Believe it or Else

Fear is the mind-killer

Posted on May 28, 2021May 28, 2021 by Mike

Renegade Wes sends, and my thanks to him for the heads-up.

We are paralyzed. Paralyzed by fear. We have not acted due to the fact that people love their cushy lives, and the material possessions they have accumulated. We don’t act out of fear of losing those we love. We don’t act because doing so will forever change us. There will be an incredible loss of life. However if we don’t act there will be an incredible loss of life, it’s what communist do.

People say there is no plan, no leadership, and no consensus, this too complicates things. It keeps people from doing what in their hearts they know must be done. Our side can’t agree on anything, just look in our comment section. If we can’t stop with all the pettiness against each other, it’s going to be damn near impossible to unite and fight against this tyranny we are faced with.

People need to realize that the country we grew up in is forever gone. What is going to take its place is up to us. You know it, deep down in your bones, you know I’m right. Accept it. All those on our side should be willing to lay it all on the line to secure a future for our children and grandchildren. Quit worrying about surviving, that is not important. We should be willing to do whatever is necessary to kill this evil that we are faced with. If you aren’t willing to do that then you have lost already.

Quit obeying every edict these little tyrants are throwing your way. Quit going along to get along. Stand up! Incrementally they are taking everything from us and we are doing nothing except griping about it under our breath.

I don’t know what steps we should take. I know what I am personally willing to do, however I have no wish to be a martyr. Yes times are different from when our founders fought to establish this once great country, but that is no excuse. We are to always fight for liberty. Tyranny flourishes when good men do nothing and that is exactly what is happening.

He’s right, and you know he is. To act precipitately or in a scattershot, uncoordinated fashion reliably produces unsatisfactory, unanticipated, even disastrous results, if history is any guide. But lethargy and self-deception in the face of a resolute and implacable foe has left us with our backs very nearly against the wall.

As Wes correctly concludes, war is upon us. Against our will, Team Libery has been forced into a literally existential struggle. We didn’t want it; we don’t like it; we’ve tried our utmost, by every conceivable means, to avoid it. But we cannot afford to lose it. Because existential struggles, by definition, can only ever have one victor, and defeat means death.

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A look at the scorecard

Posted on May 28, 2021May 28, 2021 by Mike

In the late innings, with their opponents way ahead, it doesn’t look good for the home team.

The 1958 book by Cleon Skousen, The Naked Communist, set forth 45 goals communists need to achieve to take over the United States without firing a shot. Some of them are outdated and immaterial. Some are debatable. Let’s see how many commie goals have been achieved.

15. Capture one or both of the political parties in the United States.
DONE. Communists were once hunted in the U.S. Today, Democrats like Bernie, AOC, and the Squad, with ideas that are clearly socialist, if not communist, are re-elected with ease.

17. Get control of the schools. Use them as transmission belts for socialism and current Communist propaganda. Soften the curriculum. Get control of teachers’ associations. Put the party line in textbooks
DONE. Marxism has been in our schools for a while now, as pointed out brilliantly by Townhall’s Marina Medvin. Common Core is right out of the Stalin playbook. CRT is just the next step.

22. Continue discrediting American culture by degrading all forms of artistic expression. An American Communist cell was told to “eliminate all good sculpture from parks and buildings, substitute shapeless, awkward and meaningless forms”
HALF-DONE. Here is a list of 113 statues that have been toppled, defaced, or removed, though no shapeless, awkward, meaningless commie pinko forms have replaced them yet.

The list continues from there, featuring some truly depressing boxes ticked for Team Commie, to conclude thusly:

If you’re counting, that’s 17 pinko goals that have already been achieved. We can debate the others, and we should, soon, because the Marxists are succeeding at an alarming rate.

The home team will need to stage a real blowout of a bottom-of-the-9th rally if they’re gonna pull this one out.

Update! No accident, no coincidence, and most definitely related.

Most Americans have no idea how far gone their country is. We not only have the Biden regime announcing solidarity with BLM and flying the BLM flag at US embassies and consular missions, US military recruitment videos stressing recruitment of lesbian females, men dressing as women, and Americans having their genitals removed so they can become “no gender” https://www.rt.com/op-ed/524768-nullo-surgery-genital-modification/, we have Democrat school systems teaching white people self-hate and infusing them with guilt and making them effective agents in reconstructing America as a racial caste system favoring blacks.

It is clear that white liberals have succeeded in destroying the belief of many Americans in the rule of law and the Constitution by denouncing these historic achievements as “tools of white supremacy.”

Today the states are disunited between blue and red to a far greater extent than they were in 1860. There are two countries today occupying the same geographical location. One, the red states, believe in America and its founding documents. The other, the blue states, believe that America epitomizes white supremacy evil.

The message is clear. From the Democrats the message is that white Americans must submit to blacks whom they have wronged. From the Red States the response is that whites freed the blacks from the slavery that their black brothers sold them into, whites passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution that guarantee blacks equality before the law. The claim that white Americans denied these protections to blacks is a lie by traitors guilty of treason who intend to overthrow the United States of America.

The only way out of this is civil war. We will learn if the red states have enough confidence and will to defend the Constitutional rights of white Americans.

Hey, it’s NEVER a bad time to start offing Commies. Happily, though, in the words of the great Curtis LeMay: “You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.”

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How the Tenth was lost

Posted on May 27, 2021May 27, 2021 by Mike

Unsurprisingly, the profoundly nefarious 17th played an important role in its destruction.

Michael Finch, the President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has an excellent article over at the American Thinker making clear where the Progressives are in their fight against the Constitution. He identifies what the Biden administration intends to accomplish—nothing less than completing the project of centralizing power in the federal government begun by the Progressives over a century ago. Finch very correctly observes that “the 10th Amendment, with its clear limitations on federal power, has been seriously eroded over the past century,” and that Biden and his handlers intend to put an end to the remaining limitations on federal power.

The Progressives certainly have gotten away with trampling on the 10th Amendment for more than a century, but that raises this question: how did they manage to get away with doing that?

The answer is that the Progressives tricked Americans into repealing the 10th Amendment without realizing that was what they were doing. It was very cleverly done, so cleverly that even today Americans by and large do not understand what happened. When in 1913 America approved the 17th Amendment, the amendment that provided for the direct election of senators, the 10th Amendment was doomed.

How can that be? After all, the 10th Amendment says nothing about the election of senators. The point of the all-important 10th Amendment is that the Founders created a federal government of strictly limited powers. Here it is in full:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The 10th says the powers of the federal government (here referred to as “the United States”) are limited to the enumerated powers, the limited powers assigned it in the Constitution; the individual states (here referred to as “the States”) retain all their powers not delegated to the federal government. But the important point for us to understand is that the Founders’ method for selecting senators was the key to keeping the powers of the federal government limited.

In the Constitution and in the original American republic, senators were selected by the state legislatures. The wisdom of the Framers is nowhere more evident than in this feature of their constitutional design. This was the central pillar of that design. It secured the 10th Amendment by the power of the Senate. As I wrote in my book about the founding entitled Common Sense Nation:

The Senate had been a barrier to the passage of federal laws infringing on the powers reserved to state governments, but the Senate has abandoned that responsibility under the incentives of the new system of election. Because the states no longer have a powerful standing body representing their interests within the federal government, the power of the federal government has rapidly grown at the expense of the states.

Before the 17th Amendment, the state legislatures controlled the upper chamber of Congress. There was no way the federal government was going to usurp the power of the states. The 17th Amendment disempowered the states, and the 10th Amendment promptly began eroding away.

Americans in 1913 were fooled by the Progressives because too many Americans no longer understood the Founders’ design for liberty. You have to give the Progressives credit. They did understand the Founders’ design, they picked their target brilliantly, and by selling the 17th Amendment as a reform, they won a great victory.

And America That Was, in consequence, has been circling the drain ever since, spiraling ever faster as it slips down the pipe to its ultimate doom. Mike’s Iron Law #1,246: whenever Progressivists win, America loses.

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Question everything

Posted on May 26, 2021May 26, 2021 by Mike

The imperative of our era.

There is no problem in the United States that could not be solved if we were still a nation of critical thinkers. But critical thinking has been intentionally replaced by dogma. Having a degree is not equivalent to having an education. Knowing something is not the same as understanding it. In a world saturated with information, the “key” to distinguishing between truth and falsehood is one question, one word: “why?”

Why should schools and companies discriminate based on skin color? Why should my race say more about me than my brain? Why is it okay for federal immigration law to be ignored while federal tax laws must be obeyed? Why are Americans who defend the Constitution treated as domestic terrorists? Why are Americans who burn down cities treated as heroes? Why does every “solution” to climate change involve the expansion of government powers and the contraction of personal liberties? Why must the government police speech in order to keep it free? Why must government disarm citizens in order to keep them safe? Why is the government so afraid of the people that it must spy on them at all times? Why is it no longer “our government,” but rather the government?

Are those questions dangerous in a “free” society? Of course not. They lead to discussion, which leads to debate, which leads to contemplation, which leads to greater understanding, which creates a more perceptive mind, a more capable American, and a more complete human being. When government deems some questions subversive, it is admitting that it no longer represents the people, but rather rules over them. And any public school system that replaces the tools necessary for developing critical thinking skills with rigid indoctrination countenancing no dissent is producing not healthy citizens, but useful slaves.

The great philosopher George Carlin used to say, “Don’t just teach your children to read[.]…Teach them to question what they read. Teach them to question everything.” That’s how real learning is done — in the trenches with one hand on a flashlight searching for knowledge and the other gripping a shovel, digging up the oft-buried truth. Carlin also knew that when it comes to truth, governments cannot be trusted: “I have certain rules I live by. My first rule: I don’t believe anything the government tells me.” If more Americans could learn this simple principle, our society would be in a much better place. Free people with free minds do not need politicians to do their thinking for them.

The science is settled? The time for debate is over? Never. Only people interested in stealing your agency and capturing your soul say such things. It is our capacity for reason that makes each of us distinct and our distinctive qualities that make each human life individually valuable. When government deems individual minds unnecessary, then individual lives become disposable. That’s when governments do great evil.

Ahh, but what about when government deems individual minds not just unnecessary, but an active, credible threat to their own designs? What’s to be done about government then?

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“It’s a race to the bottom when brutality reigns”

Posted on May 25, 2021May 25, 2021 by Mike

Civilization vs savagery.

A morality that confers “rights” on mobs and strips those of an individual is the morality of savages. Maxine Waters is a savage, but so too are the members of the Minneapolis City Council who agreed to pay George Floyd’s estate $27 million before Chauvin’s trial had begun, the judge who recognized the prejudicial unfairness of Waters’ inflammatory statements but passed the buck for doing anything about it to the appellate courts, and the political, media, and celebrity jackals from Joe Biden on down who’ve been howling for Chauvin’s conviction since Floyd’s death.

The trial for Derek Chauvin and the lack of one for the Capitol Hill policeman (name still unknown) are another reminder—not that any are needed—that savages aren’t fair. It’s pathetic and ludicrous to expect an appellate court to grant Chauvin a new trial, although it would have ample grounds to do so in anything resembling a fair judicial system.

It’s like saying, “Wait until 22 and 24!” or, “Wait until the Arizona vote audit!” after last year’s blatant election theft. The savages have instituted corrupt arrangements that will enshrine their power in perpetuity. Expecting them to tolerate anything that would jeopardize those arrangements is like expecting water to run uphill. Fair or even quasi-fair elections would threaten their power. They are, like fair trials, but a memory.

Savages beget savagery and nothing else, until they are stopped or they stop themselves. Don’t count on them recognizing the production—a civilized and thereby forbidden act—and the producers—civilized and thereby forbidden people—that keep them fed and alive. And don’t count on them not making your weaponry, your last line of defense, a use it or lose it proposition.

They recognize no limits, certainly not the constraints imposed by reality. They may have to lay waste to the world before whomever remains of the honest and productive realize that their lives are a defend them or die proposition. For decades, America’s rulers and their accomplices have said about the enemies of the day: they only understand force. It’s projection, ascribing to others one’s own motivations. They’ve dressed it up in all sorts of verbiage, from Make the World Safe for Democracy to We’re All In This Together, but force is what they understand and to which they’ll always resort. The only thing that will stop them is superior force more competently wielded.

Abandon your mind and life is one big scary mystery. In their perpetual, pervasive fear of everything, savages will always respond to superior force. The civilized are abandoning savage strongholds, seeking refuge in states that still demonstrate a vestigial respect for individual rights, the font of civilization. These aren’t nirvanas of freedom, but they’re better than what’s left behind.

Live and let live are not options for savages; they have to prey on someone. The migrants may find relief in their new locales, but unless they’re prepared to defend them that relief will prove temporary. Having run out of victims at home, the savages will invade, plunder, and destroy any place that maintains a modicum of freedom, production, prosperity, and civilization.

Unless their would-be victims repel them.

Which demands full and frank acknowledgment of one inescapable fact, however unpleasant: the only effective way the savages among us can be repelled is by means of force and violence. Anything else is no more than a float down the river of Denial, idle thumbsuckery and self-deception. No, it ain’t pleasant. But that doesn’t make it any less true.

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Life in the USSSA

Posted on May 25, 2021May 25, 2021 by Mike

The United Soviet Socialist States of Amerika, that would be. Not to be confused—not EVER, not on your life—with the FUSA.

Lucas Gerhard is a 21-year-old man. Instead of celebrating his graduation from Lake Superior State University in Sault St. Marie, MI, in the criminal justice field and looking for a job in law enforcement, Lucas is locked down in his father’s home, wearing an ankle bracelet.

Probably a good thing, getting this dangerous criminal off the streets, don’tcha think? I mean, I’m confident this young punk is a menace to his community, and to all right-thinking, decent Americans, right?

Lucas is an Eagle Scout and has no criminal record.

Oh. Well. Hrm.

Okay, at this point I think it only right to warn all CF lifers afflicted by high blood pressure or heart problems: from here on out, I personally guar-on-tee that this bag o’ dicks is gonna REALLY piss y’all off.

During his trial, the prosecutor attempted to paint Lucas as a threat to the school community, claiming that he had numerous “contacts” with Law Enforcement at LSSU.

Lucas’s father explained: “The so-called ‘contacts’ were made as a result of more anonymous calls to LSSU public safety, and an incident where Lucas’s car was vandalized and his rear window smashed out! Not a single one of those was what can be considered a negative or derogatory incident. An example of one incident where a call was made was when Lucas was in his OCSO cadet uniform and carrying a bag of police training gear across campus to his communications class where he was giving a speech in law enforcement methods. The call was made as soon as he exited his dorm. The police were apparently told by the caller that they felt threatened by seeing Lucas when they saw him carrying riot gear. Note that LSSU is a school where a large majority of students are Criminal Justice majors! But Sault St. Marie police officers actually responded and pulled Lucas out of the classroom WHILE HE WAS GIVING HIS SPEECH to question him. His professor came out and told the officers that Lucas’s speech was pre-approved as well as the props he brought. The report noted that his explanation was accepted and no further action taken. I might add that every other time something like this happened, the result was the same. No action taken, either from Law Enforcement nor the College. The level of harassment Lucas endured there was astonishing.”

Lucas’s real crime was being an unashamed conservative college student.

The story we are about to tell you is truly one of the most remarkable cases of injustice you will ever read. It’s a story of how easily two intolerant, liberal students, with the help of the police, school administrators, and an overly zealous prosecutor, can cancel the life of a young man, all while trampling on his First and Second Amendment Rights.

Incredibly, unbelievably enough, that’s only the beginning of this bona fide horrorshow. It gets even worse.

Anybody out there whose initial response was to mutter something along the lines of “can’t happen here” is hereby strongly advised to wake the fuck up and smell what the Wokester commie ratbags are cooking. STRONGLY. Read the rest, if you can stand to. Mention is made of “making the snowflakes melt,” although Lucas was careful to aver to Johnny Law that it was actually “a reference to liberals whose brains ‘melt’ when faced with something or someone who expresses an opposing political ideology.”

Let me be the first to fling caution to the winds and state outright that it’s way past time some snowflakes were made to melt for real, physically and literally, by bringing the fires of Hell itself to bear on their sorry, smarmy asses. Before it’s too late, and they can no longer be stopped.

Totally, totally unacceptable, this is.

How liberty is lost

Posted on May 22, 2021May 22, 2021 by Mike

It’s always a mistake to accept their premises.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control did an about-face, announcing that the fully vaccinated among us may resume normal activities. The news came more than a year after California initiated the first lockdown on March 19, 2020.

The CDC’s new posture comes with some narrow exceptions. If you’re traveling on a plane or find yourself in a homeless shelter or in a medical or correctional facility, you still need to wear a mask; and the CDC made sure to clarify, apparently out of great deference for federalism and Hayekian spontaneous order, that its guidance does not predominate over the requirements of federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.

Before the CDC updated its pandemic guidance, this was exactly the position espoused by libertarian law professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. Writing from his regular perch at the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Somin’s argument is summarized nicely in the subheading of his piece, “Free the Vaccinated from COVID Restrictions”: “Doing so will protect constitutional rights, reduce vaccine hesitancy, and increase liberty—all at once.”

The CDC’s shift undoubtedly is a welcome development, all things considered. But people like Somin could not be more misguided in supporting it as a matter of best practice. In doing so, they ratify a pernicious principle that has the potential to destroy our long-term freedom. Instead of reasoning from first principles, Somin works from within a techno-scientific, experts-know-best framework that, unsurprisingly, constrains his thinking and directs him to validate the public health bureaucracy’s authority and priorities. One need only examine what accepting the totality of the CDC’s guidance would truly mean to see the short-sightedness of Somin’s position.

That the CDC, or any other institution, would presume to strip us of our God-given natural liberty to buy groceries or see a play or play with our children in a park, all in the name of some dubious goal of “public health,” and then purport to “return” our rights—but only if we jump through a vaccine-related hoop—is a grievous affront to the salutary legal revolution brought on by the birth of America that Jaffa identified. We are being ordered to accept the submerged premise of the CDC’s new position, namely, that we are free to do only what the government explicitly permits us to do. Sadly, a great many Americans are only too willing to comply.

It is deeply shameful that we let a virus with a roughly 1.8 percent death rate upend completely our society’s habits, customs, practices, mores, and ways of thinking about the interaction of law and liberty and the legitimate domain and reach of each. (Recall that SARS had a 14-15 percent death rate, and we did not feel compelled to shut down the country for over a year.)

Actually, it wasn’t a virus that did it. The Left was allowed to “upend our thinking about liberty” many decades ago, transitioning (ahem) far too many of us from stout, indendent citizens to simpering dependents content to suckle at Mommy Government’s flabby teat forever. After that “fundamental transformation” was accomplished, pulling off the Covid coup de grace was simplicity itself, practically a fait accompli.

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Truly, embarrassingly pathetic

Posted on May 21, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mike

One of these things is NOT like the other.

Russian army ad vs US army ad
2021pic.twitter.com/tGQeY3dJa6

— Pardes Seleh (@PardesSeleh) May 19, 2021

Now just you go ahead and try to tell me that, should we ever be so foolish as to get ourselves into a military dustup with the Russkies—of any scale, scope, or intensity imaginable—we aren’t well, truly, and completely fucked. Those tough, all-business Russian soldiers would go through Cpl Fluffybutt, her two mommies, and each and every gender-puzzled dainty in their circle of acquaintance like shit through a goose, and never break a sweat doing it.

Don’t even bother asking if it gets worse, either. You already know it does.

Nearly Half of Female Soldiers Still Failing New Army Fitness Test, While Males Pass Easily
More than seven months after the official launch of the Army Combat Fitness Test, or ACFT, nearly half of female soldiers are still falling short, with enlisted women struggling the most, Military.com has learned. The data again raises questions about whether the Army’s attempt to create a fitter force is creating more barriers to success for women.

Internal Army figures from April show 44% of women failed the ACFT, compared to 7% of men since Oct. 1. “Female soldiers continue to lag male soldier scores in all events,” according to a United States Army Forces Command briefing obtained by Military.com.

The pass rate for women is up 12% from last year, yet enlisted women continue to struggle the most, with a 53% fail rate. Female officers have only a 23% fail rate, but that’s still significantly higher than the fail rate for men, enlisted or officer.

“The ACFT — as part of the Army’s overall physical readiness program — continues to evolve, reduce injuries and empower Soldiers to perform basic Soldier tasks,” a FORSCOM spokesman told Military.com in a statement Monday.

Oh, how I do love that “evolve” folderol. You’re “evolving” all right—from a military Force To Be Reckoned With into…well, into something entirely else.

“Reduce injuries” is a good one too, I think. As if “reducing injuries” ought to be an item of much importance in a program whose core mission used to be training American youth in the killing of people and the breaking of things. All this, mind, from some REMF PR flack in the employ of a once-respected, nay feared, war machine whose flinty-eyed, hardcase DIs used to swear by the maxim that “the more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in combat.” Guess that one’s gone by the wayside and forgotten now, as so many other needful things have. Hell, Higher would probably toss any NCO overheard uttering the phrase straight into USDB Leavenworth these days, or cashier him outright for Crimes Against Diversity Which Is Our Strength Amen.

What a sad, pitiful joke we’ve become.

A virus of the mind

Posted on May 21, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mike

Doc Z explains why Zombie Communism won’t ever just lie down and stay dead.

Conservatives of my generation made the terrible mistake of believing Marxism was fatally discredited with the fall of the Soviet Union, and only a few aging freaks in campus faculty still took it seriously. We weren’t ready for the next wave of the mind-virus and its variants.

It was an easy mistake to make. How could people cling to an ideology that spread death, poverty, and failure around the world, once its primary nation-state supporter lay in ruins – its claims of success across the decades exposed as lies, its victims celebrating their freedom?

How could so many people ignore the hideous history of Marxism and continue to believe THIS time it will work, THIS time all the bugs have been ironed out, THIS time the right people are finally in charge? Forgive my generation for thinking the horror was finally over.

Marxism persists because it IS a virus. It was designed that way – give the old devil and his disciples credit for being ahead of the curve in realizing that an ideology could be custom-tailored to propagate itself endlessly, without needing any nourishment from success.

Every single aspect of Marxist theory is designed to protect and perpetuate the ideology no matter how badly it fails, most notably including the elements of every Marxist ideology that justify the use of violence against those who threaten it, or refuse to submit to its demands.

An ideology that asserts dissent from its principles in good faith is impossible – making dissent a sin punishable by loss of rights, confiscation of property, imprisonment, torture, or death – is well on its way to insulating itself against any degree of objective failure.

The most viral element of Marxism, the DNA that carries over into all its mutations, is the elimination of individual responsibility – the promise of “justice” and “entitlement” achieved through collective power. Every strain of Marxism tells adherents they have been exploited.

This is reflected in the core economic assumption of Marxism: capitalism “exploits” workers and “steals” the value of their labor. All of Marxism’s misery and bloody horror, all of the failure and brutal civil warfare it spreads through societies it infects, flows from this idea.

Never again should any defender of freedom underestimate the seductive viral appeal of these ideas, especially to young minds. Marxism is a vision of society run like a big family. It appeals to kids from good families…and those who desperately WISH they had good families.

Marxism flatters envy and transforms it into a virtue. It offers a regimented vision of society that appears logical once its (entirely false) basic premises are accepted. It claims to makes sense of a senseless and unjust world – very appealing to the young and alienated.

Most importantly, Marxism lifts the burden of individual responsibility from its acolytes. “Socializing” costs and consequences, classifying all misfortune as “exploitation,” dividing people into static classes at war with each other – it all says nothing is YOUR fault.

Every strain of Marxism tells its victims that they can never hope to find success, fairness, justice, equity – whatever euphemism becomes fashionable after the old ones wear out – on their own.

Gee, sounds exactly like what Democrat-Socialists have told American Nigras for years and years now, so as to keep them forever on the Donk plantation, almost word for word. Pure coinkydink, I’m guessing.

But I must remind one and all that, contra the general assumption, Marxism has NOT “failed every time it’s been tried.” Sure, it hasn’t worked—CANNOT work—according to the usual definition for the word. But as Hayward’s essay tacitly confirms, that’s predicated on a premise that is false. As I argued the other night, our metric for what constitutes success and failure must be recalibrated, putting ourselves back in line with the stark reality that Marxism has enjoyed an unbroken string of successes when it comes to realizing the true goals of the despots who implement and then rule under it. I repeat: it all depends on what the meaning of “success” is.

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LeGoBTQEtc

Posted on May 21, 2021May 21, 2021 by Mike

Why yes, there really IS nothing they won’t politicize and, ultimately, ruin. Why do you ask?

Lego Announces Its Gender-Nonbinary Playset Featuring a Black Drag Queen

The story goes on from there, but I can’t. Something a bit more subtle than the renowned Double Facepalm is called for here, I think.

Ahh, but does this ridiculousness get even more ridiculous, you ask? It appears so, yes.

Lego Unveils New Genderless Bricks With No Male/Female Connectors
BILLUND, DENMARK—As part of its new push toward inclusion and diversity, Lego has unveiled a new set of genderless bricks without male or female connectors. The entirely smooth bricks have no suggestive male nubs or female receptors and instead have entirely smooth, androgynous sides all around.

“This represents a new era in inclusive building bricks!” said Lego spokesperson Bjørn Irkestøm-Slater Walker. “Finally — anyone can play with our legos without being triggered by those horried male and female parts that imply they’re only supposed to fit in one direction. Every brick can stack on any other brick without anyone misgendering anything or making a brick feel bad because it only fits in one way.”

“I mean, I guess they’re pretty much just blocks now,” he admitted. “But they’re INCLUSIVE blocks!”

The bricks will still, of course, instantly kill you if you step on them.

I’ll leave it my readers to decide which of the above might be satire. MIGHT be. Back to NCFOM to wrap things up.

The Dismal Tide—a wonderful turn of phrase that hit me where I lived when I first heard it, from one of the very best movies I ever saw—is beginning to look more like a tsunami.

As American as motherhood and apple pie

Posted on May 20, 2021May 20, 2021 by Mike

My GOD, but Leftists are such grim, joyless, juiceless prigs. Miserable, twisted people, the whole lot of ’em.

Food injustice has deep roots: let’s start with America’s apple pie

Oh, by all means, let’s.

In the drama of nationalist culture, the bloody and international origins of the apple pie are subject to a collective amnesia. In the imagining of American community, the dish is transformed into a symbol of domesticity. By 1910, it’s possible for a theatre review to celebrate a wholesome play, “as American as apple pie”.

Guardian readers ought by now to be familiar with the exercise of undoing the commodity fetish. Scratch the surface of a bar of chocolate, a tuna sandwich, or even a chicken nugget, and you find the horrors of international trade: violence, exploitation, poverty and profit. Capitalist logic is everywhere the same, but countries are capitalist in their own ways. The apple pie is as American as stolen land, wealth and labour. We live its consequences today.

The history of the US food system has always, however, been one of struggle. “Food justice” is a term that is intelligible only because oppressed and exploited communities have organized for redress against the predations of US capitalism. The US was made by finding ever lower labour costs, and workers always fought back. Food justice, and its opposite, are of a piece.

It is clear, though, that tensions and imperfections and losses lie ahead. The US continues to spread its economic model internationally. While Joe Biden’s administration seems ready to infuse cash into the management of domestic hunger, internationally it’s agribusiness as usual. But as May Day reminds us, solidarity between workers need not be bounded by the nation state. The United States was made through global connections. It will be remade when those links are not ones of oppression, but ones of solidarity in the fight for food justice.

If I hadn’t read this interminably long and tortuous Grauniad lecture for myself, I would scarcely have believed it. But it’s real, it’s in your face, and it’s totally not going to just go away. Can “mostly peaceful” protests against the genocide represented by a slice of good ol’ apple pie be long in coming? Is the glass of milk that traditionally accompanies it still okay, or no?

So I guess now it’s “food justice” we all must wring our hands and gnash our teeth over…or else. To fail to speak out is to implicitly confirm our complicity in “injustice,” see. Also “bigotry,” “racism,” and “white supremacy.” Probably several more sundry atrocities I’m forgetting about also. Silence is violence, y’all.

One can only marvel, and wonder what the self-righteous carbuncles will come up with next.

Mistakes were made

Posted on May 20, 2021May 20, 2021 by Mike

Vox runs down a few of the most costly ones.

I don’t know why President Trump failed to publicly uphold the law and the Constitution when he was confronted with massive election fraud. Given all of the various anomalies we’ve witnessed since January, I don’t even know who is actually calling the shots in the United States. But while I still assert that Donald Trump was the greatest US president since Andrew Jackson, what I do know is that he also doesn’t merit any sympathy whatsoever from his supporters for his current post-presidential persecutions.

First, Trump betrayed – yes, betrayed – his supporters when he completely failed to address, much less crack down upon, the social media companies who were systematically attacking them. As someone who was “suspended” from Twitter six years ago, I’m completely unmoved by conservatives belatedly crying about their own recent suspensions and deplatformings. This could have, and should have, been dealt with by President Trump back in 2016, and his failure to do so was a massive strategic mistake that was obvious at the time.

If you won’t fight for your followers, don’t expect them to fight for you.

Second, it was always obvious to everyone that the witch-hunting that started before President Trump even took office was going to continue the moment that he left office. And no matter what agreements were agreed, only a complete idiot would have placed any confidence in the various parties that make up the Deep State all keeping them.

As I repeatedly pointed out during his presidency, President Trump’s fundamental weakness is that he is a negotiator, not a fighter. Which means, at the end of the day, he’s always going to cave and take the best deal that he thinks he can get. While we don’t know that’s what happened after the events of November 3, 2020, it wouldn’t be even remotely surprising to eventually learn that Trump took the best deal he thought he could get at the time in lieu of crossing the Rubicon.

I still maintain that among the most damaging and confounding of Trump’s mistakes—or failures, even betrayals, depending on one’s point of view—was his choice to not only retain so many Ogabe stay-behinds, but to appoint and/or hire Swamp creatures for posts from whence they could wage all-out bureaucratic war against him and the MAGA agenda. Just leaving Chris Wray in place as head of a transparently hostile FBI—another disastrous Trump hire, mind—to wreak havoc with total impunity was probably enough all by itself to guarantee Trump’s undoing.

Considered all together, Trump’s piss-poor showing in some of the self-same aspects of the job he should’ve been best at, given his past competence and success in those departments, is beyond baffling, almost bizarre. Enough so, in fact, that I’m beginning to wonder whether the Left’s scornful assessment of the man’s intelligence might not have been nearer the mark than my own.

Trump as a trusting naif who quickly found himself in way over his head when he rolled up his sleeves and tried to make good on his promise to drain the Swamp just doesn’t quite compute for me. His whole life had been spent bare-knuckle brawling in the cutthroat NYC real-estate market, coping with ruthless competitors and sleazy local and state ProPols who, if their power was somewhat less broad and encompassing as their bigger DC brothers, was still far from negligible. Is it really plausible that Trump, with his vast experience rasslin’ ‘gators in NYC, would suddenly forget everything he’d learned when he came up against somewhat-larger ones after making the move to Mordor On The Potomac?

It’s not easy for me to think so, I must say. Whatever the case may be, if Trump doesn’t get a clue on the PDQ and wake the fuck up to certain ugly realities, OrangeManBad is gonna find himself rockin’ orange before long. The writing, as in so many other contexts, is on the wall.

New York AG’s Office says its probe of the Trump Organization is now ‘criminal’ and will work with Manhattan DA Cy Vance in his ongoing fraud investigation
New York’s attorney general is now investigating the Trump Organization for criminal offenses, it emerged on Tuesday night.

The office, led by Letitia James, had been investigating the company for civil tax offenses since early 2019. but the investigation has now escalated.

‘We have informed the Trump Organization that our investigation into the Organization is no longer purely civil in nature,’ said Fabien Levy, a spokesman for the office.

‘We are now actively investigating the Trump Organization in a criminal capacity, along with the Manhattan DA.’

The district attorney’s office, led by Cyrus Vance, has been investigating possible criminal tax fraud since 2018.

A person familiar with the investigation told CNN that several investigators with the James’s office, who are considered experts on the Trump Organization, have joined Vance’s team.

The notice from James’s office was sent in late April to attorneys for the Trump Organization, The Washington Post said.

If Trump thinks himself untouchable or impervious, that they “can’t” do this or they “wouldn’t” do that, he’s a damned fool. The Enemy has a larger point to make here, about what will surely happen to any and every other pugnacious outsider who would dare to invade their turf seeking to bring down the Barad-Dur. Whether he knows it or not, they will NOT be content with merely removing him. They mean to destroy him utterly, to make an example of him that won’t soon be forgotten—a direct warning that will endure for every bit as long as their illegitimate kleptocracy itself does.

At this point, the best thing Donald Trump could do for himself and his family is to wake up to current reality; recognize that America That Was is lost forever, and was years ago; abandon his honest patriotism and love of country; and flee to the extradition-proof Caribbean island you just know he already owns to sit back on a sandy beach to enjoy a frosty-cool margarita and cock his snook at his tormentors back in Amerika v2.0 for the rest of his days.

Evil comes to your house

Posted on May 19, 2021May 19, 2021 by Mike

BCE posts some shocking, infuriating, just damned awful news, which I’m not gonna excerpt. Toss back a good, stiff belt of something strong and just read it…and don’t for one second assume you’re safe or immune from something similar, wherever you may reside. Nobody is.s

Living with lunatics

Posted on May 19, 2021May 19, 2021 by Mike

It can’t be done without upheaval, strife, and misery, and sane people shouldn’t even try lest insanity turn out to be infectious.

The Progressive Left has gone stark raving batshit fucking insane. It wouldn’t be so frightening if they didn’t have control of the news, the schools, the entertainment media, and now the government:

The 2016 election was stolen by Trump with the aid of Putin, but the 2020 election was unquestionably fair and even-handed, and there’s something wrong with you if you do not accept that.

Violence is speech, but silence is violence, but free speech is violence. Rioting is “mostly peaceful.” Two plus two equals racism and racism is bad, and all white people are racists, so President* Biden believes that minorities somehow can’t figure out how to use the Internet. Segregation is cool again as is discrimination in hiring. Defunding police departments is anti-racism. People who were never slaves should get reparations from people who never owned a slave, but the children brought illegally in to the country should not suffer for their parent’s crime. Genocide is bad, except in China where it’s just a different cultural norm.

Someone who was biologically male for most of his life can “identify as female” and defeat biologically female women in sex-segregated sports, and they’re brave for doing so. Dr. Rachel Levin, Biden’s transgender nominee for assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services refuses to answer questions regarding gender reassignment performed on minor children during approval hearings. (There are, at present, apparently 112 genders.) If you’re heterosexual and don’t date trans you’re a transphobe, but if you’re homosexual and won’t date outside your gender (whichever of the 112 you are) you’re OK.

“Equity” now means “Equality.” All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. Cows, pigs and sheep are among the greatest threats to the environment. We need to go to all electric cars, but we’re going to charge them using wind power on distribution systems that can’t support the load. Those clean electric vehicles run on batteries, but the Left seems to have no concern of where the materials for those come from. Mining is bad, but electric vehicles will require a massive increase in mining, not to mention the expansion of the power distribution infrastructure necessary to charge them. But math is racist, and I’m sure everything will work out fine.

And people who own guns are murderers just waiting for the opportunity, but insulting them in public is perfectly safe.

If you dare to point out the insanity, you’re a racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, Islamophobic deplorable who must be CANCELLED. You’re a heretic, or worse, apostate. Oh, and Ben Shapiro is a Nazi.

I wrote many years ago that both liberals and conservatives were necessary for a healthy society, but the Left is no longer interested in debate and compromise.

As we’re finding out, liberals aren’t at all necessary for a healthy society. Actually, they’re inimical to it; anathema to it; and, in the end, fatal to it.

Via Bill, who says:

This is a very long piece from a few weeks back. Most will probably not bother with it, but I challenge you to find a better, more compelling summation of the plight patriotic Americans now find themselves facing.

For those of you who do bother, thank you. I think you’ll find the time well spent.

We get bits and pieces of this every day, but to see it all gathered together in one place is to bring home in an inescapable way just how dangerous are the times into which we must move forward, whether we want to or not. And the sort of decisions we must make now to determine how we will face them.

He ain’t wrong about that, which y’all may not have gathered due to my having cherry-picked the insane-Left segment of the aforementioned post for the excerpt. As Bill says, carve out some time so’s you can sit down and read the whole thing.

Mulder was right

Posted on May 18, 2021May 19, 2021 by Mike

The truth is out there.

One month before the director of national intelligence and secretary of Defense are expected to deliver a UAP (unidentified aerial phenomena) intelligence report, Navy pilots and other former government officials are speaking out and describing their encounters with the mysterious sightings.

David Fravor, a Top Gun naval flight school graduate and commander of the F/A-18F squadron on the USS Nimitz, appeared on CBS’ “60 minutes” with Lt. Alex Dietrich, who was flying at his wing in 2004 when they say they saw a UFO, or unidentified flying object, together with their back seaters.

Fravor said that they saw something “better” than their airplane. Dietrich said she never wanted to appear on national television, and this was her first time talking about the subject.

The UFO encounter, which happened 100 miles southwest of San Diego, California, was documented by means of radar, camera, and four naval pilots.

It came after a new advanced radar on the USS Princeton had been detecting “multiple anomalous aerial vehicles” for a week, according to operators. The “vehicles” were able to descend over 80,000 feet in less than one second.

I’ll refrain from further comment myself, beyond saying that it’s a fascinating story—one of quite a few of ’em. Also: a ROD of better than 80k per second? DAYUUUMMMM!!

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