Begins At Home – Page 40

The rights and the wrongs

Posted on March 25, 2020March 25, 2020 by Mike

VDH isn’t often wrong. And he’s mostly right here, too. Mostly.

There is some evidence from Germany and to a lesser extent South Korea, that it may be possible to see the fatality rate dip below 1 percent. And with the breathing space from the lockdown, better hygiene (the degree of constant and near-obsessive cleaning at businesses that are still open is quite amazing), more knowledge and data, better medical protocols, the use of some efficacious drugs, warmer weather, and experience with the disease will, in perfect-storm fashion, begin to mitigate the effects of the virus.

Should we get the lethality rate down to German levels (currently two to three in 1,000), then we can cautiously assume that those who predicted that the coronavirus could eventually be contextualized as a bad, H1N1-like flu will no longer be demonized as nuts, and life can resume with reasonable precautions and focused quarantines and isolation.

Yeah, aside from that whole collapsed-economy thing we’re all gonna be just peachy-keen.

In two or three weeks, if we can just allow most businesses to reopen, gear up to pandemic testing, track cases and contacts in the manner of past protocols that lessened polio, tuberculosis, AIDS, and measles outbreaks, and focus on the ill and elderly, then the economy will reboot.

“Most businesses” assumes that “most” will survive. At least in the bar/restaurant industry, very many of them will not. The effects from that are going to be felt way beyond just some out-of-work wait staff and bartenders, too.

But now the current economy is starting to resemble a patient in an induced coma, one whom no one knows whether he will recover after the respirator is disconnected. But still, there are reasons for optimism: historically low interest rates will eventually encourage big-ticket buying.

By people employed in precarious, thin-margin sectors who haven’t worked in weeks? It’s often said that most Americans are only one or two paychecks away from homelessness. Those people are now past that threshold, with no end in sight. I dunno, maybe I’m just too much of a gloomy Gus and all, but seems to me the math and the optimism are somewhat in conflict at the moment.

Hanson goes on for a bit in that overly-sunny vein, bless his heart. But then we come to the good stuff.

In a sophisticated society under lockdown, is it more existentially valuable to know how to fix a toilet, replace a circuit breaker, or change a tire, or to be a New York fashion designer, a Hollywood actor, or a corporate merger lawyer? At 9 p.m., when you go downtown in need of a critical prescription, are you really all that furious that a law-abiding citizen who has a gun and concealed permit is also in line—or would you be more relieved that gun control laws might ensure that his ilk never enters an all-night pharmacy?

So who is important and who not?

We were often told globalized elites on the coast were the deserved 21st-century winners, while the suckers and rubes in-between had better learn coding or head to the fracking fields.

But who now is more important than the trucker who drives 12-hours straight to deliver toilet paper to Costco?

Sorry, but here’s another nit I must pick. Any trucker who drives 12 hours straight these days is going to find himself out of work somewhere around the 13th one. Electronic logs track every minute of the driving day; with ironclad rules mandating not only total hours but also occasional thirty minute breaks throughout, and freight companies closely monitoring the data so as to avoid thousands of dollars in fines levied by state authorities who monitor ditto, there just ain’t no wiggle-room left in the workday.

My brother, an owner-operator who hauls containers out of Savannah, routinely finds his legal driving time running thin when he’s about 20 minutes away from his home. He then faces a stark choice: pull over somewhere and shut down (a problem all its own considering the chronic shorage of rest-stop parking), step out of the cab, and walk laps around his rig for the required “rest” period (you’re actually not supposed to just sit inside the truck and relax, or lie down in the bunk if you’re driving a sleeper). Alternatively, he can just say to hell with it, go on home and park the damned thing, and hope like hell nobody catches him at such reckless brigandry.

There have also been occasions when his entire daily duty-time allotment is nearly used up only a few miles from his home, which means a shutdown of ten hours before he can make another move legally. On those occasions, he usually just parks at a truck stop not far from the house and has the wife come pick him up and ferry him on home. Then she gets to drag herself out of bed at four AM next day to drop him off again, which she just LOOOOVES. A time or three he’s even had me do it, although I live a good forty miles or more from his place.

He’s gotten away with defying the thirty-minute-break rule a good few times, but is currently on probation after being busted twice recently—”condition yellow,” his employer calls it. One more infraction, and he’s out on his condition-red ass to join all those waiters and bartenders out there on the soup kitchen line.

So sorry again, Victor, but those heroic truckers won’t be driving any twelve hours straight, I’m afraid. Not for long, they won’t. Oh, many if not most of them could easily do it without excessive risk to anybody; hell, most of the old pros from the paper-log days have, in fact, a bazillion times over. I have myself, in fact, and more than just once or twice too. They’re certainly willing enough, mind; running long hours on the road all by your lonesome is simply what they do; it’s the job, no more, no less. But the law—as handed down to us from On High by college-boy goobermint eggheads who never hauled a load or humped freight on a loading dock a single day in their life, and don’t know anybody who has either—don’t allow that sort of thing. And while there used to be certain cracks you could slip through in order to get the job done, those cracks have all been sealed up by technology and the nanny-state mindset now.

But back to the good stuff again.

Do we really need to ask such questions of whether the presence of the czar for diversity and inclusion at Yale is missed as much as the often-caricatured cop on patrol at 2 a.m. in New Haven?

Do social justice student protestors who surround and heckle the politically suspicious now in ones and twos also scream in the faces of the incorrect plumber who unclogs their locked-down apartment drain?

The virus has reminded us again, but in an unorthodox fashion, that the world is bifurcated by the degreed versus the non-college educated, rural versus urban, sophisticates in opposition to supposed rubes—and the dichotomy has been telling. I don’t suppose Rick Wilson will go on CNN again to do his fake-Okie accent to ridicule the supposed unwashed, who deliver his food and energy, as viewers might wonder what exactly was his expertise.

Oh, I dunno. I wouldn’t be willing to place any bets on what depths a pustulent lowlife like Wilson might or might not be capable of stooping to.

When your refrigerator goes out under quarantine and your supplies begin to rot, do you really need another rant from Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif.)—or do you rather need a St. Michael Smith and St. Uriel Mendoza to appear out of nowhere as the archangels from Home Depot to wheel up and connect a new one?

The real head-scratcher is how so many people ever convinced themselves they needed anything at all from the cretin Waters other than a cheerful, courteous “drive around to the first window, please” in the first damned place.

China syndrome

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Tucker expands on some of those Bigger Problems I mentioned below.

There are serious long-term problems facing America, as we’ve told you about for years on this show. Thanks to outsourcing, this country no longer has the same reserve of stable middle-class manufacturing jobs we did even 30 years ago.

In coastal cities, housing has become astronomically expensive. Prices are rising far quicker than wage growth. And most tragically, an opioid epidemic kills tens of thousands of Americans every year. One of the chief reasons for that is a synthetic opiate called fentanyl that is smuggled in from abroad.

Now, these might seem like unrelated problems, but they’re not. A single theme unites them — a systematic decision by many of our country’s most powerful leaders to sell out America to China.

Those jobs that were outsourced, they went to China. Those rising home prices, all-cash Chinese buyers are a major contributor to that, though it’s almost never said out loud. Fentanyl — made in China with the knowledge and tacit approval of the Chinese Communist Party.

China is no longer simply an economic rival of the United States; it’s becoming a dangerous enemy. But instead of protecting us from this threat, an existential one, our leadership class collaborates with the other side.

The scariest part is that as China has grown more powerful, America has grown more dependent on it. Outsourcing our manufacturing power brought American companies big short-term profits. Head to Florida, and you’ll see the houses they’ve built with those profits. But in the long run, that decision made this country dangerously dependent on a nation that seeks to displace us on the world stage.

The saddest and most infuriating part is that none of this needed to happen in the first place. China didn’t just one day magically overtake us. Our leaders made that possible. They abetted it. They profited from it. They betrayed us.

And Americans voted for ’em anyway, and will again too. Which makes this depressing splash of cold-water reality look more relevant than ever:

Top Men

Posted on March 22, 2020March 22, 2020 by Mike

Bitter Clinger is not impressed.

It’s not just infuriating, it’s depressing, to see how mentally softened our country has become. Reduced to a shadow of ourselves, once the greatest, most inspiring nation to grace the planet. A nation colonized by men that sailed across oceans to a wilderness unknown without modern convenience or assurance of survival to have what they coveted most, personal autonomy. A nation that sent men to the deepest depths of the oceans and planted flags on the moon.

And what are we reduced to by media-induced panic? A nation of cowards, that casts the eye of suspicion on our fellow countrymen for the crime of a public sneeze or clearing of the throat.

My Little Clingette recently travelled to Spain on a school trip, one wrought with government travel bans, social distancing advisories, the ever-present “abundance of caution”, airport screenings, and a rucksack replete with hand sanitizer, alcohol-wipes and the like.

Upon her return, the top men of government, medicine and science have deemed it proper that she be quarantined for a fortnight, because, you see, having travelled makes her a hazard to society, or so say the top men. Mind you these same men of science have informed us that a child, moments from birth, is no child at all and may be summarily executed. These same men of medicine have assured us that injecting livestock with hormones is a dangerous practice, but injecting an eight year old with hormone blockers is sound medicine. These same men of government ply us with sound logical practices such as the forgoing of jurisprudence for the rapists, murderers and drug peddlers that invade our country from lands afar and near that pillage our great nation by way of government trough and illicit acts.

As a child of the internet generation, Little Clingette is given to trust the collective knowledge of the keyboard. So she is convinced that a visit to grandma’s house is tantamount to issuing a death sentence to her elderly maternal role model, and while I love her heart for being so concerned, a part of my heart breaks for her that she is assuredly is symptomatic, not of COVID-19 (or as it is referred to in House Clinger, “The Boogeyman Virus”), but of a deeper, more worrisome disease, one that is increasingly pervasive in our society. She suffers from fear, and fear is a dreadful disease most certainly. For while a bacteria, a virus, a stranger, or whatever other form that risk may manifest as may indeed kill you, fear itself will cripple your growth and life in a way that Polio or Ebola never could.

I still say that if our Top Men—with their superior wisdom, judgment, and access to much information we lesser beings lack—were really all that concerned about CV-19, they wouldn’t be in Washington conducting the usual business in the usual way right now as if there was nothing to worry about.

They’ve lied to us, and lied to us, and lied to us—about everything under the sun, for years and years and years. We know this full well. We know they’re not to be trusted; we know their intentions, ethics, and behavior all habitually fall a good ways short of honorable. Yet now, all of a sudden, we’re going to start believing them? We’re going to start trusting them, we’re going to just take it on faith that they have our best interests at heart—that they mean well after all? That they’re only “here to help,” as the bumper-sticker joke goes?

I could be all wet, I could be overly cynical, I could be a damned idiot, but…nah, brah.

SOLD! American

Posted on March 20, 2020March 20, 2020 by Mike

It smelled fishy from the start, but with every passing day the stench worsens.

A decorated scientist with four degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology believes the coronavirus pandemic is being used by the “Deep State” for its own purposes.

Shiva Ayyadurai said on Twitter that “fear-mongering” over the outbreak is being used to push an agenda.

“As an MIT PhD in Biological Engineering who studies & does research nearly every day on the Immune System, the #coronavirus fear mongering by the Deep State will go down in history as one of the biggest fraud to manipulate economies, suppress dissent, & push MANDATED Medicine!” he said.

It is important to note that Ayyadurai did not say the disease is man-made or a hoax.

You should follow the guidelines from doctors, federal, state and local governments and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

But what Ayyadurai did say is that some in the government are using the pandemic to frighten people into obedience.

Think about what has transpired in less than a week’s time. We have handed control of nearly everything in our lives to the government.

In many places, they are telling us when we can leave our homes and when we must return to them.

They have decided what events or religious services we can attend, how many people are allowed to be there and which businesses are allowed to stay open.

In the process, the global economy has crashed with the assistance of the media stirring everyone into a mass panic.

Wonder if we can now expect an increasingly stringent Coronavirus Clampdown to become an annual event, just as a reminder of who’s really in charge around here?

Update! Is the cure worse than the disease?

For the curious, if they can get past however they are responding to the what’s happening right now, this is an amazing time. We will see things that no one could have imagined seeing just a few weeks ago. No one can know what follows a 30-day quarantine of a continent sized country. No one really knows what will follow just this one week halt to the global economy. No one knows what happens if the plague fears are wildly overblown, which seems inevitable at this point.

Regardless of what follows, we are living in a time without precedent. A century ago, we had a real plague, but the world did not stop. The stock market collapse in the 1920’s did bring a closure, but it was not for a month. The bank run that happened in 1933 resulted in a week-long bank holiday, but the rest of society kept going. The past provides some samples but nothing close to what is being contemplated. Heck, we are already into uncharted territory with the one-week lock-down.

Maybe I am the crazy one, but crazy or not, messing with big complicated things always has unanticipated results. This is an iron law of systems. Even if the response is appropriate to the danger, taking a sledge hammer to the very complex system that is American society will have consequences that no one can anticipate. Another rule of complex systems is you need to understand the iron law of systems before you are allowed to even tinker with the system. That rule has been violated.

The arrogance of our would-be masters is exceeded only by their lust for absolute power.

Perspective

Posted on March 17, 2020March 17, 2020 by Mike

Timeless wisdom from CS Lewis, shared with us by a Diplomad commenter.

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me, dear sir or madam, you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways. We had, indeed, one very great advantage over our ancestors—anesthetics; but we have that still. It is perfectly ridiculous to go about whimpering and drawing long faces because the scientists have added one more chance of painful and premature death to a world which already bristled with such chances and in which death itself was not a chance at all, but a certainty.

This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

Smart fella, that CS Lewis.

Yeah, get bent

Posted on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 by Mike

One can only stand back in awe of the enormous balls on the ChiCom swine.

Thursday’s allegations from the Chinese Foreign Ministry that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in America and was spread to China by the U.S. military was not a fluke or an example of a rogue spokesman running his mouth.

Foreign Ministry mouthpiece Zhao Lijian doubled down with more allegations on Friday, signaling a major effort by the Chinese Communist Party to gaslight the entire world and avoid responsibility for the global pandemic unleashed by the Chinese government.

At least one other Foreign Ministry spokesman more widely quoted in the West, Geng Shuang, refused to challenge or denounce Zhao’s tweets.

“The international community, including the U.S., have different opinions about the origin of the virus,” was Geng’s comment when asked about Zhao’s theories.

“China always considers this a scientific question, which should be addressed in a scientific and professional manner,” he added.

CNN noticed a “concerted campaign to question the origin of the novel coronavirus” on Chinese social media. Chinese officials are very much a part of this campaign. Zhao’s superior at the Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, used the Redfield video as an excuse to thunder that it is “absolutely WRONG and INAPPROPRIATE to call this the Chinese coronavirus.”

Right. So from here on out, then, I will be referring to COVID-19—engineered in a Chinese bioweapons lab in China by Chinese government scientists who are Chinese—as the Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Flu.

With two you get eggroll, motherfuckers.

To the astonishment of precisely no one who knows anything at all about Commies, the evil Chinese bastards are of course lying their Commie asses off.

What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world. Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots just another conspiracy theory to be dismissed out of hand.

From the beginning China has been less than forthcoming about this virus and resisted sharing critical data and access to WHO and CDC specialists. And have we forgotten Dr. Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist based in Wuhan, the epicenter of the contagion, who tried to tell the world that China was hiding something malevolent, only to be silenced and imprisoned by Chinese authorities for allegedly fabricating lies about the disease’s deadly potential? He would later die of the disease he tried to warn us about and the Chinese tried to keep under wraps.

To be clear, this is not to say the Wuhan Virus was part of any biological weapons program or that its release was intentional. It could just be that it was the result of Chernobyl-like sloppiness resulting from a bizarre blend of Chinese culture and global ambition.

Along with the constant lying and obfuscation, the corruption, incompetence, and “sloppiness” are other reliable characteristics of Communist governments. Throw in a total disregard for the innocent lives Commie regimes so casually disrupt, damage, and destroy outright in truly staggering numbers, and you know pretty much everything you should ever need to about Communism, really.

This isn’t the first made-in-China virus Beijing has sprung on the world. And it won’t be the last unless we stop worrying about political correctness and sanction China for what amounts to economic warfare and negligent homicide on a global scale.

Sanction ’em, eh? And how are we gonna pull THAT one off, pray tell? Thanks to the nefarious cabal of politicians and high-level corporate greedheads who sold America down the river for their own selfish gain while we weren’t paying close enough attention, our options now fall somewhere in the vicinity of “precious few good ones,” with a pretty sharpish tilt towards “none whatsoever.”

American manufacturing was transferred en bloc to China long ago while the Americans being slo-mo buggered politely agreed not to notice, re-electing the sleazy, grasping pols who acted in cahoots with the corporate greedheads again and again and again. Sad to say, that last is all on us.

Think I’m kidding about our lack of real options here? The Chinese themselves sure seem confident enough about it:

China is threatening to wreak havoc on America’s drug supply amid the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Thanks to our globalist elite and especially missteps during the Obama-Biden administration, Beijing has the power to do just that.

In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpieces, Beijing threatened that it can impose pharmaceutical export controls after which America will be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

Unfortunately, Beijing isn’t bluffing about this capability.

Nope. in fact, they could do plenty more, and worse, than just that if they wanted.

The last cited article continues from there with a recap of how we wound up as a wholly-owned property of Red China Inc which is guaranteed to chill your very marrow, and enrage you along with it. SPOILER: Sloppy Joe Biden plays a starring role.

How it’s DONE

Posted on March 10, 2020March 10, 2020 by Mike

Greece nuts the fuck up.

The situation in the no-mans-land between Turkey and Greece is becoming increasingly more violent and desperate for the refugees. Reporters on a tour heard gunshots despite the Greek government denying the use of anything except tear gas to stop the refugees.

Daily Beast:

For over an hour, the sound of people trying to direct each other in multiple languages through farms, woodlands, and across riverbanks was punctuated by shots. First it sounded like single rifle blasts, then came bursts of three, and then longer, heavier automatic fire.

Encouraging, and way overdue. Greek officials, when confronted by wailing “journalists” and other hanky-soaking globalist cunts claiming to have heard gunfire, blithely responded No you didn’t.

However, when Papastathis appeared on Wednesday afternoon to direct us to the new location, he denied absolutely that we had heard what we heard.

“Only tear gas is being fired,” he insisted to a group of a dozen journalists on the tracks.

Turkey accused Greece of killing a Syrian man and wounding five other people.

My heart bleeds. Maybe shoulda stayed the fuck home then, no?

Fuck the goddamned treacherous Turks and their accusations all to hell and gone, by the way. The rationale for their even being in NATO at all escapes me completely. Then again, I feel the exact same way about the US, too.

The next day footage of Greek soldiers apparently firing in the direction of migrants on the border surfaced online. And more signs of the Greeks using live fire on migrants and asylum seekers could be found at a makeshift camp for people waiting to cross the Evros River near the Turkish city of Edirne.

As encouraging as the Greek gubmint’s properly hardnosed response to the de facto invasion of their nation by predatory Moslem rapefugees and perpetual dependents surely is, this next is even more so:

Greece is becoming more and more desperate to stop what has to be considered a Turkish-inspired invasion of its territory. And since the government has been ineffective, armed private citizens have taken matters into their own hands.

The BBC has encountered members of self-styled militias who carry out night-time armed patrols in Greek border towns looking for migrants.

“There are such militia along the entire region,” said Yannis Laskarakis, a newspaper publisher in the city of Alexandroupoli who has received death threats for speaking out against armed vigilantes.

“We have seen them with our own eyes, arresting migrants, treating them badly and if someone dares to help them, he has the same fate.”

And the vigilantes aren’t only going after refugees. Aid workers and the press have also been assaulted.

I bolded the best part so’s you wouldn’t miss it. Elsewhere, the Telegraph gets busy trotting out the usual boogeyman:

On Lesbos, young men have targeted reporters and NGOs because they perceive them as being sympathetic to the refugees’ plight.

It is not clear if they are local or outsiders from the mainland, possibly connected to far-Right organisations.

On Friday there were reports that members of German and Austrian far-Right groups had arrived on the island.

Yeh, yeh, whatevs. Moran deftly slices and dices that hooraw:

I doubt whether a lot of these simple Greek villagers are members of a far-right organization. Their motivations are simple; their families are at risk and their property is being invaded by foreigners. For them, there are no grand geopolitical issues involved. They are protecting theirs and their own from harm.

But with the rest of the EU cheerleading from the sidelines — while not lifting a finger to help except to open their wallets — Greece finds itself alone and facing a potential onslaught of 100,000 people.

Doesn’t matter a damned bit whether they’re “far-Right” or not; I’d bet the farm that none of those militia types give a shit about any of that, either. Let liberal “journalists” clang the “far-Right” tocsin to their hearts’ content; there is but one issue that matters here: when a national government fails to meet its most basic obligations—securing its borders, maintaining its sovereignty, and defending its citizens—then eventually its citizens will take matters into their own hands.

Nobody is obliged to sit passively back as hostile marauders invade their country, rain violence and destruction on its people, assault its culture and institutions, soak up its resources, and just generally run riot through the place. However complacent, peaceable, or over-civilized a population may be, sooner or later enough finally becomes enough. Then the lamp is lit, the ball has dropped, and it’s game on for reals.

Somebody really ought to give our own Democrat-Socialists a strongish heads-up about that lest they someday find their own precious butts caught in the blades, for some very similar reasons.

The fight is forever

Posted on March 8, 2020March 8, 2020 by Mike

Sundance quotes a bit from a classic old Mike Vanderboegh post, which I just had to track down and excerpt some of myself.

Are we not already two different countries, the liberals and we traditional believers in free men and free markets? If we cannot agree on something so philosophically findamental as the sanctity of life, what else can we agree on? Have we not just been agreeing to disagree on when the next American civil war will break out?

We must admit that the reason we are losing the world war for western civilization both at home and abroad is because we have elected not to fight it. And we will continue losing it until we do.

Those of us who long for the restoration of the Founders’ Republic are out of time. We cannot allow ourselves to pushed back from our God-given, inalienable liberties any longer. WE MUST REFUSE TO BE SUBJUGATED A THIN SALAMI SLICE AT A TIME. We must refuse to concede to our own enslavement. In the end, and it may come sooner rather than later, we must fight.

This is no small thing, to restore a republic after it has fallen into corruption. I have studied history for years and I cannot recall it ever happening. It may be that our task is impossible. Yet, if we do not try then how will we know it can’t be done? And if we do not try, it most certainly won’t be done. The Founders’ Republic, and the larger war for western civilization, will be lost.

But I tell you this: We will not go gently into that bloody collectivist good night. Indeed, we will make with our defiance such a sound as ALL history from that day forward will be forced to note, even if they despise us in the writing of it.

And when we are gone, the scattered, free survivors hiding in the ruins of our once-great republic will sing of our deeds in forbidden songs, tending the flickering flame of individual liberty until it bursts forth again, as it must, generations later. We will live forever, like the Spartans at Thermopylae, in sacred memory.

Along those same lines, Aesop is all in.

It cuts against the grain. Because when they’re enforcing just laws in a just manner, the police are doing Good. I am neither a copsucker nor a knee-jerk cop-hater, and my record in calling out the douchebadges when they royally screw the pooch is beyond reproach. But there’s still quite a lot of them doing God’s work all the time. (In Chicongo, not so much. But I digress.) If I were a bank robber, a rapist, or a murderer, caught red-handed, that would include shooting me in the face.

But when the only alleged “crime” is that some shrieking nancypants got the hebejeebees because I own a gun (or ten, or fifty, or whatever I’m up to these days), and anyone – president, congress weasels, governor, district attorney, hysterical mother, or some black-robed fuckwit too stupid to get into a STEM program – thinks that gives them the a priori right to circumvent Natural Law, the Constitution, and due process in one fell swoop, and send Officer Jackboots And His Merry Men to come take them, without any bill of indictment, witnesses, defense, or any other shred of due process in common law going back to Magna Carta, you’d better send your minions in their serious Kevlar underpants, with their insurance paid up and their wills up to date, and leave the married men at home. Because at that point, the range is now hot in both directions, I shoot Expert, and that red range flag means “No quarter given, nor expected.”

Now, go home and think about your wife and kids. Your friends, family, and hobbies. Everything you hold dear.

That’s what you’re risking for me, and for you, when you decide a paycheck trumps the Constitution.

So think long and hard about whether today is a good day to die, for treating me like a criminal, when we both know I’m not.

Doing that is the day you decide to become a criminal.
And you’ll answer for it, both here, and hereafter.

The war may well end, someday, and either my side or yours will win.

But you won’t live to see it, if I have anything to say about it.
So, do you really want to make all kinds of enemies out of the last people in the country who think what you do is something worth having?

Instead of being so tewwibly, tewwibly fwightened of all those big mean scary-looking guns, they probably ought to be afraid of guys like Aesop, and the millions upon millions more of us out here nodding our heads in quiet agreement with his sentiments. Because it’s as Heinlein’s Sgt Zim said: There are no dangerous weapons; there are only dangerous men.

Aside: I’m going to put Vanderboegh’s hallowed halls into Ye Olde Blogrolle. Yes, I know Mike’s gone and the blog is defunct as of 2016, alas. But his stuff is every bit as pertinent now as it was back then, so I’m gonna provide myself with a handy reminder to go back and poke around in his archives now and then.

Blago gets some

Posted on February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 by Mike

A shiv for Barky.

Convicted former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich went on Fox News in his first post-release interview and held very little back about Barack Obama’s involvement in the scandal that put him in prison, while the first black president was never held accountable.

Appearing on “Watters’ World” with Jesse Watters, Blagojevich was quickly asked about the 2008 Senate-seat-for-sale scandal, in which Blagojevich had negotiated appointing an Obama-approved candidate, in exchange for a cabinet position.

“Did you ever talk to Barack Obama about this Senate seat? Did he have any knowledge about what was going on or not?” Watters asked.

“President Obama began the whole conversation because he sent someone to me as a middleman, a mediator — not unusual in politics — on the night he was elected president to say that he’d like to talk about his choice for the Senate and to see what I might be willing to ask for,” Blagojevich told him. “Political horse-trading, not what those corrupt prosecutors said it was.”

“So it was Barack Obama’s understanding that his liaison was going to work with you to appoint the guy that was going to fill Barack Obama’s Senate seat, and Barack Obama, incoming president, wanted to know what was going to be in exchange for the seat, is that what you’re saying?” Watters asked.

“Yeah, he was basically, you know, asking whether—the emissary that represented President-elect Obama was interested in a candidate for the Senate, and he asked what would you be interested in, those kinds of things, and we began a discussion over the telephone on what we might or might not ask for as part of a horse deal. It was routine politics, not anything corrupt or illegal like they tried to say it was,” Blagojevich replied.

The host then asked whether money was involved as part of the deal.

“I never said that there was money in exchange for the Senate seat. We talked about Cabinet positions, we talked about, frankly, federal money for the state of Illinois to address some of the issues we had in our state, we talked about ambassadorships,” Blagojevich explained.

No need to be so crude as to discuss a direct exchange of money, seeing as how once you get the seat the money will follow just as surely as night follows day. Blagojevich can deny that these backroom deals are illegal all he likes; hell, he may even be right about that. No doubt they’re every bit as common as he says too, just another part of the begrimed fabric of end-stage American political decay. But such “horse-trading” is indubitably corrupt, as well as sordid and dishonorable—all in all, completely contrary to the phony “not a whiff of corruption” facade so laboriously constructed around Ogabe to cloak his squalid history.

Blago hints at plenty more dirt and old-school Chicago sleaze yet to come. Hopefully he can get it all dished up before his shocking “suicide.”

Ain’t skeered

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

Schlichter’s title contains an unfounded assumption. But other than that, he nails it.

The D.C. establishment and their media rump-kissers went into a full-on spazz mode when President Trump continued his unbroken streak of awesomeness by appointing Ric Grenell the acting Director of National Intelligence, thereby threatening the intelligence community’s unbroken streak of failure. None of our media idiot savants – a term which is only half-accurate – thought to ponder the question of exactly how Ric’s appointment could possibly make the IC worse. Its legacy of ashes is a national embarrassment. But then, the purpose of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment is not to serve the people of the United States. Its purpose is to serve the personal interests of the currently-constituted intelligence community, the foreign policy community, and every wing of our incompetent, inept, and corrupt establishment.

Dead on the money so far. But then:

Its denizens fear that this fearless patriot is going to burn down their whole shoddy edifice, and we can only hope they’re right.

Flick that Bic, Ric.

We can hope so, yeah. No real harm in keeping a positive attitude, right?

On the other hand, when has anybody seen any evidence of fear on their part, really? I haven’t. Anger? Yeah. Narcissism? Sure. Assumptions of superiority and entitlement? Absolutely. Vengefulness, pettiness and spite, a strong determination to fight in defense of their presumptive turf? Yep, yep, yep, and damned skippy.

So what real evidence can be cited in support of Kurt’s contention that they’re afraid, they’re very afraid? Or even that they should be? Yes, the Deep State establishment is shrieking, all right. Along with the rest of their ideological confreres on the Left, when are they not? They’ve been shrieking about absolutely everything Trump has done or attempted to do since November 2016, even before. In the case of FedGovCo specifically, however, I do NOT take the anguished caterwauling as evidence Deep State termites are actually afraid of anything. I think of it more along the lines of battlespace prep. Or psyops, maybe.

Kurt goes on from there to laud Grennel for previous accomplishments and overall attitude, and rightly so. Grennel’s appointment bodes well for several reasons. And this bodes even better:

Today, we’re hearing that Kash Patel, a National Security Council staffer and former aide to Devin Nunes, has been tapped as a senior advisor to Grenell. Patel has also been a loyal ally to the President and to Republicans. Patel wrote the famous February 2018 “Nunes memo,” a document which alleged that the FBI used the phony Steele dossier as the basis of their application to obtain a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant to spy on Trump campaign advisor Carter Page. In his December 2019 report, Intelligence Community Inspector General Michael Horowitz confirmed the accuracy of the entire document.

The importance of having two loyal and like-minded Trump allies in place at the helm of the DNI cannot be overstated.

CBS News’ Catherine Herridge reported that Grenell has been given a mandate which is to “#cleanhouse including a “top to bottom” review of DNI operations.”

This is good news indeed. It appears that President Trump is starting the clean sweep of the government agencies he hadn’t known was so crucial early on.

It’s good news right enough, and I’m glad to see it. Nonetheless, where Kurt sees a glass at least half-full here, I can’t help but also see…well, this:

Three separate stories converged to drive home the obvious truth that America has a two-tiered justice system: the Justice Department’s decision to not indict the guilty-as-sin plotter Andrew McCabe, the attempt to give Roger Stone an outrageous jail sentence, and the Army’s decision to shrug that one of its officers attempted to orchestrate the removal of his commander-in-chief.

There are a couple of simple reasons for this. The most obvious reason is that the entire federal bureaucracy is one giant Democrat machine. This cannot be repeated enough. Nearly every member of almost every single department is a Democrat.

How bad is it? Back in 2016, 95 percent of campaign contributions for the presidential race went to Her Royal Awfulness. The Justice Department overachieved, coming in at 97 percent.

Liberal scolds are always lecturing Americans on how they are racist, imperialist, misogynistic, homophobic monsters, even if they don’t know it due to implicit bias. This is nonsense. But it is curious that these same fools see no problem with implicit bias when the entire government-media-academia complex is one giant exercise in leftist groupthink.

Daniels is talking about the DoJ here, but it’s still relevant; if anything, the IC is even worse. And, as he later cautions, “Identifying the problem is far simpler than coming up with practical solutions.”

It’s as I’ve said all along: a single President is never going to be able to force the Shadow Government genie back into its bottle; no, not even Trump, not even with two terms. The nation has been lured, tugged, and/or dragged—according to which MO seemed most practical or effective at the time—consistently Leftward for nigh on a century now, with a strident, near-continuous effort beginning in the 60s. Anyone seriously thinking that all this might be corrected in a scant eight years, by just one man, isn’t really thinking. He’s dreaming.

“The un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration”

Posted on February 24, 2020February 24, 2020 by Mike

Extremely apt nomenclature and some harsh reality courtesy of John Nolte.

There is no justice in this country, only them the persecutors and we the persecuted.

Democrats and their Deep State allies can lie and leak to destroy innocent people, they can destroy evidence, they can seek to manipulate and overturn democracy, and all they get are movie deals, book contracts, speaking fees, and cable news cash.

And now there’s this…

The Democrat frontrunner for the 2020 presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, was briefed last month that Russia is attempting to help him win the nomination.

Did you catch that?

Bernie.

Was.

Freakin’.

Briefed.

Briefed.

Bernie got a briefing, y’all — a heads up, a warning…

And you know what? That’s appropriate. That is exactly what should have happened. But…

If you’ll recall, that is not what happened to Donald Trump in 2016.

Nope, in 2016, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration did not offer the Trump campaign a heads up, did not give them the courtesy of a briefing over potential Russian interference.

Oh, no…

Instead, the un-American Deep State and malevolent Obama administration chose to use Russian-interference-that-didn’t-end-up-interfering-in-anything as an excuse to spy on the Trump campaign using spies, to wiretap the Trump campaign using wiretaps, to commit perjury against the Trump campaign using forged warrants filled with perjury.

And then, after Trump won in an electoral vote landslide, the un-American Deep State and the malevolent Obama administration committed crime after crime (classified leaks, more perjury) to launch a coup against Trump by way of a three year drip-drip-drip investigation, even though the investigators knew the investigation was bullshit on day one.

We are second class citizens in our own country.

Sad to say, but I think most of us know that by now, or at least we should. Which makes the only pertinent question confronting us all the more unpleasant: What, if anything, are we gonna do about that? The answer:

It’s all got to come down… All of it.

Yep, ‘fraid so.

“Professionalizing” pr0n

Posted on February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 by Mike

Is there NOTHING they won’t try to meddle with, micromanage, and regulate unto ruination?

In a very California story, inter-union drama appears to be marring the introduction of a bill that would require porn stars to get business licenses.

On Tuesday, Assemblymembers Lorena Gonzalez (D–San Diego) and Christina Garcia (D–Bell Gardens) introduced Assembly Bill (A.B.) 2389. The bill would require adult entertainers and video performers, including webcam performers, to obtain a business license and complete a state-mandated training course before being allowed to ply their trade.

Requirements for that training would be developed by the state’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), which would, in turn, be advised by a new 10-member, governor-appointed board composed of two adult film actors, three dancers, two medical doctors, a therapist, and a money manager.

This training will be a minimum of two hours and will provide information on reporting workplace injuries, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking. Adult performers would be required to cover the cost of this training. The bill would also require that they be finger-printed.

The creation of licensure requirements gives state regulators the authority to police the behavior of participants in what is often a pretty informal industry. Reason recently covered how police in Florida have conducted sting operations on handymen as part of their enforcement of that state’s contractor licensing laws.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has covered extensively, sex workers have plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about the expansion of the regulatory state.

It’s true also that regulatory seeds, once planted, tend to grow. It’s conceivable that the bill’s current two-hour training requirement could be expanded to become more onerous over time.

“Conceivable”? You must be joking; it’s INEVITABLE. The “training requirement” will grow exponentially…as will the licensing fees, the regulations and restrictions, the taxes, the paperwork, the headaches and hassles, and of course the bureaucracy required to administer and oversee it all. It will ALL “expand”—until the point at which no one wants to be in the industry anymore because it just isn’t worth the bother is reached.

At which point a grim milestone of sorts will have been achieved in the Land of the (gag) “Free”: against all odds, Almighty Government will have effectively destroyed the porn and titty-bar industry. Whodathunkit?

Update! Anybody seeing a pattern here?

The same San Diego area assemblywoman who brought you the job-killing AB 5, which kills freelance jobs, is back to finish off the “adult” freelance industry.

The adult workers are gobsmacked that the state has involved itself in their business— and presumes to train them in order to get a license for a job they’re already doing, while being forced to pay for it all.

Then, once the goobermint has “fixed” all the problems, they can get busy “fixing” all the problems their previous “fixing” caused. Lather, rinse, repeat, forever and ever amen. Y’know, like with Obamacare.

Manufacturing victims

Posted on February 18, 2020February 18, 2020 by Mike

One of the ways the Left does it: redefining cowardice as courage, weakness as strength, and disgrace as nobility.

Perhaps it is time for us to face a few facts. The first is this: bullying is an inevitable result of the human condition. There is no real reason to think that this ugly aspect of our nature has manifested itself more in recent years than in any other period of human history. Yet it does seem to be the case that bullying is sending kids spiraling into depression, sometimes suicidal depression, at a much higher rate today than in the past. What does this tell us? Not that bullying is worse now, or more common, but that our children are less equipped to cope with it. And why is that? Well, there are probably several reasons, but one of them is certainly the fact that we are conditioning our kids to be victims.

We have built of this mythology of “the bigger person,” and told our children that the “bigger person” is the one who walks away from bullies, disengages, tells an adult. The “bigger person” is somehow the submissive one who slinks away and runs for cover. We tell our children that remaining silent in the face of a bully is “strong” and “courageous.” But somehow the strong, courageous, bigger child, who spends his childhood avoiding confrontation and retreating in the face of aggressors, never actually feels very strong, courageous, or big. He feels, rather, like a punchline. Because that is what we have told him to be.

I’d be willing to believe that, say, an MMA fighter who remains confidently silent in the face of some scrawny punk’s drunken taunting at a bar is truly being a bigger person. He could tear the other guy to shreds. He isn’t afraid. But he chooses the high road because the scrawny punk isn’t worth his time. Being the bigger person, taking the high road — these are things we do from a position of strength. If we do them because we’re scared, or intimidated, or just praying for the confrontation to be over, we are not on the high road. We are almost literally crawling away on our knees, hoping not to be noticed. Many children spend their formative years in this position. We congratulate them for their maturity while their self-image collapses.

Now, there is a problem with teaching our kids to stand up for themselves and give back what is dished to them. The problem is that every school in America has adopted the profoundly insane position that “it doesn’t matter who started it,” everyone involved in a fight or argument will get in trouble. What sort of system is that? Of course it matters who started it. If Jimmy is defending himself from Bobby, or responding to harassment from Bobby, how is it just or reasonable to punish both Jimmy and Bobby as if they are equally to blame? I understand it can be hard to adjudicate these things in a school setting, but that doesn’t give us an excuse to adopt a blanket policy of punishing children for refusing to bow in submission to bullies. Maybe this is why we are dealing with a so-called bullying epidemic: because we have given bullies free rein and taught our children to wilt in their presence like fragile tulips.

It’s less a bullying epidemic than it is a fragile tulip epidemic, if you ask me. Kind of a symbiosis type thing; you can’t really have the one without the other. And if your culture selects for fragile tulips, then fragile tulips ye shall have, anon and in plenty. It’s exactly as Bill says:

We teach them to be cowards. We reward them for being cowards. And then we wonder why we have so many screwed-up, miserable cowards.

If boys act like boys, we drug them until they behave like good little girls. What Walsh doesn’t quite pinpoint here is that by far the vast bulk of “bullying” issues revolve around boys and their behavior. And from a feminist point of view, boys are just nasty. Violent, testosterone-drenched rapists and murderers in the making, the only decent thing to do is at least force them to act like pacifist females, who are ever so much less threatening to feminist fantasies about dangerous men.

Unfortunately, as with so much else in our deranged culture, we have turned the raising of our men over to women. One should not, therefore, be surprised when women try to raise boys by forcing them to imitate girls.

Nor ought feminists to be complaining about how there aren’t any real men out there for women to marry—when feminists have brutalized all the manhood right out of them, leaving themselves with nothing but simpering eunuchs to choose from.

How the Trump admin went off the rails

Posted on February 15, 2020 by Mike

Personnel is policy.

Unlike a George Bush (either of them), Donald Trump arrived in Washington, D.C. with no connections to the DC policy establishment. In fact, he arrived after a bruising primary and general election that left him alienated from the GOP establishment. The GOP establishment might not have called his supporters “a basket of deplorables” but they nodded their heads and chuckled when they heard it. The same establishment had gotten rich and fat off illegal immigrant labor and outsourcing American jobs to wherever. They were used to keeping the GOP base in line with promises and crumbs (George W. Bush had GOP majorities for 6 of his 8 years, how much did they accomplish in regards to slowing illegal immigration or reducing abortion?) while delivering zero. When Trump arrived in Washington he was reliant upon the very same people who had opposed his election to staff his administration.

Some hard-core NeverTrumpers were hired in an attempt to placate factions in the GOP. Some cabinet secretaries, like, for instance, James Mattis and Rex Tillerson, pressed to retain Obama appointees or bring in registered Democrats with whom they had worked into senior policy positions. The head of the White House personnel office overseeing the hiring of political appointees went to an “end of the world party” when Trump dispatched Ted Cruz in Indiana. A guerrilla war was fought against the Administration by using the security clearance process to force out many of Trump’s most loyal followers.

Streiff then links to this piece, which fleshes things out a bit further.

In past administrations, a candidate’s allegiance to the president was vetted and considered a plus, if not a must. So why is the Trump White House filling any of these spots with people who have been openly (or privately) hostile to the president?

Retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor summed up the absurdity of the situation on Fox News. “I think President Trump lost control of the whole appointment process in staffing the government shortly after the election,” he said. “He ended up appointing large numbers of people who subsequently brought in their friends, almost all of whom were opposed to Donald Trump and his agenda.”

Indeed, the appointment of never-Trumpers was aggressively championed and insisted upon by some senior Cabinet members. Some candidates were directly approved by the president himself, while others were proposed by White House political staffers as compromise picks with Cabinet secretaries. Many others slipped in because, despite their anti-Trump sentiments, they had not revealed — or were not asked about — their views in public. Some of the appointments appear to have been downright disastrous. Although many never-Trumpers hired early in the president’s term have departed, others have been elevated or reshuffled as new never-Trumpers continue to enter the administration’s ranks.

The permanent-bureaucracy insiders, in serving their own interests and safeguarding their sinecures, are keeping their eyes on the long term. Back to Strieff.

This, by the way, is not unique to Trump. Historically, party outsiders have failed or been co-opted by the system because, just like Trump, they arrive with a popular mandate but because they are outsiders, and threatening outsiders at that, the formal and informal levers of power are often out of their reach because they can’t put enough of their supporters in mid-level policy positions. When results don’t materialize, the reformer is turfed out by the voters and we all go back to the way it was.

Which, of course, is the desired outcome, the whole point. It’s the grimmest of ironies, and the neatest of tricks: the system has been so thoroughly rigged to serve the interests of its career players by thwarting any true outsider elected to clean out the rot—to “drain the swamp”—that it actually functions as a self-perpetuation mechanism, ensuring said outsider will be removed when he inevitably fails to get the job done.

Put another way, the Deep State ouroborus produces antibodies to counteract and flush away potential threats to its own continued existence and supremacy. Kinda daunting to think of FederalGovCo being so awesomely resilient, virtually immune to all but cosmetic, trifling reform or restriction. More daunting still, though, is the question of whether this systemic self-defense mechanism came into existence organically, just as a natural consequence of the gummint having metastasized far beyond its intended limits, or whether its establishment was the intentional, coordinated result of insider engineers who knew just what they were building, why they were building it, and how to build it right.

The latter scenario isn’t merely daunting but downright scary, in truth—because successfully animating such a monster would have required true genius on Dr Frankenstein’s part. A people who value Constitutionally-ordered liberty will need him to be something a good bit less than that if he’s ever to be defeated, his abominable creation laid to rest.

Still a ways to go

Posted on February 13, 2020February 13, 2020 by Mike

Welcome to the party and all, I guess. But see if you can pick out the part I’m more and more tired of.

You see, I was one of those Democrats who considered anyone who voted for Trump a racist. I thought they were horrible (yes, even deplorable) and worked very hard to eliminate their voices from my spaces by unfriending or blocking people who spoke about their support of him, however minor their comments. I watched a lot of MSNBC, was convinced that everything he had done was horrible, that he hated anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and that he had no redeeming qualities.

But when I witnessed the amount of hate coming from the left in this small, niche knitting community, I started to question everything. I started making a proactive effort to break my echo chamber by listening to voices I thought I would disagree with. I wanted to understand their perspective, believing it would confirm that they were filled with hate for anyone who wasn’t like them.

That turned out not to be the case.

It’s pretty much your standard-issue recounting of a Lefty’s shock to learn that the bubble she’s been living in was filled all along with lies and propaganda, with nary a truth or hard fact allowed entry. Then:

I started to question everything. How many stories had I been sold that weren’t true? What if my perception of the other side is wrong? How is it possible that half the country is overtly racist? Is it possible that Trump derangement syndrome is a real thing, and had I been suffering from it for the past three years?

To ask it is to answer it, each and every one. Now to the meat of the thing, such as it is.

Once we got inside, the atmosphere was jubilant. It was more like attending a rock concert than a political rally. People were genuinely enjoying themselves. Some were even dancing to music being played over the loudspeakers. It was so different than any other political event I had ever attended. Even the energy around Barack Obama in 2008 didn’t feel like this.

I had attended an event with all the Democratic contenders just two days prior in exactly the same arena, and the contrast was stark. First, Trump completely filled the arena all the way up to the top. Even with every major Democratic candidate in attendance the other night, and the campaigns giving away free tickets, the Democrats did not do that. With Trump, every single person was unified around a singular goal. With the Democrats, the audience booed over candidates they didn’t like and got into literal shouting matches with each other. With Trump, there was a genuinely optimistic view of the future. With the Democrats, it was doom and gloom. With Trump, there was a genuine feeling of pride of being an American. With the Democrats, they emphasized that the country was a racist place from top to bottom.

Now, Trump is always going to present the best case he can. And yes, he lies. This is provable.

Oh, izzat so? Name one, then. Name just fucking ONE. No, I do NOT mean some spurious morsel of twipe you’ve been spoonfed, either taken out of context or manufactured from whole cloth by CNN or some other pack of balls-out bullshit artists. I mean one genuine, bona-fide, shame-the-devil lie. Go ahead, I’ll wait. But not for long.

No matter how deep or complete the conversion, they always, always, always say this. Hell, the NeverTrumpTard pseudo “Right” never seems to STOP saying it. But as “provable” as the claim is supposed to be, I have yet to see even ONE of the people so blandly making it offer any of that “proof” to back it up.

Note that my annoyance in no way equates to declaring that Trump never lies, or never has lied. Exaggeration and hyperbole? Stipulated. These are both an integral part of his personality and, I believe, tactics Trump deliberately employs when he thinks them useful. Still, though, even they aren’t LIES.

Now, this woman seems one hell of a lot more broad-minded, thoughtful, and reasonable than the overwhelming majority of her fellow Lefty lemmings, so hats off to her for that much at least. Maybe if she continues along the path of this first exploratory step, she’ll find her eyes opened further—her vision becoming clearer, her intellectual horizons broader. Eventually, perhaps she’ll recognize that ALL the bushwa she’s uncritically swallowed all these years for the deceitful manipulation it really is. Such is to be hoped, anyway. I will not speculate on how likely I think it might be.

Via Glenn, who says: “I love that it was the PC meanness of SJW types in the knitting community — yes — that opened her eyes.” Heh. Indeed.

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