Big tsimmis – Page 37

Amerika v2.0’s energy future: ain’t none

Posted on November 8, 2022November 8, 2022 by Mike

As laid out by our senile, decrepit, corrupt old pervert of a Pretend pResident.

Biden Keeps Promising To Make Energy More Expensive. Believe Him.

Precisely so. After all, it’s the only thing the rat-bastard has ever said that was actually true.

Yes, we’re going to make energy more expensive.

That’s Joe Biden’s closing message for 2022. “We’re going to be shutting these [coal] plants down all across America and having wind and solar,” Biden told a crowd in deep blue California on Friday, arguing that it was “cheaper” to generate electricity from wind and solar.

I’ve noted this before more than once here, but it bears revisiting now and again: the technology of the distant, long-dead past can never be adequate to meet the energy demands of modern industrialized economies.

The earliest-known references to windmills are to a Persian millwright in AD 644 and to windmills in Seistan, Persia, in AD 915. These windmills are of the horizontal-mill type, with sails radiating from a vertical axis standing in a fixed building, which has openings for the inlet and outlet of the wind diametrically opposite to each other. Each mill drives a single pair of stones directly, without the use of gears, and the design is derived from the earliest water mills. Persian millwrights, taken prisoner by the forces of Genghis Khan, were sent to China to instruct in the building of windmills; their use for irrigation there has lasted ever since.

The vertical windmill, with sails on a horizontal axis, derives directly from the Roman water mill with its right-angle drive to the stones through a single pair of gears. The earliest form of vertical mill is known as the post mill. It has a boxlike body containing the gearing, millstones, and machinery and carrying the sails. It is mounted on a well-supported wooden post socketed into a horizontal beam on the level of the second floor of the mill body. On this it can be turned so that the sails can be faced into the wind.

The next development was to place the stones and gearing in a fixed tower. This has a movable top, or cap, which carries the sails and can be turned around on a track, or curb, on top of the tower. The earliest-known illustration of a tower mill is dated about 1420. Both post and tower mills were to be found throughout Europe and were also built by settlers in America.

To work efficiently, the sails of a windmill must face squarely into the wind, and in the early mills the turning of the post-mill body, or the tower-mill cap, was done by hand by means of a long tailpole stretching down to the ground. In 1745 Edmund Lee in England invented the automatic fantail. This consists of a set of five to eight smaller vanes mounted on the tailpole or the ladder of a post mill at right angles to the sails and connected by gearing to wheels running on a track around the mill. When the wind veers it strikes the sides of the vanes, turns them and hence the track wheels also, which turn the mill body until the sails are again square into the wind. The fantail may also be fitted to the caps of tower mills, driving down to a geared rack on the curb.

Interesting enough as a historical study, no doubt, but there’s a reason windmills were in the main abandoned: because, as civilization progressed and technological advances were achieved one after another, something much better came along to replace them. As, y’know, tends to happen over time. As for solar panels, they are by no means anything new either.

It all began with Edmond Becquerel, a young physicist working in France, who in 1839 observed and discovered the photovoltaic effect— a process that produces a voltage or electric current when exposed to light or radiant energy. A few decades later, French mathematician Augustin Mouchot was inspired by the physicist’s work. He began registering patents for solar-powered engines in the 1860s. From France to the U.S., inventors were inspired by the patents of the mathematician and filed for patents on solar-powered devices as early as 1888.

Take a light step back to 1883 when New York inventor Charles Fritts created the first solar cell by coating selenium with a thin layer of gold. Fritts reported that the selenium module produced a current “that is continuous, constant, and of considerable force.” This cell achieved an energy conversion rate of 1 to 2 percent. Most modern solar cells work at an efficiency of 15 to 20 percent. So, Fritts created what was a low impact solar cell, but still, it was the beginning of photovoltaic solar panel innovation in America. Named after Italian physicist, chemist and pioneer of electricity and power, Alessandro Volta, photovoltaic is the more technical term for turning light energy into electricity, and used interchangeably with the term photoelectric.

…That same year (1888), a Russian scientist by the name of Aleksandr Stoletov created the first solar cell based on the photoelectric effect, which is when light falls on a material and electrons are released. This effect was first observed by a German physicist, Heinrich Hertz. In his research, Hertz discovered that more power was created by ultraviolet light than visible light. Today, solar cells use the photoelectric effect to convert sunlight into power. In 1894, American inventor Melvin Severy received patents 527,377 for an “Apparatus for mounting and operating thermopiles” and 527,379 for an “Apparatus for generating electricity by solar heat.” Both patents were essentially early solar cells based on the discovery of the photoelectric effect. The first generated “electricity by the action of solar heat upon a thermo-pile” and could produce a constant electric current during the daily and annual movements of the sun, which alleviated anyone from having to move the thermopile according to the sun’s movements. Severy’s second patent from 1889 was also meant for using the sun’s thermal energy to produce electricity for heat, light and power. The “thermos piles,” or solar cells as we call them today, were mounted on a standard to allow them to be controlled in the vertical direction as well as on a turntable, which enabled them to move in a horizontal plane. “By the combination of these two movements, the face of the pile can be maintained opposite the sun all times of the day and all seasons of the year,” reads the patent.

Uh huh…on each and every day the sun is shining, which is nothing like every day, not anywhere in the entire world. Then we get into the storage end of the solar-power equation, ie, batteries. Which, despite some genuine improvement over recent years, is a whole ‘nother kettle of expensive, unreliable, not-ready-for-prime-time fish, other than on a very small, private-home scale.

Ironic, is it not, that the very ones who have for so long insufferably claimed to have a corner on plumping for “new ideas” and “fresh concepts” and “progress”—even going so far, in their boundless hubris, as to misnomer themselves “Progressives”—are the selfsame ones who today insist that “the way of the Future” is to regress to the dim and distant past. Back to the Harsanyi piece for the sad, sorry denouement.

In California, which not only leads the nation in “clean energy” production but is leading the rest of us into rolling blackouts, residents pay 24.62 cents per kilowatt-hour for energy, around double the national average. There are only three other states where residents fork 20 or more cents over, the isolated Hawaii and Alaska and the frack-banning New York. The price of a gallon of gas in California is around two dollars over the national average, at $5.458. In Texas, it’s $3.173.

The president also forgot to mention that affordable natural gas, propelled by technological efficiencies like fracking, is as much a reason for the struggles of coal.

After West Virginia’s Joe Manchin groused about Biden’s denigration of his state’s top industry , the White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre, “walked back” the comments, contending that the president’s “remarks yesterday have been twisted to suggest a meaning that was not intended; he regrets it if anyone hearing these remarks took offense.”

How they were distorted, she did not say. The statement stresses that the president understands that “the men and women of coal country built this nation” but that, yes, we must shut down the coal industry — as well as the oil and gas production. Biden is sorry that you’re offended. “Our goal as a nation is to combat climate change and increase our energy security by producing clean and efficient American energy,” the statement falsely goes on to say. Wind and solar, both victims to vagaries of the weather, aren’t, by any definition, “efficient.”

The kerfuffle, as with most debates over gas and oil, is confusing. The administration’s stated goal — one of the major policy planks of the Democratic Party — is to deliberately, through mandates or bans or taxes or contrived “markets,” make fossil fuels prohibitively expensive to force a “transition.” Biden’s Plan for a Clean Energy Revolution and Environmental Justice promises that a 100 percent clean energy economy and net-zero emissions will exist no later than 2050. California has banned new gas-powered cars by 2035. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal, supported by virtually every Democratic Party presidential candidate last time around, is far more extreme.

None of these climate plans can be implemented without the effective nationalization of the energy sector and the banning of fossil fuels. Solar, after decades of mandates and subsidies and cronyism, accounts for around 3 percent of the national portfolio. Both wind and solar need to be propped up by fossil fuel generation. In anything resembling a functioning market, “clean energy” loses, not only to oil, gas, and coal, but also to nuclear power.

Well, they need to be propped up by sustainable, plentiful fossil fuels if one assumes that the shitlib goal is to provide energy sufficient to heat and cool American homes, keep American fridges and freezers stocked and the sustenance within them unspoiled, invigorate our economy, and just generally keep Western Civ moving forward efficiently and affordably. Unfortunately for us all, there is no discernible sign to date that any such thing is their actual goal. Quite the opposite, in fact.

The Great Divide

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Mike

Fran gets down to the nitty-gritty of it for us.

Well, it’s finally here: Election Day 2022. Until late this evening, those of us unwilling to break the law can know very little about what’s taking place. Unfortunately, there are quite a few who are willing to break the law. Whether they can cheat sufficiently to retain their grip on the federal Leviathan will be the determinant of much that follows. They managed it in 2020; we must not assume that they can’t do it again.

It’s part of the cleavage that has riven the American people into two mutually hostile camps.

The division isn’t principally a matter of ideology, or of attachment to particular government policies. It’s mainly about self-concept.

We in the Right mostly adhere to the original conception of the United States as The Land of the Free. There are a few paternalists among us, but the great majority of us simply want to be left alone in our private pursuits. In consequence, what we want from government at all levels is to stay the BLEEP! away from us. Keep your cotton-pickin’ hands off our wallets and stick to keeping order in the streets. We can manage our own affairs without your “help.”

Over there on the Left, they’re mainly persons who hold “an assumption of differential rectitude” (cf. Thomas Sowell). They regard themselves as our moral superiors. In their minds, that entitles them to boss us around. Questioning their self-assessment provokes behavior decent persons would prefer not to face. However, not questioning their self-assessment allows them to assume that we’re okay with having them run our lives.

This cleavage in the American people is bringing about a cleavage in the nation. It’s assumed a fairly definite geographic shape. Those preponderant in one region are looked upon with disdain (at best) by those preponderant in the other. The current trend in intra-national relocations is slowly but steadily reinforcing that division. It’s also providing grounds for intensified intra-national hostilities. If you needed something to lose sleep over, you’re welcome.

None of this should be news to any Gentle Reader of Liberty’s Torch. The driving processes have been at work for decades. What matters most is the division between the moral visions of Red and Blue America. Yes, such divisions have existed before. But never has one side preached to itself that its superiority justifies the subjugation of the other by any means necessary.

A hell of a thing, innit, when those whose sole desire is to be left alone to live as they see fit must contend with a fanatical, über-arrogant opposition whose Prime Directive is that it must never, ever leave anybody alone. Really, though, the hell of it is that only one side can legitimately lay claim to being the contemporary representatives of the vision laid out for America by its Founding Fathers in the DoI and the US Constitution. Which goes a long way towards explicating the visceral, frothing opposition to those things, as well as the Founders themselves, on the part of the Goosesteppin’ Left.

The long, dark road

Posted on November 6, 2022November 6, 2022 by Mike

A sneak peek at Schlichter’s new book, We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America. All boldface in the excerpts mine, by the way.

Will America Fall With A Bang Or A Whimper?
Radio host and writer Kurt Schlichter’s latest book, ‘We’ll Be Back: The Fall and Rise of America,’ games out many scenarios that could lead to the country’s collapse with illuminating and even amusing results.

Although entertaining on its own, Schlichter’s crash course in classical history has a deeper point that applies to today. Like Rome, America will fall, but this fall won’t be anything sudden or even perceptible to most people. He explains that America’s fall will probably “be a transformational change. … The old ways can simply stop meeting the needs of the present, and something different replaces them.” For the past three decades, Schlichter charts the mounting corruption of the American government, the departure from constitutional limits, and the growing unrest among Americans, particularly conservatives. Even if these problems are fixed, the system will be different than it was in the early ’90s.

Even though President Trump turned away from this apparent trajectory somewhat, Schlichter acknowledges that Trump’s administration suffered from personnel issues for his first two years, and then was sunk by Covid-19 and trusting the experts. Now, “when Biden was sort-of elected, the Democrats pushed hard as they could to the left even though the voters had seen fit to literally provide them the barest imaginable legislative majority.” Consequently, certain checks on political abuses like the Electoral College, election integrity measures, the filibuster, and the authority of elected officials (vs. unelected technocrats) are being challenged or eliminated.

This brings Schlichter to today’s precious present in which an ascendent leftist elite imposes its will on a resistant population. Indeed, the global response to Covid offered a taste of this, as national governments stripped populations of most of their freedoms in the name of public health. What distinguishes the U.S. from other nations, however, is that Americans have the right to bear arms. For Schlichter, this is the ultimate check on power: “They [Americans] understand that the decision to allow or disallow any act by the government ultimately resides with themselves.”

Americans like to tell themselves that cozy lie, but absent a credible and somber threat to resort to those sharply-curtailed 2A rights if and when they must, all the guns ever made add up to no more than empty bluster, easily laughed off by our tormenters as just more hot air expelled by unserious, contemptible blowhards.

This leads him to think that a time will come soon when violence breaks out. He grants that quite a few things will need to happen before this happens: “What this [a civil war] means is that for America to reach a state of tyranny, there must not only be massive and systemic violations but, simultaneously, the elimination of any meaningful ability to address those wrongs, either under the Constitution or otherwise.”

Um. I really don’t have to point out the gaping hole in the premise here, do I?

It’s at this point that Schlichter’s role as polemicist turns into one of a prophet, forecasting a variety of outcomes in the near future. First, he describes an America captured by the hard left, which brings tensions to a breaking point. Unfettered by the constitutional checks and balances, the Democrats would wreck the economy with uncontrolled deficit spending, permanently restrict individual freedoms, and refuse to enforce laws on protected classes. Any modicum of prosperity, peace, and stability would immediately be lost in an anarchic frenzy.

Huh. Maybe I do at that. Kurt speaks as if those “massive and systemic violations,” the intentionally rubbled economy, uncontrolled deficit spending, &c are mere grim but as yet unrealized future possibilities, instead of having long since come to pass, every last one of them.

Assuming none of these prognostications come to pass and the center holds for a little while longer, Schlichter concludes that Americans will have three choices: restore the constitutional order, elect a right-wing authoritarian leader, or elect a left-wing authoritarian leader. Since he discussed the last option already, he spends some time on the second option, the conservative authoritarian. He likens this to the reign of Augustus Caesar, which, at least in the beginning, had many things going for it. In one fell swoop, an authoritarian leader could fix the problems of crime, immigration, woke indoctrination, energy and water shortages, and people like Ilhan Omar holding office. However, as Schlichter concludes, “Yes, an authoritarian can make the trains run on time for a while, but that kind of regime has to derail eventually.” A few decent emperors may have succeeded Augustus, but none of them were quite as effective.

I’ve been leaning towards Option 2 for a good while now myself, albeit reluctantly. The wise old quip about socialism—you can vote your way into it, but must shoot your way out—holds equally true for all other flavors of authoritarianism. That stipulated, in order to undertake any truly serious effort to restore American Constitutional liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we must first rid ourselves of the insidious threat to freedom and individual self-determination posed by our “Enemies, domestic” on the Left. And there’s only one sure way to achieve that most laudable of goals: by suppressing Leftists and Leftist cant ruthlessly, ferociously, every time and everywhere they dare to rear their ugly heads.

I’ve often stated that I have no good or easy solutions to propose for this crippling conundrum; this is not an admission of intellectual shortcoming or inadequacy on my part, mind. It’s simply because it’s become my firm belief that, at this late stage of the game, there ARE NO good or easy solutions left to us. Henceforth, every choice will be difficult, costly, and damaging in one way or another.

At each and every turn, we readily descry a path fraught with hazard, uncertainty, pain, and wretchedness. Through a perfectly natural human reluctance to confront the ugly reality of our situation, to relax into comforting fantasy about where we now are and what we now must do, we have painted ourselves into a very tight corner indeed.

One thing is certain: carrying on under the delusional fiction that we still live in the America we grew up in—a stumbling but still essentially sound America with a badly warped but still basically functional system—will get us noplace we want to be, and gain us nothing worth having. No matter which way we finally jump or what we finally decide to do, there’s trouble up the road for sure.

Kari Lake campaign HQ shut down for the duration

Posted on November 6, 2022November 6, 2022 by Mike

As they always do, the DemonRats are playing hardball.

Here are the details known so far from Daily Mail:

FBI and police were at the Lake offices from 10pm Saturday to 5am on Sunday

A staffer received two envelopes containing a suspicious white powder

There were also threatening messages the campaign considers an ‘attack’

A hazmat team and bomb squad also responded to the scene in Phoenix

Lake is in a tight race in Arizona with her Democratic opponent Katie Hobbs

Last week Hobbs suggested Lake was partly to blame for a break-in at her campaign headquarters

The incident appears to have taken place Friday night or early Saturday morning but information has been slow in coming out.

Oh, I just bet it has. Look for that calculated foot-dragging to continue, as Jurassic Media works diligently to do the bidding of their DemonRat masters and suppress all factual information. No matter; those of us who are familiar with the usual shitlib MO all know who did this, and why.

Keepers of the One True Faith

Posted on November 5, 2022November 5, 2022 by Mike

The Branch Covidian faith, that would be.

The CDC Has Lost All Credibility
The Left’s politicization of the once-revered organization has morphed it into a haven for medical hacks and become a massive laughing stock.

I begin to see where the mistake was made here, with that “once-revered” codswallop. NO FederalGovCo bureaucracy should EVER be “revered” by any Real American with even half a lick of sense.

As a licensed and practicing healthcare provider, I want to know the CDC committee’s clinical justification for recommending the COVID-19 vaccination for children aged 6 months and older.

Because, as it turns out, we have little objective data. I’m talking minuscule. No human trials whatsoever; only tests on eight mice using the updated Omicron booster shots.

Oh, but the human trials are underway now! They’re happening after the U.S. Food and Drug Administration extended emergency use authorizations, which shield pharmaceutical companies from legal liability. Doesn’t that give you a tremendous sense of confidence?

I would rather take my chances with gas station sushi.

The recent child vaccine push by the CDC is essentially bypassing clinical data. How could a 15-member panel of Branch Covidians vote to inoculate children with no real human data? The answer is that they do not care. They are fully invested and have been blinded by false Covidian prophets. These are not ignorant people. They are hand chosen by the CDC. If you are willing to fall in line and do what you’re told instead of being a real scientific arbiter, then you are welcome to serve on the committee. Buck the system, and it’s a hard no.

It’s also helpful knowing the Biden Administration purchased 170 million doses of the updated booster.

As one trained in biological and medical science, I can say with certainty that all of this is absolute lunacy!

There has never been a vaccine added to the child immunization schedule without clear and substantial evidence that it would significantly reduce disease.

The COVID-19 vaccine is a first for the CDC. Added with no clinical data.

The White House COVID-19 response coordinator, Dr. Ashish Jha, claims to have reviewed unpublished data and said that “based on the data we have, [the new vaccines] should be better at providing protection against infection.” He went on to say, however, “Again, we’ll see where the data lands, but I am very hopeful…“

What are they hiding?

Absolutely everything they think they can get away with, not one jot or tittle less, as ever. Speaking strictly for myself and nobody else, I saw through the whole Kung Flu stratagem when the official story started changing, and then went right on changing on an almost daily basis from there. I realized that if this supposed extinction-level event really was as bad as they claimed, then why were the authorities having to pretzel themselves so severely lying about it? If CoVid had been the planet-depopulator they said, there would have been no need to oversell the thing the way they did.

Let’s call it Mike’s Iron Law #847: “government health care” is not about either health, or “caring.” As regards government itself, at every level and in every place, it’s always and forever about power and control, as per usual. Once you’ve accepted that admittedly harsh reality, everything clicks into place and begins to make sense. Not before.

The TRUE threat

Posted on November 4, 2022November 4, 2022 by Mike

HINT TO SHITLIBS: It ain’t us, it’s you.

Biden’s Rhetoric is a Threat to the Republic
This isn’t just pandering to the base

The only good thing about this speech is that it didn’t have a color scheme out of V for Vendetta and didn’t feature Marines in the background. Whoever runs these things at least learned from that attempt at looking like Biden was about to declare martial law, suspend habeas corpus and make everyone read Gender Queer and How To Be An Anti-Racist at gunpoint in a gulag.

With the countdown underway, voters have made it clear that they care about the economy and crime. Anyone who finds the “threat to democracy” routine persuasive is already a solid blue voter and ActBlue donor who probably showed up for at least one D.C. protest.

This isn’t just pandering to the base, it’s pandering to the Elizabeth Warren base.

Biden’s call to “vote knowing what’s at stake and not just the policy of the moment, but institutions that have held us together as we’ve sought a more perfect union are also at stake” is an admission that his faction has lost the policy argument and doesn’t have anything else to work with.

While the delivery is laughable, the premise isn’t. Biden’s speeches may not interest voters, but they continue to push the totalitarian message that “democracy” is embodied by Democrats and threatened by Republicans, that if Dems fail to win, then the result will be the end of America.

That kind of rhetoric is typical, but under Obama and Biden, it’s been backed up by arrests, investigations, surveillance, raids, imprisonment, censorship and the whole banana republic gamut.

Daniel is a bit too blasé about Slow Joe’s overheated bargain-basement histrionics amounting to no more than mere pandering to Leftard extremists to suit me. Bribem and his fellow like-minded fanatics aren’t so much pandering to their proven-violent followers as they are trying to motivate them, along with granting tacit permission for them to do what they so badly want to do already.

It’s never been more vital that Heritage Americans pay unflagging heed to a hoary old military mantra, a handy phrase I was first introduced to at the NAS Oceana O-club by the fighter-jocks therein assembled: head on a swivel, total SA. Indeed, it could well turn out to be a matter of life and death for some of us before all is said and done, depending on where you are, what you’re doing, and who you’re with.

Forget, HELL redux

Posted on November 3, 2022November 3, 2022 by Mike

SO much more to say about this shit-circus, even now. In fact, Our Side should commit ourselves, every man Jack of us, to holding their feet firmly to the fire until their soles are blackened and crisped, for reals.

There Can Be No ‘Amnesty’ On Lockdowns Without A Reckoning
Letting people off the hook isn’t amnesty. Amnesty requires an admission of guilt and a commitment to repairing the wrongs done.

Annnnd BINGO. In fact, as a CF Lifer who prefers to remain anonymous astutely pointed out to me in an email yesterday, the two words missing so far from this whole faux-debate are as follows: I’M, and SORRY. Certainly, I don’t recollect seeing them in Ms Oster’s now-notorious plea for “amnesty” in the Atlantic.

She concludes her article, “Let’s acknowledge that we made complicated choices in the face of deep uncertainty, and then try to work together to build back and move forward.”

Yet it’s simply not true there wasn’t enough information for leaders to make prudent decisions back in January to April 2020. Indeed, they were certain enough about their patently cruel policies that included leaving the elderly alone to die, requiring women to give birth utterly alone except for masked strangers, and forbidding families from holding funerals.

Oster is not actually advocating for amnesty, but for a complete lack of responsibility-taking and accountability. That will make our nation’s future worse, less able to address the problems lockdowns created. There is no such thing as “moving forward” from mass civil rights abuses until their root causes have been discerned and steps taken to provide recompense and prevent repeat abuse in the future.

We the people were never told by the Covid totalitarians that their predictions were “uncertain” and “complicated.” They were so certain of their false claims that they sent police to record the license plates of people who attended church on Easter, a constitutional and human right. They shut down schools while keeping abortion facilities and marijuana dispensaries open. They were so sure of their moral righteousness that they seemingly gleefully threatened people’s ability to feed their kids if they didn’t take experimental injections for a disease that may have posed little risk to them. The vaccine mandates led to dangerous employee shortages at hospitals, police departments, and now in the U.S. military.

None of this deliberately inflicted mass suffering was necessary, and that was all known early on. It wasn’t, as Oster claims, a matter of “deep uncertainty.” Among others, Dr. Scott Atlas very publicly presented strong evidence that mask mandates and shutdowns were poor policy choices throughout 2020. He was brutalized in the media and his own Ivy League university for pointing out this data. So were the eminent authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that made similar data-based arguments, Drs. Jay Bhattacharya, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff.

All of whom paid a much higher price for their OUTRAGEOUS!!! truth-telling than Oster and ilk seem prepared to shoulder for their manipulative dishonesty. But hey, while we’re freely dishing out gifts of undeserved absolution to the obstinately unrepentant, here a few more possibilities shitlibs, DemonRats, GOPer swine, and fascist despots across the fruited plain would very much like us to consider.

Besides COVID, Here Are 43 Other Things Democrats Are Requesting Amnesty On
1. Slavery

2. Jim Crow laws

3. Grooming children

4. Ted Kennedy

5. U2

…9. The DMV

10. Kale

11. Dr. Fauci

…13. Comedienne Amy Schumer

14. The term “comedienne”

…17. Gluing themselves to things

…22. Jeffrey Epstein

23. Killing Jeffrey Epstein

24. Michael Moore

25. Not killing Michael Moore

…28. The KKK

29. Kale again

And so on and so forth from there. As is always the case with the Bee, it’s damned near impossible to tell if they’re doing satire here or simply reporting the news straight-up, dry, and as-is. Speaking strictly for myself and nobody else, though, #25 is enough to condemn the Dems/shitlibs/whatevs to the furnaces of Perdition for all eternity, all by its lonesome.

Update! This one showed up in my latest “Libs of TikTok” email.

This video is in response to the @TheAtlantic article about “pandemic amnesty” and it’s a much watch. This man is so right on. pic.twitter.com/ZuuA9tIloD

— Just Mindy 🐊 (@just_mindy) October 31, 2022

If you ain’t subscribing to the LoTT email list yet, you damned well oughta be. Not entirely sure how I got on it; somebody musta signed me up for it without asking, I suppose, but I’m damned glad they did.

The threatening truth

Posted on October 30, 2022 by Mike

Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.

It is instructive – it is vitally important – that we remember how truths about “masks” and “vaccines” and the actual danger of “the virus” were cat-called as “misinformation,” “anti” Science and, yes, “denialism.” How those who dared to speak the truth were persecuted and punished – and still are (viz, the recent punishing of Dr. Peter McCullough, the eminent cardiologist, for stating truths about “the virus” and the “vaccines”).

That is what comes of tolerating cat-calls in lieu of conversations, no matter how uncomfortable those conversations may be. No matter how wrong some people may be, sometimes.

If a person is antagonistic toward a group of people on account of race or religion or some other such non-specific attribute, that will become clear enough soon enough – and that person’s arguments or statements can be picked apart on the basis of sloppiness, inaccuracy and disingenuousness (after a pattern has been established, after it becomes clear that contrary facts aren’t acknowledged and the person’s arguments and statements change to reflect the chastening effect of truth). That person’s statements and arguments can then be dismissed as wrong, without resorting to cat-calling.

It is easy to cat-call the arguments and statements of those you disagree with – and even easier, if you dislike them, personally.

With good reason.

It is very easy, for example, to dislike the person of someone as personally loathsome as Dr. Fauci – or the CEO of Pfizer, Anthony Bourla. But it is also easy to deflect and dismiss – and even pathologize – any questioning of their actions, their views, their policies, as being “anti” – including, in the case of Bourla, – “semitic” as simply (exactly the right modifier) motivated by dislike of them personally, or on account of their race or religion. And that – if accepted as argument-ending before there is an argument – confers upon their actions, their views and their policies a kind of blanket immunity from being questioned or criticized.

Well, a free society cannot exist without questioning and criticism, whether right or wrong and however uncomfortable certain topics may make some people feel. A free society requires people who can think – and aren’t cat-called for doing so. Even when what they think – and say – is racist or anti-Semitic. Not placed in air-fingers quote marks because it is a fact that there are such people.

But there are also worse people.

They are the people who use those terms to cat-call people who aren’t those things but who make statements or raise questions they’d rather not address, often because they are true and the truth can be very threatening, to falsehood. We’ve had an object lesson about that over the course of the past almost three years now. The lies told us about “the virus,” which were used to further worse lies about “masks” – and then on to “vaccines” – which nearly led to camps – show us what happens when such lies are protected by accusing those who dare to question them as being “anti,” as being “deniers.”

And there is still the road ahead of us, with a fork in it.

Peters explains why this fork is a most perilous one indeed, and why it’s imperative that we choose the right one.

The Kingdom of Hell

Posted on October 30, 2022October 30, 2022 by Mike

As the drunken psychotic Karl Marx himself specified, seizing control of and then “fundamentally transforming” the very language itself remains Item One on the shitlib agenda.

Transgendering Language
As has become flagrantly obvious over the years, the political left and its myrmidons in the media, medical industry, social agencies, public libraries, and school system have become slickly adept at framing the cultural debate between conservatives and “progressives” by mutilating discourse, fudging long-accepted distinctions, and decoupling terms from their culturally ascribed referents. What was understood for centuries and millennia as decency becomes indecency, good becomes bad, virtue becomes vice, settled tradition becomes feral violence, family and marriage become barbarism and bondage (the feminist mantra), and so on. Conversely, what is destructive of customary order becomes enlightened transformation.

A comparatively recent and most egregious case in point involves what is now called “conversion therapy,” the target of the non-binary and transgender prepossession preaching “diversity” to minors — a cult that has now acquired conventional status. But what is “conversion therapy”?

It is a term calculated to deceive, to reverse normal assumptions by condemning parents concerned about their children’s sexual identity. Thus, to take an instance of adroit dissimulation, according to Human Rights Campaign (HRC), “So-called ‘conversion therapy,’ sometimes known as ‘reparative therapy,’ is a range of dangerous and discredited practices that falsely claim to change a person’s sexual orientation.” The truth is precisely the opposite. Responsible parents do not wish to “change” or “convert” their children’s sexual orientation but to retain it.

The real “conversion” that is taking place is from natural sexual identity at birth to non-binary and transgender dysphoria, assumed as a therapeutic given. Nonetheless, it is the parents who have been criminalized in law for an offense committed by a persecuting and iniquitous government. Witness Canada’s Bill C-4, which declares that conversion therapy harms society because “it is based on and propagates myths and stereotypes about sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression, including the myth that heterosexuality… and gender expression that conforms to the sex assigned to a person at birth are to be preferred over other sexual orientations” (emphasis mine). The Bill is a farrago of abject nonsense, as is the concept of sex as “assigned” at birth by medical personnel and society.

The irony of gender ideology is particularly mordant. Psychological, chemical and surgical mutilation is a function, not of parents maiming their offspring as is generally claimed, but of the gender theorists and predatory groomers who transition (or “convert”) children via persuasion, doctrine, pornographic material, sexual gadgetry, hormone treatments, puberty blockers, testosterone infusions, metoidioplasty, phalloplasty, orchiectomy, voice therapy, facial reconstruction, mastectomy, hysterectomy, and other undiminished horrors. It is the official mandarins in the precincts of authority who are the real criminals, encouraging and even forcing young people to embrace life-altering outcomes that promise to be, for many of them, a lifelong condition of misery and dysfunction.

Meanwhile, as noted, the gender mavens will jail parents who object to the insertion of the state into the natural family. They will move to pass legislation, like Ontario’s Bill 89, that seeks to place the state in loco parentis — as in totalitarian societies, the child is understood as belonging to the state, not to the family. They will hide their congenial abominations under perfumed euphemisms like “gender-affirming health care,” but they are nonetheless recidivist felons. The stench of their dogmatic atrocities befouls the cultural and social environment. Their starting point is to conceive the abnormal as normal; preserving the normal is consequently regarded as a “conversion.” The device is a classic non-sequitur, assuming as a rhetorical fact what has not been or cannot be established, like the “Have you stopped beating your wife?” canard. It is as effective as it is disingenuous.

No coincidence, that, seeing as how Canada is well gone into its own fundamental transformation into a totalitarian society, with Amerika v2.0 trotting along dismayingly close behind it.

These apprentices of evil must be held to account.

Absolutely, indubitably correct. The sticking point being that there is only one way that can ever be accomplished, and no amount of well-written op-eds, well-constructed arguments, well-attended protests and/or rallies, or VOATING HARDERER™ at them is gonna suffice to turn the trick. What can speeches, essays, and debates possibly avail anyone when the very words themselves have been stripped of all meaning?

“Suicide by obedience”

Posted on October 30, 2022 by Mike

Adjust to the New Paradigm on the fly, or perish.

The important message I want to relate right now, is this is all a diversion. All of these domestic issues, the insanity of drag queen strip-tease in schools is designed to enrage and distract us from the fact that literally every nation in the world owes more money than can possibly be repaid; it’s a shell game that’s running out of time. It’s the economic monstrosity of the world that’s driving nuclear war, because, like 9/11, there has to be a dramatic and terrifying moment in order to institute an earthquake of new, more-restrictive laws; in this case the great reset by which all government and banking debt will be erased, but not yours, not your car, your home, just theirs and they’ll use your assets to free themselves.

The governing powers are so jealous of our every penny, that soon they’ll just take it. Forget taxes, forget legality, they want it and we have it and they have the forces to take it. There are no principles involved here. To do that, they need a war, they need a crisis and they’ve long ago stopped caring what is right, proper or legal. Everything they’ve done in the past two years proves that point. If they’re willing to kill you, they’ll surely rob you.

Nothing will stop it. Nothing can be done about the entirety of Western civilization committing suicide by obedience, except disobedience. It’s probably too late for that to have much effect, but its a question of dying on your feet or on your knees. No matter what happens, there will be enough leftists/communists left to blame it all on our founders and capitalism. The importance of Nine Principles of Freedom, I think, is a starting point for whoever is left in deciding what sort of society to rebuild after the cataclysmic events to come.

In the chaos of post-nuclear war, there’s a chance to resettle and reorganize, but the globalists will have to be confronted directly. They’re instigating this nuclear exchange to arrive at that chaos to institute their vision. Nothing says that those who understand the principles of the republic can’t exploit that breach just as well as they can.

If we don’t step into that breach and refuse, be willing to lay down our lives to resist that sweeping change, you might as well put a Trump 2024 sign in your yard and wait for the Stasi.

If, by some miracle, all of it can be headed off, there’s the longer, tougher road of disobedience that will take an extraordinary shift in personal dynamics to save anything of the world we knew prior to 2019. Even then, it was a disaster. You have to go further back, much further.

Yep, back to around 1950, at the very least. As TL implies, the fact that you might not win doesn’t by any means excuse one from fighting on anyway. In any such conflict, the outcome is never guaranteed; the one and only absolute certainty is that if you don’t fight, you will definitely lose.

Musk takes Twitter

Posted on October 29, 2022October 30, 2022 by Mike

From the rear.

Dear, Sweet Leftists: Show Us On The Doll Where Elon Musk Touched Your Twitter

A truly WONDERFUL title, if you ask me.

Outside of anything illegal or the explicit doxxing of an individual, liberals should offer a single tweet that posed a legitimate threat to someone. They can’t.

Because, of course and as always, they’re lying through their fucking teeth, that’s why.

If you haven’t heard, a bunch of people are about to lose their homes, their jobs, and perhaps their very lives because Elon Musk has successfully purchased Twitter and assumed control of the most powerful thing in American political discourse.

There will be just too much “disinformation” and “harmful content” for innocent men and women to bear now that Musk is in charge of the platform he has promised to make more conducive to free conversation and expression.

There needs to be a new rule. Each time a liberal sounds the alarm about “disinformation” and “harmful content” that absolutely must be censored, lest dire consequences ensue, a tangible example of such material needs to be provided.

Everyone deserves to know what content would have been so detrimental to their well-being that there was no choice but for it to be erased from reality.

The shrill shitlib hissy fit over the ghastly, nightmarish prospect of free speech on Twitter *GASP* confirms for all time and beyond any possible doubt something some of us have long known: it isn’t Elon Musk that’s got them so upset, it’s free speech itself. They’re unalterably, irredeemably against it, no matter how strenuously they may deny that sad, sorry fact whenever they think it useful and/or needful for them to do so.

Update! “The Bird is freed.”

That’s what Elon Musk tweeted upon the consummation of his bid to buy Twitter. ’Twas a consummation devoutly to be wished. Why? For one thing, as Musk later tweeted, henceforth comedy once again will now be “legal on Twitter.”

Musk’s acquisition of Twitter for more money than you or I can really contemplate ($44 billion) lit the punditocracy ablaze. On the Left there was, as St. Matthew (13:42) put it in another context, abundant “fletus et stridor dentium,” “wailing and gnashing of teeth.” On the Right, there were cheers and not a little “Schadenfreude,” which is German for “serves you right, knucklehead.” The Right also went in for some creative trolling.

The dominant narrative, on the Left anyway, is that Musk’s acquisition of Twitter represents a conservative takeover of the social media giant. Twitter had been a brash and scrappy upstart, you see, and now it has been “colonized” by the rich and powerful…

In order to appreciate how funny this is, you can start with CNN’s story about the pile of money paid to the executives that Musk, in his first order of business, fired on Thursday. It is a large pile. According to CNN, Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s former CEO, Ned Segal (former CFO), and Vijaya Gadde (former Chief Legal Officer) will walk away with nearly $200 million. (I pause so that you, along with many others, can savor the word “former.”)

Gadde, by the way, was not only paid many millions of dollars a year but was also instrumental in engineering the expulsion of Donald Trump, then the president of the United States, from the platform.

The idea that Twitter was a challenge to the establishment before the advent of Musk is almost as wrong as the idea that Musk is conservative and that he aims to transform Twitter into a a bastion of Trumpesque MAGA (or, to quote Joe Biden’s focus group, “ultra-MAGA”) sentiment.

There are, I think, two major things to bear in mind about Musk’s takeover of Twitter. One is that, although he is not himself a conservative, the fact that he supports a robust view of free speech in which a wide variety of opinions are not only tolerated but encouraged means that he will be regarded as an existential threat by the progressive establishment.

That establishment is right to regard him as a threat. For its guardians require strict conformity in dispensing their twisted gospel of “diversity” if they are to maintain their power and perquisites. Open the door just a little, let just a little sunlight in, and pow! The magic spell that made it seem OK to say that men are women, that “climate change” is a threat to humanity, that COVID is a peril on the same plane as the Black Death, or that BLM and Antifa were justified in burning down our cities—suddenly that spell is broken, and so is the hold over the narrative that these new guardians of conformity had enforced.

The second thing to bear in mind is that the establishment will not sit idly by as Elon Musk challenges their narrative. Everything about Musk is an insult to the coddled, low-testosterone consensus that has been ruining America this last decade through the promulgation of its dependency agenda. It is no accident, as the Marxists say, that even as Musk pushes ahead with his reformation of Twitter, the coercive busybodies of the state have begun making minatory noises about “investigating” Musk. Thus we read that Tesla is under federal investigation over autopilot claims.

Expect more of that.

Yep—a LOT more of it, until either Musk cries “Uncle” from his knees; FederalGovCo has stripped him of every asset, right down to the last bloody nickel; or Musk somehow, unexpectedly and against all odds, emerges victorious after his defiant but draining face-off with an angry and vengeful Leviathan. Conservative or not, I wish the man nothing but the best in this endeavor.

The greatest story lie ever told

Posted on October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Mike

I repeat: if it weren’t for lies, they’d have nothing to say at all.

More than two years since the lockdowns of 2020, the political mainstream, particularly on the left, is just beginning to realize that the response to Covid was an unprecedented catastrophe.

But that realization hasn’t taken the form of a mea culpa. Far from it. On the contrary, in order to see that reality is starting to dawn on the mainstream left, one must read between the lines of how their narrative on the response to Covid has evolved over the past two years.

The narrative now goes something like this: Lockdowns never really happened, because governments never actually locked people in their homes; but if there were lockdowns, then they saved millions of lives and would have saved even more if only they’d been stricter; but if there were any collateral damage, then that damage was an inevitable consequence of the fear from the virus independent of the lockdowns; and even when things were shut down, the rules weren’t very strict; but even when the rules were strict, we didn’t really support them.

Put simply, the prevailing narrative of the mainstream left is that any upside from the response to Covid is attributable to the state-ordered closures and mandates that they supported, while any downside was an inevitable consequence of the virus independent of any state-ordered closures and mandates which never happened and which anyway they never supported. Got it? Good.

Astonishingly, in a debate on Monday, Charlie Crist, Democratic candidate for governor of Florida, accused Ron DeSantis of being “the only governor in the history of Florida that’s ever shut down our schools.” “You’re the only governor in the history of Florida that shut down our businesses,” Crist went on, “I never did that as governor. You’re the one who’s the shutdown guy.”

In fact, as DeSantis pointed out, Crist had publicly sued DeSantis to keep kids out of school in 2020, and he wrote DeSantis a letter in July 2020 saying the entire state should still be in lockdown.

Arguments like these are as facile as they are transparent. Does anyone honestly think these people would be arguing that lockdowns didn’t happen, or that it’s impossible to measure their effects, if the policy had been a success?

Read on for an incredibly chilling rundown of the veritably incalculable and multifarious damage done by those newly “nonexistent” lockdowns—first and foremost among that being, for me at least, the wreckage it made of such piffling concerns as individual autonomy, self-determination, and the very idea of unalienable, Constitutionally-protected rights.

The piece continues from there with pictures, almost none of which I’d seen before, putting this wanton, needless destruction on display for all to see and be shamed by. Bottom line? You’ve been had. Hoodwinked. Bamboozled.

By pretending that all of these horrors were attributable to public panic, apologists for the response to Covid are attempting to shift blame away from the political machines that imposed lockdowns and mandates onto individuals and their families. This is, of course, despicable and bunk. People did not voluntarily go hungry, or stand in the freezing cold to get food, or remove themselves from hospitals while they were still sick, or bankrupt their own businesses, or force their own kids to sit outside in the cold, or march hundreds of miles in exodus after losing their jobs in factories.

The collective denial of these horrors, and the refusal of media, financial, and political elites to report on them, amounts to nothing less than the greatest act of gaslighting that we’ve seen in modern times.

Further, the argument that all of these terrible outcomes could be attributed to public panic rather than state-imposed mandates would be far more convincing if governments hadn’t taken unprecedented actions to deliberately panic the public.

Does it get even worse yet? Oh, you bet your sweet bippy it does.

A report later revealed that military leaders had seen Covid as a unique opportunity to test propaganda techniques on the public, “shaping” and “exploiting” information to bolster support for government mandates. Dissenting scientists were silenced. Government psyops teams deployed fear campaigns on their own people in a scorched-earth campaign to drive consent for lockdowns.

Moreover, as a study by Cardiff University demonstrated, the primary factor by which citizens judged the threat of COVID-19 was their own government’s decision to employ lockdown measures. “We found that people judge the severity of the COVID-19 threat based on the fact the government imposed a lockdown—in other words, they thought, ‘it must be bad if government’s taking such drastic measures.’ We also found that the more they judged the risk in this way, the more they supported lockdown.” The policies thus created a feedback loop in which the lockdowns and mandates themselves sowed the fear that made citizens believe their risk of dying from COVID-19 was hundreds of times greater than it really was, in turn causing them to support more lockdowns and mandates.

Those who publicly spoke against lockdowns and mandates were ostracized and vilified—denounced by mainstream outlets like the New York Times, CNN, and health officials as “neo-Nazis” and “white nationalists.” Further, among those who really believed the mainstream Covid narrative—or merely pretended to—all the authoritarian methods that had supposedly contributed to China’s “success” against Covid, including censoring, canceling, and firing those who disagreed, were on the table.

Though many now claim to have opposed these measures, the truth is that publicly opposing lockdowns when they were at their apex in spring 2020 was lonely, frightening, thankless, and hard. Few did.

A-HENH. Actually, although it was certainly lonely, I saw nothing whatsoever hard about it, much less frightening; way more frightening to me was how very many of us failed to see through this patently bogus nonsense, even supported it at the time.

This revisionism is all the more disappointing because a small handful of politicians including Ron DeSantis, Imran Khan, and Alberta Premier Danielle Smith have proven that admitting error in implementing lockdowns and mandates isn’t that hard, and can even be politically profitable.

The same should go for the political left. Thus far, we have yet to see anything remotely resembling regret from any leader on the left, but this is what a decent, Truman-era Democrat might say in these circumstances:

“The lockdowns of 2020 were a terrible mistake. While they were outside my field, it was my duty to properly vet the credibility of the advice that was coming from health officials and to end the mandates as soon as it was clear they weren’t working. In that role, I failed, and you all have my humblest apologies. Given the unprecedented harm that’s been done by these mandates, I support a full investigation into how this advice came about, in part to ensure there hasn’t been any untoward communist influence on these policies.”

Those who spoke against lockdowns and mandates in early 2020 showed that they were willing to stand up for the freedoms and Enlightenment principles for which our forebears fought so tirelessly, even when doing so was lonely, thankless, and hard. For that reason, anyone who did so has reason to feel extremely proud, and the future would be brighter if they were in positions of leadership. That fact is now becoming increasingly clear—unfortunately, even to those who did the opposite. One more reason to keep all the receipts.

Any liberty-oriented American worth his salt must never, ever forget the needless, intentional disaster of Spring 2020, on pain of seeing one of the bleakest chapters of our history repeat itself. Because it’s for sure and certain that they’re going to try, and the only way they can get away with it again is if We The People allow them to. If you only read through all of one thing I link to this entire weekend, this one absolutely must be it.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

Look back in anger

Posted on October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Mike

A capsule review of where we are and how we got here.

As some may remember, Biden practiced plagiarism in law school, where he was a bottom feeder. In 1988, when Biden first ran for president, he ripped off a speech by British leftist Neil Kinnock. Biden’s 2008 presidential bid went nowhere but the Delaware Democrat still thought he was the best man for the job. But even Mark Bowden’s hagiographical “Joe Biden, Salesman” exposed the Oval Office occupant as a know-nothing incompetent.

By 2020, Biden was telling African Americans “you ain’t black” if they didn’t vote for him. According to the former vice president, auto workers who disagreed with him were “full of shit.” As he spouted gibberish, Biden was sometimes uncertain of dates, times, and locations. Even so, Democrats made him their party’s nominee.

Cellar-dweller Biden failed to conduct a national campaign in 2020. Key states rushed to change election laws, and party “mules” stuffed ballot boxes in the middle of the night. Democrats had often challenged election results but now any challenge was a threat to national security and Our Democracy™. Without comparisons of previous contests, the press proclaimed 2020 the fairest election of all time. As the establishment media had it, the nation had been panting for an addled plagiarist.

More than 25,000 troops guarded the inauguration, and 7,000 remained in the nation’s capital until late May. If anybody thought that Joe Biden was selected, not elected, or “installed” in the manner of Third World dictatorships, it would be hard to blame them.

In March 2021, Biden fell three times getting into an airplane, so the Delaware Democrat has a problem with basic motor functions. For all but the willfully blind, Biden is physically and mentally incapable of exercising national office. Conrad Black calls him a waxworks effigy of a president, but that might be too kind.

He handed the Taliban $7 billion of some of our best military equipment, and abandoned many Americans and Afghan allies. Biden hired the Taliban to provide security, and a terrorist bomb claimed 13 American lives and at least 95 Afghans. The Delaware Democrat then claimed the withdrawal was an “extraordinary success.”

On Biden’s watch, goods are more scarce, everything costs more, and your money is worth less. When a reporter asked about inflation, Biden called him a “stupid son of a bitch.” Biden canceled pipelines and drilling leases and sent the price of gasoline skyrocketing. The Delaware Democrat now claims gas was “always” $7 a gallon in California. And he sends oil from America’s strategic reserve to China.

Under Biden, the U.S. border is in perpetual crisis and the Delaware Democrat disregards U.S. immigration law. The administration gave “migrants” more than 300,000 smartphones, at a cost to U.S. taxpayers of $361,218.08 per day. The Biden junta allows illegals to use arrest warrants as identification to board domestic flights. Just so you know, legal immigrants and legitimate citizens can’t do that.

Biden proclaimed COVID-19 a “pandemic of the unvaccinated,” which placed many workers at risk of losing their jobs, or their positions in the military. Then Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci both tested positive for COVID, repeatedly, so Biden’s earlier statement was kind of like a lie.

So the chants of “fuck Biden” were perfectly understandable.

If this is what Delaware “Democracy” looks like, maybe Civil War v2.0 ought to kick off with the rest of the states teaming up to kick Delaware’s ass up between its shoulder blades, so to speak. There’s more yet, incredibly enough, and dismal and depressing though it surely is you’ll still want to read it all.

Power, destruction, death

Posted on October 27, 2022 by Mike

Quoth Captain Malcolm Reynolds: If somebody tries to kill you, you kill ’em right back.

Middle Earth had its Mount Doom, into which the One Ring of Power could be tossed, ridding that evil from J.R.R. Tolkien’s fictional setting. Real Earth is not so fortunate, but in all other aspects the lessons drawn from his classic apply. It only comes up short in one respect. Tolkien never delved into the psychology of Sauron, Saruman, and the lessor denizens of Middle Earth who lusted after the One Ring’s power, other than to depict the inevitable corruption of the soul their lust produced.

There are two conclusions uncorrupted souls have difficulty accepting, although both experience and logic point uncompromisingly towards them. The first is that those in power and those who lust for it want power for power’s sake, ultimately to destroy and kill. The second is that they want to destroy and kill because they want to destroy existence and kill themselves. We owe the first conclusion to Orwell, the second to Rand. (For a fuller explanation see “The Last Gasp,” Robert Gore, SLL, March 24, 2020.)

This article assumes both conclusions are well-founded and that the second in particular is the key to understanding where the world is now and where it’s going. They offer a realistic assessment of the chances for nuclear Armageddon.

It is no coincidence that the twentieth century witnessed history’s most totalitarian regimes and its bloodiest wars and genocides. By all indications the twenty-first century will extend the connected trends. Power goes hand-in-hand with destruction and death. Governments are based on their capacity to inflict violence; what else can they produce? Rejecting lofty rhetoric and revolutionary rationales, Orwell wrote that: Power is not a means; it is an end. The twentieth century demonstrated that power is a means to inflict incalculable destruction and death. Know them by their fruits—those are the true ends of those who seek and hold power.

Report after report details the injury and death inflicted by the Covid mRNA vaccines, puncturing hollow platitudes and invocations of “Science.” The travesty offers a refresher course we don’t really need: from world leaders down to petty politicians and functionaries, they want to kill us. Those who aren’t killed are to be frightened into compliance with their ghastly and tyrannical edicts, herded like cattle into some other slaughterhouse.

The gelatinous souls who move whatever direction the bowl tilts usually don’t recognize what’s happening until the moment of their execution. Beforehand, a few of the more intellectually adept will argue that the powerful will be limited by their instinct for self-preservation—if they kill too many they’ll end up killing themselves. Perhaps that thought offers comfort, however scant.

But what if the powerful are like those mass shooters whose terror ends only when they turn their guns on themselves? What if mass murder is the means to their desired end: suicide? Someone who kills himself but no one else is to be pitied. Someone who kills innocents before taking his own life perpetrates paramount evil.

Which would give our putative “leaders” not one moment’s pause, being willing representatives of Paramount Evil their own selves.

(Via Dave Renegade)

“The Flight 93 Election” revisited

Posted on October 26, 2022October 26, 2022 by Mike

The Biden junta has vindicated Michael Anton’s brilliant, prescient, and justly renowned “Flight 93” essay. Not that it needed any; the piece acted as its own vindication, more than adequately so. But still.

Anti-Constitution insurrectionists have seized the American cockpit, and they must be stopped even if that requires electing a polarized Donald Trump, wrote social critic Michael Anton in 2016 under a pseudonym.

“The Flight 93 Election” set off an internet storm. The late, great Rush Limbaugh read almost all of it to his audience of Republican base voters soon after it came out, giving them assurance that not everyone on the right hated their candidate after an ugly primary battle in which no less than National Review published a cover essay collection titled “Against Trump.”

Anton was as reviled as he predicted in the essay. But now, six years later, Trump’s four years of governance and the Biden administration’s willfully malicious reign has vindicated the overall accuracy of Anton’s analysis.

Anton said the U.S. administrative state’s gradual replacement of constitutional self-government has metastasized into a national emergency, an argument American conservatives have been developing for more than 100 years. The essay justified a vote for Trump based on his platform against open borders, endless foreign war, and trading our economic advantages to China.

Trump was a wild card, Anton noted, but every other Republican candidate had no idea what time it is, so we’ll have to play the wild and see what happens. The alternative was certain political suicide.

2016 is the Flight 93 election: charge the cockpit or you die. You may die anyway. You — or the leader of your party — may make it into the cockpit and not know how to fly or land the plane. There are no guarantees.

Except one: if you don’t try, death is certain. To compound the metaphor: a Hillary Clinton presidency is Russian Roulette with a semi-auto. With Trump, at least you can spin the cylinder and take your chances.

He was right. Nothing backs that truth so much as the Biden presidency. It is, as Clinton’s would have been, a third term for Barack Obama, which is to say another four years of planned national demolition and the astonishing expansion of unlimited government, which is to say tyranny. The evidence is more visible now than it was in 2016, and those who tried to un-person Anton over his arguments owe him, and the country, an apology.

Yet another thing nobody should be holding their breath awaiting. The piece goes on from there to a lengthy list of then-impending man-caused national disasters foreseen by Anton with perfect clarity and accuracy. The whole article is fantastic, out of which this next ‘graph is my own personal fave:

If we can’t make Americans out of Afghans in their native country, how can we pretend we can make Americans out of Afghans, Somalis, and Guatemalans flooding the failing institutions of a wildly polarized United States? We can’t even make Americans out of most of the people who are born here. Trump was the only person willing to even talk about this supremely important public concern.

Bold mine, because…well, I mean, YEAH. You know what you must do, Glasshoppah. Myself, I think it’s high time I went back and read Anton’s outstanding piece again, for the first time in many a moon.

Update! Yep, “Flight 93” remains at least as gripping—as trenchant, as apposite—now as I remember it being back when it first appeared, probably even more so. Herewith, an appetizer—which, as Cartman informed us, is what you eat before you eat to make you more hungry.

If conservatives are right about the importance of virtue, morality, religious faith, stability, character and so on in the individual; if they are right about sexual morality or what came to be termed “family values”; if they are right about the importance of education to inculcate good character and to teach the fundamentals that have defined knowledge in the West for millennia; if they are right about societal norms and public order; if they are right about the centrality of initiative, enterprise, industry, and thrift to a sound economy and a healthy society; if they are right about the soul-sapping effects of paternalistic Big Government and its cannibalization of civil society and religious institutions; if they are right about the necessity of a strong defense and prudent statesmanship in the international sphere—if they are right about the importance of all this to national health and even survival, then they must believe—mustn’t they?—that we are headed off a cliff.

But it’s quite obvious that conservatives don’t believe any such thing, that they feel no such sense of urgency, of an immediate necessity to change course and avoid the cliff. A recent article by Matthew Continetti may be taken as representative—indeed, almost written for the purpose of illustrating the point. Continetti inquires into the “condition of America” and finds it wanting. What does Continetti propose to do about it? The usual litany of “conservative” “solutions,” with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, “civic renewal,” and—of course!—Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable. Decentralization and federalism are all well and good, and as a conservative, I endorse them both without reservation. But how are they going to save, or even meaningfully improve, the America that Continetti describes? What can they do against a tidal wave of dysfunction, immorality, and corruption? “Civic renewal” would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve “civic renewal”? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.

Continetti trips over a more promising approach when he writes of “stress[ing] the ‘national interest abroad and national solidarity at home’ through foreign-policy retrenchment, ‘support to workers buffeted by globalization,’ and setting ‘tax rates and immigration levels’ to foster social cohesion.” That sounds a lot like Trumpism. But the phrases that Continetti quotes are taken from Ross Douthat and Reihan Salam, both of whom, like Continetti, are vociferously—one might even say fanatically—anti-Trump. At least they, unlike Kesler, give Trump credit for having identified the right stance on today’s most salient issues. Yet, paradoxically, they won’t vote for Trump whereas Kesler hints that he will. It’s reasonable, then, to read into Kesler’s esoteric endorsement of Trump an implicit acknowledgment that the crisis is, indeed, pretty dire. I expect a Claremont scholar to be wiser than most other conservative intellectuals, and I am relieved not to be disappointed in this instance.

Yet we may also reasonably ask: What explains the Pollyanna-ish declinism of so many others? That is, the stance that Things-Are-Really-Bad—But-Not-So-Bad-that-We-Have-to-Consider-Anything-Really-Different! The obvious answer is that they don’t really believe the first half of that formulation. If so, like Chicken Little, they should stick a sock in it. Pecuniary reasons also suggest themselves, but let us foreswear recourse to this explanation until we have disproved all the others.

Whatever the reason for the contradiction, there can be no doubt that there is a contradiction. To simultaneously hold conservative cultural, economic, and political beliefs—to insist that our liberal-left present reality and future direction is incompatible with human nature and must undermine society—and yet also believe that things can go on more or less the way they are going, ideally but not necessarily with some conservative tinkering here and there, is logically impossible.

Let’s be very blunt here: if you genuinely think things can go on with no fundamental change needed, then you have implicitly admitted that conservatism is wrong. Wrong philosophically, wrong on human nature, wrong on the nature of politics, and wrong in its policy prescriptions. Because, first, few of those prescriptions are in force today. Second, of the ones that are, the left is busy undoing them, often with conservative assistance. And, third, the whole trend of the West is ever-leftward, ever further away from what we all understand as conservatism.

If your answer—Continetti’s, Douthat’s, Salam’s, and so many others’—is for conservatism to keep doing what it’s been doing—another policy journal, another article about welfare reform, another half-day seminar on limited government, another tax credit proposal—even though we’ve been losing ground for at least a century, then you’ve implicitly accepted that your supposed political philosophy doesn’t matter and that civilization will carry on just fine under leftist tenets. Indeed, that leftism is truer than conservatism and superior to it.

If you somehow missed The Flight 93 Election back when it originally appeared, then I urge you—nay, I implore you, I beseech you—to hie thee thither to rectify that deficiency without delay. I assure you, you’ll be glad you did.

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