Big tsimmis – Page 77

Yeah, get bent

Posted on March 16, 2020March 16, 2020 by Mike

One can only stand back in awe of the enormous balls on the ChiCom swine.

Thursday’s allegations from the Chinese Foreign Ministry that the Wuhan coronavirus originated in America and was spread to China by the U.S. military was not a fluke or an example of a rogue spokesman running his mouth.

Foreign Ministry mouthpiece Zhao Lijian doubled down with more allegations on Friday, signaling a major effort by the Chinese Communist Party to gaslight the entire world and avoid responsibility for the global pandemic unleashed by the Chinese government.

At least one other Foreign Ministry spokesman more widely quoted in the West, Geng Shuang, refused to challenge or denounce Zhao’s tweets.

“The international community, including the U.S., have different opinions about the origin of the virus,” was Geng’s comment when asked about Zhao’s theories.

“China always considers this a scientific question, which should be addressed in a scientific and professional manner,” he added.

CNN noticed a “concerted campaign to question the origin of the novel coronavirus” on Chinese social media. Chinese officials are very much a part of this campaign. Zhao’s superior at the Foreign Ministry, Hua Chunying, used the Redfield video as an excuse to thunder that it is “absolutely WRONG and INAPPROPRIATE to call this the Chinese coronavirus.”

Right. So from here on out, then, I will be referring to COVID-19—engineered in a Chinese bioweapons lab in China by Chinese government scientists who are Chinese—as the Chinese Yellow Peril Fu Manchu Wuhan Flu.

With two you get eggroll, motherfuckers.

To the astonishment of precisely no one who knows anything at all about Commies, the evil Chinese bastards are of course lying their Commie asses off.

What calling this latest virus the Wuhan Virus is is a reminder of the multiple contagions China has spawned and released on an unsuspecting world. Nor is connecting some very big, ugly, and obvious dots just another conspiracy theory to be dismissed out of hand.

From the beginning China has been less than forthcoming about this virus and resisted sharing critical data and access to WHO and CDC specialists. And have we forgotten Dr. Li Wenliang, the 33-year-old ophthalmologist based in Wuhan, the epicenter of the contagion, who tried to tell the world that China was hiding something malevolent, only to be silenced and imprisoned by Chinese authorities for allegedly fabricating lies about the disease’s deadly potential? He would later die of the disease he tried to warn us about and the Chinese tried to keep under wraps.

To be clear, this is not to say the Wuhan Virus was part of any biological weapons program or that its release was intentional. It could just be that it was the result of Chernobyl-like sloppiness resulting from a bizarre blend of Chinese culture and global ambition.

Along with the constant lying and obfuscation, the corruption, incompetence, and “sloppiness” are other reliable characteristics of Communist governments. Throw in a total disregard for the innocent lives Commie regimes so casually disrupt, damage, and destroy outright in truly staggering numbers, and you know pretty much everything you should ever need to about Communism, really.

This isn’t the first made-in-China virus Beijing has sprung on the world. And it won’t be the last unless we stop worrying about political correctness and sanction China for what amounts to economic warfare and negligent homicide on a global scale.

Sanction ’em, eh? And how are we gonna pull THAT one off, pray tell? Thanks to the nefarious cabal of politicians and high-level corporate greedheads who sold America down the river for their own selfish gain while we weren’t paying close enough attention, our options now fall somewhere in the vicinity of “precious few good ones,” with a pretty sharpish tilt towards “none whatsoever.”

American manufacturing was transferred en bloc to China long ago while the Americans being slo-mo buggered politely agreed not to notice, re-electing the sleazy, grasping pols who acted in cahoots with the corporate greedheads again and again and again. Sad to say, that last is all on us.

Think I’m kidding about our lack of real options here? The Chinese themselves sure seem confident enough about it:

China is threatening to wreak havoc on America’s drug supply amid the Wuhan coronavirus outbreak. Thanks to our globalist elite and especially missteps during the Obama-Biden administration, Beijing has the power to do just that.

In an article in Xinhua, one of the Chinese Communist Party’s mouthpieces, Beijing threatened that it can impose pharmaceutical export controls after which America will be “plunged into the mighty sea of coronavirus.”

Unfortunately, Beijing isn’t bluffing about this capability.

Nope. in fact, they could do plenty more, and worse, than just that if they wanted.

The last cited article continues from there with a recap of how we wound up as a wholly-owned property of Red China Inc which is guaranteed to chill your very marrow, and enrage you along with it. SPOILER: Sloppy Joe Biden plays a starring role.

Permanent revolution, permanent crisis, permanent instability

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Mike

All features, not bugs.

What this means is that socialism, at least revolutionary socialism, cannot function outside of a crisis. It is a last resort position a desperate people will tolerate in times of extreme duress. That’s the odd thing about the concept. It is an admission that the radical program cannot exist in easy times. It can only thrive when the people, or at least a large swath of them, are sure their existence is on the knife edge. It also means the revolution can never achieve its stated goals.

This contradiction within radicalism is important to keep in mind when looking at modern politics, broadly inclusive of current events. In America, we have been in some form of crisis since the turn of the century. Under Bush the Minor, it was Islamic terrorism that put us on permanent war footing. The ruling class stripped away most of our remaining rights in the name of fighting this existential threat. America now has political prisoners and a security state that spies on citizens.

In the Obama years, the permanent crisis over Islamic terrorism slowly gave way to a laundry list of left-wing bogeymen. Racism, antisemitism, various imaginary crimes against imaginary identity groups. The rape hoax on campus was a classic example of trying to maintain the permanent crisis. Coeds were supposed to act as if Chad and Biff were lurking around every corner, ready to rape them. Of course, this warranted preemptive strikes against Chad and Biff in self-defense.

What the last two decades have been, really starting after the Cold War, is the bourgeois version of permanent revolution. The managerial elite maintain a militant and independent approach to politics, seeing themselves outside of society. They are the revolutionary class that is driving progress by driving the revolution. When they shriek about threats to the democracy, they really mean a threat to the revolution, their revolution, the managerial revolution.

The old radicals understood something about the class war they promoted. Marxist intellectuals understood they lacked the stones to fight for their cause. These were soft men who lived soft lives. The working class, on the other hand, had lots of tough guys comfortable with violence. The bourgeois class was also full of soft men, comfortable living the liberal lifestyle. In a genuine class struggle, they would not stand a chance against the working class. They would not fight.

Ahh, but that’s one of the things that demonstrate the true genius behind Gramsci’s revision of Marx’s original revolutionary theory, see. A slow, semi-clandestine takeover of society’s culture and institutions renders it unnecessary to fight. When done according to Gramsci’s clever recommendations, the frog ends up boiled without any struggle at all.

The managerial revolution, on the other hand, is led by radials, who make many of the same assumptions. The difference is there is no working class. They destroyed it by auctioning off the industrial base. Instead they will use their power over institutions, like the police, the security apparatus, finance and so on, to intimidate the middle-class into going along with the program. The permanent crisis legitimizes endless intrusions into daily life by the managerial state,

The thing is, the permanent crisis has another flaw. It channels the natural energies of a people away from industry and community. The permanent revolution becomes a bonfire onto which is thrown the social capital of a people. For the revolutionary, society is the sum of men, exclusive of their inner connections. They place no value on the social capital they burn for revolutionary fuel, because they see no purpose in it. To the managerial class, society is just kindling.

We are getting a glimpse of this with the Chinese Flu. The federal state is paralyzed by the growing incompetence of the managerial class. State and local responses have been incoherent, because the normal social capital that would animate such a response has been largely destroyed. You cannot have a community response when there are no natural communities of people. Clusters of strangers in temporary developments named after what was knocked down to build them are not communities.

The purpose of government either eventually becomes or is from the beginning to grow, to consolidate and then expand its power over its subjects to the widest extent it can. The problem is that it’s just not possible to effectively micromanage a nation as enormous and heterogenous as this one, no matter how overgrown and intrusive the central government may become. The more power it tries to reach, the more its grasp is exceeded, and the more apparent its metastasizing failure.

Worse (for them), this escalating failure drives them to attempt to regain the upper hand by imposing a veritable blizzard of niggling laws and regulations, which only results in most of those petty edicts being either slyly circumvented, ignored, or even contemptuously defied. Lather, rinse, repeat, until one of three things happens: 1)the bloated system collapses under the weight of its own incompetence and futility; 2) the subjects rise up in righteous outrage to overthrow it, either violently or through other means; 3) the whole mess spirals down into exhaustion and irrelevance, the collapse into dissolution, decrepitude, deprivation, and utter futility more or less accepted by its population as just the natural order of things. Unless and until things get so bad that large numbers of them begin to starve, at which point see No. 2.

Why, it’s almost as if God His Own Self might have stacked the karmic deck against Big Government and all its works, ain’t it?

How much longer can this train keep wrecking?

Posted on March 14, 2020March 14, 2020 by Mike

Oh dear, poor Uncle Gropey has wandered off again.

Wow

Biden walks off camera in mid-sentence and the campaign put up a logo to cover it up pic.twitter.com/kDnHAdK3n4

— Jack Posobiec (@JackPosobiec) March 14, 2020

Just so’s you know, I am now about THIS close to announcing my endorsement of Gropey for Prez. The entertainment value we’ll receive from what will doubtless be a side-splittingly chaotic and inept Biden campaign and Presidency, however long it might last before he just keels over or is carted off to be tucked in an appropriate managed-care facility, simply can’t be estimated.

Backstory

Posted on March 12, 2020March 12, 2020 by Mike

I just gotta bring Georgiaboy61’s most excellent comment out front here, for anybody who might have missed it.

The convoluted logic by which Turkey was admitted to NATO was that Kemal Ataturk was a secular modernist ruler, and that by admitting the Turks, we could bottle up the Soviet Black Sea fleet while having the ability to station intermediate range nuclear missiles on their border.

The provocation of stationing missiles right hard up against the Soviet border was lost on the foreign-policy hawks, who did not realize that they had set the stage for the Cuban Missile Crisis by their action. Ataturk may or may not have been what he represented himself to be – a secular moderate (there is considerable evidence that he was not who he claimed to be) – but the fact remains that Turkey has been an explicitly Islamic nation for almost all of her long history, and perhaps the oldest and most-determined of the Islamic enemies of western (Christian) civilization.

We see this today under the neo-Ottoman ruler Recep Erdogan, an unreconstructed Islamic supremacist and Sunni Muslim who longs to return his nation to its glorious “golden age” as a new 21st-century caliph. Under Erdogan, Turkey is reverting to its historical mean and what it has heretofore always been – an explicitly Islamic nation.

Erdogan has done more than talk. He is one of the founders of ISIS/Islamic State, the Sunni Muslim direct-action jihad-terror group which has caused so much trouble across the Middle East and elsewhere in the world. In the recent past, Erdogan has been the biggest supporter of the group, and his son, Bilal, was caught red-handed smuggling oil to market in Turkish-flagged ships, the revenue from which had been funding the group’s operations.

Erdogan is also part of the cabal of globalists and other mischief-makers attempting to infiltrate millions of Muslims into old Europe, would-be conquerors for the new caliphate. His latest stunt along the Greek border is just his latest gambit. One in a long line of them.

The U.S. should remove its equipment, personnel and weapons from Turkey, as soon as possible, and then inform Ankara that they are no longer members of the NATO alliance. And if the other NATO members complain, then the U.S. should threaten to dissolve the alliance entirely. Once done, Turkey can then be treated as precisely what it is – an enemy of western civilization and of the alliance. Whereupon, if requested by Athens, NATO assets can be moved to Greece, should the need arise, to reinforce their borders.

Endorsed, to the last syllable, with all my heart and soul. Well done, G.

Again and again, the West has attempted to rehabilitate its Moslem enemy without Moslem consent or cooperation, recasting them as “moderates,” as “peaceful,” as civilized people who are “just like us” at bottom, who “love their children as much as we do,” without a single shred of evidence supporting any of it. The West perpetuates this pathetic self-delusion exclusively for its own near-term comfort and convenience, but the only thing such puerile folly has ever achieved is to convince the enemy of our weakness, our decadence, and our cowardice.

We crave safety so desperately that we’re willing to try nearly anything to get it, excepting of course the one and only thing that ever will: an honest, clear-eyed acceptance of certain unpleasant realities, along with the flinty resolution to act in accord with them.

How it’s DONE

Posted on March 10, 2020March 10, 2020 by Mike

Greece nuts the fuck up.

The situation in the no-mans-land between Turkey and Greece is becoming increasingly more violent and desperate for the refugees. Reporters on a tour heard gunshots despite the Greek government denying the use of anything except tear gas to stop the refugees.

Daily Beast:

For over an hour, the sound of people trying to direct each other in multiple languages through farms, woodlands, and across riverbanks was punctuated by shots. First it sounded like single rifle blasts, then came bursts of three, and then longer, heavier automatic fire.

Encouraging, and way overdue. Greek officials, when confronted by wailing “journalists” and other hanky-soaking globalist cunts claiming to have heard gunfire, blithely responded No you didn’t.

However, when Papastathis appeared on Wednesday afternoon to direct us to the new location, he denied absolutely that we had heard what we heard.

“Only tear gas is being fired,” he insisted to a group of a dozen journalists on the tracks.

Turkey accused Greece of killing a Syrian man and wounding five other people.

My heart bleeds. Maybe shoulda stayed the fuck home then, no?

Fuck the goddamned treacherous Turks and their accusations all to hell and gone, by the way. The rationale for their even being in NATO at all escapes me completely. Then again, I feel the exact same way about the US, too.

The next day footage of Greek soldiers apparently firing in the direction of migrants on the border surfaced online. And more signs of the Greeks using live fire on migrants and asylum seekers could be found at a makeshift camp for people waiting to cross the Evros River near the Turkish city of Edirne.

As encouraging as the Greek gubmint’s properly hardnosed response to the de facto invasion of their nation by predatory Moslem rapefugees and perpetual dependents surely is, this next is even more so:

Greece is becoming more and more desperate to stop what has to be considered a Turkish-inspired invasion of its territory. And since the government has been ineffective, armed private citizens have taken matters into their own hands.

The BBC has encountered members of self-styled militias who carry out night-time armed patrols in Greek border towns looking for migrants.

“There are such militia along the entire region,” said Yannis Laskarakis, a newspaper publisher in the city of Alexandroupoli who has received death threats for speaking out against armed vigilantes.

“We have seen them with our own eyes, arresting migrants, treating them badly and if someone dares to help them, he has the same fate.”

And the vigilantes aren’t only going after refugees. Aid workers and the press have also been assaulted.

I bolded the best part so’s you wouldn’t miss it. Elsewhere, the Telegraph gets busy trotting out the usual boogeyman:

On Lesbos, young men have targeted reporters and NGOs because they perceive them as being sympathetic to the refugees’ plight.

It is not clear if they are local or outsiders from the mainland, possibly connected to far-Right organisations.

On Friday there were reports that members of German and Austrian far-Right groups had arrived on the island.

Yeh, yeh, whatevs. Moran deftly slices and dices that hooraw:

I doubt whether a lot of these simple Greek villagers are members of a far-right organization. Their motivations are simple; their families are at risk and their property is being invaded by foreigners. For them, there are no grand geopolitical issues involved. They are protecting theirs and their own from harm.

But with the rest of the EU cheerleading from the sidelines — while not lifting a finger to help except to open their wallets — Greece finds itself alone and facing a potential onslaught of 100,000 people.

Doesn’t matter a damned bit whether they’re “far-Right” or not; I’d bet the farm that none of those militia types give a shit about any of that, either. Let liberal “journalists” clang the “far-Right” tocsin to their hearts’ content; there is but one issue that matters here: when a national government fails to meet its most basic obligations—securing its borders, maintaining its sovereignty, and defending its citizens—then eventually its citizens will take matters into their own hands.

Nobody is obliged to sit passively back as hostile marauders invade their country, rain violence and destruction on its people, assault its culture and institutions, soak up its resources, and just generally run riot through the place. However complacent, peaceable, or over-civilized a population may be, sooner or later enough finally becomes enough. Then the lamp is lit, the ball has dropped, and it’s game on for reals.

Somebody really ought to give our own Democrat-Socialists a strongish heads-up about that lest they someday find their own precious butts caught in the blades, for some very similar reasons.

Pussified snowflakes triggered, piddle themselves in fwight

Posted on March 8, 2020March 8, 2020 by Mike

Too, too funny.

Colorado Congressman Ken Buck wanted to have a little fun and made a 2nd amendment video using a gun he mounts on his wall.

“I have just one message for Joe Biden and Beto O’Rourke, if you want to take everyone’s AR-15s, why don’t you swing by my office in Washington, D.C. and start with this one? Come and take it. #2A,” he said.

Enter Congresswoman Haley Stevens who apparently felt “threatened” and called the Sergeant at arms on the guy.

“Your congressional office is not your private home. It is a public space. This behavior is threatening and unacceptable,” Haley wrote.

“I feel unsafe with this in my place of work. I have been in contact with the Sergeant at Arms to express my concerns,” she added and she was serious.

Beto O’Rourke decided to join in, and responded to Stevens’ post with his own message on Twitter.

“This guy makes the case for both an assault weapons ban and a mandatory buyback program better than I ever could. These are weapons of war that have no place in our communities, in our politics or in our public discourse,” he commented.

The wall ornament has been rendered entirely nonfunctional; the bolt has been removed, and even at that sports a trigger lock too, for some reason. In other words, the thing is as harmless as newborn kittens, unless maybe you snatched it off its hanger and used it as a club or threw it at somebody or something. Dana Loesch offers another damning detail before kicking Blotto’s ass up between his shoulder blades over that “weapons of war” horseshit:

Buck’s inoperable rifle has hung on his office wall since 2015 without incident — ever since the Capitol Police inspected it and gave him the all clear to hang it.

Oh for crying out loud. These aren’t “weapons of war” anymore than my .38 revolver is a “weapon of war” or a bolt action rifle is a “weapon of war.” Buck and his inoperable, wall-mounted firearm have threatened fewer people than O’Rourke drunk-driving his automobile down the highway, but you don’t see O’Rourke calling for “common sense automobile ownership.” Also — there is no such thing as a “mandatory buyback.” That phrase is BS for “stealing people’s lawfully-owned personal property and paying them off with their own tax dollars,” a.k.a. double thievery.

“Weapon of war”? Hell, Buck’s decorative installation isn’t a weapon at all, in any meaningful sense. It’s a statement is what it is—no more, no less. Admittedly, it should come as no surprise that cringing cunt-farts like Blotto, Stevens, and the rest of their pig-ignorant, cowardly gun-grabber compadres are crapping themselves over its mere presence despite its status as wall art. But it may well be that the idea of anybody freely making “statements” like Buck’s frightens them much, much more.

You never make deals with Muzzrat savages

Posted on March 3, 2020March 3, 2020 by Mike

You kill them. As many as you can, as quick as you can, with extreme prejudice. Then you salt the earth, smear bacon grease on the corpses, and leave.

Nothing illustrates the folly of our 18-year-long nation-building mission in Afghanistan better than the partial peace bought by a months-long negotiation breaking down after just 72 hours.

AFP also reports, “three killed, 11 injured in blast in east Afghanistan,” so you know the Taliban wasn’t kidding around. The “operation,” as the Taliban likes to call it, or “savage terror attack,” as any honest person would call it, was in response to confusion between the Trump White House and the Afghan central government over the release of up to 5,000 Taliban prisoners.

“Release” them? That’s another thing you never, ever do with Mooselimb terrorists. Then again, the first mistake there was taking live prisoners at all rather than going full Black Flag on their primitive asses. At this late date, the esteemed Miz Kelly has the right of it:

With few exceptions, America’s longest war is largely ignored by our political class while the costs and casualties mount. Senator Rand Paul (R-Ky.) held a hearing last month on the Washington Post’s explosive and infuriating series on the war in Afghanistan: Only three of his colleagues bothered to attend. The sole Democrat in attendance was the committee’s ranking member, Senator Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.).

“Doing nothing is no longer an option for any senator or member of Congress with a conscience,” Paul said, perhaps during a moment of wishful thinking.

The long-time proponent of ending the Afghanistan war ticked off the stats: Nearly 2,400 dead U.S. servicemen and women with more than 20,000 wounded. Soldiers who have faced numerous deployments since the war began in 2001. And nearly $1 trillion in U.S. tax dollars—an average of $50 billion per year for almost 20 years, as Paul pointed out—spent in a backward nation that still ranks near the bottom of the list of the world’s most economically and politically free countries.

“What has that $1 trillion bought us? What do we have to show for it?” Paul asked. “Did a trillion dollars make Afghanistan more stable…[or] move us one step closer to victory?”

The answer, of course, is no. Barack Obama’s 2009 troop surge didn’t work; as his vice president now campaigns for president, it’s important to remember that three-quarters of the total troop fatalities in Afghanistan occurred during the Obama presidency.

The war in Afghanistan is a catastrophic failure by every measure. It should cast a permanent shadow of shame over those who continued to promote it despite clear evidence for years that it was a disaster with no hope of a positive outcome.

Afghanistan is not worth one more life, one more grievous injury, or one more tax dollar to maintain our military’s presence there. Those who insist we remain only do so out of vanity and self-interest; to concur with Trump at this point would concede that their planning and execution have been wrong all along.

Even the peace plan’s detractors cannot come up with a compelling reason to stay other than hollow warnings about national security threats to the homeland. That claim, according to Jordan Schachtel, a D.C-based foreign policy analyst and journalist, is bunk.

“There is no threat to America from Afghanistan, a land of desolate poverty, which is occupied by subsistence farmers and families living in mud huts,” Schachtel told me by email. He thinks the peace deal is a “stall tactic” designed to fail and should have no bearing on whether the U.S. stays or leaves Afghanistan. “The best path forward does not include a deal. Just leave the country.”

A. Friggin. MEN.

“Nation-bulding” is the bunk. If you’re going to fight a war, you fight the ever-loving hell out of the damned thing. You use absolutely every weapon available to you, employing their destructive capabilities to the verymost maximum. You throw everything at the enemy you can get your hands on, without reference to the folly of gentlemanly niceties, sentimentality, or misguided “code of honor” that your enemy will never comply with himself or, in this case, even comprehend. You kill people and break things—savagely, ruthlessly, and mercilessly—until your enemy’s will to resist is irrepairably broken. You rain almighty Hell-fire and brimstone down on his head with neither pity nor surcease, until sheer terror at the merest fleeting thought of doing battle with you reduces him to a state of gibbering catatonia.

If you lack the will or the cold practicality to do all those things, you stay the fucking fuck home.

Sherman said it best: “War is cruelty, there is no use trying to reform it; the crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.” He later added: “War is the remedy that our enemies have chosen, and I say let us give them all they want.” Yesirreebob. All they want, plus a stiff measure more, so as to discourage future misbehavior.

Some things never change

Posted on March 2, 2020March 2, 2020 by Mike

Daniel Greenfield, as is his wont, jacks another one right out of the damned park.

The truth about disaster relief and pandemic management is that it hasn’t changed much between administrations. The Bush administration dealt with SARS in much the same way that the Obama administration addressed swine flu. And the Trump administration is doing most of the same things.

That’s because the actual decisions are being made by bureaucrats based on existing protocols.

The best example of this was the decision to fly back infected American passengers from the Diamond Princess. This fateful decision helped spread the virus inside the United States.

President Trump had been told that nobody with the coronavirus would be flown to America.

The State Department decided to do it anyway without telling him and only made the announcement shortly after the planes landed in the United States.

According to the Washington Post, as unfriendly an outlet to the administration as there is, “Trump has since had several calls with top White House officials to say he should have been told, that it should have been his decision and that he did not agree with the decision that was made.”

Who in the State Department actually made the decision? That’s a very good question.

It was yet another Obama stay-behind, natch, one Dr William Walters—a State Dept bureau-hack who seems to be of the opinion that officeholders elected by Duh Peepul count for naught. This asshole knows where the REAL power in FederalGovCo resides. He would be correct in that odious opinion, maddeningly enough. The crux of the issue:

You can vote one way or another and the real decisions that matter will still be made by the head of a directorate that is a subsection of a bureau that you never heard of…

And who is almost impossible to fire.

This is how the country is really run. And that’s the problem.

The underlying problem with our government is that it’s too big to control. Voting in an election or even sitting in the Oval Office doesn’t mean you’re in charge. The problem goes beyond the current obsession with the Deep State. The real issue has always been the Deep Industry or the administrative state.

If the coronavirus becomes a critical problem in this country, the blame will go back to an obscure arm of the State Department, but it will never be placed there. Whatever happens a year from now, no one outside a small professional class will have ever heard of the Directorate of Operational Medicine.

The media will spend all its time bashing President Trump, Pence, assorted cabinet members, and perhaps the CDC, without ever drilling down to the facts, even though it has them at hand. The media’s rule of thumb is that natural disasters and disease outbreaks are always successfully managed by Democrats and mismanaged by Republicans. Katrina and Maria were disasters, but Sandy was a success story. The coronavirus is a catastrophe, but the Ebola virus was brilliantly handed by smart people who are handling the coronavirus response. But it’s different because the guy in the White House is.

The truth is that all of these were mismanaged by the same agencies, many of the same people, and by a government infrastructure that excels at drawing up big budget proposals, but is inept at solving problems when they actually emerge, and just follow whatever protocols will cover its collective asses.

Just as after Katrina and Maria, watch for the outpouring of lies, the claims that New Orleans had reverted to cannibalism and that everyone in Puerto Rico was dead, will be matched and exceeded.

There will be a cure for the coronavirus. But there’s no cure for the spread of viral fake news.

There is however a cure for the decisions that led to a coronavirus problem in the United States.

It’s called the Constitution.

America was meant to have a small government under the control of the people, not the bureaucrats. The real disease is bigger than the coronavirus. It’s a fatal illness called big government. Unlike the coronavirus, it has a total mortality rate. No society that has succumbed to it has ever survived.

This one won’t, either. In fact, it’s entirely safe to say that it succumbed a long time ago.

Ship: SAILED

Posted on February 28, 2020February 28, 2020 by Mike

Wait, you mean to tell me that Red Bernie is a *gasp!* COMMUNIST? And that Amerika might actually be in danger of lapsing into *GASP!!!* SOCIALISM?!?

Why, SAY IT AIN’T SO, MCGEE!

Democrats are almost out of time to change the trajectory of the race, although it remains to be seen if Sanders fantasizing about Cuban literacy rates slows him down. Some Democrats are begging the New York Nondisclosure Agreement to carpet bomb the airwaves and social media with attacks on Sanders knowing that if Sanders sails into the convention with a significant lead, they will be left holding a menu with a couple of equally horrible choices, the political equivalent of Brussels sprouts or liver and onion.

Their hope to pull off a convention bait and switch works only if somebody can keep the delegate count close. But who can pull it off? Mike Bloomberg? Not without a charisma transplant and the removal of layers of baggage. So far, he and Shrill Indian have combined to net one more delegate than is currently in the hands of the candidate from Minnesota who nobody has noticed is in the race. Joe Biden? He was last seen fantasizing about running for the Senate, even as his South Carolina firewall is fraying. Pious Pete, the Bible “scholar”? Sanders could not have hand-selected a better field of awful candidates to propel him.

An increasing number of Democrat talking heads are resigning themselves to the Sanders storm rolling in and trying to prepare the ground to receive its rain. Liberal revisionists have tried out two lines while the race is still somewhat in play: the Paul Krugman he’s not really a crazy Marxist…he just plays one on TV special and the one about vote for Bernie because he won’t be able to do the crazy stuff he has promised. These are political losers, but they are just the warm-up act for the socialism revisionism to come. Today’s Democrat Sanders critics will soon pivot to singing homilies to socialism.

Um—”WILL SOON pivot” etc?

Just now noticing all this, are ya? But Red Bernie ain’t the biggest problem we have here, not by a long yard.

So how did we get to the point where the nation founded by champions of liberty is on the cusp of nominating a man who is a fellow ideological traveler with history’s greatest foes of liberty? The Democrats have been on a steady march toward this Marxist moment for generations.

Ronald Reagan, in one of the greatest American orations, delivered back in 1964, saw that we were heading toward the moment, noting that “back in 1936, Mr. Democrat himself, Al Smith, the great American, came before the American people and charged that the leadership of his Party was taking the Party of Jefferson, Jackson, and Cleveland down the road under the banners of Marx, Lenin, and Stalin.”

We are now 84 years past that 1936 Al Smith epiphany, and we are nearing the finish line, which is not surprising, since socialism is the natural destination for big-government Democrats as each successive generation ups the ante on the generation that came before.

Most Americans don’t yet appreciate just how much Marxism and its grievance-mongering offshoots have become the university mainstream in America, but this is of profound importance. America’s colleges, with a few notable exceptions, have been churning out Marxists for decades, which is why an old Marxist who looks like a madman is this year’s surprise hot political commodity.

The short-term problem for Democrats is that there are still too many older voters they need with an understanding of history who are horrified at the prospect of socialism.

But the long-term problem for Republicans is that the balance is tilting farther toward Marxism with each passing year as academia continues to crank out Marxist voters and influencers who are changing the ideological balance of society. Even if Sanders gets demolished in the 2020 election, Democrats will not tack to the center, since socialism is now the beating heart of their party. Sanders’s candidacy is the outcome of this tectonic shift, not the cause of it.

Although I’d argue that it isn’t “are changing the ideological etc,” it’s “HAVE changed,” that last bit is nothing but solid, 24k gold truth. Which then brings us right ’round to another ugly but inescapable fact, one I keep repeating: The war for America was lost long, long ago. The battle to reclaim it, should there ever be one, must be initiated in the Leftist indocrination factories we’re pleased to misnomer “public schools” to have any hope of attaining anything but the most transitory success. So far, I see no sign whatsoever that enough of us even realize that, much less that any such battle is being waged.

If the US was anything remotely like the nation it properly should be, the very idea of an avowed Marxist—particularly a buffoonish, all-thumbs crackpot as just plain stupid as Bernie The Klown—making a serious run for President would be so preposterous as to make the welkin ring with gales of laughter from sea to shining sea. Instead, somehow…well, here we all are.

America, let this once seemingly impossible concept sink in, and sink in deep: It can happen.

Sanders can win. Not just the party nod. The election.

The Wall Street Journal fretted recently: “Democrats are waking to the prospect of a nominee who wants to eliminate private health insurance, raise taxes on the middle class, ban fracking and put government in charge of energy production, make college a taxpayer entitlement, offer free health care to illegal immigrants, raise spending by $50 trillion, and tag every down-ballot Democrat with the socialist label.”

Journal editorial writers apparently believe simply repeating those erstwhile bogeymen will ensure McGovern 1972-style catastrophe for Sanders and his party in the fall.

Inquiring readers want to know: what country are they are living in?

And that “socialism” word: will younger voters really desert Sanders in droves over a couple comments praising Cuban communists? The Berlin Wall fell before a substantial bloc even drew breath. Communist China is our biggest trading partner. Millennials and beyond have a vague notion that socialism has been bad for Venezuela, but not why.

“Moderate” Democrats tried the Journal’s roundhouses on Sanders Wednesday, and didn’t lay a glove on him. Sanders countered with research purporting to show his Medicare for All budget-buster would save money. Cited praise for the Castros from the sainted Barack Obama. Ridiculed efforts to align him with the NRA.

And he pointed to strong head-to-head polling numbers against Donald Trump and burgeoning grassroots support.

Not to come off too Eyore-ish on y’all or anything, but don’t for a moment kid yourselves that it can’t happen, people. For one thing: know how our side likes to point to the humongous, wildly enthusiastic crowds every Trump rally draws as evidence of his grass-roots invincibility? Well, don’t look now, but guess who else is beginning to enjoy a similar level of support?

The above article’s title quite correctly states: “This is not McGovern’s America.” Once again: THAT, not Red Bernie or any other specific individual, is where our real problem lies.

Waiting.

Update! Did somebody mention the government schools just now?

It has been long known that American “education” institutions are spectacular failures at teaching the rising generation about their birthright to self-governance. The famous 1983 report “A Nation at Risk” declared it a national crisis that “In many schools, the time spent learning how to cook and drive counts as much toward a high school diploma as the time spent studying mathematics, English, chemistry, U.S. history, or biology.” Things only got worse.

Today, 4 in 10 Americans who are younger than 39 disagree that the United States “has a history we should be proud of,” according to a 2019 poll by FLAG/YouGov. The poll also found that half of all Americans agree the United States is a sexist and racist country, including two-thirds of millennials. Millennials showed the lowest level of agreement with the statement, “I’m proud to be an American.” Thirty-eight percent of “younger Americans do not agree that ‘America has a history that we should be proud of,’” according to the poll.

2019’s annual poll from the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation found that 37 percent of millennials think the United States is “among the most unequal societies in the world.” Despite their curricula’s obsession with so-called multiculturalism and diversity, they clearly have zero sense of what life is like in most of the world, and how that contrasts with the United States’ singular freedoms and opportunities.

The VOC poll found that 70 percent of millenials said they are likely to vote for a socialist. It also found that “57% of Millennials (compared to 94% of the Silent Generation), believe the Declaration of Independence better guarantees freedom and inequality over the Communist Manifesto.”

That poll also found that large percentages of younger Americans said communism was presented favorably in their elementary, middle, and high schools.

But of course. The one is what gets you the other. Cause and effect, man.

Yet another thing I’m beginning to sound like a broken record on, I know: Gramsci was a diabolical genius, the Long March Through The Institutions he inspired a most horrifying success.

Bernie blowout!

Posted on February 23, 2020February 23, 2020 by Mike

America That Was hardest hit.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) can claim to have won the popular vote in each of the first three early states in the Democratic Party presidential primary with his victory in Nevada on Saturday night.

It is the first time a candidate for any major party’s nomination has won the popular vote in all three of the first states.

Opposition to Sanders within the Democratic Party remains strong. There are serious doubts about whether he would be able to defeat President Donald Trump in a general election. His “democratic socialism” is a fringe left-wing philosophy.

Yeah, just keep telling yourself that. I’m afraid observable reality, grim though it be, suggests otherwise. Left-wing philosophy is one hell of a lot less “fringe” than it should be, that’s for sure.

Nothing to see here, folks

Posted on February 23, 2020February 23, 2020 by Mike

I’m SURE it’s all on the up and up.

Philip Haney, the author of “See Something, Say Nothing: A Homeland Security Officer Exposes the Government’s Submission to Jihad,” has died at the age of 73. In addition to being an author, Haney was a long-time Department of Homeland Security expert with a focus on Islamic extremism.

Reports of Haney’s death first appeared on the morning of February 22. Fox News’ contributor Sara A. Carter tweeted regarding Haney’s death saying, “Somebody I deeply respected and considered a friend Phil Haney – a DHS whistleblower during the Obama Admin was apparently killed yesterday in Southern California. Pray for his family and pray they find the person who murdered him. Still trying to get confirmation on details.”

A few quotes, emphasis mine, to set the stage:

Phil Haney spoke out against CAIR in an interview in October with Barry Nussbaum on American Truth Project.

Philip Haney: CAIR is the acronym for the Council on American Islamic Relations. It’s probably the best known Muslim organization in the country, but unfortunately, it’s also connected, irrefutably proven to be connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. Now, the Muslim Brotherhood has been already designated in several countries around the world, including Middle Eastern countries…as a front group up to and including Hamas, which we know as a designated terrorist group itself…We’ve been continuing to track this group and other ones that are part of the Muslim Brotherhood. And I have to say with great distress that if anything, they’re more woven into the fabric of different branches of our government today, 2019 October than they were when I was still active duty within DHS. And yeah, that does seem like a bold statement. It seems like it ought to be impossible, but I think that’s what we’re going to go over today.

Barry Nussbaum: So I get it. And let’s talk specifics. So why in the world Phil with the FBI, the premier law enforcement agency in the world, and certainly our number one national police force whose mission it is to protect us internally within the boundaries of the United States what the heck is the FBI doing in bed with CAIR?

Philip Haney: Well, first of all, let’s make sure to make the point that they are. This isn’t something that started years ago and was taken care of. I’m talking just in the last week or two. CAIR and other Muslim Brotherhood front groups have been meeting by invitation from the Department of Homeland Security and/or branches within the U.S. State Department to help implement and develop policy here in the United States. And before I forget it, I should mention that the new focus of the Department of Homeland Security has just released in their new twenty nineteen strategic documents, about 20 to 40 pages, is a focus on white supremacy, not so much Islamic terrorism…And that brings us to the relationship with CAIR. They have now asked groups like CAIR and the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations all part of the Muslim Brotherhood to come and help them implement this new policy of focus on white supremacy.

Haney’s death was hastily declared a “suicide” by California authorities, via “a single self-inflicted gunshot wound.” Emphasis mine again:

A screenshot taken from Frank Andrew Bostom’s Twitter feed shows what appears to be a statement from Frank Gaffney, the Executive Chairman of the Center for Security Policy.

“As you may know, we lost this week one of our most brilliant, most dedicated and most devout comrades-in-arms: Philip Haney.

While the details are sketchy at the moment, Phil went missing on Wednesday in the area he called home in northern California to which he returned after the passing of his beloved wife, Francesca, following a long struggle with a series of terrible health afflictions. On Friday morning, a sheriff’s deputy finally found his body with a gunshot wound to the chest.

So, Haney committed suicide by shooting himself…IN THE CHEST?!? Nope, no malodorous funk wafting off of that entirely believable story, nosirreebob. I mean, I suppose it maybe happens that way once in a rare while. But it’s hardly the usual way of going about it, which ought to raise questions all by itself.

Why yes, there IS more to consider. Such as: did this guy ever really do or say anything so extreme and/or incriminating as to alarm some of the Ogabe junta‘s more shadowy henchmen, perhaps even enough to have him offed?

During a 2015 appearance on Fox News, Haney said that his work in the Department of Homeland Security had been curtailed and that if it were able to continue, it may have prevented the 2015 San Bernardino shooting. According to Haney, among the places that he was investigating was a mosque attended by the shooter, Syed Farook. Haney alleged that his investigation was curtailed by the Obama administration. Haney said, “Either Syed would have been put on the no-fly list because association with that mosque, and/or the K-1 visa that his wife was given may have been denied because of his association with a known organization.”

In 2016, Haney testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee chaired by Senator Ted Cruz to allege that the Obama administration had acted irresponsibly with regard to Islamic extremism. Haney claimed that the administration had acted in favor of “political correctness” rather than take actions that may have prevented the June 2016 Pulse night club shooting in Orlando or the San Bernardino shooting in December 2015.

Haney also alleged that the Obama administration destroyed or changed 800 of his files relating to the Muslim Brotherhood because they were deemed offensive to Muslim people.

Hmmm. Well, okay then. But that really isn’t enough, is it? I mean, Haney would have had to represent a real, credible threat to Ogabe and his minions before they’d go to such extraordinary lengths, wouldn’t he?

Rep. Steve King (R-IA) issued a statement Saturday night on the death of Obama DHS whistleblower Philip Haney, who was found dead Friday by police in Plymouth, California. Police said the 66-year-old Haney had what appeared to be a self-inflicted gunshot wound, but that an investigation was “active and ongoing”.

King posted to Twitter, “Phil Haney was a friend & patriot. He was a target because of all he knew of Islamic terrorist coverups. He insured his life by archiving data that incriminated the highest levels of the Obama administration. Phil Haney didn’t kill himself. RIP, Phil.”

Um. Well, okay then. But hey, Haney was no doubt distraught over losing his wife. It’s scarcely unthinkable that a person in such straits might lose all hope and kill himself, right? In fact, people close to him were probably concerned about just such a possibility, I’d expect.

A statement on author Andrew Boston’s Twitter page, said that Haney had returned to California following the death of his wife. That statement also said that Haney was engaged to be married later in 2020. The statement adds that friends of Haney’s say that there was “no way” he would have taken his own life.

Uh. Well. Okay, then. Still. If Haney DID have the goods on Ogabe’s mollycoddling of Moslem terrorists; and DID seem to be coping with the loss of his wife well enough to be planning to get on with his life and remarry; and his relatively positive state of mind has been unequivocally attested to by people close to him; and he was aware that his unflinching realism concerning Moslem terrorist groups, along with his insider knowledge of Ogabe’s treasonous, criminal behavior, would seriously antagonize Ogabe And Pals…wouldn’t he then have expressed concern somewhere along the line about all this having effectively painted a bullseye on his back?

Haney’s close friend Jan Markell, a radio host, author and speaker, tweeted out this from her last conversation with Phil Haney.

My friend Phil Haney was found shot yesterday in CA. I had lunch with him a month ago. He warned something could happen to him. He was to get married in a month. It will be falsely called a suicide.

WELL. Okay, then.

Of course, it’s just absurd to go too far with all this wild-eyed conspiracy mongering. I’m sure we all feel perfectly confident that none of our most powerful professional politicians would ever dream of resorting to such outré measures just to cover their own asses. Right?

RIGHT?!?

Important note to Rod Blagojevich: better be checking your six, buddy.

Commies always lie

Posted on February 22, 2020February 23, 2020 by Mike

That steady drip, drip, drip you hear is the sound of the truth, outing.

Xi didn’t actually admit that the coronavirus now devastating large swathes of China had escaped from one of the country’s bioresearch labs. But the very next day, evidence emerged suggesting that this is exactly what happened, as the Chinese Ministry of Science and Technology released a new directive entitled: “Instructions on strengthening biosecurity management in microbiology labs that handle advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus.”

Read that again. It sure sounds like China has a problem keeping dangerous pathogens in test tubes where they belong, doesn’t it? And just how many “microbiology labs” are there in China that handle “advanced viruses like the novel coronavirus”?

It turns out that in all of China there is only one. And this one is located in the Chinese city of Wuhan that just happens to be…the epicenter of the epidemic.

That’s right. China’s only Level 4 microbiology lab that is equipped to handle deadly coronaviruses, called the National Biosafety Laboratory, is part of the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

As if the revelations I posted on last week weren’t convincing enough for ya, we now have this too:

What’s more, the People’s Liberation Army’s top expert in biological warfare, a Maj. Gen. Chen Wei, was dispatched to Wuhan at the end of January to help with the effort to contain the outbreak.

According to the PLA Daily, Gen. Chen has been researching coronaviruses since the SARS outbreak of 2003, as well as Ebola and anthrax. This would not be her first trip to the Wuhan Institute of Virology either, since it is one of only two bioweapons research labs in all of China.

Does that suggest to you that the novel coronavirus, now known as SARS-CoV-2, may have escaped from that very lab, and that Gen. Chen’s job is to try and put the genie back in the bottle, as it were? It does to me.

It does to anybody who understands the essential truth about every Communist regime: the truth only emerges from them gradually, one halting step at a time. Not willingly do they come clean, either; the true story must always be dragged forth, as if honesty was actually a physically painful thing for them.

Which, y’know, it is.

Seems to me that, at some point, Red China’s toxic government is going to have to be taken out. Their aggression, their lawlessness, their ongoing attempts to infiltrate and manipulate other nations around the globe make for an intolerable combination. Throw in a clandestine bio-war program that has become a serious threat to the entire world because of the incompetence, deceit, and corruption that are also stock-in-trade characteristics endemic to any Commie shitrapy you care to name, and the only sane course is proactive self-defense against them.

Not that I’m advocating American boots on the ground there, mind. A double handful of well-placed tactical nukes lobbed from around FL200 or so ought to do the trick.

“Professionalizing” pr0n

Posted on February 22, 2020February 22, 2020 by Mike

Is there NOTHING they won’t try to meddle with, micromanage, and regulate unto ruination?

In a very California story, inter-union drama appears to be marring the introduction of a bill that would require porn stars to get business licenses.

On Tuesday, Assemblymembers Lorena Gonzalez (D–San Diego) and Christina Garcia (D–Bell Gardens) introduced Assembly Bill (A.B.) 2389. The bill would require adult entertainers and video performers, including webcam performers, to obtain a business license and complete a state-mandated training course before being allowed to ply their trade.

Requirements for that training would be developed by the state’s Department of Industrial Relations (DIR), which would, in turn, be advised by a new 10-member, governor-appointed board composed of two adult film actors, three dancers, two medical doctors, a therapist, and a money manager.

This training will be a minimum of two hours and will provide information on reporting workplace injuries, sexual harassment, and sex trafficking. Adult performers would be required to cover the cost of this training. The bill would also require that they be finger-printed.

The creation of licensure requirements gives state regulators the authority to police the behavior of participants in what is often a pretty informal industry. Reason recently covered how police in Florida have conducted sting operations on handymen as part of their enforcement of that state’s contractor licensing laws.

As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown has covered extensively, sex workers have plenty of reasons to be apprehensive about the expansion of the regulatory state.

It’s true also that regulatory seeds, once planted, tend to grow. It’s conceivable that the bill’s current two-hour training requirement could be expanded to become more onerous over time.

“Conceivable”? You must be joking; it’s INEVITABLE. The “training requirement” will grow exponentially…as will the licensing fees, the regulations and restrictions, the taxes, the paperwork, the headaches and hassles, and of course the bureaucracy required to administer and oversee it all. It will ALL “expand”—until the point at which no one wants to be in the industry anymore because it just isn’t worth the bother is reached.

At which point a grim milestone of sorts will have been achieved in the Land of the (gag) “Free”: against all odds, Almighty Government will have effectively destroyed the porn and titty-bar industry. Whodathunkit?

Update! Anybody seeing a pattern here?

The same San Diego area assemblywoman who brought you the job-killing AB 5, which kills freelance jobs, is back to finish off the “adult” freelance industry.

The adult workers are gobsmacked that the state has involved itself in their business— and presumes to train them in order to get a license for a job they’re already doing, while being forced to pay for it all.

Then, once the goobermint has “fixed” all the problems, they can get busy “fixing” all the problems their previous “fixing” caused. Lather, rinse, repeat, forever and ever amen. Y’know, like with Obamacare.

Zero Hedge scoops the world!

Posted on February 16, 2020February 16, 2020 by Mike

Tyler Durden proven right again. Scornful Leftymedia critics hardest hit.

Chinese scientists believe the deadly coronavirus may have started life in a research facility just 300 yards from the Wuhan fish market.

A new bombshell paper from the Beijing-sponsored South China University of Technology says that the Wuhan Center for Disease Control (WHCDC) could have spawned the contagion in Hubei province.

‘The possible origins of 2019-nCoV coronavirus,’ penned by scholars Botao Xiao and Lei Xiao claims the WHCDC kept disease-ridden animals in laboratories, including 605 bats.

It also mentions that bats – which are linked to coronavirus – once attacked a researcher and ‘blood of bat was on his skin.’

The report says: ‘Genome sequences from patients were 96% or 89% identical to the Bat CoV ZC45 coronavirus originally found in Rhinolophus affinis (intermediate horseshoe bat).’

It describes how the only native bats are found around 600 miles away from the Wuhan seafood market and that the probability of bats flying from Yunnan and Zhejiang provinces was minimal.

In addition there is little to suggest the local populace eat the bats as evidenced by testimonies of 31 residents and 28 visitors.

Instead the authors point to research being carried out withing a few hundred yards at the WHCDC.

Tyler practices an avocation wholly alien and hazardous to Enemedia bullshit artists, knob polishers, and smear merchants: diligent, thorough Real Journalism. Meanwhile, Jurassic Media knuckleheads reflexively dismiss his work as nothing more than paranoid Wingnut conspiracy theorizing, ever reliable in their desperation to keep inconvenient facts solidly bricked up behind a Narrative wall.

But as time passes, that wall has a funny way of collapsing on their empty skulls due to the arduous spadework of honest reporters like Durden; the true story they buried is unearthed despite them, and Tyler winds up with another victory notch carved into his blade. The Lyin’ Left badly needs tyrannical Communist regimes to be perceived as trustworthy, and are willing to do whatever it takes in order to preserve the threadbare scrim of integrity wrapping their deceits as best they can. They also need all efforts to pierce the threadbare veil to be discredited, if they can manage it. The abominable ideology they share with the ChiComs can only survive and advance under cover of darkness, and they know it. T’was ever thus.

Unfortunately for them, though, sooner or later truth will out. Now, once again, it has.

Aside: my own expertise in matters like this isn’t even thimble-deep, so it’s my practice to refrain from much in the way of comment on them unless some aspect comes to light that I feel more qualified to address. With that in mind, it seems to me that there are two possibilities regarding the above story: A) The Chinese government has concluded that their attempt at deception and concealment of this biowar bombshell has failed, and decided to use their compliant SCUT minions to gradually allow the disgraceful truth to slowly leak out, or B) The SCUT researchers have risked all to courageously defy their masters by blowing the whistle on the government’s evil deception.

Personally, I lean towards the former scenario at the moment. Then again, Occam’s Razor and historical precedent suggest the latter might be more likely. If the SCUT researchers are suddenly reported missing, scenario B is the correct one and those poor chumps will never be heard from again, on account of having been brutally murdered by government goon squad. Kinda puts the mewling of fake “whistleblowers” we all know and love here in the US expressing sheer terror at the threats, persecution, and potential for grievous bodily harm perpetrated against them by the monstrous dictator Chairman Trump in perspective, don’t it?

Nature, taking its course

Posted on February 15, 2020February 16, 2020 by Mike

UNEXPECTED!™

John Alpert is an American photojournalist whose work is featured in the Netflix documentary Cuba and the Cameraman. He first went to the island nation in 1972, a little more than a decade after the Cuban Revolution. Over the next 45 years, Alpert returned to Cuba, each time taking pictures of its towns and cities and people. The images he took are a timeline that chronicle how Castro’s socialist revolution played out for the Cuban people in the years that lay ahead.

SPOILER ALERT: it played out exactly the way it always does, in every place it’s tried. Shocking, I know.

To a young photojournalist who was idealistic and somewhat naïve at the time, socialism seemed to portend a bright future for Cuba. With its people happy and well taken care of by a paternalistic government, things were going well. But as time moved one, Cuba’s house-of-cards communist system fell apart. The free goods and services given to the Cuban people were funded not by the country’s top-down collectivist economy, but by a massive infusion of hard cash, gasoline, food, and other provisions from the Soviet Union. When the Soviets eventually pulled the plug as their own socialist economy was crumbling, the day-to-day lives of the Cuban people fell on hard times, a rude reminder of Margaret Thatcher’s observation the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.

The once vibrant island nation of Cuba is but another place where socialism added to its unbroken trail of failure. The country’s capital, Havana, was once an international tourist destination. Known as the “Jewel of the Caribbean,” Havana was a glamorous city with beautiful homes and modern vehicles. After six decades of socialism, only the communist rulers and their cronies live in upscale homes, and the country’s poorly maintained roads are traveled by junker cars built in the middle of the last century.

Easy prediction: the longer they cling to socialism, the more all of these things will worsen. In some quarters, this strange phenomenon of escalating decay, collapse, and chaos is known as “bad luck.” In others, it is sometimes referred to as “getting the government you deserve—good and hard.” Not to worry, though; it’ll be diff’runt here in the US.

I find this next bit of puffed-up, self-dramatizing sanctimony hilarious:

Among the greatest heroes of the Cuban Revolution were two foreigners whose battlefield exploits were so legendary that they became the only non-Cubans to be awarded the rank of Comandante in Castro’s army. One was an idealistic 29-year-old American named William Alexander Morgan, the other a ruthless Marxist revolutionary from Argentina named Ernesto “Che” Guevara.

Hailed by Castro for acts of valor that earned him the affectionate nickname “the Americano,” Morgan said he joined the Cuban Revolution because “the most important thing for free men to do is protect the freedom of others.”

Uh huh. And then—as also always, always, ALWAYS happens under Marxism/communism/socialism/Progressivism/WTFever—EVERYBODY’S freedom was taken away—along with their hope, their health, their wealth, their dignity, and their future. One just imagine the eager naif Morgan’s surprise at yet another thing that always happens:

A fervent anti-communist, Morgan was personally assured by Castro that communism would play no part in the future of the new Cuba. But once Castro had consolidated an iron-fisted grip on power, he revealed his true stripes.

NO! That just can’t be right. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.

I don’t quite grasp how any halfway intelligent person can honestly claim to be both a socialist revolutionary and a “fervent anti-communist” without suffering severe neck, spine, and brain injury from the whiplash effect of extreme cognitive dissonance. But that’s what the man says, so maybe I missed something somewhere along the line. Anyhoo, at the end of this article is a link to another worthy compendium on socialism’s inevitable failure from the same author.

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