

On Gab, Fran just comes right out and says it.

We must accept…
That the Constitution is a dead letter.
That the last two elections were fraudulent.
That the edifice in Washington is hostile to us.
That we cannot trust anyone who holds public office.
That “movements,” so called, are mostly a trap for enthusiasts.
That no explicitly political undertaking will restore our rights or our nation.

These are not happy pronouncements. I’m distressed by the need to make them. But reality is not a matter of opinion. Today we have a government of Usurpers who mean to rule by force, and with no particular regard for our rights. They will not yield to anything but massively superior force.

So what then?

I don’t know. I don’t have the answers. I’m an old man who’s seen too much and has no stomach for yet another fight. But what is must be frankly faced. America is now a nation ruled by an unelected oligarchy that selects its own successors, much as the Kremlin did. And as bad as its oppressions and exactions are today, present trends continuing, they’ll get worse.

How do we prevent “present trends” from “continuing?” And please, nobody say “Vote harder!”

I could never possibly say “ditto!” enough times to do the above justice, not in a million bazillion years.

5

SHOCKER!!!

Posted on November 27, 2022November 27, 2022 by Mike

Imagine my surprise.

There’s a remarkable concession appearing in The Washington Post today:

“a majority of Americans dying from the coronavirus received at least the primary series of the vaccine.”

The latest data shows that 58% of COVID-19 deaths in August 2022 were from people who were vaccinated or boosted. Based on past figures and the current trends, we can reasonably estimate that the number of vaccinated/boosted COVID-19 deaths will only rise. (In September 2021, the vaccinated accounted for 23% of COVID-19 deaths; in January/February 2022, the vaccinated were 42%.)

This is what happens when you rush ineffective and dangerous vaccines.

It’s also what happens when you blindly put your trust in institutions wholly, demonstrably undeserving of it.

10

Self-loathing, humiliation, shame

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Mike

That’s the kink.

NBC reporter Ben Collins said on Peacock’s “MTP NOW” that parents take children to all-age drag brunches to meet a drag queen “just to show them they’re human beings.”

Host Kristen Welker said, “What are you seeing online in the wake of this shooting? Is anything standing out to you?”

Collins said, “I will say that the months-long campaign of targeting trans and gay rights events and supports and things like drag brunches, that has been a persistent narrative by the anti-LGBQ right in the last six months to the last year. One of the main drivers of that hate is an account called Libs of TikTok.”

Welker said, “You said this, but we I think we can’t emphasize this enough. This was during a drag night.”

Collins said, “And also hours before what they call an all-ages drag brunch which is probably the number one target of these anti-LGBTQ events recently. For example, the Proud Boys will go and protest any drag brunch, any drag story hour, anything that a child might go to meet a drag queen, just to show them they’re human beings and people. They go there, and they read Dr. Seuss there. They read regular books, but it is read by a drag queen, and they have breakfast. It is not some hypersexual event, but that’s what it’s viewed as on the far right.”

Oh, izzatso? Then why, pray tell, do you have to do it in drag? If all it really IS about is “reading Dr Seuss to children,” as you so speciously claim, then just do it in regular street clothes. It shouldn’t be necessary for you to don full-on Freak regalia and turn yourself into an outrageous, disturbing parody of what you perceive a woman to be. By wearing casual slacks or even just jeans and a T-shirt, you’ll thereby avoid any potential hassle with justly-irate parents who, unfortunately for you, are onto your little game.

But that just doesn’t have quite the same appeal to you, now does it? Doesn’t quite fire your rockets. So instead, we get this:

Authentic my ass — *It’s all about the litt-rachure, H8TRRRZ*

Yeah, tell me the above obviously mentally-diseased dude ain’t getting his rocks off with his little shitshow.

Whatever the hell is going on here, Dr Seuss ain’t got a thing in the world to do with it, beyond acting as an enabling step along the way to achieving that delightful little frisson of, yes, sexual ecstasy so powerfully alluring to degenerate Groomers like these. Sorry, bub, you’re gonna have to peddle that bushwa someplace else; ain’t no market for it here, I’m afraid.

5

1

Worst. “Elite.” Class. EVAR

Posted on November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Mike

A fuse that forever smolders, without igniting a goddamned thing.

Thirty-seven billion more dollars for Ukraine? (That’s thirty-seven thousand millions of dollars, by the way.) Bringing the total this year to a click-or-two over ninety billion (ninety-thousand millions), on top of whatever Sam Bankman-Fried’s FTX company funneled through that sad-sack international money laundromat — soon to be the darkest backwater of a European failed state since Field Marshal Melchior von Hatzfeldt of Westphalia left Bohemia a corpse-strewn wasteland after the Battle of Jankau (1645).

It really doesn’t matter how much more money we pound down that rat-hole, you understand, because by the time various parties — the weapons-makers, Volodymyr Zelensky, sundry members of the US House of Representatives, the Biden family, the World Economic Forum — are finished creaming off their fair shares, poor Ukraine won’t have enough cash-on-hand to replace six fuse-boxes in Zaporizhzhia.

Against this backdrop, the USA enters a holiday season near-death spiral as unspooling scandals battle a collapsing economy for supremacy of the alt news sites. Case-in-point: the aforementioned FTX monkey business, a metastasizing tumor of the body politic. This complex fraud will smolder for a few weeks before it explodes into an extinction-grade event for the Democratic Party.

Uh huh, I’m entirely confident our brand spanking new Repugnican Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy will get RIGHT ON ALL THAT. Who knows, we may even see Miss Lindsey Graham start another of his “blue ribbon panels” to get to the bottom of the whole shit-circus.

The Bankman-Fried extended family is the quintessence of Woke aristocracy. Dad Joe Bankman and mom Barbara Fried are both law professors at Stanford. She also acted as a money-bundler for the Democratic Party and ran two non-profit “voter registration” orgs (against the IRS laws which only permit non-partisan organized voter registration). Brother Gabe Bankman-Fried headed a non-profit named Guarding Against Pandemics (funded by Sam), which lobbies Congress to construct new platforms for medical tyranny. Aunt Linda Fried is Dean of Columbia U’s Public Health school, and is associated with Johns Hopkins, which ran the October 2019 Event 201 pandemic drill (sponsored by the Gates Foundation) months before the Covid-19 outbreak.

Sam’s girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, ran the Alameda Investments arm of the FTX empire (that is, FTX’s own money laundromat). Her dad, Glenn Ellison, is chair of MIT’s Econ School. His former colleague on the MIT Econ faculty, Gary Gensler, who specialized in blockchains there, is now head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, an agency that Sam Bankman-Fried was attempting to rope into a regulation scheme to eliminate FTX’s crypto-currency competitors. Caroline’s mom, Sara Fisher Ellison, is an MIT econ prof specializing in the pharmaceutical industry (fancy that!). Caroline Ellison is currently on-the-run.

The sum total of all this professional and academic accomplishment is also the quintessence of Woke-Jacobin turpitude in service to a political faction that seeks maximum moneygrubbing while acting to overthrow every norm of behavior in the conduct of elections, and perhaps in American life generally. That’s some accomplishment. It’s also a lesson in why the managerial elite of our country are no longer trustworthy. They have gotten away with crimes against the nation for years, which has only made them bolder and more reckless.

And concomitantly, more “elite” too, in a Ruling Class circle-jerk that never, ever ends. As George Carlin once quipped: It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. Moar Carlin, from that same routine:

[Transcript] “There’s a reason education SUCKS, and it’s the same reason that it will never, ever, ever be fixed. It’s never going to get any better, don’t look for it, be happy with what you’ve got.

Because the owners of this country don’t want that. I’m talking about the REAL owners, now. The REAL owners, the BIG WEALTHY business interests that control things and make all the important decisions — forget the politicians.

The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. YOU DON’T.

You have no choice. You have OWNERS.

They OWN YOU. They own EVERYTHING.

They own all the important land, they own and control the corporations; they’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the State houses, the City Halls; they’ve got the judges in their back pockets, and they own all the big media companies so they control just about all the news and information you get to hear.

They gotcha by the BALLS.

They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying — lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want — they want MORE for themselves and less for everybody else.

But I’ll tell you what they don’t want. They DON’T want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that, that doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests.

That’s right. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting FUCKED by system that threw them overboard 30 fuckin’ years ago. They don’t want that.

You know what they want?

They want OBEDIENT WORKERS. OBEDIENT WORKERS. People who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passably accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, the reduced benefits, the end of overtime, and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

It’s a big CLUB. And YOU AIN’T IN IT.

You and I are NOT IN the big club. By the way, it’s the same big club they use to beat you over the head with all day long when they tell you what to believe.

Good honest hard-workin people — white collar, blue collar — doesn’t matter what color shirt you have on. Good honest hard-workin people CONTINUE — these are people of modest means — continue to elect these RICH COCKSUCKERS who don’t GIVE a fuck about them. They don’t give a fuck about you, they don’t GIVE A FUCK ABOUT YOU.

THEY DON’T CARE ABOUT YOU — AT ALL. AT ALL. AT ALL. You know?

And nobody seems to notice, nobody seems to care… that’s what the owners count on, the fact that Americans will probably remain willfully ignorant of the big red, white and blue dick that’s being jammed up their assholes every day.

Because the owners of this country know the truth — it’s called the American Dream…‘cuz you have to be asleep to believe it.”

More words of wisdom from another old white dude.

Update! It’s ~~turtles~~ Ruling Class corruption, all the way down.

GOP establishment leader and Speaker of the House pretender, Kevin McCarthy used FTX cash to defeat conservatives in 2022, as the corrupt, globalist-tied crypto exchange funded the establishment wings of both parties. Now, McCarthy is feeling the heat, as conservative members of Congress, and the voters they’re accountable to, are demanding answers for the GOP’s failed “red wave,” which looked more like a pink trickle.

Throughout the midterm campaign season, GOP establishment leader Kevin McCarthy (CA-23) used his Congressional Leadership Fund political machine to inject massive amounts of cash into House races nationwide. In doing so, he targeted GOP primary races and even general elections vs. Democrats, in which America First conservatives, aligned with President Trump, were on the ballot.

Millions of dollars worth of the campaign money came straight from corrupt crypto exchange FTX and its top executives.

Along for the ride on McCarthy’s scheme were GOP lobbyist Jeff Miller, described as one of McCarthy’s “closest friends,” and Brian Walsh, an establishment strategist who McCarthy brought in to take down Madison Cawthorne after the young Representative blew the whistle on DC drug use and Capitol Hill pervert parties.

As they often do, over a month ahead of the 2022 primaries, The Washington Post, notoriously used for decades as a uni-party communication rag, openly admitted that McCarthy was using left-wing oligarch money to “sway” the GOP field in favor of his establishment agenda.

Conveniently for McCarthy and the establishment, the piece wasn’t published until after the last of the GOP’s nominating primaries had ended.

“Conveniently.” Well, I guess that would be one word for it, yeah. I can think of several much-less-polite others, right off the top of my head.

4

Something’s rotten in Denmark Arizona

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

In the spectral grip of the cold, dead hands of McCain.

If you were paying attention this election cycle, it’s likely several key races and their consuming details would have occupied your attention. For one, you probably followed the Oz–Fetterman matchup, consistently baffled at the descent into the bizarre, a disbelief which could have peaked at the debate-opening ‘adieu’ moment or possibly the announcement that the Pennsyltucky Orc was in fact the political victor. (I actually have family members who hail from and reside in the state, one of whom is so embarrassed, she’s decided that upon disclosing this information to new acquaintances, she will add “but I did not vote for Fetterman.”)

Above all though, you most certainly would have been tracking on Arizona, with the polished and viciously pro-American Kari Lake. You would have noticed the massive crowds she drew and her razor-sharp wit — she probably reminded you of President Trump during his glorious tenure.

So, understandably, for those outside of Arizona, things aren’t adding up — how is a bathroom-lurking caitiff like Katie Hobbs leading the America First heroine? Well, allow me to explain: the globalist ghost of McCain lives on, and the Uniparty has a stranglehold on Arizona politics, preventing transparent elections and a return to the constitutional conservatism and civil service that Lake embodies.

If you recall, the last time Arizona made serious political headlines was in the wake of the 2020 presidential upset. It is the home of counties like Maricopa and Pima, jurisdictions where more than six million Arizonans reside and which were rife with allegations of fraud; both counties largely contributed to the “statistical anomalies and historical irregularities” that defined the election. In fact the discrepancies were so at odds with election integrity and security, Dinesh D’Souza produced a documentary laying bare compelling evidence (much of it centered around Arizona) against the idea that the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history.”

For a state where Republicans held both chambers at the legislature, the attorney general’s office, and the governor’s mansion, one would think that rectifying exploitable or corrupt practices would be easy — but you’d be dead wrong.

First off, the Legislature has had two years to pass laws to reform and strengthen the election process. During the 2021 session (which began before Biden was even inaugurated), lawmakers completely ignored the issue; during the 2022 session, there were two attempts made: the first was killed by Republican Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers, and the second was indefinitely tabled by Republicans Senate President Karen Fann because she “didn’t have the votes” — ultimately the bill died when the session ended this past June. Concerned citizens demanded a floor vote to identify the dissenters, but Fann refused. The Swamp doesn’t rat on the Swamp. (You might recognize “Bowers” for his performance in front of the Jan. 6 Committee or his close friendship with Liz Cheney.)

Secondly, as recently as last month, the Arizona attorney general’s office under Republican Mark Brnovich made an open request to ask that the Joe Biden FBI and IRS be used to “investigate” the conservative non-profit behind D’Souza’s film. True the Vote’s Catherine Engelbrecht and Gregg Phillips were promptly arrested and only just released from custody by an appeals judge.

Currently, Democrat officials running Pima County elections have said that official results won’t “realistically” be known until November 15th. Meanwhile, in a +8 Republican district in the county, votes continue to trickle in for the Democrats running against a slate of conservative firebrands known as the Freedom Team — all with apparently zero outrage from the county Republican party. Mind you, this is the same county party that bolstered a proud abortionist as a legislative candidate over members of that very same Freedom Team, so again, not all that surprising. In fact, boots on the ground in Pima asserted that the only candidate the local party really rallied for was Governor Doug Ducey protégé Juan Ciscomani, who has since won his race. You might remember, Ducey earned an official GOP censure for certifying the 2020 vote at the same moment lawyers presented evidence alleging fraud to state lawmakers. When I asked Mr. Ciscomani if he thought Ducey had done a good job, he replied with “Yes, I do.”

Plenty more where that came from, all of it stinking like 3-day-old roadkill in the Sonoran desert in late July. Guess this marrow-deep corruption and malfeasance explains why Arizona Repugnicans kept sending the loathsome, duplicitous Juanny Mav back to Mordor On The Potomac again, and again, and again.

6

Another “Red Wave” that wasn’t

Posted on November 12, 2022November 12, 2022 by Mike

Heather Mac Donald seems to think of this as a good thing. Me, I’m not so sure about that.

Well, that was a dud. Not the abortive “red wave,” but the Democratic expectation (read: ill-disguised hope) that “election deniers” would disrupt polling places on Tuesday with violence and intimidation. In October, a national security bulletin had warned that poll workers were at physical risk from homegrown election terrorists. The Justice Department let it be known that it was monitoring threats against election employees. Illinois officials installed panic buttons and security locks in election offices. People using ballot drop-off boxes were said to be at risk of violent intimidation from crazed MAGA supporters. Michigan anticipated that right-wing poll watchers would disrupt ballot tabulation in Detroit. Election-deniers who had run for office and lost would allegedly refuse to concede defeat, putting “democracy,” in establishment parlance, at further risk. “We could be six days away from losing our rule of law,” warned historian Michael Beschloss, who wondered “whether our children will be arrested and conceivably killed.”

None of these predictions panned out. There was no electoral violence or intimidation. No one mobbed ballot boxes or election offices. As of this writing, political election-deniers who lost their races have accepted defeat.

We have been through this hysteria before. Predictions of right-wing violence are now a standard feature of Democratic rhetoric. In the lead-up to January 6, 2022 (the one-year anniversary of the 2021 Capitol riot), the media, politicians, and the Biden national-security apparatus warned that “domestic violent extremists” were likely to strike again. Washington, D.C., was reportedly on edge in anticipation of the MAGA rebels. As it turned out, January 6, 2022, was notable only for the maudlin theatrics of newly patriotic Democrats, who softly sang “God Bless America” in a candlelight vigil on the Capitol steps, as calm engulfed them.

During the previous year, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security had issued regular warnings about election-denying terrorism. The summer of 2021, August 2021, September 2021—all provoked a satisfying increase in alerts and in precautionary barricades and bollards. And still, the right-wing terrorists did not strike.

This is where Mac Donald, quite disappointingly, lapses into some garden-variety Swamp-establishment boilerplate decrying the “loathsome, despicable mob violence of January 6, 2021.” We’ve all seen all too much of that garbage by now; I see no need to include any more of it here, no matter who says it or how much I may think of them otherwise. Onwards.

The “violent election-deniers” narrative is a subset of the larger white supremacist conceit so beloved of President Joe Biden. Biden has regularly speechified about the enduring strain of white supremacy in the American character and about its salience for contemporary street violence. In September 2022, for example, the president convened a White House summit against racism and right-wing hate. His portrayal of U.S. history consisted of one dispiriting atrocity after another.

No matter. The fiction of a white-supremacist, election-denying terror threat has allowed an expansion of government power and a wide-ranging assault on merit and speech. Biden boasts that on his first day in office, he directed national security officials to develop a strategy for countering domestic terrorism, focused exclusively on white supremacists. His since-discontinued Disinformation Governance Board would have surveilled and censored social media users who challenged the validity of elections—something that remains the prerogative of every American, even if those challenges are baseless. The right to free expression is not contingent on the truth of one’s speech. Private companies, whether in media, finance, or tech, routinely censor speakers they deem bigoted. The idea that white Americans can’t stop discriminating against people of color, even to the point of violence, has unleashed an avalanche of merit-destroying race and sex preferences throughout science, medicine, law, business, government, and education. Voting procedures are being recklessly loosened on the false theory that voter-identification requirements represent a ploy to disenfranchise minority voters. The focus on fictional white-supremacist, election-doubting violence allows Democrats to deny the real source of street violence in the U.S.: inner-city criminals, further emboldened by post-George Floyd depolicing, decriminalization, and decarceration.

Yet somehow, you choose to take Biden & Pals’ equally-specious J6 narrative as Gospel truth…WHY, exactly?

The lack of electoral violence this week will have no effect on the dominant Democratic narrative.

No, it most certainly will not. Anyone who objects to the dominant DemonRat narrative, however mildly, peaceably, or respectfully, will continue to be smeared, vilified, and bunged into the Gulag-Garland Archipelago indefinitely, just as they have been right along. Which tells me that it may be time, and past time, to re-instill an appropriate and becoming fear into these ersatz “public servants,” however that needs to be accomplished.

4

Preview of coming attractions

Posted on November 12, 2022 by Mike

Not that they’re at all attractive, natch.

Now that the Left has secured its power, expect the Left to exercise it.

This will manifest in numerous ways but perhaps the most directly felt will be at the pump, shortly – where we can expect the cost of gas and diesel to increase, suddenly – to the point of unaffordability for many. Especially people who do not live in or near cities.

The point of this being to nudge them out of the country, long a percolating desire of the Left.

Superficially, it will be done as a way to nudge people into EeeeeeeeVeeeeees – which are said by the Left to be “zero emissions” vehicles that rely on “renewable” and “clean” energy. Claims that are as false as they are disingenuous (it not being a question of ignorance about those those claims being false). But never mind that, for the moment.

At this moment, it is necessary to at least triple the current cost of gas and diesel – in order to make driving gas and diesel-powered vehicles – including hybrids – financially impossible for most people. In order to make an EeeeeeeeVeeeee seem – per Pete Buttigieg – the “affordable” alternative to them.

Never mind the cost of the EeeeeeeeeVeeeeee itself, as opposed to the cost of gas or diesel fuel.

The point being to make the EeeeeeeeeeeVeeeeee look – just plausibly enough – to the not-too-numerate – as being a way to “save money” vs. spending it on gas and diesel made very costly, indeed. That will be the sell. The hook will be that – even if you can afford to spend what it takes to buy an EeeeeeeVeeeee – you will have difficulty using it.

Unless you live in or near a city.

Do you think it’s possible the people nudging us into EeeeeeeVeeeeees might just do that? In order to nudge people who don’t live in or near a city to move out of the country? If you don’t suppose it, you probably haven’t read about it. Urban planners – as they style themselves – who are all of the Left – have for the past 50 years-plus been planning to use their power to curtail what they sneer at as “sprawl.” By which these Leftists mean you not living in or near the city – and so under their control – but rather as far away from it as it is economically and practically feasible for you to get away from it.

The car – not the EeeeeeeVeeee – made that possible.

People who didn’t want to live anywhere near the crowds, the costs and the general diminishment of life that attends city life for all who are not rich enough to afford a handsome townhouse (or swanky condo) in the best part of the city but who had jobs in or near the city were able – via the car – to live very far away from all of that because it was feasible as a practical matter and affordable as a financial matter. They could avoid city life. Could live a much larger life than was economically possible in or near the city, where they could not afford the handsome townhouse or the swanky condo – nor the expensive private schools for their kids, either (so as to keep their kids away from the pathologies that afflict in-city government schools).

The upshot is, they want the country, the nice houses, the wide-open spaces, for themselves and their kind. Not…not…not YOU PEOPLE, ick!

1

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