Begins At Home – Page 38

LET FREEDOM RING!

Posted on April 29, 2020April 29, 2020 by Mike

Gaston County is in a state of insurrection, and I couldn’t be more proud of my home turf.

Gaston defies Cooperovitch order. Official says stay-at-home restrictions don’t ‘fix anything’

Fair warning: I may have edited some of this excerpt. Y’know, for clarity.

Gaston County says it will allow many businesses to reopen at 5 p.m. Wednesday, appearing to contradict Supreme Kommissar Roy Cooperovitch’s statewide stay-at-home order that expires May 8.

Effective Wednesday in Gaston County, “large venues” — places such as restaurant dining rooms, theaters, gyms and houses of worship, according to Gaston’s order — can reopen with social distancing limitations. Under Comrade Cooperovitch’s order, those businesses are not permitted to open.

Commissioners’ Chairman Tracy Philbeck, who leads an all-Republican board, said the decision was based on relatively low coronavirus numbers and the availability of hospital capacity. Reopening, he said, will help save local businesses that have been decimated by Cooper’s “one-size-fits-all” restrictions.

“If we continue the stay-at-home order, it will not have a good effect for Gaston County and we will maybe not have anything to come back to,” he told reporters Wednesday morning during a virtual press conference.

Said a mouthful there, brother. Meanwhile, in what very well could be an actual quote, Supreme Kommissar Cooperovitch spluttered in outrage at Gaston County’s defiance:

“The revanchist running dogs of capitalist imperialism will not be allowed to get away with this Crime against the State,” Cooperovitch was quoted as saying. “The People will not stand for such brazen acts of counterrevolution, and their government will see to it that they are punished severely. All inside the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State!!”

More like this, please, and not just hereabouts either. Calls for an anthem in celebration of the momentous occasion, I do believe. And I can’t think of any better than one of the Who’s very veryest.

And the men who spurred us on
Sit in judgment of all wrong
They decide and the shotgun sings the song

‘Nuff said.

Update! Calling a spade a spade.

As hundreds of lockdown protesters converged Tuesday upon Raleigh, North Carolina, demanding that Democratic Gov. Roy Cooper reopen the state’s economy and lift his stay at home order, four of the protesters were arrested, the News & Observer reported.

ReOpenNC leader Ashley Smith was among the arrestees, the News & Observer reported. As she was being handcuffed, the 33-year-old yelled that officers were “dishonoring the flag” and that her “tax dollars” paid for the sidewalk she was standing upon.

Anybody still think most of our “boys in blue” won’t be more than happy to come take the guns away the moment someone like Comrade Cooper tells ’em to?

“This is how Nazi Germany started,” her husband, Adam Smith, remarked, according to the paper. Smith used a bullhorn to call each officer outside the governor’s mansion a “little piggie,” the News & Observer said, adding that other protesters handed him bail money.

Before her arrest, Ashley Smith stood in a pickup truck and delivered a speech, the paper said: “We’ll all go to church, we’ll open our businesses, and we’ll buy what we want. We will not go down gently. … If you feel the need to stay home, it is your God-given right to do so. But we want to live!”

“Every job is essential,” salon owner Danielle Wells said, according to the paper. “Every job matters.”

Some protesters carried signs with religious themes — “Trust God not Reopening” — while others appeared to point toward violence, the paper said. One sign included an image of a handgun with the slogan “The Only Shot I’ll Take” while another read, “If we hanged traitors like our forefathers did, we would all be at work today,” the News & Observer noted.

Which amounts to yet another lesson regarding the one-hundred-percent guaranteed result of NOT hanging the sons of bitches.

An idea whose time has surely come

Posted on April 27, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

And, unfortunately, probably gone.

The country has been thrown into an unforeseen and immediate crisis the likes of which we have never seen in American history. There was no warning and no way to prepare; we are in a state of shock that the collective life we led just two months ago is completely and heartbreakingly gone for the foreseeable future.

That’s why it’s time for President Trump to speak to the trauma the nation is enduring, and not just continue the same drumbeat about the “invisible enemy” each day from the White House press room.

The daily briefings featuring the Coronavirus Task Force have become repetitive. Trump’s jiujitsu with the hostile, childish, and hysteria-inducing White House press corps might entertain some of his followers, and undoubtedly it amuses the president himself, but does little to ease Americans’ rising anxiety about the future.

Fauci and Birx, aside from misleading the president with the disastrous Murray models, don’t have much new to offer. Their updates should be short and weekly, not daily, since the health crisis shows major signs of abating.

The president should now pivot to focusing primarily on how to recover both the economy and the spirit of the American people. He needs to speak directly to our fears. He must give cover to governors who have every reason to bring life back to normal in their states rather than listening to the same small chorus of “experts” who have misled him. (Commending New York governor Andrew Cuomo while openly criticizing Georgia governor Brian Kemp isn’t a great idea, either.)

He needs to get his economic team before the public every day to explain how and when we can start getting back to business as usual—and in days, not weeks or months. Most Americans don’t want more government hand-outs or debt-inducing programs. We want to protect the vulnerable, strengthen our health care capacity, and move on before the damage is too great to repair.

Trump performs best when he gives voice to the inner worries of Americans that others are too timid to express. COVID-19 is deadly and scary but Trump promised Americans the cure wouldn’t be worse than the disease. We are now at the point where we need to hear his plan to make good on that promise—and the president must change course accordingly.

I agree with Kelly, for all the good it will do. Jules also makes brief mention of the imminent collapse of the food supply chain, which is but one of several reasons I said above that the time for Trump to try to turn things around may have come and gone. All such attempts now will most likely be too little, too late:

Executives with the Arkansas-based Tyson Foods took out a full-page advertisement in several major newspapers over the weekend, declaring the country’s food supply chain “is breaking.”

The ad, an open letter from company board chair John Tyson was published in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

“There will be limited supply of our products available in grocery stores until we reopen our facilities that are currently closed,” wrote Tyson, who noted earlier in the letter, “The food supply chain is breaking.”

The discomforting statement from Tyson comes as the company has closed plants in Logansport, Indiana, and Waterloo, Iowa. Similarly, Smithfield has closed a facility in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where one worker died of the virus, and JBS has shuttered a plant in Worthington, Minnesota.

Tyson’s Waterloo plant, reportedly linked to some 182 cases of COVID-19, is critical to the country’s pork supply.

The letter from Tyson warned all of these closures means “millions of pounds of meat will disappear” from the national food supply chain.

“In addition to meat shortages, this is a serious food waste issue,” wrote Tyson. “Farmers across the nation simply will not have anywhere to sell their livestock to be processed, when they could have fed the nation.”

“Millions of animals — chickens, pigs, and cattle — will be depopulated because of the closure of our processing facilities,” he added.

More, and worse:

“During this pandemic, our entire industry is faced with an impossible choice: continue to operate to sustain our nation’s food supply or shutter in an attempt to entirely insulate our employees from risk,” Smithfield Foods, the largest global pork producer owned by the Chinese WH Group, said in a statement on Friday. “It’s an awful choice; it’s not one we wish on anyone.”

“It is impossible to keep protein on tables across America if our nation’s meat plants are not running. Across the animal protein industry, closures can have severe, perhaps disastrous, repercussions up and down the supply chain,” the statement said. “Beyond the implications to our food supply, our entire agricultural community is in jeopardy. Farmers have nowhere to send their animals and could be forced to euthanize livestock, effectively burying food in the ground. We have a stark choice as a nation: we are either going to produce food or not, even in the face of COVID-19.”

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who is also is a beef rancher, spoke about the food supply chain on SiriusXM’s Breitbart News Sunday with host Joel Pollak.

“I’ll tell you why there will be shortages,” Massie said. “Right now there aren’t shortages because there was a supply of meat that was destined for restaurants, and the demand at the restaurants was curtailed when they were shut down. It’s frozen meat, and [restaurants] are repackaging it and diverting that supply to the grocery stores.”

“That supply is going to run out,” Massie said. “The [meat] pipeline has a crimp in it, and that’s at the processing plants.”

In a Tweet accompanying the article, Massie lays it out starkly and directly, with no ifs, ands, or buts: “FOOD SHORTAGES ARE COMING.”

Meanwhile, there are nearly four million gallons of milk per day being poured down the drain—literally.

Farmers are dumping milk and plowing crops back into the soil across the U.S. after the closings of restaurants, hotels and schools in response to the coronavirus outbreak.

Farmers are dumping 3.7 million gallons of milk daily and a single chicken processor can smash 750,000 eggs per week, reports Dairy Farmers of America, the largest dairy farm cooperative in the country.

As America’s agricultural industry is confronted by the impacts of the virus, there have been some striking examples of food waste.

Correction: it’s the impact of the overreaction to the virus that they—and we all—are confronting.

Wisconsin and Ohio farmers have dumped thousands of gallons of fresh milk into lagoons and manure pits.

An Idaho farmer found himself digging ditches to bury 1 million pounds of onions.

Yet more, and yet worse:

Meanwhile, South Florida farms, which supply much of the East coast, have sent tractors across the fields to replow beans, cabbage and other ripe vegetables right back into the ground.

‘It’s heartbreaking,’ Paul Allen, co-owner of R.C. Hatton, tells the Times.

The company has had to destroy millions of pounds of beans and cabbage at his farms in South Florida and Georgia.

This is scary, scary stuff, folks.

“There’s a huge amount of milk still today going on the ground in the state of Florida,” said Brittany Nickerson Thurlow, a fifth-generation dairy farmer in Zolfo Springs. “There’s just nowhere to send it.”

The supply chain that ultimately brings milk from a cow’s udder to your refrigerator has spoiled.

Florida had over 15,500 coronavirus cases, including over 300 deaths, as of the Department of Health’s Wednesday evening count. Gov. Ron DeSantis’ statewide “safer-at-home” order remains in effect until at least April 30.

There’s no telling when life on Sunshine State farms will return to normal.

Sorry to have to be the one to tell ya, but this is the NEW Normal. It ain’t pretty. Every passing day under lockdown etches total economic collapse and all its attendant misery—joblessness, poverty, hunger, and death—more deeply in stone. And for the life of me, I can’t see any way out of it.

Hope and despair

Posted on April 25, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

A little tough love.

Listen. You were always going to suffer and die. Everyone in your family was always going to suffer and die. Everyone you know was always going to suffer and die. All your earthly efforts were going to come to nought, your country and culture — and, least we forget, “the economy” — were going to degenerate and disappear, and the sun was going to expand into a red giant and consume the earth as though it had never existed. All that was always going to happen, and you knew it all along, or would have if you had been paying attention.

If you are in despair now but weren’t before, you’re an idiot. You do realize this game you signed up for is called mortal life, right? Did someone not explain that to you? Were you expecting something different? I don’t know anything about your situation, but I know it hasn’t fundamentally changed. You were born on death row. Don’t you think that should have made you a little tougher than this?

As for the all the dupes and caitiffs and hypocrites and quislings you suddenly find yourself surrounded by — I hate to break it to you, but they were already like that. All you’re seeing now is what their true colors were all along. That’s what the word apocalypse actually means, you know: Revelation. Revealing. Uncovering. The green field coming off like a lid. For just a second, you get a glimpse of all the men behind all the curtains in the world. The whited sepulchers may have looked nicer before they were opened, but they were full of dead men’s bones all along.

You should have come to terms with death and suffering and evil a hell of a long time ago, but if you somehow haven’t gotten around to it yet, well, now’s your chance to do so. (Or not. Distraction is always an option, of course. I hear porn sites are offering premium memberships for free.)

Shall I close by saying that God loves you and everything’s going to be all right? Fine. God loves you, and everything’s going to be all right. Just keep in mind that God has loved everyone who has ever lived on this earth, and that “everything being all right,” by God’s standards, is evidently consistent with every imaginable human tragedy. Go read Candide sometime. Or the Book of Job. Or any history book, really. God’s love offers no assurance at all against the kinds of things you’re probably scared of. In the end, I’m afraid there’s just no substitute for learning not to be scared of them. And there are only two ways of doing that.

Good stuff; read it all.

I’ve long been amused, since way before the recent farcical hysteria, by news reports or those scolding seat-belt commercials making specious claims about “lives saved” or “deaths prevented.” Sorry, no. In all of human history, there has never been a single death “prevented,” nor a single life “saved.” There have been deaths averted, lives spared, yes. But that’s a strictly temporary reprieve, a postponing of the inevitable fate that faces us all.

In the long run, there ain’t no long run. It turns out that life really is nasty, brutish, and short after all. Deal with it.

Now let’s get to the hope, by which I mean tonight’s Feel Good Story Of The Week.

A Florida kennel at an animal shelter is empty for the first time in history since all of its dogs were adopted.

Volunteers at the Palm Beach County Animal Care and Control cheered in front of empty dog cages in celebration.

According to the organization, the kennel is just one out of three at the facility, which usually houses strays and overflows from the adoption kennel. It is also the first one to have been emptied completely.

Happy tidings indeed. If that story don’t make you feel a little bit better about things,then I’m afraid I just can’t help you.

(Via WRSA and Larwyn)

Stand update! A small victory.

HOUSTON, Texas — Harris County law enforcement officials backed down as the owner of the Federal American Grill decided to re-open his restaurant on the city’s west side despite orders directing restaurants to be closed except for curbside orders. Multiple law enforcement agencies in Houston said they were not responsible for enforcing the ordinance.

“We’ve complied 100 percent until now,” Brice told the Houston Chronicle. “What I don’t like is that the government is picking and choosing which businesses win or lose. They are sinking the economy. We have to stand our ground and get people back to work.”

After he announced the re-opening of his restaurant for dining-in, customers flocked to his side. Brice said he is only seating up to 30 percent of his capacity in order to maintain social distancing.

Sounds sensible enough to me. Good on Houston LEOs too, for upholding their oaths and ignoring unlawful orders. TL Davis, while somber and realistic, remains guardedly optimistic:

This is communism in the 21st Century. This is what we have allowed to take over capitalism and individual freedom. Part of that is something Ted Nugent spoke about on Glenn Beck. Hunters, people who enjoy traipsing through the countryside to down, butcher and eat their food from nature, vote in the single digits, i.e., less than 10%. While I am no big fan of the vote at this point, where there is no actual representation due to the dilution of the Permanent Reapportionment Act of 1929 that froze congressional representatives at 435, it’s the only current defense against communism short of civil unrest. If hunters voted at 90%, as they should be by now, it would change the entire dynamics of every rural state in the Union and maybe some of those on the fringes of it.

While I believe we have suffered from the ongoing communist agenda promoted since Woodrow Wilson, there are ways to counter and perhaps eradicate it from American life, but a few people would have to recognize this pandemic for the blessings it offers and spend a lot more time trying to point out those blessings.

He goes on to list and analyze some of them, winding up thusly:

While we now have the tools to rectify a lot of damage done over the years, there is no assurance that these points will be made. They certainly won’t be made by the current media. Our stated goal at 12 Round Enterprises is to expose these actions even prior to the pandemic. We can take it back, we can change America forever. Or, we can lose again, only this time, it’s for all the marbles.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. After long decades of passively watching as our liberty was incrementally taken from us, we suddenly find ourselves confronting a true now-or-never, do-or-die moment. Choose wisely and hope’s flame will continue to flicker, until the next challenge confronts us. Choose poorly and the final darkness will envelop us, once and for all.

Freedom fighter update! Comrade Sundance gives us the straight izvestia.

A review of controlled social media shows various acts of civilian rebellion are being met with police arrests, detention and incarceration.

Some states have released inmates to make room to jail rebellious soccer moms and subversive members of churches who are non compliant with the dictates of their local command and control authority.

According to the national Lügenpresse proximity alerts have been sounding in/around west coast beaches as well as multiple parks in the northeastern unified control zones. As a result, additional enforcement personnel have been dispatched to these hot spots to avoid any outbreak of spontaneous liberty.

Compliance, while increasingly tenuous, is being maintained.

Simultaneous to the targeting of the rebels, armed behavior modification coaches (local police) have taken positions around Blue state public parks and beaches to identify, separate and arrest targeted provocateurs and subversives attempting to express liberty against the interests of the COVID-19 ministry.

He has pictures from the front lines too, including this:

27-Year-Old San Diego Woman Faces 90 Days in Prison for Organizing Anti-Lockdown Protest https://t.co/5oWFMC4CsK via @gatewaypundit

— Tom Fitton (@TomFitton) April 25, 2020

Disgusting, abominable, intolerable, and as un-American as it’s possible to imagine. The mind reels. I’ve read dystopian sci-fi and PAW fiction that was easier to swallow than this is.

Preview of coming attractions

Posted on April 25, 2020April 27, 2020 by Mike

If you like the panic-ninny overreaction to the Chink-N-Pox, just wait until you get a load of the rationale your masters plan to use to indefinitely confine you to your home over next.

You knew this was coming:

Public want radical response to climate change with same urgency as coronavirus, poll finds
The government should be more radical and put in place serious policies to fight the climate crisis with the same urgency as it has to coronavirus, voters believe. A new survey by pollsters Opinium found 48 per cent of the public agree that the government should respond “with the same urgency to climate change as it has with Covid-19”, with just 28 per cent saying it shouldn’t.

Environmentalists said the polling figures were a “green light” for the government to be more ambitious in tackling the climate crisis and that politicians had not yet caught up with public opinion on the issue. The polling is the latest evidence that public opinion is moving fast towards seriously tackling the crisis, following a surge in attention given in the issue last year amid international protests. The start of 2020 was punctuated with climate-related disasters like forest fires in Australia and major flooding.

Yes, it’s the Independent, a left-wing British newspaper. and, yes, we’ve been seeing this conflation of the coronavirus and “climate change” for at least the past month. The overreaction to Covid-19 has resulted in the summary abrogation of the First Amendment in the United States without so much as a shot fired, and in the imposition of lockdown orders in formerly semi-democratic Britain and in the never-really-democratic “social democracies” on the Continent.

Politicians the world over, it seems, just couldn’t wait to unleash the heavy hand of government on their hapless, trusting citizens. and now, having gotten a free look at how willingly the people transform themselves into sheep, petty tyrants in statehouses around the U.S. and in European capitals are hardly likely to let go. It seems that all you have to do is stand on a podium surrounded by doctors, frighten people into think they’ll all soon be extras on The Walking Dead, and you can get away with anything, the Constitution be damned.

And thus is the game given away. Never mind that the “legal goal” is a fiction that can easily be repealed. The absurd panic over the coronavirus is now being used as a stalking horse for further, even more punitive measures against the citizenry. After all, if the government can forbid you to leave your home out of fear of the flu, what can’t it do? Further, the longer the lockdowns last, the more “new normal” they will come to seem, so that the next government mandate, and the next, and the next, will be seen as part of a legitimate continuum, rather than the enormities they are.

And that ain’t no accident, either. Nor is it coincidence. What it is, is enemy action.

Already, those advocating for a swift reopening of the economies are being accused of wanting to kill grandma by the moral brow-beaters. In their eyes, even one death is too many, and the capitalist economies should not reopen until we can absolutely guarantee that no one will ever die of anything ever again.

Now let me see, who was it that said “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” again, now?

The “progressives” are trying to forge a chain from coronavirus to “climate change.” Having softened up the population and herded them into pens, unleashed the petty police on them, and condemned them to a life of terrified solitude until their masters deign to free them (with restrictions, of course!), government is now very nearly free of all constitutional and moral restrictions.

Again: Accident? Coincidence? Or that third thing I mentioned?

Some folks out there have challenged the get-the-boot-off-our-necks crowd with the query: So, how many people are you willing to let die of Chink-N-Pox so you whiny little bitches can go back to work? But that’s the wrong question, seems to me, and is more or less irrelevant anyway, since A) none of us has any real control over who will die, or of what, and B) none of us are getting out of this world alive anyway.

What I’d much rather have an answer to is: How many more of your already-vanishing Constitutional rights are you willing to give up forever in order to contain a malady that looks more every day like much ado about very little? Do you REALLY trust your rulers and their pet “experts” that much—even after EVERY SINGLE ONE of their computer-model projections have proven wrong, and their doomsday predictions have had to be hastily revised over and over again?

Make no mistake, people: when I said “permanent” and “forever” just now, I meant it. History has proven again and again and again that rights relinquished will never be given back; they must be TAKEN back, almost always via violent force. But what really curdles my cream is the abandonment of the fundamental principle that—no matter the crisis, the calamity, the season, the general public mood, or the supposed justification—directly and incontrovertibly flouting the US Constitution is NEVER acceptable. If you’re the gummint—federal state, or local—YOU DON’T GET TO SHUT DOWN THE CHURCHES, for one example, regardless of the supposed “risk” to however many of whomever from whatsit.

Yeah, yeah, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Got it. If I remember correctly, exceptions to the clear injunction against any restriction of the people’s unalienable rights are countenanced therein, if reluctantly, in time of war or insurrection only. Well and good.

But a blanket, across-the-board imposition of house arrest? No right to peaceably assemble? Businesses shuttered indefinitely by government decree, the purchase of certain arbitrarily-selected consumer goods forbidden? Freedom of movement now punishable by legal sanction, up to and including arrest? Gun stores closed, ammo sales locked down? No right to attend worship services?

No, sorry, but…NO. Contrary to what panic-ninnies both Left and Right are now screeching, nobody wants to get sick. Nobody wants to die, or to recklessly endanger others, to have “blood on their hands.” So stipulated. Nonetheless, Constitutional principles are supposed to be fundamental, not to be contravened by any government that hopes to sustain its claim to legitimacy. Here’s how I see it:

The tension between the Executive, Legislative, and Judicial branches, between the states and federal government, is by design. It is supposed to be challenging to “get things done” in government. Sure, crises require sacrifices, but we must be careful to preserve the structure that protects our liberties in the long run.

We are thankful that the U.S. Department of Justice recognizes the serious threat to the constitutional structure these sorts of action present. Americans do not lose constitutional rights during crises. “There is no pandemic exception,” DOJ writes in its statement of interest in the case, “to the fundamental liberties the Constitution safeguards.”

It is a great tribute to our Constitution that these checks and balances are working to create the friction necessary for Americans to take notice of the deeper issues at stake here. But we must take note and demand much better from our public officials. Federal and state executives would be wise to take a step back and consider the long-term implications of the actions they are taking. They must preserve and respect the constitutional structure that guards our liberty.

The American spirit in 2020 still shouts, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” as Patrick Henry did in 1775. No exception for Covid-19.

Forever and ever, amen. Peggy Ryan calls BS:

What are we doing, America? We’ve destroyed a booming economy, turned a record number of jobs into record unemployment numbers, and given up our basic tenets of liberty — all so we won’t get sick?

We’re allowing governors to restrict people’s movement; prevent citizens from assembling; and order mandatory masks, testing, and vaccines. These governors now claim the right to track our every move, to surveil every American in order to ensure compliance. This shutdown is not just a slippery slope to socialism and communism; it’s a downhill slalom.

How did we get here? Americans aren’t cowards who would eagerly surrender liberty for immunity. But therein lies the genius of the left. It’s not just about you and me, now, is it?

The left has hostages: our aging parents, grandparents, sick relatives. Either we put down the Constitution and slowly back away or the hostages will die.

Too many Americans have died for our liberty for us to squander this treasure over a virus. Over a million American soldiers — young, healthy — ran headlong into gunfire, navigated mine fields, dodged bombs, and otherwise gave their lives so Americans can be free.

Not a single patriot sacrificed his life, his future, to keep Americans from getting sick.

The government claims it’s protecting us from the virus. With the Constitution in lockdown, who’s protecting us from the government?

Just us, as always. Like I said last night, the Constitution doesn’t protect the people; it is the people who must protect the Constitution. Ryan closes out with a dead-on quote:

“There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters.” —Daniel Webster

Precisely so. It’s dismaying to see how many of us have forgotten that truism, or never understood it in the first place.

Blood on your hands update! Reasonable people can disagree honestly and respectfully. Then again, some people are just irredeemable assholes.

Just this once I’ll forego my customary “fuck you in the liver with a rusty railroad spike” comeback and let Linda handle it.

But, in fact, we are making a choice that returning to work is worth the risk – EVEN OF OUR OWN FAMILY. We take sensible precautions. We do the outside errands of our elderly family (and, often, of neighbors, as well).

But, in the end, some risks just have to be taken – for example, those who are considered essential and frontline. No one tells the nurses and truckers to stay home. We accept that they are putting their own, and their family’s lives at risk – for YOU to stay home, safe.

Don’t see those sanctimonious ones criticizing them. Instead, they are filled with praise for their “bravery”.

Financial problems have destroyed more than one American family. Long-term financial problems – not just “Oh, I can’t buy the latest shoes!” or “Bummer, I have to drink homemade coffee, rather than my $5 Latte” – can cause the emotional, physical, and mental breakdown that leads to a lifetime of despair.

It’s not selfish to prefer to keep your family intact. It’s not a bad thing to think that children deserve to have their mother and father living together. It’s not evil to NOT want (corrected from opposite meaning) to see the frugality of a lifetime wiped away, because NO ONE should die. Ever.

Even old people with multiple illnesses/conditions. Even if they were already hanging on by their toenails to life.

This is not Un-Christian. This is a realistic understanding that we cannot ask the entire country to upend itself for months, solely to make you feel better about having sacrificed US. Yes, US. Because most of those who are saying these things, are still getting a paycheck. Government workers, large corporations, schools.

If this is not devastating your finances, I just don’t want to hear from you. You haven’t skin in the game. You have nothing to lose by Virtue Signaling your willingness to see the rest of us suffer to make you feel better.

As she suggests, a sense of proportion is one of several important things that have gone right out the window in this debate. And that ain’t helping any either.

Two ways of being an American?

Posted on April 24, 2020April 24, 2020 by Mike

Nope.

Yesterday we published two seemingly unrelated news articles. Yet the story they tell when placed next to each other and viewed in the same gaze with clear eyes is one every American should hear and ponder.

First, we reported on Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. The darling of the “just left of Marx” camp, in an interview with Vice, stated that once the economic lockdowns are lifted, Americans should simply refuse to go back to work. Here’s what she said:

“When we have this discussion about ‘going back’ or ‘reopening,’ I think a lot of people should just say, ‘No. We’re not going back to that. We’re not going back to 70 hour weeks just so we could put food on the table and not even feel any semblance of security in our lives.'”

Americans should refuse to go back to work, she says. “No. We’re not going back to that,” we should say.

Back to what? To the greatest and most prosperous economic times humans have ever known. The highest wages and the lowest unemployment for all groups. Companies fighting each other to pay people more for their skills and services. The least amount of financial suffering of our lifetimes. An economic situation that should have caused any of us with a modicum of self-awareness, knowledge of history, and honor to say out loud every day, “Thank you, God, for this time in which I live.”+

That’s what AOC says we should refuse to go back to. The best we’ve ever had it. Because it wasn’t enough. The government should be giving us more, more, more — without us having to lift a finger. We deserve it. We are entitled to it.

That’s one way of being an American.

No, that’s one way of being UN-American, however gratingly Sandy from Westchester might protest otherwise.

Next, we reported on factory workers at a company called Braskem America in Pennsylvania. More than 40 employees made the collective decision in March to leave their families and live at the factory for 28 days, where they would eat, sleep, and take turns working 12-hour shifts to produce protective equipment for healthcare workers fighting the coronavirus pandemic. They clocked out yesterday after their month-long shift.

I couldn’t help but notice that every one of these workers appears to be male (extremely problematic lack of gender equity!). And may I hazard a guess that most of these men were raised to be men.

They lived in a factory. For a month. Doing factory work in 12-hour shifts. They agreed on it unanimously.

I wonder, did they each have an in-depth consultation with a union rep first? Did they demand quadruple-time “hazard pay”? Did they insist on more benefits, more accommodations, some equity, shorter work-weeks, and an extra paid month off next year as a “human right”? Did they require that the owner of the factory reduce his income a certain percentage before they’d do the work?

I don’t know these men, but I have a hunch that instead of all that, what they said was something like, “Alright, boys. We can help a lot of people and get some sweet overtime in the process. Let’s man up and take care of business.”

That’s another way of being an American.

In truth, theirs is the ONLY way. Or the only RIGHT way, at least. Whatever Juggs McMouthbreather might or might not believe herself to be, every peurile syllable out of her mouth proclaims that she has no concept whatever of what it means to be a real American, and likely never will.

(Via Insty)

The American Uprising gathers steam

Posted on April 24, 2020April 25, 2020 by Mike

Fight the Power.

CASTLE ROCK—Sedalia knife shop owner Hal Van Herke on Tuesday posted a Declaration of Business Independence on Facebook saying he would reopen CastleGate Knife and Tool Tuesday in defiance of Governor Polis’ stay-at-home order.

Van Herke’s declaration says in part:

“WHEREAS: Small businesses have carried the burden of this effort more heavily than special interests, large corporations and major banks who once again received preferential treatment and largess from the Federal Government at the further cost of small business tax payers, and

WHEREAS: Non-essential Government, Academic, and Corporate staff continue to remain unconscionably fully paid at the same time that Small Business, the Self Employed and the Unemployed suffer, and

WHEREAS: Our attempts at petition and righteous redress, to Our Government has fallen on uncaring ears, and in some cases has been actively suppressed, and

WHEREAS: We refuse to become second-class citizens, beholden to the entitled class for our safety, freedom, and wellbeing, and

WHEREAS: We have the ability to operate our business in such a manner as to reduce and mitigate the risk to our Community, Customers, and Staff, and to adjust operations in a responsible and balanced manner commensurate with local conditions.”

“I felt like it was important to for somebody to stand up along with other businesses and say we’re not going to be discounted in this and we’re not going to sit back and watch our life’s work destroyed while many of the people making decisions are still being paid their full time salary while they’re sitting at home,” said Van Herke.

Amen to that, brother.

In his declaration, Van Herke quotes President Ronald Reagan’s farewell address of January 11, 1989 in which Reagan says, “I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”

Amen to that, too. Ain’t it sad how quickly, and how thoroughly, Americans seem to have forgotten that home truth.

(Via Stephen Green)

Update! Defiance: the American spirit.

Shelly Luther, a salon owner in Dallas, is drawing a line in the sand. Behind on her mortgage and no Small Business Association funding in sight, Luther has decided to re-open her business Friday, April 24, in violation of the stay-at-home order in Texas that has closed all non-essential businesses, Inside Edition reported.

“I’m behind on my mortgage,” Luther said. “I know a lot of my stylists haven’t paid their mortgage. It’s either come in and make money to be able to feed your family or stay home and freak out.”

A mother of three, Luther has 19 stylists who make their living at her salon.

“Obviously I don’t want anyone to get sick and I don’t want the virus to spread,” the business owner told Inside Edition. “It will be one of the safer places for people to go rather than going to Walmart or Home Depot.”

And Luther is willing to risk her freedom as an American.

“No one wants to go to jail, but if push comes to shove I’m willing to take that risk,” she said.

Which is the question podcast host Cari Kelemen asked in a tweet.

Noting that Luther’s schedule was “PACKED,” Kelemen asked how local authorities would respond to this carefully calculated violation.

“This morning, a single mom Salon Owner in Dallas, who cannot afford to stay closed another day, is opening her salon ‘ahead of schedule.’ Her schedule today is PACKED with happy women. Will sheriffs be there to arrest her? How will the women with appointments respond if they do?”

That really is the crucial question here, isn’t it? For their own part, the cops ought to know that enforcing illegal edicts carries a price tag of its own.

In my previous column, posted on April 6, I lamented that the actions of some police officers, ordered to carry out some of the sillier or more onerous restrictions attendant to the pandemic, will further erode the already strained relationships their departments have within their communities. As one might have predicted, things have only gotten worse. Since that column was posted, we have seen police officers issuing $500 citations for the crime of attending a drive-in church service, and others arresting an Idaho woman who dared take her kids to a closed playground. Indeed, social media is awash with similar tales, which are all the more insulting to the average citizen when accompanied by stories of criminals released from jail only to re-offend within hours.

With the accumulation of these stories, the populace grows ever more restive at the restraints placed upon them. If the law and civil authority are to be respected, the laws must be respectable, at least to a majority of those on whom they are imposed.

Which brings us back to the police officers in the field and caught between their feckless superiors and a fractious public. There comes a time in every cop’s career when he receives instructions he knows will waste his time and may even be antithetical to his mission to reduce the fear of crime in his community. Often these instructions are relayed by a sergeant who himself is equally dubious about them, but who is obeying orders to disseminate them. When this happens, it is the wise officer who can say, “Yes, sir,” and then go out and do the right thing, modifying the instructions or ignoring them altogether with the sergeant’s tacit blessing. Every good cop, and every good sergeant, is familiar and comfortable with this arrangement.

Chasing people away from churches, beaches, hiking trails, and parks, and arresting those who do not meekly comply, is not enforcing the “law,” it is enforcing the whimsical edicts of people unqualified to craft and issue them. When all of this is over, can the damage be undone?

Doubtful at best, and certainly not easily. Look at it this way: when a trust is betrayed, how willing should the betrayed be to grant it again, at least without a great deal of hesitance and skepticism? Does that sound like a smart move, or a sucker’s bet?

Non-essential update! I didn’t think of this angle before, and I really should have.

Whenever the threat of a government shutdown looms, Democrats and their media allies give us daily doses of how devastating such a thing will be on “non-essential” government workers.

Then they go into overdrive when a shutdown actually occurs: wall-to-wall sob stories giving examples of government workers supposedly harmed even though, everyone knows, those employees will soon be paid. They essentially have a paid vacation.

Now, after weeks of the intentional destruction of the private sector with tens of millions of jobs lost, with businesses and families being devastated and having no idea how they will feed their families and themselves, there are few of those same sob stories, despite real hardship, and here is what we get instead:

If a Republican governor wants to open a state’s businesses, we get attack pieces saying he wants people to die. It’s as if the media were acting as a major participant in encouraging the U.S. to commit economic suicide. For decades, they have sought to weaken the U.S. and remake America.

If most of the media had an honest bone in their bodies, instead of an agenda, they would report that states that did not have a complete shutdown, or stay-at-home orders, had as good results or better results than states that put in the tyrannical, dictatorial orders. They would say there is no proof that the stay-at-home orders and harsh measures caused the flattening of the COVID-19 curve. It appears that most of the flattening has occurred naturally, same as with the normal flu.

That’s a pretty big “if” there, fella. Probably the biggest, most glaring one ever attempted indoors.

Choices, choices

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by Mike

Our would-be masters will narrow and restrict them as much as possible, until we’re well and truly cornered.

Presently, billions of people around the world are ‘living’ under mandatory stay-at-home orders, purportedly to help stop the spread of the coronavirus. Aside from the question as to whether quarantine is the most effective method for fighting this particular pandemic, what exactly will be required from us before any semblance of normalcy returns?

One possible requirement – aside from being discouraged from ever shaking hands again – is the mandatory participation in a global vaccine program, underwritten by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Big Pharma and an assortment of other people who supposedly have the best interest of the global citizenry in mind. Should we be concerned?

Despite so much uncertainty with regards to the real mortality rate, US medical spokespersons are uttering incredibly irresponsible statements that only serve to instill a sense of fear throughout society. Dr. Fauci, for example, said in the course of his above interview that “I don’t think we should ever shake hands ever again, to be honest with you.” Meanwhile, World Health Organization (WHO) special envoy David Nabarro told the BBC that “some form of facial protection, I’m sure, is going to become the norm.”

Now, judging how the medical experts are preventing entire nations from acquiring herd immunity, together with the media’s refusal to consider the merits of hydroxychloroquine, this leads to what should have been the last resort: a vaccine program, which could very well turn out to be mandatory; a requirement forced on individuals before they are able to participate in any sort of public events again.

This much was suggested by none other than the world’s premier vaccine pusher, Bill Gates, who said in a recent interview that any sort of mass gatherings “may not come back at all” without a wide-scale vaccination program. Some would call that a form of blackmail, used against a desperate people who would do just about anything right now to get back to life as they once knew it. Those days appear far in the future. Just this week, the UK announced that people will have to “live with some restrictions” until a vaccine is developed.

To be clear, few people would question that vaccines have been an inherent good for civilization; they have helped eradicate some of the worst diseases mankind has ever faced, like smallpox and polio. But today things are not so straightforward as simply eradicating a pandemic. Presently, there is a major push being made – with Bill Gates at the vanguard of those efforts – to introduce a vaccine that contains nanotechnology to ‘mark’ and surveil those injected. As just one example, consider the work being carried out by ID2020, a San Francisco-based biometric company that counts Microsoft as one of its founding members. It recently announced it was exploring “identification technologies for infants” that is based on “infant immunization.” In other words, tracking devices embedded inside of vaccines.

While the world would welcome a vaccine that eradicates the coronavirus, many would find it unacceptable to be forced to have a vaccine that contains any sort of surveillance technology. At this point in our battle against a pandemic, which has created millions of newly unemployed, the last thing people need in their lives right now is yet another source of worry. Let’s develop a vaccine against coronavirus, Mr. Gates, but please hold the tracking add-ons.

Don’t you people get it yet? The tracking add-ons are the whole point.

Let a million middle fingers rise

Posted on April 21, 2020April 23, 2020 by Mike

The spirit of American rebellion still lives, and is beginning to awaken at last.

Clearly, the greatest public- heath threat imaginable…a kid on a skateboard. Young people, remember, this is what Big-government statist Democrats do—they take away your freedom. https://t.co/VBCmnZRvfC

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) April 19, 2020

Now get a load of what happened next. Trust me, it’ll warm the cockles of even the most cynical heart.

It may not seem like all that much…yet. But it will be small, seemingly insignificant acts of defiance like this that will snowball into full-on revolt—which is something America has never in its history needed more desperately than it does right now.

Update! Washington state insurrection.

Washington Governor Jay Inslee’s draconian executive orders mandating business closures and stay-at-home status for all residents has been rejected by county commissioners in Franklin County. The motion passed unanimously. Now, the legal battles may or may not begin but in the immediate future, the county is official reopened for business.

“I move that Franklin County end recognition of the governor’s stay at home emergency proclamation that is now deemed unconstitutional. We support the reopening for all builders and small businesses that want to work,” Commissioner Clint Didier said during a meeting Tuesday morning.

This opens the door for other counties and cities to oppose the order based on RCW 43.06.220(4), which limits the governor’s state-of-emergency powers to 30 days unless the state legislature passes an extension.

Well, I gotta admit I didn’t see THAT coming.

Payback time update! Cockroaches get hit with a spotlight, to their great dismay.

Talk radio great Jamie Allman filed a Sunshine law request for the actual emails of St. Louis County residents who’ve snitched on local entrepreneurs trying to make a living. Most of the complaints were unfounded, involving people “turning in” companies that were deemed essential by the county.

But reading the actual complaints reveals just how terrified the media and corrupt academics have made good people. The complainants are truly scared. They believe that Coronavirus kills almost everyone who gets infected. They believe that washing your car, hitting golf balls at a range, or playing singles tennis can spread the disease to many people.

The 900-page file of complaints is, ultimately, sad. What could be more depressing than a mother begging government officials to put her daughter out of work? Or women asking the county to shut down their fiancé’s company?

Well, about the only thing I can think of is the thought of such despicable, craven panic-ninnies getting away with diming out friends and loved ones without paying a stiff price for such perfidy. Doxx the living fuck out of every last one of these diaper-dragging ratbags; if the old “snitches get stitches” bylaw can’t be practically enforced, then public exposure, scorn, and humiliation is the very least they have coming to ’em.

So how’s THAT working out for ya, Bill?

Posted on April 21, 2020April 21, 2020 by Mike

When His (dis)Honor Red Bill DeBalledZero gets a bucketful of dung hurled in his face by constituents repurposing his New York Narc Line for the better, you know there’s still hope for America.

De Blasio’s social distancing tip line flooded with penis photos, Hitler memes
Mayor Bill de Blasio’s critics let him know how they really felt about him ordering New Yorkers to snitch on each other for violating social-distancing rules — by flooding his new tip line with crank complaints including “dick pics” and people flipping the bird, The Post has learned.

Photos of extended middle fingers, the mayor dropping the Staten Island groundhog and news coverage of him going to the gym have all been texted to a special tip line that de Blasio announced Saturday, according to screenshots posted on Twitter.

One user sent the message “We will fight this tyrannical overreach!” to the service and got an automated message that in part said, “Hello, and thank you for texting NYC311.”

“F–k you!” replied @MorganLSchmidt1, along with a meme showing Adolf Hitler and the words “TO THOSE TURNING IN YOUR NEIGHBORS AND LOCAL BUSINESSES — YOU DID THE REICH THING.”

“Start flooding their reporting text numbers with this pics!” the tweet added.

Other profane messages included a photo of a bowl of gummy candies in the shape of male genitalia and a sign saying “EAT A BAG OF D–KS.”

All good stuff, yes, but this next one is probably my own personal fave.

An NYPD source said that “dick pic” photos of real penises have also been texted to 311, and a caller phoned in a tip that de Blasio was seen performing oral sex on someone “in an alleyway behind a 7-11” early Sunday.

YES. More like that one, please. Remember to include a detailed description of the burro Bill was observed blowing with your report next time, too. Thank you.

The inundation of off-color texts was so large the city had to temporarily shut down the service.

“The city has begun vetting everything before dispersing the information to precincts,” the NYPD source said.

And then, after you guys get done with all those, umm, essential services, maybe youse could get back to work doing some actual police work.

Sounds crazy, I know, but it just might work.

Chicken Little 86’d

Posted on April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 by Mike

Probably the most level-headed, even-handed, and just plain sensible examination I believe I’ve yet seen of the current contretemps.

Although the full story of the 2020 corona crisis cannot yet be told, already it is clear that it will have three parts: medical, economic, and cultural-political. The effects of the first two parts, especially the first, are already patent. The novel coronavirus presents a public health issue. Some regard it as a public health emergency of the first order. Others are less anxious. The issue is up for debate. As we write, the falling rate of hospitalization and leveling off of fatalities may seem to support an optimistic outcome. But even if the sunny interpretation is correct, Benjamin Jowett’s observation is to the point: “precautions are always blamed,” he said: “When they are successful, they are said to be unnecessary.” Maybe the tide is turning because we have been so assiduous in following severe “mitigation” procedures: staying home, practicing “social distancing,” and the like. Or maybe the tide is turning because the epidemic, like all epidemics, has reached its natural peak and is receding on its own. Opinions vary.

Less debatable are the economic consequences of the epidemic. We don’t know anyone who believes that they are other than catastrophic. The question is, however, whether the draconian measures imposed to slow the spread of the virus are justified. Whether or not this nasty respiratory disease presents an “unprecedented” challenge is open to interpretation. What does seem unprecedented is the experiment of suddenly shutting down almost all economic activity in a complex market-oriented country like the United States. It is one thing to switch off the mighty engines of prosperity and wealth creation. We are about to discover whether they can be restarted so expeditiously.

Which brings us to the third part of the corona caper, the cultural and political aspects. It is hardly surprising that this crisis, like all crises, has presented an opportunity to advance political agendas. Rahm Emanuel, President Obama’s chief of staff, was speaking a home truth when he observed during the economic panic of 2008 that you should “never let a serious crisis go to waste.” That sounds, and it may in fact be, cynical. It is also a truth acted upon by all parties at all times. From this perspective, the coronavirus is not only a deadly pathogen. It is also a political opportunity. It is too soon to say who will be able to make the most of that opportunity. A presidential election looms, which makes our hall of mirrors more fraught and disorienting than ever. The intensity of the scramble is a token of the high stakes involved.

But all that is just politics as usual. More noteworthy, and more worrisome, are three other features of our cultural-political situation—of “the way we live now”—that this crisis has revealed. First, there is the issue of fragility. The Western world, and the United States in particular, comprises the richest and most powerful societies in history. The fact that they can be brought to a quivering standstill by a bug that sickens and kills a minuscule part of their populations should give us pause. Is that fragility real and unavoidable, or is it chosen?

Second, there are the interrelated issues of widespread docility, on the one hand, and eager authoritarianism, on the other. We suspect that aspiring totalitarians will ponder the response to this epidemic with thoughtful anticipation. How quickly an entire population can be herded like obedient sheep, willing to be subjected to the most extravagant prohibitions! We speak of “sheltering in place.” Is it clear that we are not “cowering in place”?

The other side of that docility is the rude overbearingness of those with the power to direct our lives. Federal authorities in this instance have imposed upon us less stringently than state and local officials, some of whom have been quick to monitor and punish any hint of independence.

Longtime readers will know that we are fond of a sermon preached by C. S. Lewis in the dark days of 1939. “I think it important,” he said,

to try to see the present calamity in a true perspective…The war creates no absolutely new situation: it simply aggravates the permanent human situation so that we can no longer ignore it. Human life has always been lived on the edge of a precipice…The insects have chosen a different line: they have sought first the material welfare and security of the hive, and presumably they have their reward.

Men are different. They propound mathematical theorems in beleaguered cities, conduct metaphysical arguments in condemned cells, make jokes on scaffolds, discuss the latest new poem while advancing to the walls of Quebec, and comb their hair at Thermopylae. This is not panache; it is our nature.

Perhaps the most disturbing thing about the crisis we face is the possibility that Lewis was being too generous when describing human nature.

I really don’t need to tell you to read it all, do I?

At last, the silver lining!

Posted on April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 by Mike

Hey, you never let a serious crisis go to waste. Right, libtards?

President Trump announced on Twitter Monday night he will be signing an executive order temporarily suspending immigration to the United States due to the COVID-19 Chinese coronavirus and the need to protect jobs for Americans.

“In light of the attack from the Invisible Enemy, as well as the need to protect the jobs of our GREAT American Citizens, I will be signing an Executive Order to temporarily suspend immigration into the United States!”

Ironic, innit, that while governors and local-yokel officials are busy trampling the Constitution underfoot to glom all the power they can for themselves, Trump The Evil Dictator is taking direct, common-sense action to protect the interests of working-stiff Americans whose livelihoods have been at best jeopardized by those same governors and local-yokels?

“De Blasio Wants New Yorkers To Rat On Neighbors. Don’t Do It”

Posted on April 20, 2020April 20, 2020 by Mike

Disagree. Strongly.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio took to Twitter Saturday to urge his constituents to monitor, photograph and report each other if they aren’t strictly obeying his social distancing guidelines. Just fire off a photo to 3-1-1 of a few guys having a chat in a bodega and Hizzoner will send police officers, with guns and everything, to break it up. What could go wrong?

That rhetorical question is exactly why I disagree with discouraging meddlesome NYC panic-ninnies from snitching out their neighbors. No, no, let a million busybodies bloom, sez I. What more fitting opportunity to not only take a page from Alinsky (make the enemy live up to its own book of rules“) but also enact something of a Cloward-Piven Inversion at the same time? Remember:

The Cloward–Piven strategy is a political strategy outlined in 1966 by American sociologists and political activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven that called for overloading the U.S. public welfare system in order to precipitate a crisis that would lead to a replacement of the welfare system with “a guaranteed annual income and thus an end to poverty”.

So, yeah: if DeBalledZero wants to turn New Yorkers into a passel of skulking stoolies, then by all means let them oblige the Commie asstard…by lighting up those 311 switchboards morning, noon, and night with reports of real, imagined, or made-up infractions. That ought to be plenty enough to quickly exhaust police resources and manpower on a never-ending parade of bootless snipe-hunts for trifling infractions against The Rules laid down by the Kommissar of Public Cleanliness, until the whole goddamned system collapses into smoking, stinking rubble.

Should DeBalledZero himself be driven to nervous collapse and involuntary institutionalization by the anarchy and chaos resulting from meticulously strict obedience to the letter of his own dictates, well, so much the better.

Update! WHO COULD HAVE FORESEEN THE HORROR.

It is “unconscionable” that Rikers Island inmates who were released due to coronavirus concerns are committing new crimes, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Monday.

“I think it’s unconscionable just on a human level that folks were shown mercy and this is what some of them have done,” the mayor said during his morning briefing Monday, which came on the heels of a Post report outlining the issue.

You stupid fucking moron. If you’re uncertain about how “unconscionable” it might be, Comrade Mayor, try asking someone who gets robbed, mugged, assaulted, or worse by one of the thugs you just cut loose how they feel about it.

On the other hand, though, they’re the ones who voted you into office, so I guess they’re just getting the government they deserve—good and hard.

De Blasio said the number of re-offenders remains relatively small and that the city was “buckling down” on monitoring and supervising released prisoners.

“We do see some recidivism. I have not seen a huge amount, but any amount is obviously troubling,” he said.

Oh, OBVIOUSLY so, Perfessor. Because there should never have been so much as one act of “recidivism” in the first fucking place. And there wouldn’t have been either, if your dumb ass had sense enough to pour piss out of a boot.

Sheesh.

(Via Bill)

It’s five o’clock somewhere

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

After the bleak despair of the previous post, how’s about something a little more uplifting, eh?

Some states are declaring what businesses are “essential” and “non-essential.”

Many states, at least, are putting liquor and beer/wine stores in that “essential” category (it’s a pandemic, people, and alcohol has been proven to help*).

But getting out to the store is not easy for everyone — especially for the most vulnerable Americans.

Take Olive Veronesi. She’s 93 years old and lives outside Pittsburgh. She ran out of beer during the coronavirus lockdown and, being in a vulnerable age group for coronavirus, couldn’t leave to get more.

So she made a little sign and held it up in front of her window, holding a Coors Light can. “I need more beer!!” she said from her home in Seminole, news station KDKA reported.

People have sent in comments from all over the world. “Love you to bits all the way from England,” Martin Goodwin wrote. “Oh okay a 93-year-old does it and it’s funny and heartwarming but when I do it I’m an alcoholic,” Ty Mason wrote.

And in this day and age, heroes come in all sorts. Coors stepped up to the task and pledged to help out Veronesi. “Olive asked, and beer is on its way,” Coors Light tweeted Sunday night.

Hey, if Granny wants a beer, she by God oughta have herself one.

Prognosis: negative

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by Mike

On the express train to the hurt locker.

Are we dumping milk because of greed or low demand, no. It’s the supply chain, there are only so many jug fillers, all were running 24/7 before this cluster you-know-what.

Now demand for jug milk has almost doubled. However, restaurant demand is almost gone; NO ONE is eating out.

Restaurant milk is distributed in 2.5 gal bags or pint chugs; further, almost 75 percent of milk is processed into hard products in this country, cheese and butter. Mozzarella is almost a third of total cheese production; how’s pizza sales going right now??

A bit of history – Years ago (40+) every town had a bottler, they ran one shift a day, could ramp up production easily. Now with all the corporate takeovers (wall street over main street) we are left with regional “high efficiency” milk plants that ran jug lines 24/7 before this mess, no excess capacity.

Jug machines cost millions and are MADE IN CHINA. Only so many jugs can be blown at a jug plant. We farmers don’t make the jugs, damn hard to ramp up production.

I’m a dairy farmer, believe me NO dairyman likes dumping milk; and so far there is NO guarantee they will get paid. Milk must be processed within 48 hours of production and 24 hours of receipt in the plant or it goes bad. Same with making it into cheese and butter, and neither stores well for long.

The same supply line problems exists where restaurants are supplied with bulk 1 pound blocks of butter or single serv packs or pats; and cheese is sold in 10 to 20 pound bags (think shredded Mozzarella for pizza). Furthermore, it is not legal for this end of the supply chain to sell direct to consumers in most states.

We are headed for the same problem with canned veggies. The vast majority of produce comes off and is processed in season; canned or frozen. The supply is already in cans for the season; restaurants use gallon cans or bulk bags of frozen produce.

At some point we will run out of consumer sized cans in stock because home size sales are up (40%+) and restaurant sales are almost nonexistent. Fresh produce out of U.S. season comes from Mexico (different climate). I’m talking sweet corn, green beans, peas, tomatoes, all veggies are seasonal in the USA. Fresh, out-of-season, row crops are imported. (There are exceptions, like hydroponic grown, but small amount of total).

Eggs? Same problem. Bakeries and restaurants of any size use Pullman egg cases, 30 dozen at a pop, 30 eggs to a flat, 12 flats to a case. There are only so many 1 dozen egg cartons available and only so many packing machines.

Industrial bakeries and processors of packaged food buy bulk liquid eggs, no carton at all. Also in many states it is illegal to sell this supply-chain directly to consumers.

On your standard buffet of any size, do you really think they boil eggs and peel them? They come in a bag, boiled and diced; those nice uniform slices of boiled egg you see on your salad, a lot of them come in tubes boiled and extruded at the same time, just unwrap and slice. Your scrambled eggs come in a homogenized bag on most buffets.

Another example of Main Street being gutted and “improved by wall street” NO local egg processors available or many small egg producers either, all corporate and huge, contracted to sell to the corporate masters.

This is a warning the same problems exist in all supply chains.

The supply chain is farked.

David Osterloh,
61-year-old dairy farmer

Scary stuff.

Killed by the cure

Posted on April 11, 2020April 11, 2020 by Mike

So how’s everybody liking their 30-day free trial of Communism?

Over the course of the Coronavirus pandemic and societal shut down (the communist trial run) it should be understood by those communists cheering on the lockdown of humanity and the destruction of the market system, the person most likely to be designated as the new Tsar of America is Donald Trump, someone capable of running a multi-trillion dollar economy, who understands production better than Bernie Sanders, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, James Comey or whatever communist cut out Washington has to offer.

If we are to be forced into a “climate saving” lockdown and re-tooling of the American economy, of which this fake pandemic is pretext and having seen the American patriots and their terror-filled responses to all other machinations of communist principles overlaid on their capitalist system, then the outcome is already known. So, since communism seems to be undeniable, largely because through the dilution of the American educational system, the slow progression of communist government displacing capitalist government, we ought to at least focus ourselves on determining our tyrant.

I am all for a mass march on Washington to demand capitalism and a release from self-imposed captivity. I am all in on a state by state effort toward the same goal, release, freedom, liberty, etc., but none of my fellow citizens seem to think it is such a situation and even if it is, it is much too dangerous to group ourselves together in such a manner as we might further enrage the communists in charge (as they have proven over the past few weeks that in fact they are) of our lives, our liberty and our persons to the degree that they can fine and imprison us for exerting our individual right of movement and commerce.

Understand the situation we are in. If any Democrat is elected president, this will be the model for fighting climate change. I finally heard this understanding of the situation broached on talk radio. Finally, someone understood that after we had gone this far, any health issue might be used as an excuse to thus confine us. My thoughts went to the amount of lives that could be saved by keeping the majority of us off the roads, except by the communist practice of “travel permits” allowing us to go to work at pre-determined and acceptable jobs or for specific purposes only, but the idea of combating climate change is equally useful to those wishing to impose communism on America.

And if you’re telling yourself “it can’t happen here,” you’re a damned fool.

TL also has a post up on the release of his Lies Of Omission doc, which you can stream for free if you have Amazon Prime. And, of course, you can still donate to the fundraiser for the Belmont Playboys doc if you’re so inclined, too.

Update! I for one welcome our new Green overlords.

Last month, we were wondering whether the cure could be worse than the disease; this month, it seems clear that the cure and the disease were always the same thing. Rely on Chinese communists to produce your medicines and fill your supply lines with breakable crap, and this is what happens. Rely on globalist socialist flimflammers to remedy the situation with “calm expertise,” and they will instead send in an army of anti-American boffins to complain, arrest fathers playing catch with their daughters, and find ways to blame the whole out-of-control exercise in petit-tyranny on Christians and Southerners. For the first time since the James Younger Gang was roaming these parts, grown men are walking around with bandanas covering their faces, but their eyes are telling a whole other story. There’s only so much despotism that free people will endure, and if the price for life is the surrender of everything that makes life worth living, then those bandanas begin to feel like something else entirely. If all these municipal Napoleons-in-aspiration getting fitted for shiny hobnailed jackboots right now can’t control their shared impulse to rule over other men, then these bandanas might become a more permanent fixture. If there’s one thing Americans have always understood, it’s this: where speech and religion and personal defense are all outlawed, be an outlaw.

I, for one, welcome this grand display of government intrusion from coast to coast. Unlike the invisible Chinese virus hunting us surreptitiously, this overbearing application of government force is right out in the open for all to see. The more unscrupulous Democrat mayors openly brag about shutting down private businesses, banning gun ownership, and ripping congregants from church pews. They’re closing every house of worship in sight until their constituents learn to supplicate at the steps of City Hall and nowhere else! Democrats are always gravely warning about creeping fascism from others, but they insist we ignore the rank smell of authoritarianism emanating from their every local executive order. Lone drivers are pulled over for no other reason than to remind the riffraff that they are powerless before their local lords; neighbors are enticed by official favor and bounty to snitch on isolated joggers running through their streets; married nonagenarians are forcibly separated “for their own good.” Only the Democrats could follow the examples of Boko Haram and the Chinese Communist Party in taking advantage of human misery for their own gain. There is no need to imagine the historical totalitarianism of the ’30s and ’40s when it is now bursting forth before us with a vulture’s plumage for all to see. And for that, I am thankful.

Well, now that we’re getting an awful peek behind the socialists’ GND curtain with this partial shutdown of the economy. Does it feel as if the American people are jumping up and down with excitement that “revolutionary change” on an “epic scale” has finally begun? Does it seem as if we’re “committed” to this path? Millions of Americans out of work. GDP contraction. Stock market and retirement savings up in smoke. A Constitution left in tatters. All to decrease electricity usage in the United States by five to ten percent and slash the demand for gasoline in half. If this is what it feels like to destroy capitalism and usher in a new era of universal misery, please stop teasing me with the amuse-bouche of collapsing just part of the economy. I can hardly wait until we are allowed to indulge ourselves with the gluttonous feast of shutting down the whole thing. What a world Biden has promised us! It is as one anti-fracking Greenie declared online: “We now see the ‘glorious vision’ of a world free of fossil fuels.” Except the Green New Deal requires twenty times the effort and sacrifice and many more orders of magnitude in national debt to finally free ourselves of the dastardly hydrocarbons they abhor. Imagine the bliss we will discover from our future of permanent social lockdown. Thank goodness China Joe and the Green tyrants have such grand vision to go with their good intentions. We can save the planet by destroying ourselves over and over again!

Or maybe enough Americans will find this depressing glimpse into the future the Democrats promise us more than enough for one lifetime. Perhaps America will wake up to the reality that the Green New Deal and the Chinese virus share an identical life force. Maybe we won’t have to fight the war to come because enough of the great-grandchildren of the last generation to fight state-sponsored evil will finally recognize the Democrats’ counterfeit promises of unobtainable perfection here on Earth. Either way, at least we can finally see for ourselves what the Democrats have in mind. This miserable police state is the only future they desire.

It was always that way. It was always obvious too, for anyone with eyes to see, although it’s true that they’ve been more up-front and brazen than ever before with this Chink-N-Pox shinola. Yet half the electorate votes for them nonetheless. Again:

There’s the REAL problem.

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