COOOOL!

If it’s gonna be done, it’s gonna have to be Musk that does it.

180 Days for a SpaceX Starship Moonbase
There is a proposal to use the SpaceX lunar starship as a rapidly deployable moonbase. It could be completed 180 days after the SpaceX lunar Starship lands on the moon.

The payload area of the Starship is about 1000 cubic meters. This proposal would tip over the lunar Starship and cut it open to use three times as much volume and enable it be buried for radiation shielding.

NASA and Thales Alenia just rolled out their first Moon Base concept for the Artemis project. Why do we need a tiny module when we have over a thousand cubic meters in Starship? Does this base have any use at all?

Does it really matter? It’s nothing but pie in the sky, a pipe-dream. NASA can’t even get a man into low-earth orbit anymore.

Via Insty, who quips: NOW THIS IS MORE LIKE THE 21ST CENTURY I WAS HOPING FOR. Heh, indeed. Now about those Jetsons-style flying cars we’ve all been waiting for, Elon…

Which reminds me of a humorous incident from a cpl-three weeks ago. I was trying to access a shopping-center wheelchair ramp blocked by one of those damned Teslas, see. Thankfully, the driver was still in the driver-seat—her BF/husband/whatever had dashed into a restaurant to grab their go-order while she waited, it soon developed. Anyhoo, as she backed out of the way for me the car made that burbling beedle-beedle-beedle noise originally produced by the Jetsonmobiles in the classic old Hanna-Barbera cartoon. I just about fell out laughing at that, and I’m still laughing.

I solemnly swear to you here and now, that Tesla sounded so exactly, precisely like the above I have to conclude that Musk must have licensed a recording of it to use in lieu of the exhaust note typical of an ICE. Good going, Elon!

Why yes, my ideology IS better than yours, Leftards

S’truth.

To use a metaphor, if I activate a burner on a stove I know that if I put a cast iron pan on it, it will get very hot and denaturize anything I place in that pan.

The left believes that the pan is a cat.

I’m hardly kidding. Radical ideologies force people to perceive reality in a way that isn’t real. Like Don Quixote, a simple windmill becomes a monster they must tilt at. Any attempts to tell them it’s just a windmill are met with the leftists accusing the truth-teller of being monsters themselves.

They’re so buried in their own ideological beliefs that, not only can they not see reality, but they also delude themselves into believing they’re heroic and better than everyone else for seeing around them all and spotting what the “evil” hiding in the hearts of the masses.

As feminist grifter Anita Sarkeesian once confessed, “Everything is sexist, everything is racist, and you have to point it all out.”

Moreover, they believe it’s their job to destroy it by any means necessary. This includes what are blatant attempts at brainwashing, but what they believe is actually “fixing” problems. So full of themselves are these social justice adherents that they will take the works of people like Tolkien and pervert and corrupt them to fix the “problematic” issues they believe are embedded in his stories.

Look at any piece of work that has been commandeered by the radical leftists in Hollywood. Can you honestly say they improved the works of people like Tolkien? Of course not. Amazon’s “Rings of Power” series was a complete joke and the viewership numbers reflected that. As we speak, Marvel and Star Wars, once untouchable brands, are crashing and burning at breakneck speeds thanks to a hefty woke injection of modern politics.

What about that makes these “better,” and how does that prove the radical left’s ideas are “better?”

They may answer with “Well, we’re not racist, sexist, or bigoted.”

Ah, but the left is all of those things, they just think they aren’t because they believe who they’re racist, sexist, and bigoted against deserve it. Their idea is that the people they believe they’re fighting the good fight against are purely evil, and that everything they love and care about must be destroyed, taken, or perverted.

This doesn’t just mean works of art, this also means your workplace, your government, your military, your doctor’s office, your food, your home, and your children just to name a few. And each inroad they make doesn’t improve anything but causes suffering, depression, hunger, suicide, destruction, and death.

What about that is “better?”

Not a damned thing, of course. The ironic part is, we’re going to have to adopt the Left’s own policy regarding what must be done about the opposition and do it to them for real, if we hope to survive. To wit: if the truly superior ideology—namely, ours, having been proven so over centuries of successful application—is to continue and prevail, the inferior one and its proponents will necessarily have to be destroyed. No one asked for that, no one really wants it, but their having forced it upon us, it’s just the sad, harsh, implacable reality. There’s simply no around it, much as we might long for there to be.

It’s a VIP post, but I ran it through The Wayback Machine so’s you could read it all, which you’re gonna want to do.

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“Fossil” fuels?

Ummm…well…see, now, uhh…okay, it’s like this…

Titan Has More Oil Than Earth
Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.

The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”

At minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan would be an awful place to live. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon’s surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term “tholins” was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

SO then: might this mean that there were once Thunder Lizards in space? Or might it mean instead that modern theories purporting to explain the origin and formulation of “fossil fuels” are totally bassackwards and wrong? Of those two possible eventualities—1) complex carbon-based life forms not just extant but flourishing on icy, barren rocks throughout our solar system ages ago (but long gone now), or B) simple human error—which scenario seems more likely to be accurate?

What made me think of it was running across mention in several places of Tucker’s latest ep (one of which was here), wherein the topic is discussed. I read about this a while back, may have even brought it up before here, dunno. But Tucker’s riffage on it got me to Luxxle-searching a bit, which led me to the above short article, from 2008. And, well, here we all are. Fascinating subject either way, I think.

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Masks are slipping all over the place

Most. Transparent. Facade. EVAR.

Biden in dark over defense chief’s cancer for month
President Joe Biden was kept in the dark over his defense secretary’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent hospitalizations for about a month, the White House admitted Tuesday, as details of Lloyd Austin’s deeply unusual disappearance raised questions about leadership of the world’s top military.

The 70-year-old’s failure to disclose his hospitalization has prompted an extraordinary row in Washington and could be embarrassing for Biden, who faces multiple foreign crises in his reelection campaign year, including in Israel and Ukraine.

As defense secretary, career soldier Austin is personally overseeing military deployments to try and contain fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, which has sparked violence against American forces in Iraq and Syria as well as attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea.

After days of refusal to issue details, the Pentagon came out Tuesday with its first full account of Austin’s health issues, but the new transparency came too late for a clearly upset White House.

According to two of his doctors from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Austin’s prostate cancer was detected as a result of routine screening in early December.

He underwent minor surgery to treat it on December 22, returning home the following day, the doctors said, referring to a procedure the Pentagon had previously been describing as “elective.”

However, Austin was readmitted to the same hospital on January 1 due to complications “including nausea with severe abdominal, hip, and leg pain,” they said.

“Initial evaluation revealed a urinary tract infection,” while medical personnel found “abdominal fluid collections impairing the function of his small intestines” after Austin was moved to intensive care on January 2.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby made clear that Austin had not followed procedures.

“It is not optimal for a situation like this to go as long as it did without the commander-in-chief knowing about it or the national security adviser knowing about it, or frankly other leaders at the Department of Defense,” Kirby said during a briefing at the White House.

“It’s not the way this is supposed to happen…It’s not good. We want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Kirby insisted that Biden retains “complete confidence” in Austin and was looking forward to having him back at the Pentagon.

Yeah, tell me the one again about how ANY of these boobs—Bribem, Austin, Kirby, the whole clown-car load of ‘em—is actually in charge of anything whatsoever, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

I need to establish a new category for this sort of thing, I’m thinking. “Deep State maskirovka” is pretty good, but doesn’t hit the mark quite as squarely as I’d like. Not sure what the name for it oughta be, but I’ll come up with something.

Update! So far I’ve got it narrowed down to six possibilities:

  • Frontmen, figureheads, and marionettes
  • The Great And Powerful OZ!
  • The Not-Ruling Class
  • Shadow-State kabuki
  • Signifying nothing
  • All the Washington world’s a stage

Preferences or suggestions of your own, anyone?

Updated update! Ace sees through it…almost.

White House Orders Cabinet Heads to Inform the “President” If They Cannot Perform Their Duties
—Disinformation Expert Ace

Let me save everyone the time: None of them is capable of performing their duties. Pete Buttigieg fucked off to play mommy for months and months and then have a secret vacay in Portugal and no one even noticed he was gone.

A “president” who even has to give this “order” (or strong recommendation) is obviously not really the president.

Annnnd bingo. In the next line, Ace says it’s “Obama’s staffers” who are in charge, but as much as it may seem so at times, I remain extremely skeptical. As far back as 2008, I maintained that the Boy Who Would Be King was nothing but a ventriloquist’s dummy himself; the man with his hand up Charlie McCarthy’s butt making his lips move was who really brought the act to life.

In fact, though, it isn’t even the Edgar Bergens who are of supreme interest here. The Grey Men skulking in the wings who don’t have faces; don’t have names; never do interviews or appear on the Sunday shows; and who don’t ever stand for “election” are the ones who must be sought out and uncovered. Otherwise, we’re still just playing the same old game, tilting at the same old (replaceable) windmills, dancing to their tune as always.

It’s a daunting task to be sure, but until the backstage string-pullers are at last brought out into the bright lights at center stage, willing or not, there can be no real hope of bringing the final curtain down to close the long-running Amerika v2.0 Show once and for all.

And even that arduous quest, should it be successfully accomplished, will be just the first step. Makes you respect the Founders more than ever, don’t it?

Update to the updated update! Gee, ya THINK?

Via WRSA.

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The J6 shenanigans continue apace

Quelle surprise.

Tucker Carlson’s Latest Bombshell About January 6 Might Make You Rethink Everything

Doubtful, that. I’d say the battle lines are pretty well drawn at this point, the sides fully chosen, all minds made up. The odds of anybody who pays attention changing their opinion at this juncture are pretty slim, seems to me.

PJ Media readers already know that the Jan. 6 Capitol riot wasn’t an insurrection, but it’s still absolutely mind-blowing just how much we’ve been lied about the events of that day.

The truth has never stopped the left from pushing the narrative that it wants, between the criminally partisan House Select Committee on Jan. 6 and Joe Biden’s annual speeches making insane accusations and debunked mischaracterizations, it’s almost a miracle they haven’t turned Jan. 6 into a federal holiday akin to Memorial Day. According to the left, it was not only an insurrection, but as many as five Capitol Police officers died that day when there were actually zero. 

Why do they continue to push these falsehoods and bogus narratives? For one thing, it’s pretty much the only message Biden has (but, sadly for him, it’s not working), and it’s also an effective fundraising tool. According to a report from The Hill, Biden’s campaign raised more than a million dollars following his January 6 anniversary speech.

But again, we’re being sold a huge barrel of lies. In an interview with Tucker Carlson on the new Tucker Carlson Network, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who has been investigating the Capitol riot, says that there were at least 200 undercover FBI assets embedded in the crowd, inside and outside of the Capitol Building.

“We believe that there were easily 200 FBI undercover assets operating in the crowd outside the Capitol, embedded into groups that entered the Capitol or provoked entry of the Capitol,” Higgins told Carlson. “Given the scope of the operation and the number of doors where entry was allowed or even encouraged — and the number of people that were actually outside the Capitol and that entered — we believe 200 [is a] conservative number.”

“It’s shocking what you’re saying and confirms everyone’s worst suspicions about this,” Carlson told Higgins, clearly alarmed by this new information. “It’s clearly true.”

Higgins said that based on the evidence he’s reviewed, the FBI worked with local law enforcement, including the Capitol Police. The undercover agents, Higgins said, dressed as Trump supporters inside the Capitol “because those were the guys that knew their way around the Capitol.”

As Carlson explained in the interview, FBI Director Wray has long refused to answer whether the FBI had assets dressed as Trump supporters at the Capitol that day.

Higgins believes that anti-Trumpers in the FBI orchestrated the entire thing.

“It’s a complex web of FBI assets across the country that can be activated. So, if you have authority at some of the highest levels in the FBI, it doesn’t take much,” Higgins explained.

“Their objective was to destroy the entire MAGA movement to forever stain the patriotic fervor that was associated with the America First MAGA movement that had won in 2016 and we believe won again in 2020,” he continued.

Higgins says the evidence points to FBI undercover agents who planted the seeds of a “radical occupation” of the Capitol online before Jan. 6.

“Some of that evidence shockingly reveals that the FBI agents that were operating undercover within the online groups across the country were the first ones to plant the seeds of suggestions of a more radical occupation of the Capitol.”

One of those FBI “assets” most certainly NOT being great MAGA-American patriot Ray Epps, mind you.

The Feds’ Pet J6 Protester, Ray Epps, Is Sentenced. You’ll Want to Sit Down for This.

Naah, you won’t, no need for it. My bitter, caustic sarcasm just a moment ago notwithstanding, you won’t be at all surprised. Nor should you.

Ray Epps, the federal government’s pet protester, has been granted one of the lightest sentences for a January 6 rioter that we’ve seen yet.

Epps was gifted by federal prosecutors and a D.C. judge with probation for one year. His recent sentencing memo has been widely mocked by imprisoned January 6 protesters, some of whom are still awaiting trial. In fact, he didn’t even have to show up for the sentencing that was done via Zoom.

Epps was “only” charged with one misdemeanor count of disorderly conduct, and not the felony the feds have bootstrapped to misdemeanor charges to create an imprisonable offense of interfering with an official government proceeding. Multiple January 6 prisoners have been hit with this Enron-era corporate statute that supercharged the feds’ case against them and imposed decades-long sentences against members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers, among others.

Indeed, Epps was one of the more prominent provocateurs before and during the January 6 riots that started at the Capitol Complex well before President Trump stopped speaking at a rally about the 2020 election.

Come come, the saintly Ray Epps, a Fed?!? UNPOSSIBLE!!! Why, in the pictures and vids Epps can be clearly seen wearing one of those scary red Trump hats, ferchrissakes! How could anybody in a Trump hat POSSIBLY be an FBI stooge? Or anything, really, but a diehard, violent, ÜberUltraMegaMAGA InsurrectionistRevolutionaryTraitor©? It’s absurd. The honest “journalists” at AP know what’s really going on here, and are courageous enough to spell it out for us. Everybody say it wit’ me now: another RIGHT WING CONSPIRACY THEORY!!!!

A man targeted by right-wing conspiracy theories about the U.S. Capitol riot was sentenced on Tuesday to a year of probation for joining the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by a mob of fellow Donald Trump supporters.

Ray Epps, a former Arizona resident who was driven into hiding by death threats, pleaded guilty in September to a misdemeanor charge. He received no jail time, and there were no restrictions placed on his travel during his probation, but he will have to serve 100 hours of community service.

Link is to Bonchie at Hot Air and not the original AP item, because fuck them. Bonch has plenty more over at his place, which you should definitely peruse. All in all, though, there really is but one possible conclusion to be drawn by any sensible, thinking person, and it is assuredly NOT the claptrap being pimped by FederalGovCo, its Stasi goons, or its in-house propaganda organs like AP.

Yet more details on this ludicrously not-credible fairy story, so hackishly ginned up as threadbare cover for Deep State manipulation, skullduggery, and treachery—chockablock with video, Tweets, and pics—at the Daily Mail.

I just have to ask again: how in the everlovin’ blue-eyed world did we ever let a Ruling Class this inept, this half-assed, this just plain incompetent steal an entire nation from us, anyway? In the final analysis, it might really be us who should be more ashamed of ourselves than anybody, just for that alone.

Update! Another smelly and telling detail, from Hoft.

As reported by the Gateway Pundit, Epps was just sued by J6 defendant Eric Clark for “Conspiracy to Violate Civil Rights.” The case was filed in a Utah Federal Court.

Here’s where it gets shady.

The Gateway Pundit had a tip that Ray Epps was going to be served with the lawsuit at the courthouse during his sentencing. Process servers were hired by the Plaintiff and our reporters were scheduled to be there to capture the moment Epps was served on video. This was all discussed yesterday in private phone calls.

Then like magic, Ray Epps’ Fairy Godmother changed his PUBLIC IN-PERSON sentencing hearing to a REMOTE TELEPHONIC sentencing hearing.

What a coincidence.

Uh-huh. MUST be, right?

It’s like they don’t even care anymore that we know they’re lying to us, so confident and secure in their arrogance are they. This is not, repeat NOT, the behavior of people who are “scared of us” and all our big, bad firearms locked away in the gun safe at home.

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Pseudo-intellectual self-beclownment

Oh for the love of…

The Thrill Of Word-Policing
Come, dear reader. Let us visit the publication now laughingly referred to as Scientific American. In particular, an “analysis” piece by Juan P Madrid, in which we’re told,

The language of astronomy is needlessly violent and inaccurate.

Dr Madrid, an assistant professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, begins his attempt to persuade with a tale of poetic drama:

This summer, a team of students and I were enjoying breathtaking views of the night sky while we collected data using telescopes at the McDonald Observatory in West Texas. One night, when we were outside on a telescope catwalk…one of my students amazed me with her interpretation of the fate of Andromeda, the galaxy closest to our Milky Way. In describing how these two galaxies will merge a few billion years from now, she said they will experience “a giant galactic hug.

I know. The very stuff of amazement. Brings a tear to the eye.

The kindness, but also the accuracy, of the language my student used was in sharp contrast to the standard description we use in astronomy to explain the final destiny of Andromeda and the Milky Way: “a collision.”

Apparently, the word collision is, for Dr Madrid, much too brutal and masculine when referring to the unstoppable convergence of two galaxies, and the subsequent merging of the supermassive black holes at their centres – an event that will entail the sling-shotting of countless stars and their orbiting planets, and which may release energy equivalent to around 100 million supernova explosions, and subsequently be detectable halfway across the universe.

A mere hug, you see. All that kindness.

A galactic hug is scientifically truthful, and it’s led me to believe that astronomers should reconsider the language we use.

Here, Dr Madrid’s own use of language – specifically, the word reconsider – is somewhat misleading and just a little coy. The reconsidering he has in mind would of course be enforced by those suitably enlightened, much like the author himself – as hinted at with enthusiasm later in the piece:

Referees, editors, and editorial boards can step up to…stop the use of violent, misogynistic language that is now pervasive.

So, not so much a reconsidering, then, as a coerced neuroticism. A mandatory affectation, on which career progress may very much depend. But hey, where’s the fun in being a pretentious and neurotic scold if you don’t have the power to make others jump through hoops?

Jeez-O-PETE, but what a fucking loony-toony-maroony. Improbable as it may seem, these self-styled SooperDooperGenii© never cease to amaze: forever coming up with new ways of bringing saner, more sensible sorts to a dead screeching halt, scratching their heads in awed stupefaction at yet another wondrous exhibition of rampant, pointless imbecility. No matter how extreme, how over-the-top SPECTACULAR the previous ludicrous record-setter was, they nevertheless contrive to raise the bar of Teh Schtoopid with each successive outing. It’s damned nigh miraculous, really.

And to think: within about a week, no more, another Halfwit Hall O’ Fame hopeful will come staggering along to make this week’s tromping of one’s own dick nonpareil look like weak beer in comparison.

Dr Madrid being an astronomer and college prof and all, you’d think a well-above-average level of intelligence would surely have been required just to land the job at all, much less keep it for more than, say, three or four hours. And yet.

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Pursuing, wielding, using, abusing…and, ultimately, losing

Power abhors a vacuum.

Joe Biden certainly knows how to wield his ‘power’ — to transform the country for the worse

Or his behind-the-scenes puppeteer, one Bathhouse Barry Soetero, does, more like.

Joe Biden let slip a telling boast after his latest Dark Brandon speech.

“I understand power,” he whispered into the microphone as the first lady wrangled him off stage to stop him impersonating a Roomba.

While ostensibly a self-deprecating cliché about wives’ control over men, “I understand power” also was a statement of unwavering confidence in his own mastery of today’s political landscape.

It’s hard to admit, given Biden’s manifest frailties and incompetence, but he’s right.

The president does know how to use power to transform the country.

From all available evidence, the so-called pRetend ***”pResident”*** doesn’t even know what year it is anymore. Nor who he is, who he’s speaking with, where he is at any given time, or what his minders brought him there for. Not that Pedo Peter ever was what any sentient soul would call the sharpest knife in the drawer, mind, even on his very best day.

What did Donald Trump achieve of any lasting value in the four years he had power? Clearly, he was a better president on every important measure: the economy, the border, foreign affairs, energy policy.

But every achievement of Trump’s was undone on day one by Biden, and many of his aspirations were foiled by Biden’s Deep State allies.

Power is all Biden has ever cared about. In his dismal first speech of the election season near Valley Forge, Pennsylvania, on Friday, Biden used the word 13 times. He said “insurrection” or “insurrectionists” 11 times, because that is how he intends to hang on to power, by fashioning his entire campaign pitch around Jan. 6 and Trump’s threat to “democracy.”

Biden’s dishonest depiction of the Capitol riot as something far worse than it really was is out of kilter with the way 73% of Americans in a weekend CBS poll see it, as a “protest that went too far.”

But it’s no coincidence that his speech coincided with strategic leaks from special counsel Jack Smith’s Jan. 6 probe, which cast Trump as inciter-in-chief, exactly the question that has been dumped in the lap of the Supreme Court by puerile Biden proxies in Colorado and Maine, as 32 other states similarly consider removing Trump from the ballot on “insurrectionist” grounds.

Yet not one person of the 1,200 charged over the Capitol riot has been charged with insurrection.

And how could they be, prithee tell? What with the batch of unexpurgated J6 tapes having finally—FINALLY—been released into the wild after years kept tightly under wraps, it’s plain to the meanest intelligence that there WAS NO insurrection, not even remotely close to anything like one. Ah, but now we come to the tally of obfuscatory shitlib word-wrangling.

“Democracy” came up 30 times in Biden’s speech, too. Apparently it’s “on the ballot.”

“The alternative to democracy is dictatorship,” he thundered.

It’s a bizarre statement for the president of a nation that was founded deliberately, not as a democracy, but as a constitutional republic, precisely to avoid the “tyranny of the majority,” which James Madison warned about.

That’s why we have an Electoral College, and not a presidential election determined by popular vote, where New York would overrule Iowa.

Biden’s pursuit of power at any cost is behind his insidious new eulogies to “democracy.”

Similarly, he has dropped the word “unity,” which he invoked no fewer than 11 times in his inaugural address back in 2021.

The divider-in-chief has given up even pretending he meant it.

Which indicates, as I’ve long insisted, that far from being “terrified” or “afraid” of us as so many erroneously proclaim, they are instead contemptuous of us—that they now believe their grip on absolute power to be so secure, so unchallengable, that they no longer perceive any necessity to keep the iron fist carefully concealed beneath the proverbial velvet glove.

As time marches ever on, though, this assumption will eventually be proven incorrect. History tells us that every would-be dictator carries deep within himself the seed of his own undoing, whether it be arrogance, greed, recklessness, or some other unlovely hobgoblin of his little mind. It’s an old, old story, going at least as far back as Hubris and Nemesis if not farther still, and it will be no different with our current crop of (mis)rulers.

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A sordid history

Steyn reviews his op-editorializing on the J6 put-up job—of which there’s a gracious plenty, all up to the usual Steyn standard of excellence.

Re Rubio: well, the scene was still unfolding, and you’d have to be made of sterner stuff than a Republican senator not to get swept up in all the shameful-desecration-of-the-world’s-greatest-deliberative-body wankery. But what was Ted Cruz’s excuse when he denounced it, one year later, as a “violent terrorist attack”? Has he ever given a plausible explanation for that? “Oh, sorry, I forgot I was making a public statement. I thought I was just shooting the breeze in the Capitol hot tub with Chuck and Nancy”?

“Violent terrorist attack”? I thought that was Speaker Pelosi’s talking point. Say what you will, but the Dems play the long game very effectively. As opposed to the GOP, who don’t play it at all. Whoever’s waggling the dead husk of a moth-eaten sock-puppet that is Joe Biden planted the word “insurrection” within twenty minutes of the smoke clearing knowing full well its constitutional significance—and here we are three years later with judges and state officials using the term to ban the leading candidate from the ballot in the interests of “saving democracy”. The Maine Secretary of State’s statement is particularly instructive in this regard.

Meanwhile, in Nevada this career thug trying to kill his judge gets more lenient treatment than gran’mas with no criminal records who wandered around “the people’s house” for half-an-hour:

That last bit refers to the Jungle Bunny HoF’er mentioned here yesterday. Next up, another appalling horror-news item I’d nearly forgotten about.

Re that bit about the Capitol Police, the name of that woeful constabulary rang a vague bell with me, and I eventually recalled the last time I’d written about their shooting of a young woman, seven years earlier. Please read on to what I regard as the most repulsive aspect of this story: Congress’s standing ovation for the Capitol Police’s dispatch of that poor defenseless mom. You can read the full column here, but this is the pertinent part:

An unarmed woman was gunned down on the streets of Washington for no apparent crime other than driving too near Barackingham Palace and thereby posing a threat to national security. As disturbing as Miriam Carey’s bullet-riddled body and vehicle were, the public indifference to it is even worse. Ms Carey does not appear to be guilty of any act other than a panic attack when the heavy-handed and heavier-armed palace guard began yelling at her. Much of what was reported in the hours after her death seems dubious: We are told Ms Carey was ‘mentally ill’, although she had no medications in her vehicle and those at her home back in Connecticut are sufficiently routine as to put millions of other Americans in the category of legitimate target. We are assured that she suffered from post-partum depression, as if the inability to distinguish between a depressed mom and a suicide bomber testifies to the officers’ professionalism. Under DC police rules, cops are not permitted to fire on a moving vehicle, because of the risk to pedestrians and other drivers. But the Secret Service and the Capitol Police enjoy no such restraints, so the car doors are full of bullet holes. The final moments of the encounter remain a mystery, but police were supposedly able to extract Ms Carey’s baby from the back of a two-door vehicle before dispatching the defenseless mother to meet her maker.

In perhaps the most repugnant reaction to Ms Carey’s death, the United States Congress expressed their ‘gratitude’ to the officers who killed her and gave them a standing ovation. Back in the Eighties, the Queen woke up to find a confused young man at the end of her bed. She talked to him calmly until help arrived and he was led away. A few years later, Her Majesty’s Canadian Prime Minister, Jean Chrétien, was confronted by an aggrieved protester. As is his wont, he dealt with it somewhat more forcefully than his sovereign, throttling the guy, forcing him to the ground, and breaking his tooth, until the Mounties arrived to rescue the assailant from the PM. But, had the London and Ottawa intruders been gunned down by SWAT teams, I cannot imagine for a moment either the British or Canadian Parliament rising to applaud such an outcome. This was a repulsive act by Congress.

Miriam Carey is already forgotten, and the lawyer her family hired has now, conveniently, been jailed for a bad debt. I am not one for cheap historical analogies: My mother spent four of her childhood years under Nazi occupation, and it is insulting to her and millions of others who know the real thing to bandy overheated comparisons. But there is a despotic trend in American government. Too many of our rulers and their enforcers reflexively see the citizenry primarily as a threat. Which is why in Congress the so-called people’s representatives’ first instinct is to stand and cheer the death of a defenseless woman.

Ted Cruz’s anniversary remarks were very much in the spirit of that 2013 Congress. On the broader point, that “despotic trend” I noted a decade ago is well advanced now. I don’t do the constitutional-fetishisation shtick because, aside from anything else, from Miriam Carey to Ashli Babbitt, from Covid to ballot access, it’s increasingly clear that in the pseudo-republic citizens don’t count. Hence the daily scenes at the Rio Grande. Ultimately, open borders render citizenship a nullity. That’s one reason they do it to you.

Hm, lemmesee now:

  • State-sanctioned murder of its subjects
  • Applause for said murder from its well-insulated, invulnerable political class
  • Fraudulent national “elections”
  • Manifestly authoritarian lockdowns, Vaxx and mask mandates, and other unlawful edicts wholly incompatable with the concept of self-government, ordered liberty, and the rule of law
  • Leading opposition candidates barred from running for office via “legal” harrassment, smear and innuendo, and direct declarations of ineligibility issued by state-level officials with no authority to do such
  • A federal intelligence agency in flagrant violation of its own founding charter, which expressly restricts it to foreign surveillance and intel-gathering operations only
  • A heavily-politicized federal police force deployed against the ruling party’s civilian opponents absent indictment, due process of law, or credible evidence of criminal offense
  • An elephantine, lawless, prodigiously-rapacious central government gone rogue: untouchable, unstoppable, and entirely out of control, checked by neither meaningful oversight, periodic impartial review, nor accountability to its tax-slave populace

A credulity-straining litany of shocking malfeasance, shamelessness, and illegitimacy, and we’ve still barely skimmed the surface. SO: anybody out there want to try explaining to me in what sense Amerika v2.0 is NOT a dismal, banana-republic-style shitrapy? Because from where I sit, this one sets a new all-time record for shitrapy-ness.

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Shameless

Amazing. It’s as if they have no self-awareness, no sense of irony at all.

Yesterday near Valley Forge in Pennsylvania President Biden delivered a speech to mark the third anniversary of January 6th. The speech was moved up a day because of the threat of snow in the area today (cue George Washington rolling his eyes), but Biden’s speechwriters made sure to be as over-the-top as possible. 

In the speech, Biden claimed we “nearly lost America” on that day, and the crowd erupted in applause when the president said that J6ers have collectively been sentenced to 840 years in prison so far. We say “so far” because there could be more to come, all while the DOJ is trying to throw Biden’s possible Republican opponent in jail in order to “save democracy,” or something like that. 

Biden’s speech also included something the White House thought was worth putting out on social media:


Nice to see that such notables as the Hodge Twins, Mollie Hemingway, and Juanita Broaddrick didn’t waste a second to dispense with that self-evidently risible horseshit in the “Replies” section. But leave it to our friends at the Bee to truly put paid to it, having done so over a year ago.


Heh. Indeed. As the man says:


I repeat: Heh. Indeed. Seems to be a lot of that going around with these lunatics of late. Of course, in the interest of giving credit where due, Too Old Jaux has a long history of it, so for him this is nothing whatsoever new. Call him a trendsetter, maybe.

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FINALLY

It’s about damned time somebody said it. Besides me, I mean.

Let’s Stop Using the Words: ‘Trump Tried to Overturn the 2020 Election’
After almost three years — and as Democrats in Colorado and Maine ban Donald Trump from the Centennial State’s ballot — it is beyond time for the media to stop “reporting” that “Trump tried to overturn a presidential election” and to quit referring matter-of-factly: to “the election that Trump lost”; to “Trump’s defeat” and his “baseless” “false claims”; and to “Trump is challenging the results” of “Biden’s victory (in, say, Georgia)” and to “swing the election in his favor.”

It is equally time for news organizations to stop “reporting” that the four (who’s counting?) indictments are nothing more than valid or understandable (if ill-timed) reactions to punish Trump for his (“criminal”) attempts to “disenfranchise voters” and thus “subvert democracy.”

This is not a neutral, objective, and non-partisan view of of the facts of the 2020 election. Far from it. No. It is the (self-serving) DNC version. It is akin to asking “When did you stop beating your wife?”

Phrases like “baseless fraud claims,” “sham election investigations,” and “false claims of election fraud” come straight from the Democrat party. At a minimum, readers and viewers are used to circumspect “allegedlys,” to prudent “reportedlys,” and to cautious “accused ofs“. What happened to them?

Easy-peasy: they’re not useful to D卐M☭CRATs in this instance, so they must be expunged. Temporarily, of course; next time it suits them, their Praetorian Media partners in crime will trot those terms back out to club us over the head with as before.

Remember that his whole message — as was that of the protestors on Jan. 6, 2021 (not a single one of them, to my recollection, brandishing weapons other than cellphone cameras for selfies) — is exactly, or almost exactly, the same — i.e., that it was the Democrats who tried to overturn (and, indeed, who succeeded in overturning) the 2020 election and thus democracy (hence his, and the protesters’, far from unreasonable anger).

We could even use similar wordings: “the election that Biden lost,” “Joe’s defeat,” “false claims,” and “the Democrats tried to change/challenge (and succeeded in changing/challenging) the results.” Indeed, the 45th President called it “stealing the election” and thus…if anyone disenfranchised voters and undermined democracy, it was the party of Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden.

Yes. YesyesyesyesyesohshitmuddafugginHELL. YES. Every last one of us ought to be out there shouting it from the gott-damned rooftops, each and every time any Lyin’ Liberal, great or small, so much as even attempts that “baseless” bushwa again. Right before we slap the taste right out of his/her/its mouth, of course, in a response we’ll call “mostly peaceful.”

Remember, too, that this ain’t just about Trump, either. At this very moment, there are patriotic Americans doing hard time for the “crime” of exercising their Constitutional right to petition the government for redress of grievances, after being untruthfully smeared as “violent insurrectionists.” All of it, every bit of it, based on nothing but baldfaced lies, used by the Power against these poor victims so as to

  • Disempower, intimidate, and subjugate Real Americans
  • Depose a duly-reelected President
  • Demoralize his supporters
  • Discredit their chosen candidate, and rationalize said candidate’s ongoing persecution
  • Defang the political opposition entire
  • Seize power for a figurehead “president” and his éminence grise puppetmasters

Then again, though, when it comes to the “mainstream” press, such in-your-face propagandizing and manipulation is no more than we’ve come to expect from them. Doesn’t make it any more tolerable or less grating, but it’s nonetheless par for the usual course. The truly confounding thing, at least to me, is why so many otherwise sensible people have just sat silently back and taken it all this time—worse still, that they’ve adopted this patent codswallop themselves, bleating the “baseless claim” mantra like so many hypnotized lemmings as if there had ever been one iota of truth to it. To wit:

The way that even conservative outlets like Fox News and the Wall Street Journal, not to mention RINOs like Mike Pence, buy into and repeat the Left’s “talking points” and double standards is disconcerting. (A WSJ editorial defended Donald Trump against “lawfare” (to wield war on people through the legal system, by imprisoning them or “merely” ruining them, a tactic the Democrats have already used on such Trump allies as Gen. Michael Flynn and Rudy Giuliani) while calling his “post-election behavior” in 2020 “deceitful and destructive” and referring to his “disgraceful” “malfeasance.” While National Review also pushed back against the Trump indictments, all the while feeling the need to point out that it “condemned Trump’s appalling actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election” as well as “Trump’s deceptions”: “Mendacious rhetoric in seeking to retain political office is damnable.”) 

An otherwise outstanding post at the Power Line Blog by the usually outstanding John Hinderaker, gives us, paragraph after paragraph, evidence of cheating and lying by Democrats. And still, that can’t prevent Hinderaker himself from being polite and handing some rope to the opposition, ending said post with the words, Trump’s “obviously indefensible claims,” and with these immortal lines:

In sum, the indictment does not make out a case that Trump is a criminal who should go to prison. But it does make out a strong case that Trump is a dishonest egomaniac with terrible judgment who should never again be entrusted with a responsible government position.

You have just written 15 paragraphs detailing the Democrats’ lying, cheating, and criminal interference in the 2020 election, John Hinderaker — not least in the very indictments that have been served up by Bolshevist prosecutors. Where do those two final sentences fit in except to prove that with enough pressure and broadsides, the Drama Queens’ left-leaning propaganda will overwhelm even the most open-minded and the most honest brain?

Indeed so, good sir, to the eternal disgrace of all who have so docilely gone along with this abominable crime. The esteemed Mr Svane, who I didn’t know about before seeing this excellent piece, goes on at some length from there—all of it every bit as on-target as it is long, long, LONG overdue.

In re the rest of it: gird them loins, load them mags, and stock them larders, people. For Spicy Time cometh, and that right soon, I’m afraid.

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In the bleak midwinter

Kunstler brings the DOOOOOOM in his year-end review/2024 preview combo, and It. Is. EPIC.

Do You Dare Even Look? — Forecast 2024
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men…strong men bring good times…good times make weak men…Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out…topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op…the global mass vaxx campaign…the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans…the broad-based censorship operations…the capture of the news media…and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

And with that, we’re off on a railway ride to Doomsville for an unflinching look at where and how the impending trainwreck might occur. A couple more bits ‘n’ pieces of dis ‘n’ dat before I tell you to go read all of it.

The Energy Picture
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

How the hell could any but either the most insulated (ie, Mordor on the Potomac orcs) or oblivious (ie, any random shitlib Karen or Ken you run across in your daily round) NOT have noticed? Onwards.

Civil Strife and the Election
Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate…whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

As I’ve said more than once, the “election” will indeed happen. Why on earth wouldn’t it? They’d do themselves way more harm by cancelling or postponing it than they would just going ahead and keeping the scam going as is. The whole sorry charade is working out quite nicely for them, as well it might be after all the years of work getting the fraud engine dialed in and tuned to run smoothly. Throwing all that away would achieve but two things, neither of which the Power would find desirable:

  • It would pull the rug out from under the VOTE HARDERER Republicrat© politicians, pundits, and citizenry who still so fervently Want To Believe, all of whom make up such an important part of Team Status Quo
  • It would once and for all blow the lid off the quaint, ever-more-feeble delusion that We The People still have any say whatsoever in how we are governed ruled, and by whom; despite all their best efforts, there are still hundreds of millions of guns in private hands out there, so God only knows where that ugly relevation might possibly lead

If we know anything about The Enemy by now, it’s that he is cunning, amoral, and above all patient. A long-term plan he conceived, implemented, and nurtured for nigh on a century is now VERY close to full and final fruition, and they’re all of a sudden going to lose patience now? Sorry, I just can’t see it. Anyways, as I said above: go check out the rest. It makes for some pretty grim reading, but is all the more accurate for that.

Oh yeah, about my post title: as my fellow Christmas music aficionados will know, it’s the title of a lovely Song O’ Teh Season which reminded me that I yet have two more videos to put up for y’all—one I only recently discovered, the other a fantastic rendition of an old favorite—which I will get to anon.

Update! In the “Civil Strife and the Election” category: Mark Steyn sees the writing on the wall, mentions the unmentionable.

The lone hyperpower is not quite a one-party state, but it is a one-party Deep State. In 2016, while everyone was shrieking about foreign interference in US elections, there was sustained domestic interference in US elections – courtesy of the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane and all the rest. But, in those bygone days, it was still necessary to do it sotto voce – offshoring most of the dodgier bits to friendly Five Eyes guys, such as the Australian High Commissioner in London.

Unfortunately for Peter Strzok et al, they underestimated the scale of the challenge. So they were obliged to spend the next four years subverting the so-called head of the executive branch – again, mostly on the sly.

But they’re doing it openly now. They’re using anything to hand – civil suits, criminal prosecution, executive authority, whatever it takes. It’s ever more brazen. In the preferred cliché of the age, last time round it was the quiet part, now it’s out loud.

We are a little over ten months to what’s still quaintly called “Election Day”. Does this seem like the behavior of people who, come Tuesday night in November, will be willing to lose a democratic vote?

In my bestseller After America, I quoted the late Pat Caddell’s observation that it is not a good thing to tell the people that there are no peaceful means of effecting meaningful course correction – not in a land where half the people are disinclined to go along with open borders, Chinese domination, grade-school transitioning and all the rest. If voting doesn’t change anything, you are setting up pre-revolutionary conditions – assuming for the purposes of argument that, in the panopticon state of 24/7 high-tech surveillance, our rulers haven’t already priced that in, and figured it’s no longer possible.

Nevertheless: In Colorado and Maine, in Georgia and New York, the permanent state is telling you that, in the interests of “saving democracy”, there isn’t going to be any “peaceful transfer of power”. The talk-radio guys with the butch bumper music and the easy-listening opinions could at least stop trying to pass this off as “politics”.

I repeat: why WOULD they cancel or postpone the 24 “election”? In dystopian tyrannies such as Amerika v2.0—(mis)ruled by ruthless, reckless, amoral swine hidden behind stone walls, concrete barriers, electrified fences, and armed security squads—even when The Power loses, it still wins anyhow. As the hoary old stage aphorism has it, the show must go on…and it will. Until one day, all of a sudden-like, it doesn’t.

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Haley gets one right

Even though the Hallelujah Chorus of VOTE HARDERER!!! Republicrats© is giving her hell for it, she ain’t wrong for once.

I’ve never run for office, but I can imagine that for a politician in the South — especially a conservative — questions about race relations and history sound like “gotcha” questions. That may have been what was on Nikki Haley’s mind at a town hall event in New Hampshire earlier this week when an attendee asked her a historical question.

A voter asked Haley, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” Granted, it’s an odd question, but Haley could have answered it quickly and moved on. Instead, she gave the strangest answer imaginable.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” she began with a quip. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do.”

She then turned the tables on the man who asked the question and asked him what he thought caused the Civil War. That part of the exchange wasn’t audible on the video of the town hall, but it opened the door for Haley to dig her hole of bizarre answers a little deeper.

“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she continued. “And we — I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”

“Bizarre”…and perfectly correct, too. The “offense” Haley is being pilloried for, of course, is not making the obligatory genuflection towards the written-by-the-winners revisionist history which holds that the “cause” of Civil War I was blood-simple, that the North invaded and punitively subjugated the South over the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Just one leeeetle problem with that belief: know who else didn’t think the War of Northern Aggression was all about slavery? Massa Abraham Lincoln, that’s who. Among other things, he said this:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

Note also that the “Great Emancipator,” with his fabled Proclamation in 1863, freed not a single slave in any state wherein he actually had the power to do so; the Emancipation Proclamation was a purely political document whose two-fold purpose was to maintain the shaky entente back home between the radical contingent of so-called “fire eater” abolitionists and the moderates, as well as to gain military advantage for the Yankee invader over the Southern foe.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the U.S., contrary to a common misconception; it applied in the ten states that were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, but it did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slaveholding border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) or in parts of Virginia and Louisiana that were no longer in rebellion. Those slaves were freed by later separate state and federal actions.

The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, under a recognized Union government, so it was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties then in the process of forming the new state of West Virginia, and seven additional counties and two cities in the Union-controlled Tidewater region of Virginia. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and 13 named parishes of Louisiana, which were mostly under federal control at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. These exemptions left unemancipated an additional 300,000 slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation has been ridiculed, notably by Richard Hofstadter, who wrote that it “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” and “declared free all slaves…precisely where its effect could not reach”. Disagreeing with Hofstadter, William W. Freehling wrote that Lincoln’s asserting his power as Commander-in-Chief to issue the proclamation “reads not like an entrepreneur’s bill for past services but like a warrior’s brandishing of a new weapon”.

Lincoln first discussed the proclamation with his cabinet in July 1862. He drafted his “preliminary proclamation” and read it to Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles, on July 13. Seward and Welles were at first speechless, then Seward referred to possible anarchy throughout the South and resulting foreign intervention; Welles apparently said nothing. On July 22, Lincoln presented it to his entire cabinet as something he had determined to do and he asked their opinion on wording. Although Secretary of War Edwin Stanton supported it, Seward advised Lincoln to issue the proclamation after a major Union victory, or else it would appear as if the Union was giving “its last shriek of retreat”. Walter Stahr, however, writes, “There are contemporary sources, however, that suggest others were involved in the decision to delay”, and Stahr quotes them.

In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In the battle, though the Union suffered heavier losses than the Confederates and General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, eliminating more than a quarter of Lee’s army in the process.

On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, and while residing at the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told cabinet members, “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to issue the proclamation “as a necessary war measure.” Therefore, it was not the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment, because Lincoln or a subsequent president could revoke it. One week after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the ‘institution’; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand”. Lincoln continued, however, that the states included in the proclamation could “adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation; and…they may be nearly as well off, in this respect, as if the present trouble had not occurred”. He concluded by asking McClernand not to “make this letter public”.

Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of the slaves, namely those who were behind Union lines in areas not exempted. Most slaves were still behind Confederate lines or in exempted Union-occupied areas. Secretary of State William H. Seward commented, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” Had any slave state ended its secession attempt before January 1, 1863, it could have kept slavery, at least temporarily.

And there you have it. Nota bene:

  • Quite a few Northerners still owned slaves for some years after the war was over
  • Northern general US Grant was as ambivalent about slavery as his boss Lincoln, at least initially:

    To his father he wrote, “My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.”

    More on all that here

  • Legend has it that Grant’s wife retained ownership of her personal valet for several years after the end of the war; when asked about this apparent contradiction, Grant is said to have dismissed his interlocuter with a laconic “Because good help is so hard to find nowadays”
  • At the end of the war, certain Northern states and/or cities barred Nee-grows from so much as setting foot within their boundaries, decrees often enforced via violence

And so it goes. As is usually the case, the first American Civil War is not reducible to simple, easily summed-up causes and effects; it just doesn’t work that way, however much we flawed hoomons might wish otherwise. History is rich and complex, with many strange twists and turns serving to make the topic all the more interesting for those of us who study it intently.

Loathe though I ordinarily am to sing the woman’s praises, sincerest kudos to Nikki Haley for truly getting the historical nuance here, and refusing to yield to pressure from the stupes and dupes who don’t to dumb it down for them.

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An “open air prison”

It’s not that the Paleosimians in Gaza are angry about being “mistreated” by the Israelis; they’re angry that Israel—and ((((JooJooJooJOOOOOOOZ!!!)))) generally—exists at all.


Yep, pre-Oct 7 Gaza sure looked like Hell on earth for those poor suffering Paleosimians, didn’t it? After being treated as inhumanely as that—forced by the Israelis (who, by the way, control absolutely everything and everyone in the entire world) to live in such extreme squalor and deprivation as seen above—no WONDER they’re so implacably pissed off. What rational, reasonable human being yearning only to breathe free and be left alone to live their lives in peace WOULDN’T be?

But hey, you know ((((DemPeskyJOOOOOZ!!!))) and their never-ending propaganda trickery. The above footage was probably shot in Milan or Nice or Martinique, and the IDF just P-shopped in the Arabic-language signage on the storefronts and whatnot to fool everybody. JOOJOOJOOJOOOOOOOO!!! Plus, they all have big noses, wear funny hats, are greedy as hell, and sound like a throat-cancer victim trying to hock up the world’s worst phlegm-ball when they talk in that fucked-up Yid language of theirs, the rat-bastards. Right, Jew-haters?

And those JOOOOOO women, they’re just the WORST, right? Compare, contrast:

Yep, looks like a no-brainer to me all right. Then again, I’ve obviously been deceived by the International JOOOOO Conspiracy©, so never mind, I guess.

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The year that was

David Thompson offers a whole year’s worth of reasons intelligent, rational people despair of the very concept of “human” “progress” as nothing more than a laughable conceit.

The year began with a tale of oysters and college lesbianism, via Bon Appétit magazine, in which Brooklynite pronoun-stipulator Isha Maratha was keen to overshare. For Ms Maratha, “My first time eating an oyster was an act of queer intimacy.” Indeed, we were told by an obliging editor, “The act of eating an oyster uniquely and intimately expresses her queerness.” And so, we were regaled, at length, with descriptions of mollusc-gobbling, stolen glances, and lemon wedges being squeezed. “There is something uniquely unspoken,” we learned, “between the eater and the eaten.”

We also pondered mass fare-dodging, now at record levels, and its progressive defenders – including those employed to maintain public transport – and whose pre-emptive disapproval of anyone noticing such crimes was remarkable in its vehemence and uniformity. The effects on social trust of a large and growing minority disregarding the law and norms of behaviour, and doing so with a learned impunity, is apparently something one shouldn’t – and mustn’t – register or explore. Because, in the progressive world, noticing habitual and brazen thievery is much worse than indulging in it. And obviously racist.

And we visited the pages of Scientific American, where wokeness is ascendant and thinking simply isn’t done. In particular, an “important analysis” piece in which we were urged – by Tracie Canada, a “socio-cultural anthropologist” at Duke University – to fret about “the violence Black men experience in [American] football,” and in which we were told that the physicality of the sport “disproportionately affects black men.” This was framed to imply, but never establish, some systemic racial wrongdoing – “anti-Black practices” that are “inescapable” – rather than, say, being an unremarkable reflection of the sport’s demographics, in which, at professional levels, black players are a majority. Or to put it another, no less scientific, way – the risk of injury while playing a contact sport disproportionately affects those who actually play it. When this rather glaring logical error was pointed out by readers, the magazine’s editor-in-chief promptly accused said readers of “systemic racism.”

In February, we encountered a suboptimal substitute teacher named Lydia Lamere – formerly Christopher Lamere – who spent lesson time directing students to his overtly sexual TikTok account, and conscripting middle-school children into his cross-dressing psychodrama. When not discussing “kink” and preferred sexual positions with other people’s eleven-year-old children, Mr Lamere found time to tells us, “I’m not a predator, I’m just a woman who happens to be super tall and hot.”

Matters academic cropped up again via an eye-widening overview of racial “equity” policies in various schools and institutions, where expectations of competence are deemed racist and terribly problematic. In New York City, for instance, thanks to “disparate impact” policies, firefighters are no longer expected to be able to read the instructions on their own firefighting equipment. Likewise, in scrupulously progressive Ontario, it is now illegal to use a maths test to determine whether maths teachers actually possess the knowledge that they are being paid to convey in class. Such is the world of triumphant wokeness, in which “suspending proficiency requirements” – and denouncing diligence and competence as “white supremacy,” a wickedness to be shunned – will somehow “benefit” the children on whom these things are imposed.

We also marvelled at a contrived and unconvincing display of forgiveness by Guardian contributor Anna Spargo-Ryan, whose home was invaded in the night by a gang of sociopaths armed with carving knives. It turns out that when being robbed by habitual predators, the progressive thing to do is to sympathise with the creatures breaking into one’s home and driving off with one’s stuff in one’s own car. Ms Spargo-Ryan was hailed by her peers as a “beautiful person” for gushing with pretentious sympathy for her assailants and for wishing to see the burglars spared the normal corrective consequences, presumably so that they might go on to burgle the homes of others, including her neighbours. Which of course they were busy doing. Though it occurs to me that a person breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night and stealing their possessions is sending a pretty strong signal about how much concern, or how little, the rest of us should have for that person’s wellbeing.

The Pronoun Game, so very much in fashion, cropped up in March, along with a demand that employers accommodate the made-up identities of insufferable narcissists. Even when those made-up identities can change several times a day, with such changes being signalled via colour-coded pronoun bracelets, pronoun earrings, and other pronoun-stipulating accessories. Accessories that all colleagues would be expected to monitor closely, lest “misgendering” ensue, followed by a visit to Human Resources. A scenario that inspired the question of exactly how much farce in the workplace might be considered excessive.

Thanks to Oxford University’s Department of Biology, we beheld some ostentatious fretting about the “numerous negative consequences” of obscure Latin names that almost no-one knows about. According to Assistant Professor of Conservation Science Ricardo Rocha, some “1,565 species of bird, reptiles, amphibians and mammals” are named after “white, male Europeans from the 19th and 20th centuries,” which is apparently a very bad thing. What with all that whiteness and maleness, you see. This legacy of legwork and exploration is, we’re to believe, oppressing the people of Zimbabwe and Botswana, for whom the Latin textbook names of lizards and beetles are foremost in their minds. We were also assured that would-be botanists and biologists are in some way being psychologically injured by the existence of this Latin taxonomy, and by the fact that much of the “flora of New Caledonia” is “named after a man.”

Read on for the rest of it, there’s lots more yet to come, alas.

A matter of life and death

Ever wonder why moronic shitlibs hate fossil fuels so desperately? Wonder no more, friend.

We Can’t Let Fossil Fuels Die Because They Keep Us Alive
It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity.

This is my first Christmas without my dad. As hard as it is for me and my siblings, it’s harder still for our mother, who is having her first Christmas since 1963 without him. Dad’s days in the hospital and subsequent death ushered in a wave of emotions, memories, and ponderings about heaven, sin, salvation, and for me, fossil fuels.

The last item in that list may sound strange, but let me explain. As an advocate for the energy industry, work follows me everywhere, and I love it because I love what I do. But fossil fuels are not just my life, they are life-giving and life-sustaining.

After his heart attack, Dad had a cardiac catheterization to assess the damage to his coronary artery. A hollow, plastic tube was inserted through the groin. Then, guided by the doctor, it traveled through the blood vessels, sending back data and information. In this procedure, the plastics are made of oil. The needle is forged to the finest of points by heat produced from coal. The medicines used to prevent infection are petrochemicals likely made from natural gas. Right there: fossil fuels.

A stent was also implanted to keep the blood flowing in a collapsed artery — thinner than human hair, hollow, nontoxic, noncorrosive, flexible, and 100 percent made from oil.

Medicines, IV bags, disposable gloves, hand sanitizer, the port in his arm, the numerous beeping machines — in every corner of Dad’s hospital room were products of abundant natural resources, which professionals deploy daily to save lives and heal patients. And we take it for granted.

Those advocating for a “green transition” never tell us what the plan is to make needles and bedpans once we “phase out” of fossil fuels. What is the replacement plan for plastic, rubber, cement, steel, and the millions of products they create?

Perhaps I thought these things sitting in Dad’s hospital room to distract myself from the heartache. Perhaps I think these things because it is my job. Either way, I know the world is not ready for fossil fuels to lose this battle. It is not just cars and leaf blowers, stoves, or even air conditioning. What is at stake is much deeper: human dignity — a dignity that elevates us above the harshness of nature and cruelty of illness or allows us to cleanse ourselves from the sweat of labor. 

We do not talk about the “then what” after fossil fuels are eliminated. But I assure you, life as we know it would be absolutely, categorically impossible without them.

For you and me, sure. For them? Never. Or so they think, at any rate. All just part and parcel of being what Lenin termed a “useful idiot,” see. And if we hated Normals have to keel over and drop dead en masse so’s they can feel all smug and sanctimonious about themselves and their “noble” Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ works…well, so much the better, then. For these assholes, that’s a feature, not a bug. This gem, which ran over at the Eyrie with this week’s Screamin’ meemie Monday post, is worth another look, I think.

Yes indeedy-dew. Or, as Glenn has long maintained: I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who keep telling me it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis. Call it Reynold’s Law, p’raps.

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