Big tsimmis – Page 51

Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Mike

The small-business levee is dry.

Lockdown proponents across the media are smugly patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that stay-at-home policies didn’t harm the economy. Try telling that to the millions of small-business owners who were irreparably damaged by prolonged and irrational restrictions.

With many big corporations deemed “essential,” and a stock market propped up by the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to see economic strength and miss the glaring weaknesses.

While Walmart and Target continue to beat earnings expectations, small businesses struggle to survive. Nearly two-thirds of them are hitting only half or less of their pre-lockdown monthly revenue levels, according to Alignable’s June Road to Recovery report.

Then there are the businesses that never recovered at all. The Biden administration recently projected that more than 400,000 small businesses have closed permanently, but that’s likely a massive underestimate: Already by June 2020, the Hamilton Project had counted 400,000 closures. Opportunity Insights data, meanwhile, show that by the end of May 2021, there were 38.9 percent fewer small businesses open nationwide than at the outset of 2020.

Small business forms the US economy’s backbone, accounting for more than 99 percent of all business entities, and before 2020, around half of growth domestic product and jobs.

And these businesses bore the brunt of lockdowns. The Alignable report found that 37 percent of small businesses couldn’t pay their rent in full and on time. Millions of small-business owners have six-to-seven-figure debt liability, much of it personally guaranteed.

And as if lockdowns weren’t enough, those small firms desperately trying to save their businesses now can’t find workers, thanks in large part to government interfering in the labor market via enhanced unemployment benefits and direct stimulus payments that incentivize not working.

If the government actively set out to reward big businesses and punish small ones, how would it look any different?

This is an American tragedy. Small businesses provide economic freedom for tens of millions of people.

Which ought to make it crystal clear why it happened. We’re looking at an American tragedy right enough, but killing off small business isn’t all of it. The incremental erasure of entrepreneurship has been ongoing for years now, and is but a single component of a much larger tragedy: the end of America That Was itself.

Understand: whether it’s automobiles, single-family homes, Christianity, honest elections, speech, guns, or small businesses, there is absolutely NO aspect of freedom and self-determination they won’t try to undermine, discredit, and ultimately do away with.

Update! A small-business story that ain’t nothing but pure-tee, hunnert ‘n’ ten proof America, in all the very best ways.

BUCKSTOWN, Pa.—The Duppstadt’s Country Store, sitting high on a plateau along the Lincoln Highway between Stoystown and Reels Corner, has served Somerset County residents and weary travelers since 1903. When you open the heavy wooden door and hear it creak with age, you get the sense you have entered somewhere special.

Not because it has stayed frozen in time, but because it has stood the test of time—surviving all the winds of change while adjusting and prevailing through every decade it has stood on its perch.

From Civil War veterans stopping on their way to Gettysburg to celebrate the anniversaries marking that pivotal battle to the World War I troops on their way to the 10th Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard headquarters for Company C before heading to areas of conflict to today’s young families shopping for necessities, this place has seen it all.

It was here both shoppers and the owners saw Flight 93 pierce the clear blue skies on September 11, 2001, shaking the ground under them when it slammed into a field just over the hill in Shanksville.

Anyone in the store that day or next door at the Lincoln Cafe diner stood momentarily frozen at the sight of the black smoke rising from the crash. Many of those same people then rushed in their cars to the fire stations where they volunteered and were the first on the scene to help a clearly helpless situation.

The Duppstadt family is the third family to own the store since it opened in 1903, according to Mike Duppstadt, one of five siblings who co-owns the business. This store was started by the Williamson family, who operated it for a while before Jack and Helen Spangler bought it and called it the Clover Leaf Farm store. Duppstadt’s parents bought it in 1971 from the Spanglers.

As I speak to him, Mike is sitting outside the store on a long wooden bench with his sister Michelle. All five siblings have full-time jobs outside of the store. He is a contractor, she is a nurse, and they rotate shifts working at the store along with nieces and nephews.

Next door, his wife Robin and their daughter Kate are handling the kitchen of the Lincoln Cafe diner. The family just bought it in March. The cheeseburgers are arguably the best you’ll ever find, and they’ve added a bakery case in the front of the diner with sugary raised donuts that are divine.

I just bet they are at that. Somehow back in my frequent endless rides through backroads Pennsylvania, I missed this little store, but Salena Zito’s article almost makes me want to get back out on the road again for a visit. Read on, it’s good stuff.

Patience will out

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

An (eventually, ultimately) optimistic take from Robert Gore.

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

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

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

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

Government of the savages, by the savages, and for the savages doesn’t have much to draw on, and decades of propaganda have told savages to look to the government for every need. Vegetarian stew in every pot, two Teslas in every garage, paid for diplomas on every wall, a band-aid for every scratch, and a kiss for every boo-boo are just the minimum of what they’ve been told to expect. If they don’t get them it’s the selfish civilized’s fault. But who will they blame when the selfish civilized skip town or quit? And who will feed them?

The separatists will have the productive capabilities. Many of the country’s honest entrepreneurs (as opposed to its crony socialists) have already migrated. They will also have military expertise, especially after the savages eliminate retrograde rightwingerism and transform the US military into the most diverse, empathetic, and politically correct conflict resolution force the world has ever seen. (Oh, how the world trembles!) Notwithstanding the many thanks they’ve received for their service to the savages’ government, many veterans will join the civilized.

After last year’s mostly peaceful riots and the January 6 Insurrection That Nearly Overthrew The Most Exceptional Government In History, many savages bought firearms for the first time. Unfortunately for them, there’s a big difference between buying a firearm and knowing what to do with it, and most of that knowledge (and millions of firearms) are on the side of the vets and the civilized.

Many of the vets have also received on-the-job training in guerrilla warfare, against which the US government is batting zero. The government has many scary weapons, but it has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep such weapons out of the hands of its adversaries. Perhaps the separatists will prove as clever and capable as the Vietnamese, al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, and Iraqis and other groups have been at capturing US government weaponry. Notwithstanding their diversity, empathy, and political correctness, the conflict resolution forces would then find their weapons turned against them.

At this point, imagination is far more important than a deer-in-the-headlights’ fixation on present realities, because those realities are changing so quickly and chaotically. When the ground is continuously shifting under your feet, you can’t know where you are with any certainty. Your chance of saving yourself depends on knowing where you want to go and having an idea of how to get there.

Skepticism about imminent revolutionary change is understandable, but often betrays a misunderstanding of how revolutions in politics, science, culture, art, philosophy, learning, and all other fields of productive human endeavor work. The explosion visible to all is almost always preceded by a long, burning fuse visible to few and understood by fewer, only generally apprehended after the explosion.

The burning fuse in this case is the awesome force of decentralization sweeping the planet; the revolution is actually well underway. Centralization is a legacy idea and government is its legacy institution. After centuries of centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government failures, and after the failure of the most centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government in history, legions of intellectuals of impaired intellect and infinitesimal imagination still hail or fear a centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical global government. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there trying to institute such a government, but they’re building a three-foot-high wall of beach mud and sand against a tidal wave.

That wave will arrive, of that there can be no doubt. Afterwards people will point to some contemporaneous event as the catalyst, but the catalysts have been accumulating for decades, their leitmotif decentralization. Multi-volume sets could be written about them all.

Don’t get too attached to today; tomorrow it’s gone. The questions that will emerge from the chaotic maelstrom: Freedom or tyranny? Civilization or savagery? Anyone who chooses civilized freedom is going to have to fight for it, but it’s a fight that can and will be won.

We can but hope…and prepare, plan, and load magazines.

I preminisce no return of the salad days

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

Another Ironbear masterpiece of commentry that needs to be moved out front here.

There is no going back. We live in post-America now, and have for quite some time. We can’t go back to the America of the Founding any more than we can go back to the bright, shiny, thriving, hopeful and optimistic America of the ’50s. There is no time machine that will take us there.

Conservative thinkers like Smith, Codevilla, and the rest err in thinking that there is somehow some way to dismantle and excise the degeneracy of Progressivism while keeping the worthwhile parts of what Codevilla calls “Republican America”.

There is not.

Post-America is not going to somehow revitalize and go back to being America. We’re in the degenerate phase of a decadent civilization, and, to date, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a degenerate civilization that has reversed course and revitalized into a thriving, growing, and vital civilization.

Breakup and partition is inevitable at this point. Empires always fall apart.

What grows out of that is no more going to resemble the America of George Washington than the Western Civilization that grew out of the breakup of the Roman Empire resembled Classical Rome.

The primary question at this point, and the one that thinkers like Smith and Codevilla refuse to face squarely – because that would require admitting that they’re spinning their wheels – is whether the breakup and collapse will be slow and gradual over centuries like Rome, or fast and bloody like Yugoslavia.

I don’t believe that quick and peaceful like Czechoslovakia or even the Soviet Union is in the cards for us.

The secondary question is: What comes next? What grows out of rubble?

Smith and Codevilla can’t answer that for the same reason I can’t: the caterpillar can’t envision the butterfly.

Yup, that’s about the size of it. I myself am frequently guilty of using phrases like “restoring America” and the like, despite knowing that such a thing not only won’t happen, it in fact CAN’T happen. We’re walking on uncharted and extremely dangerous ground now, and the destination is uncertain at best.

“Can Radical Federalism Save America?”

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Worth a try, of course. But doubtful. Very, very doubtful.

Eminent conservative thinker Angelo Codevilla had an article titled “To Rescue a Nation” last week at the American Mind that’s very much worth reading. To save the republic means ending the escalating tensions and conflicts precipitated by growing divisions. A radical approach is necessary.

To allow divergent peoples to peacefully coexist and find some commonality of purpose so the nation may survive, differences must be accepted and governance made to conform to that reality. To achieve that good result, Codevilla asserts that we need a “radical de-centralization” or, as might be said, a radical federalization of the nation. It’s the remedy for saving the country from disunion or tyranny. But is this worthy goal achievable?

Almost certainly not. At this point, whether it’s even desirable or not is eminently debatable. There’s a certain inconvenient reality the more reticent and respectable commentariat overlooks that undoes every argument they try to make: the nation is ALREADY split, in every truly meaningful sense. The divergence of political ideology, ambition, and intent has widened into a yawning chasm. It is a gap that can no longer be bridged. The point is moot; tyranny is already in place, and the only thing disunion lacks is an official, de jure proclamation of it.

The arguments proferred by authoritarian Leftists—who loathe the Founders’ conception of what constitutes just and legitimate governance to their very marrow—and those of Real Americans—who revere those noble principles, mourn their loss, and wish to see them restored to their rightful primacy—are wholly intractable. Tyranny and liberty are incompatible; sooner or later, the eternal conflict between them will be resolved. History shows that it will not, it cannot, be done peaceably unless one side acquiesces. The author knows this as well as the rest of us do:

We’re tempted to say that Codevilla’s vision aligns the nation more closely with its inception, with the Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union — at least in that spirit. A looser federation of states and enhanced localities with Washington more focused on core functions — national defense being preeminent – would boost chances of the United States continuing as one nation.

But there’s a sticking point, and it isn’t trifling. In fact, for the nation’s elites (the oligarchs — Codevilla uses that descriptor, too) and the left, radical decentralization is precisely what they oppose. Whereas republican America would, and portions of Woke America may, welcome a significant decentralization, which amounts to a policy of “live and let live,” a radical centralization of the nation is what oligarchs and the left seek.

The oligarchs do so, principally, for power that leads to wealth. The left, which holds to Marxism, lusts for power and seeks wealth but also craves control over lives. Marxism — not judged by its blarney, but by its practice – demonstrates that it’s about hierarchy, concentrations of power, and control — not of an authoritarian stripe, but a totalitarian one, as history makes abundantly clear.

Today, these anti-liberty factions are playing a zero-sum game, and they’ve given no indications that they’re willing to compromise or are open to realignments of government that thwart their aspirations.

Which is precisely the tack Team Liberty must now take also. It was the starry-eyed “willingness to compromise” and blasé acceptance of “realignments of government that thwart their aspirations,” combined with their fatally-mistaken granting of an undeserved assumption of honest intentions and fair-mindedness to the Left that got us all in this mess.

Alas, this is where I must part ways with the author, who otherwise seems to grasp our conundrum more acutely than most.

Codevilla says that to rally and lead a national movement a galvanizing figure must emerge. He doesn’t appear to be keen on Trump, because he believes Trump is too self-focused. Here we disagree. Trump has largely galvanized Red or republican America. As president, despite relentless hostilities, he accomplished for the nation. He drew large audiences, in person and across mediums, including last Saturday night at an Ohio rally. Yet, the organization behind Trump has been inchoate and most often ad hoc. Trump may be the General Washington republican America needs. What he requires are able lieutenants who can effectively organize behind him.

In a word: NO. Trump’s time has passed. He had his opportunity, and whatever may have motivated him to do so, he failed to seize it. He may or may not have some part to play in what’s to come, I really couldn’t say. But he has shown himself to be a far less effective champion than Real Americans had hoped. Love him or hate him, when the rubber met the road he took his foot off the gas and stalled the car. I can no longer see him as the man to get the motor running again and drive us on to where we need to be.

With the closer, the article gets back in track.

A critical consideration is that the oligarchs and left would offer robust counters to republican America’s “defensive” offensives. The stakes are sky-high for them. We must grasp the nature of the enemy.

Men and women, bent on domination, and in many cases, with years of sweat equity invested in achieving their aims, aren’t going to be quickly deterred. They will fight and fight hard. As we saw during the Trump presidency, they have no compunction about using false accusations and illegality (Russia Collusion hoax), destroying reputations, brazen disinformation (the January 6 “insurrection”), resorting to election chicanery, stoking public fear as a means of manipulation (COVID lockdowns), and loosing Antifa and BLM to incite riots. Exposed in 2020 was the ugliness and, in fact, ruthlessness, of anti-liberty factions. They can get uglier and more ruthless without a doubt.

And they will. None but a fool could have any doubt about that by now. As has been more than amply demonstrated, they intend to rule. There is no length to which they won’t go to make that happen—none. Will we let them?

Which isn’t an argument against fully joining the fight and committing to nothing less than total victory. Republican America has plenty at stake, too: the rule of law and liberty. It’s simply to impart the understanding that in war — cold, hot, or somewhere in-between — it’s best to anticipate a greater intensity of conflict for a longer duration than decent people would hope, particularly when wars are civil in nature.

The status quo is unsustainable. The question is, can republican America win the day, ushering in a fundamental decentralization of the nation, thereby permitting divergent peoples to share one nation, bound by some traditions and some shared beliefs and aspirations? Perhaps. Or will this clash between very different worldviews lead to the permanent partition of America? Or will it boil down to a zero-sum game, with one or the other side prevailing? Much awaits future events.

There should be no further discussion of whether “republican American” CAN win the day. It’s deflating, demoralizing thumbsuckery, and we can no longer afford to indulge in it. “Republican America” MUST win, and that’s flat. No matter what it takes, no matter how distasteful the actions required of us, the alternative is far too terrible to contemplate.

Courtroom wrangling, legislative mucking about, the strongest imaginable words, idle daydreams of a way out that doesn’t involve resorting to violence against an enemy that has already done just that—none of these, alone or combined, are anywhere near sturdy enough tools to wreak a reconciliation between two adversaries whose commitment to diametrically-opposed beliefs is unswerving. He who flinches from battle has already lost the war. Try as we might to find another path, throughout human history it has always come down to the same, simple equation: One side must win. One side must lose.

We MUST not lose.

An encouraging word

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Since I couldn’t make it work as a comment over at Expat’s joint, I’ll just post this here and hope he sees it:

“A single grateful thought toward heaven is the most perfect prayer.” — Gotthold Ephraim Lessing

One of the best, most profound quotes I know of. Hang in there, ol’ son. Long as you’re still breathing, they haven’t beat you yet.

DOOOOOMED!!!

Posted on June 29, 2021June 29, 2021 by Mike

Everybody got their last will and testaments current and their life insurance paid up?

Top experts have likened the COVID-19 “Delta Variant” to the common cold and hay fever. This comes as people like Anthony Fauci, Boris Johnson, and the WHO are pushing for more social distancing, lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccinations.

Experts in the United Kingdom have compared the symptoms of the COVID-19 “Delta Variant” to that of hay fever and the common cold, according to various reports. The new strain has reportedly been the cause of 99% of all new COVID-19 cases in the UK. “The main symptoms of COVID-19 appear to have changed — with headaches and sore throats now more common than fevers and coughs, according to a warning by UK experts,” noted the New York Post.

Dr. Fauci continues to assert that “the Delta variant is currently the greatest threat in the US to our attempt to eliminate COVID-19,” which reportedly has accounted for 20% of all new COVID-19 cases in the United States. Fauci maintains that COVID-19 vaccines can protect people from the “Delta Variant,” adding that young, unvaccinated people are “more vulnerable than ever.”

However, many Americans are skeptical about the COVID-19 vaccinations they’ve received amid reports of the “Delta Variant” infecting individuals after they’ve been fully vaccinated. As was reported by the Wall Street Journal, “About half of adults infected in an outbreak of the Delta variant of Covid-19 in Israel were fully inoculated with the Pfizer Inc. vaccine, prompting the government to reimpose an indoor mask requirement and other measures to contain the highly transmissible strain.”

On May 13, Joe Biden told America to “get vaccinated or wear a mask until you do,” prompting hundreds of millions of Americans to eventually receive their COVID-19 vaccines.

I will not comply, and you and your grubby little bureau-stooges can all go fuck yourselves. Preferably, with something razor sharp, rusty, and very, very girthy.

Whacked

Posted on June 28, 2021 by Mike

John McAfee did NOT kill himself.

Getting subtle messages from U.S. officials saying, in effect: "We're coming for you McAfee! We're going to kill yourself". I got a tattoo today just in case. If I suicide myself, I didn't. I was whackd. Check my right arm.$WHACKD available only on https://t.co/HdSEYi9krq🙂 pic.twitter.com/rJ0Vi2Hpjj

— John McAfee (@officialmcafee) November 30, 2019

Eric Weinstein, whom I can’t say I’m familiar with, backs McAfee up.

John reached out to me not all that long ago. I also will not kill myself. I’m not suicidal.

Also, this is getting fucking ridiculous.

This authoritarian turn around Epstein, Wuhan, Ivermectin, “Fortifying Democracy”, UAP, climate, mostly peaceful protests, Leaked Tax Returns…

…mandatory racism exorcism at work, #metoo witch hunts, shadowbanning, Build Back Better, Trust and Safety, TOS changes, compulsory speech, ANTIFA denials, Labor Shortage claims, denial etc…etc… is clearly a repudiation of all the US stands for. He was bugged by it all.

And if you mention the ENORMOUS number of issues that are behaving in this *same* totally artificial fashion, the reputation attacks SOAR from all sides.

What the hell has control of the US and why is it localized to the Democratic Party & it’s associated media and businesses?
I wish I could remember his call w/ more precision. But it was when I was in San Francisco. I couldn’t believe I was known to him.

NOTE: I will be taking a new approach to all repetitive doxing, reputational or other attacks as a result.

Think I’m done fucking around.

Having been menaced over asking for Epstein as a fake “Disgraced Financier” to be called out by our press and connected to any intelligence services, this takes on new meaning.

At this late date, it’s abundantly clear that we ALL better be done fucking around.

(Via Ace)

Unrecognizable America

Posted on June 28, 2021June 28, 2021 by Mike

This one has so many tasty lines in it it’s hard to choose which ones I’ll be stealing for future use. A couple of them might even need to go into the sidebar’s Notable Quotes section, that’s how good they are. But then, it’s Steyn, so that comes as no big surprise.

It is not at all clear to me that many of America’s conservative politicians understand the seriousness of all this. You can see it in the fact that they go around trying to scare people with the specter of a “radical socialist agenda.” For well over a year now, we have been living in a world in which it’s accepted as normal that the state has essentially unlimited power—and in which our freedom to decide for ourselves has been diminished almost to invisibility. Why do these conservative politicians think the words “radical socialist agenda” still scare anyone in a time when the state can tell us whether we can have Aunt Mabel over for Christmas? They are completely out of touch.

Over the same period as the pandemic lockdowns, we have seen an escalation of so-called wokeness. And if you look at one of the most startling manifestations of this, transgender fanaticism—which involves, after all, the abolition of biological sex and, I’m sorry to have to say it, the physical mutilation of children—one notices that America is farther down this road than any other country in the Western world. In other words, at this moment of crisis for Western Civilization, or for what we used to call Christendom, the leading country of the free world is pulling the wrong way.

Think of it. Your daughter has been training since she was a little girl to run in school sports. Now at 17, she’s in the state high school track championships, and you are forbidden even to notice that she’s competing against a woman who is 6’2” with thighs like tugboats, a great touch of five o’clock shadow on her face, and the most muscular bosom you’ve ever seen. You’re not supposed to notice the craziness of this, and the craziness is at its craziest right here in America.

We traditionally think of France as being a bit screwy, but today there are French intellectuals who regard themselves as hardcore leftists and yet who think America has gone bonkers on this transgender issue. President Macron himself has said that American wokeness is an existential threat to the French Republic, and he even found bureaucrats in France’s education bureaucracy who agreed. There is not a single bureaucrat in the Department of Education in Washington, D.C., who would agree, but there are apparently a few in Paris.

If you look further east in Europe to the lands that were once behind the Iron Curtain—to Hungary, Poland, and the Czech Republic, which still function as conventional nation-states calculating their best interests—you find tremendous fear of the threat of wokeness that is being exported, sometimes aggressively, from America. So it is here in the U.S. where we have to put the stake through these ideas.

Not to be too pedantic and literal and all about that last metaphor, but you can’t put a stake through an idea. You have to put a stake through the people who promulgate the idea, before the toxic thing takes hold so deeply it becomes damned near impossible to uproot, like the noxious, strangling weed it is.

Getting back to the southern border, it perfectly symbolizes the bifurcation of our society. We’re told there’s a health emergency. We’re told we can’t open our businesses or attend weddings or funerals. Yet at the same time, every day, thousands of people pour across the southern border, test positive for COVID, and are then driven to a nice hotel and put up there at taxpayers’ expense.

It’s also interesting to compare the southern border with the northern. Prior to the pandemic, when the border with Canada was open, my kids had their Kinder Eggs confiscated by the Department of Homeland Security when we would cross the border going south into Vermont. Kinder Eggs are chocolate eggs with a kid’s toy inside. They are sold in Canada, but they are banned in the U.S. because the Food and Drug Administration calls the toy a “non-nutritive embed”—and that’s good enough to send Homeland Security agents swinging into action! There is always a big crackdown before Easter on Kinder Eggs. So at the northern border there are lots of things, down to Kinder Eggs, that are illegal. But at the southern border you can come in with pretty much anything you want, including COVID. Why is that? It is because some groups serve the needs of the ruling class and others don’t. License is extended to the former and not the latter.

People ask me, “Why are you going on about Kinder Eggs? They’re not important. It’s more important that so-and-so is up two points in Iowa and three points in New Hampshire. That could be a real game changer.” To which I answer no, that’s not how it works. If they take the small freedoms away from you, whether it’s the freedom to eat Kinder Eggs or to enjoy a high pressure shower, you will lose all the larger freedoms, which is the world we’re in now.

I used to get occasional pushback when I’d talk about rights. “Rights are abstract things,” people would say—“they don’t have anything to do with our real lives.” Well, after the last year, we know they have everything to do with our real lives. When you’re told you can’t open your hair salon, when you’re told you can’t have family or friends over for dinner, when you’re told you must wear a mask in your own garden, there’s nothing abstract about it. This is where all the stupid Kinder Egg laws have been trending for years. And it’s why we need to push back.

President Macron of France is not my favorite chap—he’s a sinister globalist for one thing. But he made an admirable stand when he announced that not one French statue would be taken down and not a single French street name would be changed, because they are all part of French history. And “Bingo!” as Peter Navarro likes to say, the statue toppling and street-name changing in France went away. Why can’t American conservatives show that kind of strength? The Senate Minority Leader says he personally would not be bothered if the historical names of U.S. military bases are changed. The editor of National Review says that he wouldn’t be bothered about taking down Confederate statues. But of course it doesn’t stop there—now they’re going for all the statues. Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, McKinley, and on and on. The point conservatives need to grasp is, unless you’re prepared to surrender everything, don’t surrender anything.

I’ll end by pointing out that the Left wins because it seizes language. Take the policy of letting people vote who are not U.S. citizens and shouldn’t be voting. The Left calls this policy “counting every vote.” Therefore someone who wants to make sure voters are citizens is opposed to “counting every vote.” If we don’t take back the language, we will lose the truth. Even on FOX News, I have noticed, news anchors now talk about “gender assigned at birth,” as if that’s something different from one’s biological sex. There may be 57 genders, but there are only two biological sexes.

Don’t surrender the language. Reclaim the language. It’s the first step to recovering our civilization.

Although it’s always a worthwhile endeavor, I’d say all this has gone way too far for reclaiming the language to be of any substantive help. In the end that’s basically just a mental exercise, and fixing this squalid mess, I’m afraid, is going to require MUCH more drastic measures—physical ones, IYKWIMAITYD.

Days of future past

Posted on June 27, 2021June 27, 2021 by Mike

Bear writes a letter of explanation to a future that is by no means assured.

Dear Future Generations,

How did this happen? How did America go insane, and destroy itself? How did…

Renaming “French Fries” to “Freedom Fries” become the same as “I don’t like what you said, so I’m going to dox you so someone can find and physically attack you, destroy your business, cancel your social media presence, close your bank accounts, and hound the would-be survivors to death” cancel culture?

“Silence is violence” but “violence is speech” become a respected take?

Looting is reparations?

2 + 2 = 4 is racist?

Equality in opportunity is equity in outcome?

Politicians actively agree to actively violate state election laws to aid the opposing party?

A human with XY chromosomes is female, not male?

And we’ll pass laws forcing everyone to believe that (or at least actively fake it)?

That’s but a taste of a necessarily lengthy list, arriving here:

Future generations, I did not make up any of that. It was (is, as I type) real. How, you ask. It started generations ago. In America; the roots go back to the 19th century and more. But I’ll give you the short form. Maybe you’ll find books that survived the burning that has started, that will explain more details.

It’s a long ‘un, of which you should certainly read the all. Really, though, the explanation is summed up concisely by the very next ‘graph:

People wanted power over others. America had a Constitution that limited their ability to simply seize it, so they tried something else.

Annnnd BINGO. The same old problem, whose only solution is extremely distasteful to every decent human being of sound mind. Yet those same decent, peaceable people will forever be forced to embrace said unpleasantness nonetheless, which is no more nor less than the price of liberty. The day any particular generation declines to shoulder the cost of securing and maintaining their freedom and natural rights is also the day they admit themselves unworthy of them. Taken all together, these are the overarching paradoxes of life on this existential plane.

(Via WRSA)

Learning from history…or not

Posted on June 26, 2021June 26, 2021 by Mike

Sarah says a mouthful.

APROPOS OF PETER GRANT’S BLOG POST, YOU MIGHT FIND THIS BOOK USEFUL: The Washing of the Spears: The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation Under Shaka and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879 (Touchstone Books) by Donald R. Morris.

There probably is some bias in there (and not on the side of white anything) though I don’t remember detecting it, when I did my deep dive into African history 17 years ago. What became very clear to me is that whenever civilized (in this case defined as post-tribal) humans collide with tribal humans, tribal humans lose. They use the techniques that work in between tribes, imagining that their adversaries are also a tribe:

They start off with unimaginable massacres and horrible evil in the belief that this will cause the adversaries to back off. Because this works, between tribes. But when you’re dealing with people who view human individuals as both important, and important regardless of tribe, the more atrocities they commit the more they aggravate the anger of the civilized people.

The civilized hold back, afraid of committing atrocities, and the tribal humans commit more atrocities, and act like victors, while doing truly horrific things.

And then at some point the post-tribal people lose it.

What comes after is usually horrific and causes college social studies majors to cry centuries later.

This dance has been performed over and over and over again, since Rome at least. Since we had a polity that transcended tribes. The end is always the same.

So, the neo-tribal barbarians of the left who are following the script to the letter might wish to hear and revise their tactics. They won’t, of course, but we should warn them, all the same. Since we’re the ones who are trying to avoid the horrors.

I’ve said the same myself, countless times. And like Sarah is beginning to, I long since despaired of the purblind fools ever waking up and taking their foot off the accelerator pedal, or at least just reducing speed slightly. But no. For them it can only ever be full throttle, and pay no never-mind to that big brick wall looming just up the road a piece. With those who refuse to pay heed, warnings are useless. It appears they can only learn the hardest possible way, if at all.

So be it, then. Time for them to get schooled.

Up and up and up some more

Posted on June 25, 2021June 25, 2021 by Mike

BidenFlation, let’s call it.

Okay, I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and suggest that this CAN’T be a sign of anything good.

All this, mind, in only one (1) year. Actually, less, since the drooling moron and his Shadowman handlers only usurped power a few short months ago.

(Via Vanderleun)

“Freedom” Day

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

As Steyn says, it’s been postponed till further notice.

To our readers in the United Kingdom Happy Freedom Day! By proclamation of “Boris” Johnson (phoney name, phoney guy), today was supposed to mark the end of all lockdown restrictions in his benighted land. Unfortunately, freedom has had to be “postponed” until July 19th, supposedly because of the “Delta variant”, which is puttering along nicely while the ChiComs fine-tune the Epsilon variant in time for its soft launch in Chad or Bolivia around July 12th.

On the surface, naming the day “Freedom Day” concedes the case of old Boris chums like Toby Young and James Delingpole that the year-plus lockdown is a massive unprecedented assault on free peoples’ core freedoms. On the other hand, naming the day “Freedom Day” also reminds the masses that freedom is not an inalienable right but the gift of the state, and the state giveth and taketh away and in this third decade of the third millennium inclines more toward the latter.

The citizenry (if it is not entirely risible so to dignify them) is getting used to it. One almost suspects the now routine leaked video of our rulers “accidentally” whooping it up maskless at the G7 or Nato cocktail soirées mwa-mwa-ing each other with triple-kisses and hugs and Uncle Joe sniffing the Euro-chicks’ hair while their experts recommend masks for the rest of us in perpetuity is intentional: it is designed to accustom the Great Tested & Jabbed Unwashed to the distinction between us and them.

Anthony Fauci has been in his present job since 1967. When he was first appointed, he reported to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who has since become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But, whatever you call them, there have been twenty of them since Fauci took lifetime office: Does it really make any difference to him who’s attending Cabinet meetings? A year or two and some other transient schlub will be there; what’s the diff?

Oh, well, ultimately the Secretary of Health and Whatever reports to the President, who is chosen (mostly) by a self-governing people. But Fauci took office when Lyndon Johnson was president. So he has “served” a quarter of all presidents in the history of the republic. Last year I started joking that Fauci was the J Edgar Hoover of public health, but the gag does him an injustice: He has already outlasted three more presidents than Hoover and he intends to be here for President Kamala, President Ocasio or whoever’s next.

As you know, I get complaints that I don’t write more about Mitch McConnell or Joe Manchin – and the short answer is it’s because it’s like following an exciting badminton match during the Blitz. The Fauci emails are fascinating because they reveal the corruption of the bureaucracy. We babes in the wood assume that when you want to infiltrate and compromise a government you try to wangle somebody into the laughably misnamed “intelligence community” – as Hillary did with dossier boy Christopher Steele. But the sophisticates in Beijing figured out the opportunities in infiltrating as boring a backwater as public health. The key revelation in the emails concern the bureaucracy’s determination to quash any suggestion that Covid might have originated in the lab of their Chinese-controlled/US-funded friends – to the point where by last summer all meaningful investigation by the United States Government of the origin of an ongoing global pandemic had ceased…because it was stymied not by the ChiComs but by US bureaucrats.

You don’t need a presidency-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life – and, if you’ve got the right bureaucracy-for-life, you don’t need life, as the good folks of many parts of the “free world” have come to accept.

The greatest day in the lives of our globalist, authoritarian oligarchs was the day they all learned that they wouldn’t need to bother taking anybody’s freedom; we were perfectly willing to hand it over quietly, with no resistance, out of sheer panic.

Segregation today, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever?

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

George Wallace might soon be proved righter than anybody knew.

Marriage is supposed to be forever. That is the symbolism of the wedding ring, a piece of precious metal with no end. But the reality is that some marriages just won’t work. There can be what marriage law calls irreconcilable differences – differences so great that separation is the only solution.

The same thing happens with groups of people. Nations. They can have irreconcilable differences, so they break up. This is an interesting YouTube video that shows how the borders of Europe have changed, every year, since 400 BC. A lot of this, of course, is conquest. But look at more recent history, from 1988 to 2012. This is a story of irreconcilable differences, of people who had lived under the same government but decided they were better off governing themselves.

What about people who try to live together generation after generation but still don’t get along – and may even hate each other? The United States has certainly reached that point. There is more hostility, more disunity than at any time since the Civil War. The political hostility between Right and Left is vicious, but the real problem is race. The deepest hatred in this country is racial hatred. It infects every issue in politics: medicine, welfare, education, the judiciary, the budget – race poisons them all.

And the most open race hatred in America is the hatred of blacks for whites. Often, the blacks who benefit most from American society seem to hate us the most. Ta-Nehisi Coates is one of the most influential and honored black authors in America. Let me quote him: “I would like to tell you that a day approaches when white people renounce this demon religion [of white supremacy] and begin to think of themselves as human. But I can see no real promise of such a day.” I didn’t realize I was part of a demon religion.

Taylor then offers depressingly numerous examples of other prominent Nee-grows openly celebrating their implacable, murderous hatred of whites, including explicit calls for genocide and the “elimination” of whites, before throwing down the gauntlet:

Now, do all non-white people hate us? Of course not. But have you ever heard a black person say, “I really like white people.” Or even just, “Some of my best friends are white.” From psychoanalysts to best-selling authors to preachers to gun-toting radicals the message is clear. We are terrible people and always will be.

But if we are demented predators who murder black and brown people with impunity and are a collective pandemic, why don’t they leave? Why not back to Africa? I think I know why.

When whites ran it, South Africa was the most developed country in black Africa. Now, it can’t keep the lights on. In the townships, where many blacks live, people just hook up to the power lines and steal electricity. See video here. Bad maintenance and a complete inability to build new power plants mean most places in the country have power cuts of several hours *every day.* There are 26 countries where the per capita GDP is less than $1,000 a year. Twenty-two of them are in black Africa, and the 23rd is Haiti.

Not very enticing.

So, black people, you benefit immeasurably from living with us whites. You need us. Badly. We don’t need you. I’m calling your bluff. If all white institutions are full of systemic racism, leave them. There are already 107 Historically Black Colleges and Universities. Train your own doctors, historians, politicians. If white police are killing blacks and browns with impunity, set up your own police.

And why would you want to be anywhere near people you hate? American blacks spend $1.2 trillion a year. That’s more than the entire GDP of Mexico. You have the resources to work, live, and go to school far away from horrible people like me. You could do it — if you dared.

But I suspect deep down, you and all the other non-whites who love to vent hatred and scorn for my race, my heritage, the society my people built – you know you couldn’t even come close. Look at where, in the United States, blacks or Hispanics are already the majority. If you were really on your own, it would be a lot worse than that, because even Detroit and Brownsville, Texas are still part of a nation that white people built.

So keep telling us you just how much you hate us. Keep telling us we have to be eradicated. Do it every chance you get. Eventually, even the most long-suffering white people will realize this is hopeless, and that if this were a marriage, it would have been over long ago. The sooner whites realize this, the sooner what you say is a nightmare – and what we know is a nightmare – will be over.

Remember that animated map of Europe? Borders aren’t permanent, even in the United States. If you’re serious about how much you hate us, escape from us. Build your own communities. Build your own nations. And let us build ours.

I dare you.

Don’t let’s be holding our breath, ‘kay? I mean, why would they, when it’s so much more fun to leech off the comforts of the civilization whites built, bitching all the while about it.

Storm, gathering

Posted on June 19, 2021June 19, 2021 by Mike

Aesop spells it out plainly.

The People will grow weary of the constant lies and machinations of the kakistocracy, and when they go back to the Capitol (as they certainly will), they won’t just be bringing bullhorns the next time. No one can build a wall big enough to stop that, and there aren’t enough troops in the world to prevent it. But whatever rump troops and lapdog stasi are brought will be a handy re-supply point for what follows, once they’re stripped to rotting carcasses and bleached bones.

The whole bunch of Banana Republicans in both parties is rotten, and they’re going to get peeled.

That’s where we are. And that’s where we’re headed, like a freight train.

We’re talking a freight train where we end up stringing up most of institutional and elected Washington by the necks, in batches, in Lafayette Park, and any handy light posts. Not only for crimes already committed, but pour encourager les autres. That’s a feature, not a bug.

And both sides of the Uniparty not only thirst for that train, they’re actually stoking the fires under its boiler with racing fuel to bring it about, to the tune of “MOAR! Faster! Harder!”

So don’t nobody get all butthurt nor surprised when TPTB get their wish, in spades.

You can only push a pendulum (or a population) so far, then it comes all the way back, and wallops you coming and going if you try to stop it.

Pardon me for showing some unrestrained enthusiasm for that day.

I still do regard the Coming Unpleasantness as a thing of horror and dread all up one side, but am developing a growing enthusiasm for it all down the other nonetheless. With every passing day, it becomes more apparent that the current situation is unacceptable; that the divide between authoritarian Leftist zealots and tolerant, broad-minded, freedom-oriented Real Americans can never be bridged; and that the lawless despots, grifters, and wreckers who torment us ceaselessly from their secure Mordor On The Potomac enclaves richly deserve to face a harsh reckoning for their numerous crimes and encroachments.

I wish things were different, that we weren’t where we are. I really, really do. At the same time, I can’t honestly say I consider the prospect of the Bastard Left and Swamp critters all being force-fed a heaping helping of Just Deserts at long last to be completely without its charm.

Update! Francis sees what’s coming too, and expresses the exact same annoyance as I have at the dainty squishes who, despite recognizing the urgency of taking action in resistance against raw tyranny and oppression, still can’t quite bring themselves to honestly square up to the more brutal realities without flinching.

Thanks to a citation by Brock Townsend, I’ve just read this brief essay by Claremont Institute president Ryan P. Williams about the encroachment of totalitarianism. It’s a good piece overall – you’d expect sobriety and rationality from the president of Claremont – but I was particularly struck by Williams’s conclusion:

We should, within the law, plan, act, and organize accordingly—before it’s too late.

I added the emphasis.

“Within the law.” Oh, really? And if “the law” should abrogate the Bill of Rights, impose federal censorship upon all communications, decree the seizure of all privately held firearms, and demand that we cease to oppose the Usurpers by word or deed, what then? Note the recent emanations from the Usurper Regime about “white supremacy” and “domestic terrorism,” its determined efforts to purge patriots from the armed forces, and its relentless use of the media to condemn attempts to audit the 2020 elections, and tell me how far off a law of that sort seems to you.

Thomas Jefferson was aware that private citizens will not easily be moved to rebellion:

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

How long the “train of abuses and usurpations” must be is the question of the hour.

The Usurpers have already done great damage to the United States: to its economy, its international standing, and its citizens’ sense of stability. Under the pretext of the Covid-19 “emergency” it seeks to do still more, though given the intensity of the reaction against the “lockdowns,” mask and vaccine “mandates,” and other nonsense, how far it can go without provoking a rebellion is unclear. What’s perfectly clear is that the Usurpers “want it all:” absolute power, unbounded by any principle of right and wrong. Certainly they have no regard for the constraints of the Constitution. Never mind that it was to the preservation, protection, and defense of that compact that Usurpers Biden and Harris swore themselves. Remember Gropey Joe saying that “no amendment is absolute” — ?

“Salami tactics” have brought the Usurpers this far. You might think they’d have sense enough to stick with what’s worked for them. However, there are signs that they’ve become impatient of any further constraint. Their attacks on the military, the energy industry, the dollar, and the southern border indicate an eagerness to get on with the wholesale demolition of the nation. There have been hints that their next target is the grand collage of retirement funds – 401(k)s, 403(b)s, IRAs, pensions, and the like – upon which Americans rely for the protection of their old ages.

John Locke was darkly foreboding about such things:

Whenever the legislators endeavor to take away and destroy the property of the people, or to reduce them to slavery under arbitrary power, they put themselves into a state of war with the people, who are thereupon absolved of any further obedience, and are left to the common refuge which God hath provided for all men against force and violence.

“Arbitrary power” is what I sense approaching. Indeed, some elements of it are already upon us. There must be a point at which the American people say they’ve had enough.

Oh, there is. And when it’s reached, there’ll be no missing it.

A breach of faith with our Fathers

Posted on June 18, 2021June 18, 2021 by Mike

The roots of the current predicament can be found in our carelessness with the irreplaceable prize we were bequeathed.

A few weeks ago my partner, Kara, and I were given the opportunity to document the family cemetery of Revolutionary War soldier Nathan Carpenter, who fought at Bunker Hill. We received permission from the company that now owns the property to photograph and geotag the graves as part of our long-term project to identify and record the final resting places of all known veterans of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which occurred 246 years ago this week.

This has been a difficult effort for several reasons. First, there is no comprehensive list of soldiers who were engaged in the battle. Apart from a 100-year-old spotty list of New Hampshire soldiers who were at Bunker Hill, I’ve had to comb through muster rolls, local history books, pension applications, and other documents. To date, I’ve identified more than 1,000 confirmed Bunker Hill veterans.

The task has been instructive and rewarding. America is a beautiful place, and we’ve had the opportunity to see some of the wonderful landscapes our country has to offer. And once given the chance to tell people what we’re trying to do, we have received nothing but encouragement and support.

Getting to know the stories of these founding Americans, with all their triumphs, tribulations, and tragedies, has reminded me of how costly and precious is the legacy all of us as Americans have inherited.

Contrary to the current dominant media narrative, these veterans were not fighting for slavery or white supremacy. In fact, there were dozens of African American and Native Americans, even slaves, who fought at Bunker Hill. Peter Salem, Jude Hall, Barzillai Lew, and many others would later serve in many of the war’s biggest battles.

Soldiers from the Mashpee, Wampanoag, Hassanamisco, Nipumc, Tunxis, Mohegan, and Pequot tribes were also present at the battle, stationed east of the Breed’s Hill redoubt along the rail fence, where some of the fiercest fighting took place. Half of the Native Americans present at Bunker Hill would eventually lose their lives in service during the war, either in action or to disease.

We owe much, and seem to care less and less about fulfilling our obligation. The irony is in the nature of the only right and proper method of redeeming our debt, which is simplicity itself: to guard jealously the American legacy of freedom, and remain forever viligant and wary of the ever-present malefactors who are eternally plotting to steal it away from its rightful heirs, at any imaginable opportunity.

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