Category: Big tsimmis

I can get worked up enough about this to blog about it, but not much more.

Judgment Day

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Tal Bachman suggests something I’ve been wondering a lot about myself in recent years: so exactly where the hell is the God of the Old Testament, He of the smiting and the scourging and the Great Floods, anyway? What, is He asleep or something?

Dear Old Testament God, Maybe It’s Time For A Comeback Tour

Maybe it’s age, but I’m starting to warm up to the God of the Old Testament big-time.

That’s the one you’re not supposed to like. The one you’re supposed to feel embarrassed by. Even outraged. To hear religion-hater Richard Dawkins (and his tedious hordes of mini-mes) tell it, the Old Testament God is the personification of all cosmic vice. In Dawkins’ words, he is “arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction”.

Let’s see what the Bible says.

God’s first genocide was his biggest and most spectacular: the flood. He created mankind, and—well, it just didn’t work out. “Every intent of the thoughts of (man’s) heart was only evil continually”, Genesis reports. But it was the ensuing evil human action which really sealed the deal for God. In a nutshell, “the earth was filled with violence”. That means, I assume, colossal rates of murder, beating, rape, child molesting, brutal slavery, and more. Human beings had taken an Edenic paradise and turned it into hell on earth. God wanted a do-over. A hard reset.

So, yeah, God killed everyone, minus Noah and his family. Wouldn’t you, if things were that bad? After all, you’d be delivering justice to the wicked, and maybe even mercy to their long-suffering victims. Just thinking out loud here.

As it happens, God covenanted after the flood to “never again destroy every living thing, as I have done”. But—thankfully—his covenant didn’t rule out more selective massacres.

Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, were cesspools of horror. The town fathers had institutionalized the gang rape of male city visitors, normalized rank sexual depravity in general (which I assume included sexual abuse of children), and topped it all off with pride, gluttony, and abominable selfishness. Even surrounding towns began crying out to God to do something. I feel sick just thinking about it.

And obviously, God did too, because he killed the entire populations of both gang-raping, probably child-molesting cities with the Bronze Age equivalent of Fat Man (fire and brimstone raining down from heaven). Why would I feel bad about that?

The common thread in all these stories is that the people God kills are incorrigibly evil. They’re a scourge to humanity. They commit murder, rape, child abuse, enslavement, cruelest tyranny, random beatings—you name the atrocity, they’re committing it. And they’re not changing their ways. They’re committed to doing the wrong thing even after multiple warnings and chances to improve. These are the reprobate types Paul refers to in Romans 1—people who know they’re doing evil, and delight in it. They hate God, they murder, they violate every innocence and trust. And for God, when things get bad enough, there’s just nothing else to do with them but say goodbye.

Follows, Bachman’s appeal to God His Own Self for a return to the old-fashioned, tried and true ways of dealing with such things. To wit:

Hello, God.

I’m just going to come right out and say it: How about a comeback tour?

You fried the sickos in Sodom and Gomorrah. You drowned all those Egyptian slavers. You even wiped out the entire population of the earth, minus Noah and his family. So how about you help us out right now with a special new demographic reset?

I use the word “reset” on purpose. You see, I want to propose you begin your comeback tour by focusing on all the control freak politicians and bureaucrats who exploited a global panic (which they themselves had cynically manufactured) in order to effect a “Great Reset”. These people make Max Robespierre look like Russell Kirk in a coma. They are—even as I type this—still busying themselves trying to destroy every single salutary aspect of human life and community. And while they’ve done all their damage in the name of public health, they’re actually doing it all in service to themselves. For in their false, pagan morality—the kind you always used to say you hated —they are the gods. Not you. They are the ones who will improve us, heal us, bless us, save us. Not you. They are the ones who will rule heaven and earth. Not you. And their moral code, such as it is, is a putrescent stew of all the most noxious, even demonic, ideas imaginable. I can send you a detailed list in a follow-up note, if you’d like.

In any case, the price these control freaks are now extracting for the patronizing, self-serving, technocratic megalomaniac globalist totalitarian “beneficence” we never asked them for, and don’t want, and which they’re imposing on us against our will, is our sovereignty, our most basic freedoms, our humanity, our families, our traditions, our beliefs, our obligations, our identities, our nations, our allegiance, our worship. In short, these people are your enemies. And ours. We’re in this together, God. We’re on the same team.

I could list many more of the most tyrannical, unconscionable impositions. But I’m going to pause here, and just say, once again, that now would be a great time for you to do a comeback tour. Boy, would it ever. These people wanted a Great Reset. How about you “great reset” them all into, shall we say, “outer darkness”? I don’t really care what you do with them (if you catch my drift) as long as we never have to see them, hear them, or be tyrannized by them ever again.

A most hearty amen to all that.

Auto-escalation

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Fear not, America: with “Gunner” Joe Bribem on the job, we’re in the best possible hands. If his steady, sure-handed “leadership” can’t see us all safely through this wartime crisis, then no one can.

BREAKING: Russia Goes Kinetic With U.S. in Skies Over the Black Sea, and the USAF Response Is Unbelievable

The conflict between the U.S. and Russia has just gone kinetic. At least, that is what the first reports are saying out of the U.S. government. But the response is emblematic of how woke the U.S. military has gotten.

Initial reports said that the Russians had “intercepted” a U.S. Reaper drone over the Black Sea. Now, the latest report has it that Russia “collided” with a Reaper drone over the Black Sea. Expect that story to change, as first reports are always wrong.

Here’s what we are being told at this moment, however. CBS News was first out of the gate with news that, indeed, the drone — which can be armed to the hilt — had suffered a “collision” with the Russian military jet.

A Russian Su-27 fighter jet collided with an American MQ-9 Reaper drone over the Black Sea on Tuesday, the U.S. military’s European Command said. U.S. forces brought down the drone in international waters, European Command said, and the White House called the Russian plane’s intercept of the unmanned aircraft “reckless.”

“Our MQ-9 aircraft was conducting routine operations in international airspace when it was intercepted and hit by a Russian aircraft, resulting in a crash and complete loss of the MQ-9,” U.S. Air Force General James Hecker, commander of U.S. Air Forces Europe and Air Forces Africa, said in a statement.

The response from the Pentagon’s Hecker went thusly: “This unsafe and unprofessional act by the Russians nearly caused both aircraft to crash.” But wait, it got worse.

Global News reported on the Pentagon’s press release about the incident.

In a press release, the U.S. Air Force said that at 2 a.m. Eastern (7 a.m. local time) a Russian Su-27 aircraft struck the propeller of the U.S.’s MQ-9 aircraft, which conducts intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. It was accompanied by a second Su-27 that wasn’t involved in the collision but that U.S. officials said was also involved in “unsafe” conduct.

“Several times before the collision, the Su-27s dumped fuel on and flew in front of the MQ-9 in a reckless, environmentally unsound and unprofessional manner,” the U.S. release said (emphasis added).

If, in fact, things are getting directly kinetic between the U.S. and Russia over the heightened tensions over the Ukraine war, environmental degradation, though important, is the least of our problems.

Gee, I certainly do hope the madman Putin won’t decide to lob a small-to-medium yield nuke right dead-center onto Mordor On The Potomac, atomizing every last sewer-crawling bureaucrat, government “expert,” cretinous career politican, predatory melanin-enhanced gangbanger, and meddlesome FederalGovCo oxygen-thief therein. Why, that would be just awful. Whatever would we do without all those fine, underpaid, hard-working public servants to watch over and protect us?

Please, Mr Putin, sir, don’t throw us into dat br’ar patch, sir. PLEASE don’t.

As I said, though, not to worry; “Gunner” Joe has the situation well in hand,  even if it should come to nooklear com-bat toe to toe with the Russkies. He settled their hash but good once, he can do it again.

MajKongsLastRide

Your feel-good video of the week

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Another FAFO Righteous Shoot™.


Justified? Yep—especially seeing as how AZ_Golfer posted a follow-up, explaining the backstory.

Man Shoots Stalker In Self-Defense, Video Goes Viral: Here’s The Full Story

Benjamin Backus, a 40-year-old financial advisor, reportedly provided assistance to his ex-felon neighbor, Michael Montanarella, in starting his own business.

However, Montanarella’s alleged descent into heavy drug and alcohol use resulted in him getting kicked out of rehab and developing paranoid delusions.

He believed that Backus was breaking into his home and stealing things, despite the fact that Backus and his son had moved. Montanarella reportedly threatened Backus after showing up at his new home, and even vandalized his property by breaking windows on multiple occasions.

Backus took out a restraining order against Montanarella, but the situation escalated on March 24, 2022.

Backus claims that he went out to warm up his car to take his son to his SATs and head to work, but heard an engine start behind him. He turned around and saw Montanarella drive past him before circling back to throw a rock at him.

Montanarella then allegedly jumped out of the car and approached Backus, who backed up down the road past his house while repeatedly telling Montanarella to stop and get down.

This led to the use of force by Backus, which was caught on camera and went viral.

Again: justified? Oh HELL yeah. More than, in fact; my only question for Righteous Shooter after reading that is, what the hell took ya so long, anyway? He never should’ve allowed Mr Psycho Stalker to get as physically close to him as he did, IMHO.

Of sowing, and of reaping

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Bitter fruits of a poisoned tree.

The predictable economic fallout of lockdown policy
The decision to lockdown the world had consequences and we’ll continue to see them unfold for some time. Can we really expect those who caused these problems to save us from them?

Lockdowns caused unprecedented disruption to the world’s economy and global supply chain, and the largest upward transfer of wealth in history.

Widespread business closures due to lockdowns caused mass layoffs of, primarily, hourly wage workers with little to no savings. Then the government spent money that we did not have so people could pay their rent and not starve. And then they did it again.

Of course, this caused inflation. Then the Fed raised interest rates to halt the inflation.

And now we are experiencing the ensuing disaster that is unfolding in real time. And the little guy is left holding the bag whether through exorbitant pricing of basic necessities like milk and eggs or small business investors wondering when and if they’ll be able to extract their money from SVB to pay their employees and vendors.

No, I’m not a banker. But it’s easy to see what happened and that’s the rough outline in the simplest possible terms.

You can’t shut the world down and think there will not be consequences. You just can’t.

As some pitiful handful of us warned at the time, no, you most certainly can NOT. Contra the vainglory of our über-arrogant Ruling Class dolts, an incomprehensibly complex, first-world economy can’t be simply turned off and then back on again, like a light switch. Why, whodathunkit? Those shouting-at-a-brick-wall warnings went all unheeded, when we who issued them weren’t being vilified outright, by the selfsame panic-ninny pissants now mewling for “amnesty” for themselves from those of us who had the right of it all along.

Um, yeah, NO. Sorry, not fucking happening; not from here it ain’t, not now, not ever. As a practical alternative, may I suggest that you all go take yourselves a flying fuck at a plate glass window instead. I do SO look forward to seeing how well that works out for you, truly I do.

All of this happened — lockdowns forcing small business closures — while corporate employees worked from home and screeched “we’re all in this together” while ordering Uber Eats, watching Netflix and working kinda, sorta sometimes. And of course, while continuing to take their salaries and bonuses and stock payouts. And continuing to do so to this day.

No company dared speak out against lockdowns. I can’t think of a single one. Instead, they laid people off with “empathy”, gave them two weeks salary and continued advocating in support of lockdowns — or at the very least going along with them, staying silent — knowing that the bill was coming.

Why didn’t ANY companies say anything against lockdowns when they knew what was inevitably coming?

Because the “woke” view — the this is what good people do view — was: lockdown forever until no covid. That was caring. Anything else was “only caring about money,” being greedy, racist, eugenicist, evil. And companies, whether they agreed with lockdowns or not, were burnishing their image as good and caring.

But in reality, the actual empathetic position would have been to challenge the logic and efficacy (or better said: assert the illogic and ineffectiveness) of lockdowns. And to advocate for opening. To let people work. To allow everyday people to earn a living, just as those in corporate were, as C-suiters were. Executives and corporate leaders shouted Stay home save lives! while staying home where they could carry on with their jobs and doing nothing to ensure that others could actually carry on with theirs.

And now the FauxVid-hoax chickens are coming home to roost, heavily settling, claws-out, onto the shoulders of the just and the unjust alike. As was always inevitable—a fact which bestows not even the coldest of comfort upon those of us who saw it all coming, right from the very beginning.

And so here we are. Millions were pushed into poverty globally, all in pursuit of zero covid, or at the very least avoidance of a respiratory virus as the only thing that mattered. It’s the insane myopia that got us here, and now there’s a panicked scrambling to ensure that it doesn’t get even worse for regular folks than it’s already been.

And still, the lockdown-ers insist, we just didn’t lockdown hard enough. And some, like Forbes, are making the case that we need rolling lockdowns from here on out.

When will we learn? The predictable economic fallout of locking down the world had consequences and we’ll continue to see them unfold for some time. It seems unlikely that the ones who created these problems are the ones who will be able to solve them.

As I’ve also insisted from the start, the lockdowns, the masks, the “social distancing”—We Duh Peepul having so readily, even eagerly, submitted to them once already—will be with us forever, to be dusted off and trotted out as and when, under whatever contrived justification, until such time as we decisively and unequivocally reject them en masse. They proved far too useful a suite of tools for the dimestore dictators, tinhorn tyrants, and midwit Mussolinis who would lord over us to just blithely discard without a real fight. Which makes the truly apposite question here not “WHEN will we learn,” but IF.

No redress, no recourse

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In Amerika v2.0, we are well past the point of no return. Which leaves us with only the one question left to be answered.

In the movie The Untouchables, written by David Mamet and directed by Brian De Palma, a streetwise Irish cop named Malone tries to educate a starry-eyed fed named Eliot Ness in the ways of Chicago justice when up against an implacable, deadly opponent like Al Capone. The scene has become justly famous for this line: ““He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

But for our purposes here, what even more important is the exchange between Sean Connery and Kevin Costner that immediately precedes it:

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don’t know how to get him.

Malone: [talking privately in a church] You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Everything within the law.

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people Mr. Ness you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? In a battle between good and evil, with the law having gone over to the side of evil—as it had in the gangland Chicago of the 1920s and ’30s—what are the good guys prepared to do? With the country-as-founded now being shot out from underneath us on a near-daily basis, how do concerned citizens fight back?

Read this—”Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition” from something called the Electoral Integrity Project and weep…

“Integrity,” heh. It is to laugh. And also, weep. “Electoral Integrity” is the very LAST thing these shitweasels really want, or for the matter of it would ever even tolerate.

Some of their thoughts:

  • The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous. We face a period of contestation stretching from the first day a ballot is cast in mid-September until January 20. The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on “election night” as officials count mail-in ballots. This period of uncertainty provides opportunities for an unscrupulous candidate to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the process and to set up an unprecedented assault on the outcome. Campaigns, parties, the press and the public must be educated to adjust expectations starting immediately.
  • A determined campaign has opportunity to contest the election into January 2021. We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides. President Trump, the incumbent, will very likely use the executive branch to aid his campaign strategy, including through the Department of Justice. We assess that there is a chance the president will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions – including illegal actions – to defy the popular vote.

“Dangerous” it is for sure. One instant solution is to restore Election Night to its one-day, one-vote place in the proper scheme of things. And note for the record that “an unscrupulous candidate” describes Mrs. Clinton’s churlish and criminal response to her loss in 2016 far better than it does Trump’s. As for defying the popular vote, so what? That vote means nothing until the Left finally passes its National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and thus eliminates the Electoral College by unconstitutional means.

Some of their solutions: 

  • Plan for a contested election. If there is a crisis, events will unfold quickly, and sleep-deprived leaders will be asked to make consequential decisions quickly. Thinking through options now will help to ensure better decisions. Approach this as a political battle, not just a legal battle. In the event of electoral contestation, sustained political mobilization will likely be crucial for ensuring transition integrity. Dedicated staff and resources need to be in place at least through the end of January.
  • Address the two biggest threats head on: lies about “voter fraud” and escalating violence. Voting fraud is virtually non-existent, but Trump lies about it to create a narrative designed to politically mobilize his base and to create the basis for contesting the results should he lose. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.

Except that politically mobilized Trump supporters didn’t take up arms on Jan. 6, and as for “violence,” the patsy protesters had nothing on the Antifa and Black Lives Matters thugs during the Summer of Floyd of blessed but rapidly fading memory, his work on earth here now done.

And that, as it turned out, was perhaps their biggest mistake. As did Trump himself, they badly underestimated not only the fanatical zeal of their Swamp-dwelling adversaries, but also just how deeply, thoroughly rotten the whole system itself had by then become. It turned out to be their undoing, and who really even knows how many of them are even now languishing in the Amerikan Gulag as a result of that incalculably-costly “misunderestimation.”

Yet most of us continue to believe in America; like the movie version of Eliot Ness, we’ve sworn to do “everything within the law” to try and right the ship of state before, like all previous democracies, it sinks beneath the waves of historical reality. As I often say about the imported “critical theory” Left, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. They won’t give up the fight until one of us is dead. 

So then what are you prepared to do?

Not near enough, apparently. Or not yet, at any rate. But we shall see about all that soon enough, I reckon.

The most disgusting story of the year

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Incredible. Unbelievable. Sickening. Horrifying. Yet somehow, like so many other dismal contemporary tales of unnecessary catastrophe, totally unsurprising.

Marine Sniper: I Was Denied Permission to Take Out Kabul Airport Suicide Bomber

After many long months without oversight or accountability for President Joe Biden’s disastrous and deadly withdrawal of U.S. forces from Afghanistan, the House of Representatives’ Republican majority is finally doing what the preceding Democrat majority never did: hearing from those whose lives were forever changed on the front lines of the chaos in Afghanistan at the end of two decades of U.S. involvement.

Tyler Vargas-Andrews, a sergeant in the United States Marines, was in Kabul as the Biden administration’s haphazard withdrawal took place. He was at Hamid Karzai International Airport (HKIA) watching the chaos unfold, and he was one of the hundreds of individual wounded when a suicide bomber attacked one of the airport’s gates where hundreds of individuals were waiting to be screened for evacuation.

In an emotional opening statement to the House Foreign Affairs Committee on Wednesday, Vargas-Andrews told his story, one that the Biden administration never highlighted and Democrats in Congress apparently didn’t want on the record.

On August 26, 2021, Vargas-Andrews was in position at HKIA when he noticed suspicious individuals outside the gate to the airport as thousands of people were attempting to flee Afghanistan as it fell to the Taliban, fearful for the future and what retribution anyone who’d helped American forces over the previous twenty years would face.

“I requested engagement authority when my team leader was ready on the M110 Semi-Automatic Sniper System,” Vargas-Andrews said, testifying in his personal capacity. “The response: leadership did not have the engagement authority for us — do not engage.”

Vargas-Andrews said he requested that his battalion commander “come to the tower to see what we did. While we waited for him, psychological operations individuals came to our tower immediately and confirmed the suspect met the suicide bomber description,” Vargas-Andrews recounted. When the battalion commander “eventually arrived,” he was presented with the evidence and photos of two men, one who met the description of a suicide bomber. “Pointedly, we asked him for engagement authority and permission — we asked him if we could shoot,” Vargas-Andrews told lawmakers. “Our battalion commander said, and I quote, ‘I don’t know.’”

“Myself and my team leader asked very harshly, ‘Well, who does? Because this is your responsibility, sir,” Vargas-Andrews explained. “He again replied he did not know but would find out. We received no update and never got our answer.”

“Eventually the individual disappeared,” Vargas-Andrews continued. “To this day, we believe he was the suicide bomber. We made everyone on the ground aware,” he said. “Operations had briefly halted but then started again. Plain and simple, we were ignored. Our expertise was disregarded — no one was held accountable for our safety.”

And so 13 Marines then got blowed up real good, thanks to this Blue Falcon, who I assume is a Light Colonel, since that would be the usual rank for a commanding officer of a battalion. Poor SGT Vargas-Andrews was gravely wounded his own self due to this contemptible Buddy Fucker Bird’s shucking, jiving, dithering, and diving away from his own responsibility:

“A crowd of hundreds immediately vanished in front of me, and my body was catastrophically wounded with 100-150 ball bearings now in it,” Vargas-Andrews explained. “Almost immediately, we started taking fire from the neighborhood and I saw how injured I was, with my right arm completed shredded and unusable. I saw my lower abdomen soaked in blood. I crawled backward roughly seven feet because I thought I was still in harm’s way,” he recalled. “My body was overwhelmed from the trauma of the blast — my abdomen had been ripped open. Every inch of my exposed body except for my face took ball bearings and shrapnel,” Vargas-Andrews continued.

“I tried to get up but could not. Laying there for a few minutes I started to lose consciousness,” Vargas-Andrews remembered. That’s when he said he heard his team leader “screaming my name as he ran to me. His voice calling to me kept me awake,” he added. “When he got to me, he dragged me to safety and immediately started triaging me, tying tourniquets on my limbs and doing anything he could to stop the bleeding and start plugging wounds with the help of the other Marines,” Vargas-Andrews said. “I was awake through most of it — screaming, moaning, and cursing.”

Well, hey, Sarge, wouldn’t you say it was all worth it, if it helped to avoid offending or antagonizing our Taliban Partners In Peace in any way? After all, your CinC *spit* and the rest of his illegitimate, incompetent, and traitorous ruling junta certainly seem to think so.

Apologies to the good sergeant for my sarcasm just now, which I admit might have been in poor taste given his injuries and his betrayal at the hands of blithering idiots both military and cake-eating civilian.

Free advice, not just for SGT Vargas-Andrews but for any decent, intelligent individual still in the armed services, of whatever branch: you deserve far better than you’re ever gonna get from Amerika v2.0’s fundamentally transformed, über-PC military—most especially its politicized officer corps, from about the level of Major on up. So just get out as quick as you can, however you can. Let the dick-chopping freaks, fatbodies, and other sundry degenerates fucking have it.

It begins

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The wheels start coming off of the Biden Economic MIRACLE!!™ bus.

A Blip On The Radar Or The Beginning Of The End?

Despite decades of working in financial services, mostly in customer facing roles where I kissed ass and took the heat for the screw-ups of others, I don’t fully understand what happened with Silicon Valley Bank but when a top 20 bank collapses, it is big news.

As others have pointed out, while SVB is a top-20 bank it pales in comparison to the really big players like Chase and Bank of America. Chase alone has something like $3.2 trillion in assets.

Notice that the bank right below them, Fifth Third Bank where I was a branch manager at a couple of locations, has slightly lower total assets but 1,104 branches while SVB only had 16 branches but more in “assets”. This was a very different kind of bank. Still it is a significant event getting little coverage because Sniffy Man Good is President instead of Orange Man Bad. It was also another opportunity to mock The Wrongest Man Alive, CNBC’s Jim Cramer, who is so reliably wrong you could base your investment strategy just off of doing the opposite of what he recommends (not investment advice, etc)

It is amazing that someone as dumb as Jim Cramer still makes a bunch of money being incorrect.

While I would hesitate to go full Zerohedge and declare this is a harbinger of imminent collapse, it does show us again that the financial system we operate under is a Jenga tower. You can pull a piece out here and there but one of these times a critical piece will come out and the whole thing will fall.

Arthur is correct in his hesitation, but it’s a matter not of statistical inevitability but of simple semantics. The collapse is indeed not imminent; it has already started, is ongoing. Things are going to get much, much worse before they get better, and that’s assuming they DO get better, which is by no means guaranteed. It’s unlikely in the extreme that they will within the lifetime of anyone reading this, that’s my belief.

Read the rest of it; Arthur moves on from the end of my excerpt to do some very astute, clear-eyed analysis of the REAL root causes of the ongoing disaster, which are not so much financial and/or political as they are cultural. He’s right about that, too.

Big trouble update! Not good.

Wall Street’s biggest banks took quite a thrashing in the stock market Thursday as investors spooked the turmoil at Silicon Valley Bank and Silvergate Capital dumped financial shares.

JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley – the four most valued US lenders – saw $55 billion wiped off their combined market capitalization on Thursday, Refinitiv data show.

JPMorgan, the biggest US bank, alone saw a $22 billion tumble in its market value as its stock slid 5.41% to $130.34. Wall Street heavyweight Bank of America lost $16.16 billion as its share price fell 6.20% to $30.54. Wells Fargo and Morgan Stanley saw their market capitalization drop by $10.3 billion and $6.2 billion, respectively.

Among other major US banks, Goldman Sachs and Citi also witnessed significant declines in their share prices.

The selloff came amid heightened fears of contagion effects from financial distress at Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) and Silvergate Capital. SVB’s stock crashed 60% Thursday after the company said it would sell more shares to cover a $1.8 billion loss it incurred after completing a $21 billion fire sale of its bond portfolio.

It’s becoming something of a mantra for me, so maybe I should just go ahead and make it an acronym to save myself some typing from here on out: WBBIEB. That is, Worse Before Better, If EVER Better. Pro tip: You will see this material again. And again, and again, and again. Because, y’know, WBBIEB.

Clarifying counterbattery

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Tucker fires back at his maleficent Deep State detractors.

TUCKER CARLSON: We knew there was a reason leaders hid the January 6 tapes

One of the hallmarks of people who are telling the truth, in case you were wondering how to tell the difference, is that people who are telling the truth are calm. (They) don’t wave their hands around and make wild accusations. They don’t need to do that. It’s enough to say what they know and if honest people turn out to be wrong about something they have claimed, they’ll admit it. They don’t double down on false. They made a mistake and that’s okay. It’s not like they’re claiming to be God.

Liars behave differently. Liars are touchy, sometimes to the point of hysteria. They’re hiding something. That’s the whole point of lying and they’re worried you’re going to find out what it is. Liars are fragile because over time, lying makes you weak and afraid and has the same effect on countries by the way.

We’re living through one of those clarifying moments. Actually, we’re thankful for it, where we’re learning exactly who the liars are. On Monday, we showed you unreleased videotape from January 6. It proved, that tape proved, that three of the most important claims our leaders have made about that day were untrue. Their claims were lies. We were not shocked to discover that. We knew there was a reason that congressional leaders had been hiding the tape and that reporters in Washington weren’t demanding to see it. They were lying to us, obviously. That’s why you hide things.

But what was actually surprising, what we can’t quite get over even now, is how they responded when they were caught lying. They didn’t seem embarrassed. They didn’t apologize. They weren’t even curious to learn more about what actually happened on January 6. Let’s see the tape. No, they don’t want to see it. They exploded in rage. And then as liars tend to do, they doubled down.

They told the same lies they’d been caught telling, but with even greater aggression this time. Shut up. It’s midnight, they said, as the sun rose behind them. Who acts like that? Well, sociopaths do and in this case, the sociopaths turned out to be both Democrats and Republicans. The commitment to lying in Washington is far deeper and more bipartisan even than we realize, and we follow this stuff for a living.

Well, sure. Of COURSE they did. I mean, what else would they do? This is who they are, this is what they do.

Now, you sometimes hear people say that the whole partisan system is an illusion and that underneath the manufactured debates, the leaders on both sides are, in fact, secretly united in a common love of money and power and the deception required to get them. And honestly, we can never really bring ourselves to believe that. It’s just too dark. But now we do believe it because we have seen it.

And now—thanks to you, Tucker, and a dogged determination in pursuit of the truth that does credit to the values falsely proclaimed by pretty much everyone else in your fallen, badly-degraded profession—many, many more of us all across the nation have been forced to confront that raw, bruising truth themselves. No small thing, that.

And yet, here’s the thing: Leaders in both parties, the party that (“QAnon shaman” Jake) Chansley voted against and the party he voted for, have said nothing, not one word about the implications of this videotape, the implications not just for Chansley, but for our Constitution and our country going forward.

Instead, oh, how dare you show this? What is clearly exculpatory evidence! Again, it’s not just Chuck Schumer, it’s Republican senators Kevin Cramer, Mike Rounds, Chuck Grassley, John Thune, Lindsey Graham, of course, Congressman Dan Crenshaw, needless to say, Kelly Armstrong, all went after us. We’re not whining about that. We don’t care, actually, but it just tells you everything about the way things actually work. They’re not loyal to their voters. They are loyal to each other, and they’re willing to lie, really lie and crush people. Mitch McConnell, Thom Tillis and BLM superfan Mitt Romney, all weak men – and like all weak men, vicious men – were especially angry.

We invited Schumer on, McConnell, anybody is always welcome to come on our show. If we got something wrong, tell us how. If you think we altered the tape in some way, tell us how.

But they won’t, nor will they answer the most basic question, which is: why should a non, demonstrably nonviolent man, who literally said a prayer of Thanksgiving for police officers on the Senate floor, how was that man ISIS? How was he a domestic terrorist? How is he a threat to the republic? Why is he in jail for four years? Shut up. Pull that show off the air. 

They won’t answer any questions, but we have a question, which is: How, in a free country guided by the Constitution, were these people allowed to withhold evidence from Jacob Chansley’s lawyer? How could that happen?

The answer is simplicity itself: first, “fundamentally transform” said country into one no longer anything remotely resembling “free,” via, among all too many other things, rendering said Constitution entirely impotent and irrelevant—incrementally, over not just years but decades. Once that’s done, the rest will surely follow, as night follows day.

Which is precisely what happened. After what I’ll henceforth be referring to as The Carlson Revelations, none but a co-conspirator, a willful ignoramus, or a straight-up, insensate goddamned fool can plausibly deny it any longer. Not without discrediting themselves—fully and for all time, beyond any hope of reform or redemption—as one or the other of those three things.

Bottom line: the facts are in, the evidence before us clear, comprehensible, and abundant. Unpleasant though they are, further debate about those facts is worse than a waste of time—neither necessary, nor desirable, nor even excusable. Such bootless distractions are now the exclusive province of either the ill-intentioned or the just plain stupid, and nobody whatsoever else.

It’s clobberin’ time.

It was ALL a damnable lie

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Yet another one, like FauxVid, that some of us have known all along was precisely that, and nothing more.

Secret Surveillance Video Dismantles January 6 Narrative
Clips aired during Tucker Carlson’s show on Monday night demonstrate how the January 6 select committee doctored surveillance video.

Fox News host Tucker Carlson aired the first set of previously-unseen surveillance video captured by Capitol police security cameras on January 6, 2021 that undermines several aspects of the reigning narrative about what happened that day.

Only “several”? I strongly suggest you take another look, Jules; it undermines the entire fucking thing, actually. Over, under, sideways, and down. Stem to stern, end to end, top to bottom, start to finish. No more, no less.

Capitol Police turned over to the FBI roughly 14,000 hours of video covering the hours of noon and 8:00 p.m. on January 6 but the full 24-hour reel has been in the hands of House Democrats for two years—reportedly the footage that Carlson’s team was authorized to view.

Carlson exposed falsehoods that bolster key animating aspects of January 6 including the movements of Jacob Chansley; the activity of still-uncharged agitator Ray Epps; the death of Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick; alleged “reconnaissance tours” conducted by House Republicans the day before; the “escape” of Senator Josh Hawley (R-Mo.); and the overall deceptiveness of the January 6 Select Committee. “Taken as a whole, the video record does not support the claim that January 6 was an insurrection,” Carlson explained. “In fact, it demolishes that claim. And that’s exactly why the Democratic Party and its allies in the media prevented you from seeing it.”

Don’t you dare miss a single word of this one, people. Anyone who does so will be derelict in his duty as a citizen, and will thereby forfeit all right to think of himself as either “informed” or “concerned,” that’s the long and the short of it.

I won’t say it’s shocking, because it isn’t, not by a long yard. What it is, is further confirmation—as if any were needed—that the so-called “American” federal government is now openly at war with not just its own people, but with every last principle this nation was originally founded upon. That really is all there is to it, no two ways about it.

Tucker Carlson—who some on Our Side contend is variously A) a phony; B) Controlled Opposition; C) even a witting sock-puppet being used by The Enemy for steam-valve purposes, which I think is just ridiculous—has done enough in his dogged pursuit of the truth here as to have earned a Medal of Honor for meritorious, above-and-beyond-the-call service to his country. Endless kudos to him for his determination and derring-do.

I know, I know, the Medal is a servicemember-only decoration, almost always awarded posthumously (actually, that isn’t so, I only just found out). But still.

Likewise for the esteemed and estimable Julie Kelly for her tireless work on this gargantuan, monstrous case. She’s stayed on J6 like the most stubborn bulldog, and the rabbit has now been well and truly caught. Bravo, woman. You and Tucker are both admirable examples of what real, true journalism is supposed to be all about, but almost never is nowadays.

Emetic update! As Ace notes, the US has used the military to overthrow foreign governments more than once for far, far less egregious offenses against their own subjects than what it has done, and continues to do, to the J6 “insurrectionists.” So vile, so indecent, so morally abhorrent has the Amerika v2.0 regime become it could literally induce projectile vomiting in any true patriot.

Show me something update! My GOD, the balls on these faux-obstreperous pusbuckets.

GOP Rep. Ralph Norman on Jan. 6 Fedsurrection: ‘Why Is Ray Epps Not Behind Bars?’

Because big-talking Vichy GOPe frauds like you refuse to PUT him there, that’s why. Do something other than run your fat yap about it or just shut the fuck up already, whydon’tcha. Miss Lindsay Graham, Mitch The Bitch, Paul Ryan, Jim Jordan, all the rest—a great many of us are sick unto death of the braggadocious, talk-a-great-fight routine, and have no desire whatsoever to hear any more of that twipe.

Hold me back, hold me back or I’ll kick his fookin’ ass!!

Yeah, right. Put up or shut up, fuckface.

Uplifting update! Trump weighs in, and It. Is. Good.

Trump Demands January 6th Prisoners Let Go, House Select Committee Prosecuted After Tucker Carlson Releases Bombshell Videos

Trump called the dramatic new evidence one of the ‘biggest scoops’ in American journalism.

“The New Surveillance Footage of the January 6th Events sheds an entirely different light on what actually happened,” he wrote on his Truth Social media platform. “LET THEM GO FREE, NOW!”

“A whole new, and completely opposite, picture has now been indelibly painted,” he contends. “The Unselect Committee LIED, and should be prosecuted for their actions.”

In another posting on Truth Social, the former President reiterated his call for those charged for their relatively mundane actions that day to be released.

“Let the January 6 prisoners go,” he wrote in an all-caps screed. “They were convicted, or are awaiting trial, based on a giant lie, a radical left con job.

Indubitably so, Mr President.

Here’s an idea: in light of the truth finally getting out despite the dead-level-best efforts of the D卐M☭CRATs to keep it swept safely and securely under the rug, howzabout sane people all immediately just stop referring to the events of J6 as a “riot,” an “insurrection,” “violent,” and/or “destructive.” I suggest that instead, we describe all further insistence on that kind of hysterical, dishonest hype as “baseless” and “unfounded,” there being absolutely “no evidence” that they were any such thing. Y’know, take a page from their own “baseless election theft accusations” playbook, as it were.

THAT oughta tach up all the right people well past the pulse-pounding, vessel-popping redline, no?

Hell, I can even see newsrooms across the country go totally chaotic in the wake of this, as thousands of “journalists” lapse into shrieking paroxysms of grief and rage at seeing their own tactic used against them—flopping about on the floor like landed fish en masse, gnashing their teeth to the gumline, tearing their hair out in great hanks, ripping each other to bloody meat-gobbets with their bare hands in an ungovernable frenzy.

Try as I might, I’m just not seeing any downside here.

All against all

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JJ Sefton’s reliably dead-on Morning Report is rife today with examples confirming the grim success of the Left’s divide & conquer strategery.

Report: Austin Police Officers Quit in Droves, Texas City ‘Hostile Place’ for Conservatives

The leftist-run city of Austin, Texas, is facing a police officer shortage with current and former officers citing hostility toward law enforcement and conservatives as the driving force, the New York Post reported on Friday.

Multiple sources told the Post the city allegedly has more than 300 vacancies and officers are quitting “because they feel disrespected,” according to the report. The Austin Police Association said 77 more officers are expected to retire before the end of March. Lt. Brian Moon, who retired last month after 23 years of service, said Austin has become like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco “where if you’re at all conservative or in law enforcement, it’s become a hostile place.” 

The staffing shortage is leading to later response times and 911 calls are being redirected to the non-emergency number “because there aren’t enough cops to solve the crimes,” according to the report. Senior Police Officer Justin Berry told the publication that the department has taken detectives off of cases to act as patrol officers.

“If you come home and find your home burglarized, calls like that are now going to 311,” said police union president Thomas Villarreal. “You’re not getting a police response to many property crimes if it’s not a violent crime that is currently ongoing.”

The report notes that “entire areas of the city are left unpatrolled” at times if a large incident occurs. 

“We’ve pretty much conceded that we’re not going to show up anymore on certain calls,” Moody said. “Eventually it’s going to get to the point where it’s so bad, everyone’s going to realize that something has to be done.”

Rest assured it will be, but you ain’t gonna like it much. It’s commonly known as vigilantism. Even though they’d greatly prefer not to have to resort to it, when things get bad enough and enough people realize they’re entirely on their own and have been forced to live in a lawless society, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it than civilized, First World nations are accustomed to. At some point, it becomes too much to expect that Normals will just passively sit back and allow themselves and their families to be preyed upon indefinitely, just because that’s what shitlibs want them to do.

Moar D&C:

Critical Race Theory Teaches Kids To Hate Each Other, And The Proof Is On The Playground
Critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children. This is most obvious on the playground.

In mid-February 2023, administrators at an elementary school in Springfield, Ohio, called the police to intervene in a racially charged incident on the playground. According to the police report, a group of black students forced several white students to say “black lives matter” against their will.

Around the same time in Orlando, Florida, a teacher at Howard Middle School created and posted to his personal social media account a demeaning skit using students from his classroom. In it, white students bowed to their black classmates, feeding them snacks and fanning them. The teacher, now on administrative leave, captioned the video: “Black History Month. The shortest month of the Year.” Critical race theory is permeating public education across the country and aggravating racial hostilities, even among elementary school children.

When people with authority, such as schoolteachers and administrators, tell children that one group is the oppressor and the other is oppressed, children tend to listen. These critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children.

Teachers and administrators need to stick to the “three Rs” of education. Social and racial politics must be under the jurisdiction of families, not public education.

And when they refuse to, as most of them will, what then? My personal preference is for pitchforks, torches, tar, and feathers, but then I freely admit I’m an “extremist” like that.

Amerika v2.0: the process is the punishment

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The persecution of American hero Kyle Rittenhouse continues. Which, it will do; the poor kid is gonna be in courthouses and paying lawyers for the rest of his life. But hey, what else would one expect? He’s dead-to-rights guilty of the “crime” of successfully defending his life against a wolfpack of marauding thugs dead-set on murdering him, after all.

A wrongful death lawsuit filed by the father of one of the men Kyle Rittenhouse shot and killed in the Kenosha riots will proceed, a federal judge in Wisconsin ruled Wednesday.

Anthony Huber was one of the two men Rittenhouse killed in August 2020 during the riots following the shooting of Jacob Blake, a black man, by police.

Huber’s father, John Huber, first filed the lawsuit against Rittenhouse in 2021 and named Rittenhouse, law enforcement personnel, and officials as defendants, according to a report.

The lawsuit alleges that Rittenhouse conspired with police to harm protesters and that officers violated Anthony Huber’s constitutional rights when they allowed a dangerous situation to manifest, which resulted in his death.

Rittenhouse’s legal team and other defendants had filed motions to dismiss, but U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman on Wednesday rejected them and allowed the civil rights lawsuit to proceed.

The death of Anthony Huber “could plausibly be regarded as having been proximately caused by the actions of the governmental defendants,” Adelman said.

The decision to allow the lawsuit to move forward does not highlight its merits, Shane Martin, an attorney for Rittenhouse, said.

No, of course it doesn’t. How could it? There ARE no merits to highlight. It’s exactly as Bill says:

There is nothing even remotely “plausible” about the judge’s made-up bullshit theory, but the trial will go forward because the goal is not plausibility but punishment. Adelman, a card-carrying (Princeton/Columbia) member of the American Commie elite, was rewarded by the head of the Clinton Crime Family with his judicial position after serving several terms as a warrior of the Wisconsin left.

And none of them will rest until Rittenhouse is destroyed for lawfully defending himself against their fellow Commie storm troopers who were trying to murder him. As a warning to any who might be inclined to do likewise.

They do this in the faith that they will always be secure from Rittenhouse-style self defense for their own attacks on patriotic Americans who exercise their Constitutionally guaranteed rights. One has to wonder, though, how long that will actually remain true.

Hopefully, not a whole hell of a lot longer. Not just for Kyle Rittenhouse’s sake, but for ours.

“Wrongful death.” What a fucking joke, an extremely unfunny and sick one. Huber went out that fateful night in the role of a violent, destructive predator. Imagine the oxygen thief’s surprise when the intended prey turned out to have pretty sharp teeth of his own. Time to rerun one of what I think is still one of my best memes ever; although the gravely wounded thug in it isn’t Huber but his partner in crime Gage Grosskreutz, the lesson therein remains the same.

FuckedAroundFoundOut

 

Sic semper all of them, until every last one of such foul, verminous ratlings is eradicated, the land cleansed of them forever.

Whither “governable”?

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Are America’s big cities ungovernable? And if they are, do those of us who don’t live in them give a shit? SHOULD we? If so, WHY, exactly?

In the wake of the failure of failure Lori Lightfoot to gain admission to the Chicago mayoral runoff, The Atlantic, a left-inclined publication, has decided to salve her wound, though not the wound her mayoralty has inflicted upon Chicago, with an article proclaiming that “Big Cities Are Ungovernable…”

If that thesis were put to a for / against debate among scholars of urban history and dynamics, how do you think the discussion would go? Myself, I expect the participants would squabble endlessly over the definitions of “big,” “cities,” and “ungovernable.” (That would consume them so completely that they’d have nothing left for “are.”) Thus they could evade all discussion of the actual proposition until the last of the audience had drifted away.

Robert A. Heinlein was no fan of the big city:

“As a thumb rule, one can say that any time a planet starts developing cities of more than one million people, it is approaching critical mass. In a century or two it won’t be fit to live on.”

And so my own preference is clear, though it might have a Mae West feel, I shall add this: I’ve been a country dweller and I’ve been a city dweller, and honey, the country is better. But that’s all to the side.

It’s hardly a state secret that America’s largest cities are in bad shape today. They’re overrun with social pathologies, consistently underperform at “public services,” and cost a fortune to live in. Yet that was not always the case. Indeed, during the mayoralty of Rudy Giuliani, New York City returned from an abyss of squalor to a quality and livability it hadn’t known since Fiorello La Guardia. The Di Blasio and Adams mayoralties have dissipated that. Los Angeles during Ronald Reagan’s governorship over California was equally a beautiful, highly livable place. It’s not enough to say sic transit gloria mundi and pass on. We must discover the reasons for the changes and what “governability” or the lack thereof has to do with them.

Large numbers of people cannot be “governed,” in the original sense of the word, by a discrete “government.” (If that statement mystifies you, look up the function and operation of a steam engine’s governor.) They must ultimately “govern” themselves, which destroys the usual interpretation of governable and governability. Moreover, the “large number” doesn’t need to be in the millions, as The Atlantic would have it.

Today, sufficient fractions of the populaces of New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, and other major cities simply refuse to be governed. They do as they please, aware of the potential consequences but willing to risk them. That has rendered those cities ungovernable, in the sense generally understood by private citizens. But clearly it was not always thus.

The residents of Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, New York City, Chicago, and other homeless capitals have elected to tolerate the public degradation that their homeless populations impose upon them. Conditions there have made them resemble “closed systems” de facto where homelessness is concerned. They would rather tolerate huge homeless camps and what comes with them than strict code enforcement. The homeless find the results congenial to their filthy and dissolute preferences. What the city governments could do, they will not, for fear of electoral backlash.

And day by day, their entropy increases.

Is this a verdict on whether “Big Cities Are Ungovernable?” I don’t think so. History speaks to the opposite effect. But it does cast an interesting light on whether large groups of left-liberals are governable.

Well, I think the answer to that ever-more-pressing question has been made plain enough by recent history; anyone still in doubt is encouraged to take themselves a nice, long stroll around downtown Detroit late at night for further education, if they dare. Wear full Class-III body armor with ceramic plates, that’s my advice.

Governable or not, the libtards can damned sure be suppressed. Nobody seems much interested in talking about that option right now, even sotto voce. Nevertheless, it’s a conversation we’re going to need to get started on sooner rather than later.

Tyranny, straight up

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As Limbaugh frequently did, one can only ask: WHO THE HELL DO YOU ROTTEN FUCKING BASTARDS THINK YOU ARE, ANYWAY?!?

Okay, maybe Rush never put it quite that way.

The U.K. Briefly Considered Killing All Pet Cats Early in the Pandemic

In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when little was known about the virus, the U.K. government briefly considered asking the public to exterminate every cat amid fears that the pets could spread the disease.

Lord Bethell, a former deputy Health Minister from 2020 to 2021, revealed the news Wednesday during an interview with Britain’s Channel 4 News.

“Can you imagine what would have happened if we had wanted to do that?” he added.

Well, I can certainly tell you what I HOPE would have happened, what SHOULD have happened. But the UK being the endarkened, blighted shitrapy it’s become, I seriously doubt anything much at all would have, sad to say.

The bombshell revelations have sparked astonishment from some on social media, with users sharing images of their own cats and vowing they would have put up a fight. 10 Downing Street’s own feline friend Larry’s unofficial Twitter parody account wrote: “hard not to take this personally.”

One would like to think so, surely. But then you groveling serfs didn’t raise much of a squawk about all the other things your tyrannical goobermint has taken from you over the years, now did ya?

According to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, animals do not appear to play a significant role in spreading COVID-19 to humans, but cases of animals have been documented and most of them were “infected after contact with people with COVID-19.”

So, it’s us hoomans who pose a threat to the animals, not the other way ‘round, eh? Of course, that’s never been any obstacle to any government taking STRONG, VIGOROUS ACTION™ to save us all from something or other, now has it?

Despite this, some countries have pursued the mass culling of animals or pets in a bid to contain the virus. Hong Kong tested and euthanized some 2,000 hamsters in January 2022, after several tested positive for the virus in the weeks prior. Earlier on in the pandemic, in November 2020, Denmark culled 17 million minks over fears that a mutation could be transferred from minks to humans.

Denmark was the world’s largest mink producer and the decision was found to have no legal justification. The fallout prompted Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to call a snap election in October last year after a member of her ruling coalition government threatened to withdraw their support amid the controversy.

Bold mine, because…well, y’know.

Never, ever fool yourself for a moment that there is ANYTHING AT ALL that ANY government, ANYWHERE, wouldn’t DARE to do with or to you, anytime it feels like it, for no reason whatsoever beyond that they just want to. “Legal justification”? “Moral/ethical propriety“? Scientific/medical/public-health emergency”? “Economic/military/cultural/climate ‘crisis’”? Stop it already, you’re killing me over here. Sorry and all, but that ain’t the way this works. Your pets; your charcoal grills; your gas stoves; your cars; your guns; your money; your home; your very lives—all those and plenty more are fair game, just grist for the mill.

Once the Superstate beast has been allowed to establish itself and begun to spread its leathery wings in triumph, there’s no longer a single thing that’s out of bounds. We don’t have to like it. We DO have to live with it. And as the Founders well knew, that’s never a good or pleasant thing.

Chin up

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I been rasslin’ ‘round in my head all day with how I might present this next without confusing the hell out of everybody, but I haven’t been able to come up with anything. So steel yourselves; gonna be a lot of jumping back and forth betwixt posts on this one. Instead of just providing one link for each excerpt as and when it’s first referenced, as is my usual wont, each time I shift to a different post I’ll re-link where it comes from. That’s the best expedient I can think of.

The Democrats Have Already Won the 2024 Election, Regardless of Who Either Party Runs

We don’t need to recap what happened in 2020, when Sundown Joe* campaigned from his basement and drove enough enthusiasm to have 81 million votes counted for him. The Democrats did a spectacular job of making their stolen votes completely unverifiable. “OK”, I thought. “The GOP has learned their lesson and won’t let this happen again, right?” Wrong.

Jump to 2022. We were ready for the Red Tsunami, which turned out to be a red trickle. Yes, there were factors. I pointed out that the Roe V. Wade victory was worth any temporary losses. Could we have had stronger candidates? Sure, Hershel Walker & Dr. Oz were far from perfect, but spare me that talk as an excuse. The Dems “won” with Raphael “Slum Lord Preacher Millionaire” Warnock in GA, Katie “Abortion Mouse” Hobbs didn’t even make any freakin’ effort to hide the election fraud that she committed! And don’t get me started on Uncle Festerman in PA. The dude got elected despite that fact that he is so clearly brain damaged that he couldn’t utter a single coherent thought! Even more so than the dementia patient who was installed as President after the 2020 election! No, a bigger problem is that the GOP Establishment didn’t want solid majorities in the House & Senate. Cocaine Mitch witheld funding for any candidates who would not kneel and kiss his ring, while barely veiled double agent Lindsey Graham decided to offer the Dems some great Get Out the Vote fodder by introducing a bill (that had ZERO chance of passing) to completely ban abortions immediately after the Roe ruling.

Then in the aftermath, the GOPe decided to spit in the faces of the Normals who they pretend to represent, with Cocaine Mitch proclaiming that sending billions of dollars with no accountability to Ukraine was the top priority of the GOP base. And in a head scratcher, the party decided to reward Mitt Romney’s niece, Ronna McDaniel as GOP Chair. I can see her appeal to the GOPe, as she is great at raising a lot of money from big donors while carefully avoiding producing results with that money (And no, I have no idea why Trump’s people whipped votes for McDaniel on election day).

So what can we expect in 2024? At the top of my post Iinked to my anti-Trump take. There was a lot of disagreement, both in the comments and on various boards where I posted, and most of the disagreement was well articulated. But on top of everything I had to say, it looks like Biden* is trying to use Merrick Garland’s corrupt Department of Justice to go after Trump to keep him from being able to run. This wouldn’t be unprecedented – Tuca recently made a strong case that the Justice Dept. railroaded Nixon out of office. So let’s say that we end up having a bruising GOP primary that toughens the eventual winner, and whoever loses decides to put the country ahead of any personal disputes and endorses the winner. And in this scenario DeSantis is the winner, and we have a simple case of what too many pundits have called, “Trump without the baggage” and the GOP cruises to victory, right?

Well, no, not necessarily.

The first and most important angle to consider when analyzing this stance is the present reality of American elections. President Trump’s seemingly insurmountable election night leads in 2020, which were significantly larger than his leads throughout the night in 2016, somehow vanished into slim Biden victories. In other words: Without our corrupt election systems being corrected, it doesn’t matter who runs since the winner is predetermined. Trump didn’t cost us; the election was stolen. But for the sake of this discussion, we’ll say that our elections are free and fair.

Despite his alleged loss, Trump gained more than 12 million votes from 2016 (and likely more,) the largest increase in vote total for any sitting president in American history and the highest vote total by any presidential candidate ever, aside from Biden’s highly suspicious 81 million votes that same year. So, the media-manufactured Trump baggage has not had any negative impact on voter enthusiasm for Trump. Based on his vote increasing by millions, you could make the argument the baggage led to more people rallying to support him.

Prior to 2016, Conservative voter enthusiasm in the previous two presidential elections was abysmal. John McCain and Mitt Romney both lost convincingly to Barack Obama due in large part to their politically correct, low energy approach to politics when conservatives were looking for the exact opposite.

The “Trump baggage” can be summarized as a combination of his brash style of politics and the never-ending war waged on him by the media. Ironically, Trump’s style was the change America sought, and his exposure of the corrupt media is what has kept him so popular. In essence, Trump is a product of the corrupt environment the media has created, and their hatred towards him makes him more popular. The “Trump baggage” is what was needed to move the needle enough for Trump to win states such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania that Republicans had not won since the 1980s.

Most of the baggage from the Trump presidency was completely manufactured by media with the purpose of doing exactly what it is accomplishing to an extent now: Diminish enthusiasm for Trump at any cost, no facts needed. The goal was never to prove any of the false accusations against Trump. They knew this was impossible; they created them.

If those examples are considered “too much baggage,” could you imagine the media frenzy with issues of actual substance? Enter Ron DeSantis. To this point, it is obvious why the Florida Governor does not seem to have much baggage, and it isn’t because he has a squeaky-clean past. He currently has not declared a run for the presidency which is when most baggage is exposed (or manufactured.) There already are accusations ready to be weaponized when the time comes. Important to note, as seen with Trump: truth and facts are not needed to create baggage.

It’s a crucial distinction, since the list of DeSantis “baggage” is much ado about the exact same style of deceitful, ginned-up nothing the AmThink author dismisses with Trump. But, as Brother Bob notes, that ain’t the point.

Personally, I thought that the anti-Desantis shots in the post I just linked didn’t have much substance to them, but that’s not the point. To The Radical Left, charges don’t have to have any substance or facts behind them. Lefties will happily believe any lie if it supports their beliefs, and just look at the stupidity they believed about Trump. I could write a few thousand words, but can sum it up with the most egregiously unbelievable example that they all swallowed: Pee Tape, anyone? Of course, in this scenario The Radical Left will also forget their seething hatred for Trump, as one trait they’ve always shared is that they obediently march in lockstep to whoever their leadership labels their latest Emmanuel Goldstein. Ace lays down a few of the ways thet they will delude themselves that they actually like Trump compared to DeSantis. And of course, unless voter fraud gets addressed, pretending any nominee can overcome it is a trap.

Since you brought it up, let’s talk about traps for a sec.

DeSantis 2024 Is a Trap

If voter fraud is not addressed, it doesn’t matter who the candidate is, because democracy in America won’t exist.

Stop trying to take Ron DeSantis away from Florida. Just stop it. I understand the rationale, but it’s wrong. It may be quite reasonable to be jealous of Florida for its governor—the only governor in the nation to win my coveted “competent” rating on every major issue. But before we encourage DeSantis and Donald Trump to have a falling out that splits the party (or, rather, before we let the RINO simps do it at the behest of Democrats and lots of Chinese money), let’s review a few salient points.

First, governors really matter now. The worse Washington gets—and it gets bigger and worse no matter who’s president because the bureaucrats never change—the more important states become. We need to stop thinking of the presidential election as the be-all and end-all of politics. It was never supposed to be that way. States were once so powerful that the federal government had to fight a Civil War to smack them down. States formerly regarded themselves as coequal partners in the nation, not as subservient entities bowing to federal dictates. Whatever else the Civil War achieved, it did immeasurable damage to states’ freedom of action and, by extension, our own.

States have it in their power to undo this damage by protecting their citizens from federal agents who operate outside the law. (Case in point: ATF agents showing up without warrants at peoples’ homes, attempting to entrap gun owners.) But that would require boldness and courage on a level I don’t expect from any governor. Maybe Kari Lake would have done it. But she had her election stolen. DeSantis is the only sitting governor who could conceivably have the strength of purpose to lead a great reawakening of states’ rights. As I say, I don’t expect it. But he’s the only one who could do it—and he won’t do it if he’s busy trying to get himself elected president.

And here’s the other thing about DeSantis. We can call it “the main thing”: DeSantis isn’t going to win in 2024. No Republican is, unless voter fraud is addressed first. That means voting in person, on Election Day, and with a valid picture ID, not voting by mail over the course of a month. If we don’t fix that—and we’re not fixing it—it does not matter who the candidate is: Trump, DeSantis, or any other Republican. None of them have a chance in hell. It has nothing to do with who they are.

I’m going to say this again, simply because far too many “conservative” writers are ignoring it: Trump did not lose in 2020. Republicans did not lose in 2022. If we think we can win with a broader “big-tent” message or with someone who does less mean tweeting, we, in our innocence, are actively helping to destroy this country.  

Pretty much, yeah. Back over to Brother Bob for the Big Question.

So what do we do now? We’ve already heard talk about the GOP adopting ballot harvesting techniques, as has already been successfully done in California. While I get the idea of using their tactics against the Lefties, that only goes so far, as the moment it becomes truly effective for us Normals is the day we get FBI raids on the homes of every Republican participating. If you don’t see that happening, look no further than all of the BLAMtifa domestic terrorist walking free while the victims of the January 6th Reichstag Fire rot away in the Garland Archipelago. Even if that threat didn’t hang overhead, I still don’t like it. For one, it gives a huge advantage to the GOPe versus any grassroots Republicans given the monetary and organizational advantages. Second, and more importantly, why should we Normals have to surrender a huge tactical advantage to The Radical Left? And if we become over reliant on harvesting, how soon until Democrats figure out that it’s a great way for them to measure how many fraudulent votes they need to find on election night? On this tactic, I share the brief, profane opinion toward Heinecken that Dennis Hopper offered in the movie Blue Velvet. Side note, but why aren’t any of us Normals pushing how ballot harvesting takes away the right of the secret ballot?

At this point you might be wondering if I’m going to offer anything remotely constructive, assuming you haven’t already put your fist through your screen hoping it will reach my nose. Adam Mill lays out the interesting scenario of boycotting the 2024 election.

I don’t completely agree with this sentiment, either. Completely sitting out the election means an electoral bloodbath downticket and wipes out representation for us Normals at the state and local levels, as well as in the School Board fights, where our base has shown new life. What if we still voted, but all voted a write in for President, such as John Galt? I’m sure that many of you disagree with me, but if I’m right (and I sincerely hope I’m not), how many rigged elections and tyranny at the hands of the Democrats do we put up with before we realize that we’re fighting the last war, and that we lost it years ago? Are we at that stage? I don’t know. Can we avoid reaching the stage where our election process has gone full banana republic, or was 2020 our Pearl Harbor, and 2022 was our Phillippines? I’d like to say that our Midway will be 2024, but based on what I wrote here I don’t see it. Calling out the regime’s illegitamacy is only a starting point, and things will get worse before they get better. But America remains the greatest country to ever exist, warts and all. My uncle didn’t get shot up by Rommel’s Africa Corps to return and live a productive life, while my great uncle didn’t get gunned down on the beaches of Normandy for me to squander what they sacrificed.

We will win this fight, as tyrannies always fall eventually. Some take longer than others. But if Germany could overcome being ruled by literally Hitler, and most of Eastern Europe could throw off Russian tyranny, there’s no reason we can’t do the same. And while we’re not as far along the road as those nations wound up, it’s impossible to ignore the path we’re on. But I’m not giving up.

Nor should you, nor should anybody else. Whatever the answer might turn out to be—and like Bob, I don’t claim to have any good ones myself—there is in fact one out there, just waiting for us to find it. Hope is only ever lost when it’s been abandoned. And that we must not, we cannot, do.

State of (perpetual un)readiness

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PopMech takes a look at yet another disastrous multi-billion-dollar boondoggle from the once-mighty US military—a bigger one, probably, than even the F35 Turducken.

How the World’s Greatest Aircraft Carrier Became a $13 Billion Fiasco

Can the military save the USS Gerald R. Ford?

Wrong question. The real question is: should it?

The late 20th century was a time of supreme American confidence and rapid innovation. The Cold War was drawing to a close, the digital age was around the corner, and the Pentagon saw an opportunity to capitalize on peacetime and begin preparing for future conflict. With few diplomatic or military distractions, the United States ushered in a revolution in military technology.

Out of that boom period came ambitions for a new class of aircraft carrier headlined by the transformational USS Gerald R. Ford, a ship featuring an expanded flight deck, a boosted power plant, and support for almost two dozen emergent technologies. Expectations were high. The Ford’s nuclear reactor and propulsion system would triple the electrical power of the preceding Nimitz-class aircraft carriers. Its state-of-the-art weapons elevators would move 20,000 pounds of munitions at speeds of 150 feet per minute compared with the Nimitz‘s speed of 100 feet per minute. Its new launch-and-recovery system would be able to handle 270 planes in a single day. From bow to stern, the ship’s innovations—designed to save time, costs, and crew—would revolutionize the way the U.S. military built and used carriers. The Ford would be a symbol of American superiority, one that would project power to American adversaries for five decades of dependable service.

Well, they got the “transformational” bit right, anyway; the Ford definitely IS that. It’s just that it’s part of a decidedly wrong-way transformation: from a capable, powerful military—along with fighters that can’t fight; tanks that can’t tank; rifles more prone to jamming than a pimply, teenaged Stevie Vai wannabe at Sam Ash on a Saturday afternoon; and battalions of mincing, simpering dick-choppers who only signed up so they could get their bulbous naughty parts lopped off by an Army surgeon for free—into a hapless, bumbling, incompetent one.

“There was this thinking of, ‘We are so far ahead of everyone else that we can afford to take a strategic pause and take risks on our acquisition and try new and untested technology,’” says Eric Wertheim, a defense analyst and expert with the U.S. Naval Institute, of the nation’s mindset after the Cold War. “And there was this feeling that the rest of the world is at least 20 years behind us.”

But after two decades of development and delays, the audacity that conceived the Ford seemed to usher its doom. Expected to save the military $4 billion during its life span, the Ford has actually cost billions more than initial estimates. First expected to deploy in 2018, it has been projected to deploy as far out as 2024. When the ship reached the Navy after construction, it was already two years behind schedule, with work outstanding on thousands of items. In 2015, Sen. John McCain, chair of the Senate Armed Services Committee and a former Navy aviator, called packing all that tech onto the Ford “the original sin” that damaged the program.

Even the Navy’s top officer acknowledged the problems that have plagued the carrier. “We had 23 new technologies on [the USS Gerald R. Ford] which, quite frankly, increased the risk of delivery on time and cost right from the get-go,” said Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Mike Gilday at a virtual talk before the Navy League’s 2021 Sea Air Space exposition. “And I think industry’s in full agreement with this: We really shouldn’t introduce more than maybe one or two new technologies on any complex platform like that, in order to keep risk at a manageable level.”

Meanwhile, naval advances by U.S. adversaries have added urgency to the Ford’s troubleshooting. The ship’s critics point to its expanding budget and timetable as evidence that the U.S. military should reconsider developing massive nuclear carriers as a foundational element of its naval program. Military advisor Norman Polmar points out that America’s most recent conflicts in the Middle East didn’t even use the Nimitz class to full capacity. “Look what we did in Iraq,” he says. “We launched [just] 20 or 30 strikes a day from a carrier that has 70 airplanes.” And Rep. Adam Smith, chair of the House Armed Services Committee, has questioned whether the Ford’s price tag justifies its utility. During a 2021 Brookings Institution discussion, Smith asked if there are other ways “to get unmanned systems closer to the fight that don’t cost $12 billion.”

All part and parcel of the truism that generals and admirals are always preparing to fight the last war, in this case WW2.  Out of the myriad mistakes, flaws, and failures of the Ford, this one remains the most jaw-dropping to me.

One standout feature of the Ford—albeit a troublesome one—is its state-of-the-art Advanced Arresting Gear (AAG). Prior to Ford, American carriers used a hydraulic arresting system to slow and stop landing aircraft, but the AAG uses an electric engine and a water twister to accommodate a broader range of aircraft—including unmanned aerial vehicles. Engineering and manufacturing of the AAG began in 2005, with 2009 the targeted end date. But a 2016 Pentagon Inspector General report noted that developmental testing for the AAG would continue through 2018; the system still hadn’t proved capable or safe enough to test on the Ford. Between 2009 and 2012, the AAG’s power conditioning system failed across multiple tests, and both its inverter system and cable shock absorber required redesigns. The setbacks ballooned the AAG’s development cost from $143 million to more than $1 billion, according to a report from Sen. McCain’s office.

(Now-retired Navy captain Talbot) Manvel says he resisted AAG on the Ford as early as 1998, wanting to push it onto the subsequent ships in the class after its design had matured. He had his way until Rumsfeld stepped in with his transformational vision. “This was transformation run amok,” Manvel says.

That it surely was, sir. Which, once the temptation of it is yielded to, is what usually tends to happen.

It all makes for a depressing read for anyone who grew up believing that the American war machine was nigh-invincible, without Earthly peer or parallel amongst its adversary nation-states. That’s simply no longer the case, if it ever really was. Which, given certain harsh realities of life on this here planet, it almost certainly wasn’t.

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