Short, definitely not sweet

CF Lifer hhluce has a brief Substack post following up on my own “Yeah, no” jeremiad from a cpl-three days ago, which he commended to our attention in the comments and I felt was worth a main-page mention here as well. Go ye and read of it, for it is…well, damned disturbing, actually, if you own a car manufactured in the last five years.

Montana sitrep

Q: Are things coming to a head, even in Big Sky Country?

A: Yes. Yes, they are.

There’s Gonna be a War in Montana
An analysis of visible propaganda in Bozeman, Big Sky, and Three Forks

In popular culture, protagonists and antagonists battle eternally for Montana’s precious land. Country folk fight off city folk in Yellowstone and the podcast Land Grab: A Podcast About the Place We Call Montana. Long before that Montana (1950) pit sheep farmers against cattle farmers. In Last of the Dogmen (1995) cowboys faced Cheyenne Indians. Of the 14 major film/TV projects scheduled to be shot in Montana, every single one involves some take on the battle for Montana’s soul. And Montana’s soul is in its land.

Land conflicts have led to at least one recent murder, but despite Yellowstone’s depiction of ranchers (our heroes) massacring greedy real estate developers with machine guns, so far Montana hot wars have been relegated to fiction.

My wife, toddler, and I attended a family reunion on a ranch in Tom Miner Basin—one of the most beautifully preserved parts of the state—for a week. Six years ago I attended the same event at the same ranch. There is indeed something special about the land and particularly the sky in Tom Miner Basin. Rural Montana is astonishing. I won’t bore you with more cringey descriptions because that’s all there is to say. Jockeying for Montana’s land provides great stakes for drama because the prize is priceless.

More interesting to me were the parts of Montana I saw by accident. A new coldness grips the relationship between visitors and locals. I first noticed it at the ranch. Six years ago the kitchen helpers were a happy mix. The chef was known for his thoughtful local cuisine, elk with au jus, beef burgers from ranch cattle, loaded baked potatoes, hearty mac and cheese. The servers wore big smiles. The progressive boomers attending the reunion were comfortable with this type of staff, the same hodgepodge they interacted with at home. Much backslapping occurred.

This time, the help had clearly experienced a vibe shift. They were all white, and distant. The food was awful—boiled carrots and reheated pork steaks, the result of some Aramark-type lowest-bidder supply chain. The new staff had been mostly hired on Coolworks, a website for low paid service jobs on ranches, resorts, and other “great places.” They came from the surrounding towns, forgotten about, left behind, bright red Trump country. Young women with sloped posture and heavy eyeshadow, barely 18. Their clothes don’t fit, they looked impoverished, hungry, skittering. The young chef who had once proudly presented his take on local food was gone. The guests no longer chatted with servants. There was separation and silence.

Then my wife tested positive for COVID so we fled to Bozeman. Throughout the subsequent week, I explored Bozeman and Big Sky, ultra-hot destinations (and now homes) for the woke bourgeoisie, and Three Forks, the polar opposite, a totally different world a razor thin distance away. I saw two groups of people, an overclass and an underclass, pressed up against each other, spoiling for a fight, just waiting for the littlest spark to set their fury ablaze.

Over what? The soul of Montana of course. One-of-a-kind land. That’s nothing new. What’s new is the character of the warring factions. They aren’t who you see on TV. On one side you have global interests imputing their values, importing cheaper labor, hollowing out Montana’s attractions and selling them to an international bourgeoisie for maximum profits. On the other you have the new underclass. Not the friendly Christian country folk of times past. And not Cowboy Hat Republican Rancher Dad either. No, these are a new kind of country person. Angry, exasperated, poor, Trump-loving service-workers—the Oxy takers, the meth cookers, the eaters of Chick-Fil-A. This group is acutely aware of just who controls Bozeman and Big Sky, and believe that the same people are coming for their territory. And they’re right.

If you listen, you can hear the two groups screaming at each other in silence, waiting for their very own Gavrilo Princip to spark this thing off.

You can at that, and not just in Montana, either. Then again, when shitlibs are screaming at the top of their lungs exactly what they intend to do to you, it probably behooves you to listen. Because if you don’t think they’ll really do it—not they themselves necessarily, but through their Wokester governments; their Wokester banks and other corporate entities; their Wokester cultural mafia; their monolithic Wokester “education” edifices from pre-K to post-grad; their grim, whey-faced Wokester bureacrats—then you probaby aren’t paying attention anything like closely enough. Divemedic knows:


Indeed so.

(Via WRSA)

MOAR trouble with teachers

I have a small question: what the actual fuck are “furries” doing in schools in the first fucking place, anyway?


Evidently, the “furries” these kids are complaining about are fellow students, not teachers—somewhat surprisingly, since the whole “furry” phenomenon started out as a sexual kink among “people” well past the age of majority (notice I did NOT say “adults” or “grown-ups”), and not a relatively innocuous if odd childhood declaration of their affection for household pets.

Be that as it may, the fact the “furries” are there at all is indicative of a failure of the teachers to maintain discipline in their classrooms, seems to me. Not an entirely unreasonable one, sadly enough, since the faculty and administrators seem to realize what would happen to them if they DID try to enforce discipline: “cancellation” by the Wokester hordes; loss of their jobs and careers; discrimination lawsuits; mass Leftist rent-a-mob protests at their homes in the dead of night, and etc.

Eventually, such dangerous White Supremacist insurrectionist Sacred Democracy™ defilin’ teachers (if any) will have their doors kicked in by FBI/SWAT paramilitary brigades, their dogs shot, their children forced out in their pajamas and laid facedown on the front lawn beside the corpses of their bullet-riddled pets with a select-fire M4 pointed at their heads—all the usual sort of thing, you know the drill by now.

Be sure to watch it to the end for the students’ near-disbelieving confirmation that their school “leadership” has actually put litter boxes in the girls’ bathrooms to oblige  their delusional “furry” students. No really, apparently they did that. The “furries” would have been better served if they installed a few fire-and-brimstone Baptist preachers in there instead, methinks. Assuming they haven’t all been rounded up and imprisoned without benefit of trial by now, that is.

HATE SPEECH!! HAAATE SPEEEEECH!!! I hereby denounce myself.

Update! Via Dave Renegade: did somebody just say “failure to enforce discipline”? Why yes, I believe someone did.


That scrawny, worthless nigger should have been strung up by his thumbs from the nearest oak tree in plain view of all his likeminded filthbags, pour encourager les autres, within no more than three (3) minutes of doing this shit, for no less than a full five (5) day school-week. Unacceptable, unforgivable, completely inexcusable and intolerable, that’s what. Instead, the shitlibs will probably give the little turd some kind of medal for his “bravery” in fighting against his “oppressors.”

Know why teachers in every semi-urban government school say they’re in constant fear every day they show up to work? Putting up with shit like this without dealing out some hard, swift consequences the instant it even looks like happening, that’s fucking why.

Boeing: What happened?

From a half-century as one of the world’s premier, most respected aircraft manufacturers to…well…

Meme purloined from the awesome Ken Lane. Now to the who, what, how, and why of it.

Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

That move, also, didn’t work out so well for the now-floundering aerospace company. The story details a toxic mish-mash of Wokesterism, the rise of a know-nothing MBA class, and a creeping, not-my-problem/not-my-fault corporate blame-shifting culture that replaced the former all-American can-do, git-er-done spirit which may well prove fatal to the once-mighty Boeing…and probably should, frankly.

It’s a sign o’ the times in Amerika v2.0, by no means unique but an increasingly commonplace story—and an extremely sad one.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

Just in time for riot season!

St George of Fentanyl v2.0, the new Martyr Of Color (type: “UNARMED!”) whose wholly justified shooting will be used to spark the upcoming Summer Of (mostly peaceful) Love v2.0.

The Press Are Pushing a New George Floyd, and the Headlines Are Dangerous and Shameless
The shooting death of Dexter Reed by police in Chicago has captured the attention of the mainstream press, and they aren’t exactly being honest in their coverage of the incident. Desperate for a new George Floyd, perhaps because it’s an election year, news outlets are shamelessly misleading about the incident.

In March, Reed was pulled over and approached by police. Body cam footage shows one officer asking him to roll the window down and then attempting to open the door after Reed tried to roll the window up. It’s at that point that shots ring out and the officers are seen running away to take cover. A gunfight ensues and with Reed stumbling out of the car, the officers discharge their weapons again.

While the press has reported that the officers fired “96 times” as a way to sensationalize the situation, 11 of the shots were actually from Reed, with his initial burst striking an officer in the arm. He can be seen bleeding on the extended body camera footage.

Misinformation about the situation began to be reported immediately, including from Reed’s family.

“If he was supposed to get pulled over for a traffic stop, why do they have four guns pointed at him? He was scared. And after he was already on the ground there, they still put him in cuffs instead of checking to see if he’s breathing. They shot to him 96 times and reload the clip three times,” Reed’s sister Porscha Banks said during a Tuesday press conference.

As the footage clearly shows, guns were only pointed at Reed after he refused to comply and started to roll his window up. The officer who was conducting the stop first approached the vehicle in a normal manner. Seeing Reed’s gun through the window may have prompted him to draw his weapon. There’s also the fact that Reed was out on pre-trial release for a variety of violent felonies related to a shooting he allegedly committed. Did the officers run his tag and know who he was? That could be another reason the officers were overly cautious in drawing their weapons after Reed refused to comply.

Regardless, you would expect a family member to defend their loved one. What shouldn’t be expected is for the press to be so incredibly irresponsible in its reporting.

Rilly? Pray tell, WHY would it not be expected, given everything we all already know about the lying Enemedia?

Much is being made about the number of times the officers fired and the fact that Reed no longer had the gun once he exited the vehicle. Both points are incredibly misleading. Once a suspect opens fire and strikes an officer, any expectation that the use of force will be limited goes out the window. At that point, the mission is to neutralize the deadly threat fully. No officer is going to count the number of shots they fire in the heat of the moment to make it look better for the press. Further, there would have been no way to know whether Reed was still armed or not after he exited the vehicle and began to move around it. That is hindsight that has no place in a fair analysis of what occurred. 

I have written many pieces criticizing the police over the years. My position has never been blind support but to judge every incident based on its own set of facts. This was a justified shooting by every metric, yet one would be forgiven for speculating that members of the press want violence to occur in response to it. Why else would they go so far to cover up what actually happened?

Well, actually, I can think of several possible alternate reasons for it, foremost among them being that for them, lying is so ingrained as to be nearly an instinctive reaction to any and every situation, regardless of whether it helps their cause or no. And if you don’t like that one, I have others.

Damn fools about it

As Wellington said after Waterloo: “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Or, as WC Fields said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There’s no use in being a damn fool about it.”

S’truth. And yet.

Woke Extremist Minneapolis City Council Demands $30.60/Hour Minimum Wage for Uber and Lyft Drivers; Uber and Lyft Both Announce They Will Abandon Minneapolis
Faced with public anger about driving out the popular ride-share services, the woke extremists of the city council say they may delay when the order goes into effect.

But they’re only doing that to allow other ride-share companies — are there any? — to enter the Minneapolis market.

By the way, I base the headline claim of a $30.60 per hour minimum wage on the city council’s demand that drivers be paid a minimum 51 cents per minute when ferrying passengers.

California recently imposed a $20/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. There’s now a $16/hour minimum wage for all other jobs.

Companies immediately began firing workers and closing down stores.

A pizza chain announced the closure of five stores in California.

Analysts forecast that this law will gift California with increased unemployment for years.

That’s putting it in the best possible light.

And there you have it. As Billy Pilgrim said: “All this happened, more or less.” And so it goes.

Animals

Sadly, all too many of us seem terribly confused of late as to who the enemy really is. PRO TIP: it is NOT Israel and/or ((((Dem pesky JOOOOOOZ!!!))).

“A Palestinian writer”
The above tweet from Amnesty International is still up. In case it disappears, here is the text:

Amnesty International
@amnesty
The death in custody of Walid Daqqa, a 62-year-old Palestinian writer who was the longest-serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails after 38 years of imprisonment, is a cruel reminder of Israel’s disregard for Palestinians’ right to life

From amnesty.org
Last edited
6:39 PM · Apr 8, 2024

The tweet calls Walid Daqqa “a Palestinian writer”, as if he had been imprisoned for his writings – as if he were the sort of prisoner of conscience on whose behalf I used to write letters on that special blue Air Mail paper, back when I was a member of Amnesty International.

To be fair, although you would never guess it from their tweet, the linked article by Amnesty does make perfunctory mention of the non-literary crime that caused Walid Daqqa to be put in prison:

On 25 March 1986, Israeli forces arrested Walid Daqqah, then 24, a Palestinian citizen of Israel. In March 1987, an Israeli military court sentenced him to life imprisonment after convicting him of commanding the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP)-affiliated group that had abducted and killed Israeli soldier Moshe Tamam in 1984.

Perhaps concerned about her wordcount, Amnesty’s writer, Erika Guevara-Rosas, did not say much about Moshe Tamam. She cited Walid Daqqa’s youthful age at the time, 24, but did not see fit to say that his victim Moshe Tamam was just 19. And she skips over some relevant details in that brief word “killed”. Daqqa and his PFLP comrades did not just kill Moshe Tamam, they tortured him to death. They gouged out his eyes and castrated him. Then they murdered him.

Sick fucks. But, if we can tear ourselves away from weeping, wailing, and gnashing our teeth for the “over 30,000 innocent civilians” Hamas speciously claims have been killed by the IDF in Gaza—FOR NO REASON, THE INHUMAN BRUTES!—for just a moment, it’s plain that the loathsome Walid Daqqah is hardly an outlier, a grotesque exception, but perfectly typical of his vile cohort.

Hamas Treats Captive Israeli Women as Animals — for ‘All Are Ridden’
The Hamas terrorists behind the Oct. 7, 2023, jihadist raid literally view their female Israeli captives as horses and other animals — to be “ridden.”

During a recent press conference, IDF spokesman Daniel Hagari stressed that Hamas members could be heard in their own (now captured) recordings referring to their female captives as sabi (or sabiya), an Arabic word that in Islamic jurisprudence refers to non-Muslim female slaves, whom Muslim men could freely copulate with — in a word, concubines (see here for more on sabis).

Sex slavery is not only an ironclad aspect of Islam; it is a reflection of “piety,” as well captured by a 2015 report:

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old [non-Muslim] girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

“He said that by raping me,” recalled the 12-year-old, “he is drawing closer to God.”

“Every time that he came to rape me, he would pray,” explained another girl, aged 15. “He said that raping me is his prayer to God. I said to him, ‘What you’re doing to me is wrong, and it will not bring you closer to God.’ And he said, ‘No, it’s allowed. It’s halal.’”

Seeing rape as a pious gesture is only one of the “oddities” of Islamic sex slavery. In the same press conference, Hagari said that “Hamas treated young women…like animals” and that one terrorist could be heard describing “a woman as a noble mare.”

No doubt, to most (non-Muslim) readers, references to Israelis as animals are a mere reflection of Hamas’s contempt for its “infidel” victims, nothing more.

Mind you, this mind-bending abuse is NOT to be inflicted on Israeli women exclusively, nor even on Jewish females more generally. No, this bestial savagery is Koran-endorsed treatment for ALL “infidel” women, all over the world, as non-Islamic nations inevitably are brought under the sway of Mooselimb rule.

As the article describes, for Moslem males raping “infidel” women of any age is not only permissible, it is actually commendable, taking on the aspect of an act of religious devotion—a divine gesture of pious, reverential obeisance to their fucked-up Murder God.

I repeat: SICK. FUCKS.

Anyone who sincerely believes that ((((Dem JOOJOOJOOJOOOOZ!!)))) are the primary problem confronting Western Civ is refusing to see the forest for the trees, sorry. Hell, most American Jews are more or less atheists anyway—call ‘em JINOs, perhaps, Jewish by ethnic inheritance rather than avowed faith—not being religiously observant, nor even somewhat interested.

No, the primary problem is that, by a huge majority, the religion practiced by American Jewry is liberal/Leftism. Don’t ask me why that is; given, y’know, pretty much all of recorded history, I find it quite perplexing myself.

Be that as it may, though, the essential fact remains: even if you exterminated and/or expelled every last Jew in the US tomorrow—the secular, the way more conservative Orthodox, the ultra-hardass Lubavitchers* alike—you’d be astonished and dismayed the day after that by how very little change would’ve resulted from your longed-for Final Solution. Alas, appalling numbers of shitlibs/Progressivists/Leftards/whatever would remain, along with all the strife, trouble, and woe they cause.

In a nutshell, then, what the Hebe-hatin’ Right are fond of deploring as “the Jewish problem” is not, in fact, much of a problem at all. It’s merely a distraction, a sideshow which draws attention away from the Main Enemy: collectivism, Statism, Leftism, whatever label you wish to slap on it. And, of course, the jihadist plague the Leftards have imported and encouraged, which now flourishes in our very midst.

It beggars belief that the memory of 9/11/01 could have been as thoroughly expunged from American minds as this nonsensical folly suggests. The disgraceful embrace of the plethora of preposterous, repeatedly debunked conspiracy theories on the subject must have been more widespread than sensible sorts feared.

Islam is no more compatible with ordered liberty, individual self-determination, and the rest of our Founding principles than liberal/Leftism is; they are diametrically (triametrically?) opposed, eternally in conflict, irreconcilable and antipodean in both practical and philosophical terms. Lose sight of that fundamental home truth, and you will surely lose everything ere the end.

* As it happens, I lived amongst the Lubavitchers my last cpl-three years in NYC; in fact, the apartment we lived in was over a shul, owned by a young Lubavitcher congregant named Mike to whom the building had been passed down as sort of an early, pre-death inheritance from his father. What a trip the Lubavitchers were, with the big hats; the long, heavy black overcoats worn year-round, even in the stifling August heat; the payess, which are those funny-looking spiral locks hanging down like overgrown sideburns or something; the rocking, swaying, and bobbing as they read from the Tanya, prayed, and sang their, uhhh, hymns (?) out on the sidewalk after synagogue let out. Strange stuff indeed for a Carolina boy who had only ever known one (1) Jew his entire life before traipsing off to NYC, definitely. Really nice folks once you got to know ‘em, though

The FauxVid fraud

Rand Paul nails ‘em to the wall AGAIN.

The Great COVID Cover-up: Shocking truth about Wuhan and 15 federal agencies
Shame on all the federal employees who covered up these facts about COVID-19

How vast was the Great COVID Cover-up? Well, my investigation has recently discovered government officials from 15 federal agencies knew in 2018 that the Wuhan Institute of Virology was trying to create a coronavirus like COVID-19.   

These officials knew that the Chinese lab was proposing to create a COVID 19-like virus and not one of these officials revealed this scheme to the public. In fact, 15 agencies with knowledge of this project have continuously refused to release any information concerning this alarming and dangerous research.

Government officials representing at least 15 federal agencies were briefed on a project proposed by Peter Daszak’s EcoHealth Alliance and the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

Read all of it; penned by the highly esteemed Sen Paul himself, the man knows whereof he speaks and takes it all the way down to the nuts and bolts of the issue. Bottom line: 1) FauxVid was actually not “Chinese CoVid,” but “US Covid,” bought and paid for entirely by FederalGovCo; and 2) Fauci is, as some of us have said all along, the most prolific mass-murderer in human history—willfully so, as is definitionally required for the charge of murder to apply.

It is not merely “unfortunate” or “regrettable” that none of the truly evil blackguards responsible will ever pay a price for their myriad crimes against humanity, it’s an atrocity.

Bee speech

From the daily missive sent by the Babylon Bee email list.

Two years ago, The Babylon Bee was suspended from Twitter for “misgendering” Admiral Rachel Levine.

We were given the following choice from the content moderators at Twitter: Remove the tweet and check a box admitting we participated in hate speech, or lose our platform. 

Here is the internal conversation we had where we decided how we would respond:

We decided to stand for the truth, because the truth is not hate speech.

We had no idea that this decision would play a role in one of the biggest wins for free speech in years.

It wasn’t long after we refused to censor ourselves that Elon Musk bought Twitter, changed his bio to “Chief Twit,” and issued an urgent directive: “Bring back the Babylon Bee.” He then changed the platform’s name to X and has committed to making it the freest place for truth-tellers on the internet. 

Our commitment to you, our readers, is this: we will never back down from this fight. The truth is worth it, and always will be.

Gotta love those guys. Elon Musk too; his takeover/liberation of the insidious Twitter propaganda-mill has been beneficial in multifarious ways nobody expected or foresaw at the time. Yeah, yeah, Musk is no conservative; don’t care, not one bit I don’t. All one has to do is take a look at the ongoing anguished wailing of pretty much every last man Jack of the Goosesteppin’ Left for confirmation of the incredible impact losing a single social-media platform had.

Keep on stingin’, Bee!

Fast food holocaust

I repeat: WHO COULD POSSIBLY HAVE FORESEEN…

California’s new $20-an-hour fast food minimum wage law poses headaches for school districts: ‘Harder to hire’
California’s new $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers won’t just impact consumers who have to pay higher prices for menu items, but it could also make it more difficult for some public schools to retain low-paid cafeteria staffers.

Cash-strapped school districts in the Golden State could be forced to compete with billion-dollar corporations such as McDonald’s, Wendy’s and Pizza Hut parent company Yum! Brands for food service workers who are badly needed in California.

The state – which became the first in the country to guarantee free meals for all students regardless of income – will distribute 70 million more meals this year compared to 2018, according to education officials in Sacramento.

Actually, the lunch-line-ladies angle I hadn’t consider myself before—but then, I ain’t the one in charge of decreeing absurd minimum-wage hikes for low-to-no-skill-required jobs, either. Meanwhile, in another part of the forest:

Mod Pizza closes 5 California locations as $20-an-hour minimum wage law takes effect
A popular West Coast pizza chain shuttered five of its California locations shortly before the state enacted its new minimum wage law this month that raises fast-food workers’ pay from $16 an hour to $20.

Mod Pizza — which has 500 locations across the US and Canada and has been dubbed “the Chipotle of pizza” — abruptly closed up shop at its location in Clovis, near Fresno, two weeks ago, according to former employees.

“It just kind of seemed like the right timing, two weeks before all of the fast food locations in California got that increase that we closed,” one fired worker, who was among 15 that were let go, told Fox 26 TV on Tuesday.

The law, which went into effect on April 1, has been blamed for ballooning menu prices at major fast-food chains like Burger King, as The Post reported.

The ex-worker said that while he initially supported the idea of an increase in the minimum wage, it may have come at too steep of a cost.

“For the extra money, yeah,” he said. “I mean, nobody is going to turn down a raise, but at the end of the day, with repercussions like this, was it worth it?”

I dunno, you tell me: was it?

Tabloid hijinks

Proving once and for all that the New York Post remains the greatest newspaper EVAR.

Heh. Not quite up to the lofty standard established by the NYP’s immortal “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” screamin’ splash, perhaps, but still damned good. In my long-past days as a NYC resident, the Post was the only paper I bothered to buy…and it, I tried not to miss.

(Via Joe Jackson)

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen…?

Mike’s Iron Law #635: If you make the cost of doing business too steep, it will close.

Fast food workers blindsided by sudden closure of Fosters Freeze in Lemoore
LEMOORE, Calif. (FOX26) — Employees at Fosters Freeze in Lemoore are out of a job.

Assistant General Manager Monica Navarro says she was called Monday morning by her boss who was at the restaurant to open, only to find the locks were being changed.

Please do note the insert that immediately follows the above for a strong hint as to why this entirely UNEXPECTED!© tragedy might have come to pass.

[RELATED] New $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in California set to start Monday

Bold in the original, entirely dispositive, and hilarious.

Navarro said she thought it was an April Fools joke.

“I was so caught off guard. We had no type of notice, no type of warning either. I mean the owner had told me happy easter,” she said.

And she wasn’t the only one.

“We had gotten a text in the group chat that we were shutting down, and I completely thought it was an April Fools joke,” said former employee Jason Boado.

After learning it was real, she drove to the restaurant on Hanford Armona Rd, where the owner was handing out final paychecks.

Navarro says the owner, Loren Wright, had previously told her the $20 minimum wage increase for fast food workers was going to be really hard on him.

Navarro says she started working three years ago and worked her way up to assistant GM.

She is a full-time student at Fresno State and was planning to work there until graduation.

She was excited about the wage increase and felt like she was stabbed in the back for not getting any kind of notice.

Bold mine this time, likewise dispositive, and hilarious. From that, one could be forgiven for jumping to the invidious conclusion that Fresno State students might not be all they should in terms of general intelligence and aptitude for deductive reasoning.

In a text from Loren Wright, he stated that he couldn’t survive the mandated wage increases:

I tried to the end to try to figure out a way to make it work. Last thing I ever wanted was to close down,” he said. “By Friday night I knew I was most likely not gonna be able to stay open but I didn’t want to ruin their Easter Sunday. Small businesses can’t survive a 120% plus min wage increase over the last 10 years. We are all more broke than we were 10 years ago its clear raising min wage isn’t helping….I am sad to see my employees off, and sad to see lemoore off. This location has been in business for 35+ years and lemoore has been such a good place. It’s painful to realize that raising min wage and regulating fast foods are putting people put if business but that is the path california leadership has taken. Thank u to my staff for everything and thank u lemoore for all the support over the years.”

“Now they’re getting laid off. They’re losing their jobs,” restaurant owner Angela Marsden told Fox News host Dana Perino. “Gavin Newsom, I hope the United States is watching. I hope he never becomes president. This man is destroying California. I don’t understand why people can’t see that he’s the biggest trickster of all time.”

As if it was only Gruesome Newsome we need to be worried about. Sadly, though, in Amerika v2.0 Newsome is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Houston, we have a problem

When Xtianist military personnel realize the government is in fact their enemy, it’s a BIIIG problem. Not sure appealing to an agency of the selfsame enemy government will suffice to remedy said problem, though.

38 Chaplains Ask Supreme Court To Stop U.S. Military From Punishing Their Faith
Like many medications, Covid-19 vaccines and therapeutics were tested on cells made from HEK 293’s kidney. Some of the vaccines have HEK 293 cells inside them. That’s one of several reasons Capt. Rob Nelson, an Air Force chaplain, couldn’t in good conscience accept those treatments despite massive pressure from the military, he told The Federalist in a phone interview.

“I have five [children], and it breaks my heart to think of this. This girl continues to be violated as her cells are replicated over and over again,” he said.

Nelson is one of 38 military chaplains whose petition is now before U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts in the case Alvarado v. Austin. The chaplains say the Department of Defense continues to defy the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act rescinding its Covid vaccine mandate, which the petition says has allowed statistically zero exceptions.

The DOD continues to violate the law by failing to rescind its punishments of conscientious objectors such as denied training and deployments required for promotions, the petition says. In addition, of course, denying soldiers’ religious exercise violates the First Amendment’s guarantee that all Americans can freely exercise their faith in their everyday lives.

That is precisely why the military has chaplains, several told The Federalist. All soldiers, their families, and civilians working for the U.S. military “have a right to believe what they believe and no one can say otherwise. It’s the same reason we can’t have a religious test for federal positions. As a chaplain, my job is to make sure the free exercise of religion is allowed, that nobody infringes upon that inalienable right,” said Army Col. Brad Lewis, a chaplain also party to the suit.

Chaplains usually help determine whether soldiers receive religious accommodations for all sorts of things, from Norse pagans wearing beards to Sikhs wearing turbans and Jews eating kosher. While the military routinely approves such waivers, it told Congress it had denied essentially all religious vaccine waiver requests from soldiers who weren’t almost retired, say the plaintiffs.

“I got in with an age waiver,” Nelson noted of his military service. “They can supposedly give wavers for all kinds of things but not a religious accommodation.”

In its Supreme Court response filed March 27, the DOD claims it has removed all punishments from soldiers imposed “solely” for conscientious objections to vaccines. It claims removing career penalties that arise from banning conscientious objectors from career-promoting training and duties has no “lawful basis.” The DOD also says that because the vaccination requirement has ended, the case is moot.

“By denying religious exemptions, what the military has done is set about the removal of people who are willing to stand on conviction,” Lewis said. He and Nelson noted this dynamic is especially dangerous if cultivated among soldiers, whose job is to kill.

Much, much more at the link, of which you’ll want to read the all.

Key Bridge: can we rebuild it?

No. No, we cannot.

Here’s the million-dollar question nobody is asking about the Baltimore bridge collapse…
The recent bridge collapse in Baltimore is an absolute nightmare, and our thoughts are with the victims and their families during this incredibly tough time. Beyond the heart-wrenching loss and the basic “whys” everyone’s dealing with, there’s one crucial question not many are asking: Can America rebuild the bridge?

Oh, America could have, probably. Amerika v2.0, though? Not a hope in Hell.

Sure, it might seem odd to wonder about our capability to build a bridge in 2024, but sadly, it’s a valid concern these days. When you consider how our nation is faltering under inept globalist rule, dragged down by dangerous DEI agendas that place “charity” over excellence, and watching the decimation of hardworking middle-class America, the question isn’t just rhetorical—it’s a stark reflection of our abysmal current reality.

Revolver has been calling attention to this decline in American society for quite some time, starting from when Biden first introduced his “infrastructure bill.” Fast forward three years, and here we are: bridges collapsing, roads deteriorating, and let’s not even dive into the chaos unfolding in our skies or the sorry state of our airports. Meanwhile, as China makes serious strides forward, it feels like we’re just spinning our wheels, stuck in neutral. It’s a stark contrast that highlights where our priorities have been misplaced and the need for a serious reevaluation of how we invest in our nation’s future.

The scary part is this: as we’re facing our own decline, other nations are advancing. The recent Baltimore bridge disaster could have been an attack, a result of DEI-related incompetence, or something else entirely. What’s clear, though, is that America is showing signs of wear and tear, and our focus shouldn’t be misplaced on absurd “pet projects” like electric cars or gender transitioning. It’s time to return to the fundamentals: roads, bridges, and airports, and see if we can spark that long-forgotten American “can do” spirit again. God knows we need it badly.

PRO TIP: We won’t. In fact, even if over half the country wasn’t vehemently, violently opposed to the whole “can-do spirit” concept, we still couldn’t. It isn’t a matter of “sparking” anything, but of recovering the skeletal remains from their long-since abandoned, musty crypt and bringing them back to life again. All the advanced tech, government financial largesse, and PC die-versity in the known universe can’t turn the trick.

Back in the mid-90s, when my friend Pfouts and I would go out for our regular Saturday strolls around lower Manhattan, he would sometimes shake his head ruefully and say, “Y’know, if New York had to build the subway system today, it couldn’t do it.” I never questioned him on that; all one had to do was take a quick glance at everything around him and see that Chris’s gloomy assessment was in no wise overly pessimistic or cynical, but in fact perfectly accurate.

Again: this was back in the mid-90s, mind. The situation both in NYC and the rest of the “nation” has certainly not improved any since those days.

All Senile Jaux’s angry yelling to the contrary notwithstanding, the EPA “environmental impact” study alone for any such FSK reconstruction project would take five or ten years and hoover up billions of dollars, and that’s before the first girder or I-beam is purchased and put on indefinite back-order while Baltimore waits for it to be shipped from China. Bottom line?

To ask the question is to answer it.

The abyss peers back

Doctor Samizdat—a good, close friend of mine, actually, which we won’t go into right now, you’ll just have to trust me on that; The Doc is part of a solid ReichWingNaziHitlerDeathBeast blogger & IRL collective which also includes my brother-from-another-mother BCE, among several others—finally carves some time out of his insanely busy work schedule to do a new post over at his Substack hang.

The Precipice
Peering into oblivion, the world on tenterhooks…..

These are strange times indeed. I told another blogger today that I haven’t written for months because, simply, I’ve had no time. That’s not exactly true. I haven’t MADE time. I’ve always held that there are folks a good deal smarter, better-connected and more prescient than me who’ve covered the same ground and that my rabble would be just more white noise.

Maybe so, maybe not. Between turbo cancers (this is a real thing, folks, it just isn’t recognized because of widespread distribution and plausible deniability), chronic fatigue and our inexorably slowly collapsing healthcare system, it’s been difficult to muster the motivation to write. I ask every new cancer patient their Vax status. The responses are predictable; their reactions are gut-wrenching. One recently asked me “did I kill myself?”. I don’t know, maybe. The saga of Kate Middleton comes to mind. Those Godforsaken royals can’t seem to love and cherish a young matriarch-to-be, can they?

The noticing is increasing, the awakening beginning to surge. Trust in government is at an all-time low, as they try to convince Americans the economy is healthy. An increasingly large percentage sees through the bullshit, and those in charge of things simply ignore it. Terrorism strikes Mother Russia, with fingerprints of CIA/MI6 everywhere, EU troops on the ground in Ukraine….not mercenaries, formal deployments. There must be some Evil shit to cover up because to all rational observers that ship has sailed; game over, score one for the Russians.

I always wondered why, after the Berlin Wall fell, we did not reach out and embrace Russia. Both largely white and Christian, yet diverse. I suppose it made too much sense. We had to have an enemy for the neocons, I suppose. So much had already been invested in China (after traitor Nixon opened them up) I believe those in charge felt that pivot was a non-starter. I’ve felt the same way about the Cuba embargo; let our culture infiltrate them. Instead, it appears as if their culture has infiltrated ours, Haitians to follow.

Insightful, perspicacious, well-written: it’s another one you’ll definitely want to read all of, even though it’s altogether too short to suit me.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

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