Category: BLEARGH!

Rowling roars, Ronny D scores

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Two people defying the current trend, one of them a standard-issue liberal on other issues, the other the most sterling example of what an American politician should be since John Adams. JK Rowling opens the ball.
Mega-author J.K. Rowling is standing up relentlessly for all people who are harmed by the transgenderism mania afflicting our society. A reliable liberal, Rowling has always been gay-friendly, feminist, and even sympathetic to transgenderism in principle. But transgenderism is a horrible concept in practice, despite Big Left’s efforts to make it appear life-saving and glamorous. Rowling is among the growing number of people speaking out against it and standing up for the countless people it has harmed.


Rowling’s public statements on this issue have all been modest and mild, not really confrontational at all. Nevertheless, the frothing rage-junkies of the Batshit Left have blown their stack frenetically after each one, hurling big shitballs of calumny, incoherence, and daylight barking madness, peppered throughout with threats of violence and personal insults so outrageous they amount to arguments for confining them all to a nearby loony bin and medicating them into drooling catatonia, if only to neutralize the threat they pose to civil order and comity.

The incomparable Ron DeSantis, on the other hand, confronts the issue pic.twitter.com/tBmFxFE3q6

— Ron DeSantis (@GovRonDeSantis) March 22, 2022

Before he issued the proclamation, DeSantis said Weyant is “an absolute superstar and she had the fastest time, of any woman in college athletics. Now the NCAA is basically taking efforts to destroy women’s athletics. They’re trying to undermine the integrity of the competition and they’re crowning somebody else the woman’s champion and we think that’s wrong.”

DeSantis signed a law in 2021 disallowing biological males from competing in women’s sports in Florida.

The Florida governor is bucking the trend. Big Tech, Big Media, and their law-making handmaidens have punished people for stating that men aren’t women.

The words “genius,” “courageous,” and “hero” get tossed about far too casually these days. The Left’s extravagant deployment of these poor abused words as cudgels to bludgeon their opponents into either silence or active endorsement of their pet projects has rendered them almost meaningless. Not in DeSantis’s case, though; no matter how many times they’re said of him, it could never be too much in my book. They’ll continue to resonate sweetly in my ears like the biggest gong in Asia entire as pure, full-strength Truth. His every successive utterance or action just makes me love the guy more.

A pathetic personal problem

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A look at the sad, cowardly neurosis of the Masked Forever, Forever Masked poltroons.

Those among us who are perfectly healthy and remain dutifully masked despite the general lifting of mask mandates are making a political statement. For them, the masks meant something they continue to hold dear, cannot relinquish.

The masks were an important, probably the most important tool in the toolbox needed to destroy President Trump and the threat he posed to the Deep State and Democrat ruling class. For that ruling class, the masks were an evil genius deployment in a pseudo-crisis; for those who continue masking despite good health, the end of mandated masking abandons them to an unsure condition of political flux. The masks represent a kind of yoke, and to the still-masked among us, the end of masking means a return to an uneasy freedom that could lead to a vast majority of voters coming to their senses and re-electing Trump, for what many are convinced will be the second time.

But it is much more than Donald Trump they fear.

Freedom, self-reliance, limited government, and rugged individualism are values that do not rest easy on their minds. Living in a society where everyone is forced to hide behind an N95 is cocoon-like, comforting in a dysfunctional way. It signals the ultimate power of the nanny state they need to not feel adrift in a sea of American freedom.

The message sent by otherwise healthy maskers is that “we voted for Biden, we fear a return of Trump, we believe in the existential racism of the United States, we believe that a pandemic lie was justified to remove Trump and demoralize his supporters, and we think it’s better, just to be sure, that everyone continues to wear masks up until some unspecified period of time.”

And in the ultimate irony, the final proof of the grand masking spoof, as Title 42 expires, after forcing masks on the populace, the Democrat enforcers stand ready to open the immigration floodgates to an invasion of unvaccinated illegal aliens.

It is just so much bulls**t.

It is that, and always was. No matter; as Jesus said of the poor, these, ye shall always have with you. I called this thing from Day One, CF Lifers will recall: we’ll never again see a time in America with no Masked retards mincing nervously among us, as in Olden Thymes. We’re stuck with the damned things forever now—both Masks and the morons who love them, take your pick—and there’s a reason for that.

It worked, you see, the mask mandates. The fear campaign. The horrible illness that overcame an election, an economy, the psychological health of our children and grandchildren, our rugged individualist entrepreneurialism. Our freedom.

True, dat. Ellis concludes by over-optimism declaring that “The tables have turned…Unmasked America is rising up to unmask the maskers,” a spot of baseless, too-much-too-soon jingoism to which I can only respond with a question: Who, exactly, and how? The Masked feebs will only be uncovered via physical force, yanking their precious wubbies from off their sallow, pimply faces—a campaign I would certainly support, at least in theory, but which I can’t see ever getting off the ground. There’s a reason for that also, a good and reasonable one in this case. To wit: the very people most likely to be accepting of a broad, aggressive mask-off program would really rather just be left the hell alone, nothing more. As long as Masked mopes aren’t all up in OUR grills, we just aren’t terribly interested in putting ourselves all up in THEIRS.

In addition to the politics of the thing, the Mask is also a precious opportunity for some full-throttle virtue signalling, a thing no Karen in the lowing, cud-chewing herd has ever yet been known to let pass them by. Yet another angle—sheer blank stupidity,as evinced by the all-too-common muttonheads wearing their Face Wubbie over a full beard—we’ll just tiptoe quietly past for the nonce, I think.

PFunny, innit, how practically every problem confronting us today comes right back to the same old conflict, between those whose primary wish is to be left alone and those meddlesome puds for whom such forbearance just isn’t on the menu. Convince those assholes to tend to their own damned knitting and keep their noses out of our’n, and so much of all this angst and aggro goes away overnight. Unless and until we steel ourselves to doing whatever it takes to accomplish that end, however, The Mask and those contemptible tools enamored of them will remain with us.

Update! Whilst being schlepped around by my cousin and former badass Playboys drummer Mark on various cripple-maintenance errands today, he related an infuriating tale. It seems that the choir director at our church was forced out of his job by one of these Forever Masked bluenoses. Apparently, this woman was haranguing the director about not having a mask on during church, prattling witlessly on about how his selfish irresponsibility created a very real threat to her life. The director—a gentle, affable, and wholly conciliatory man who’s worked himself ragged for many years in the service of our church family—gently chided her with something along the lines of, ” MIz ____, you DO know those cloth masks do nothing, right?” Whereupon the old biddy (actually, if I’m not mistaken the woman is a few years younger than me) took it upon her obnoxious self to complain bitterly about being “intimidated” and “feeling threatened” and such-like at the next meeting of the church board. The miserable bint kept the pressure on relentlessly, until finally the director decided to pull the plug on the whole ridiculous non-troversy and resign his post, in the interest of restoring comity and calm before the bint had made things even worse for all concerned.

So, the direct result of this woman’s cowardice, ignorance, and petty vindictiveness is:

  • The church has been robbed of a tireless and irreplaceable asset
  • A good and decent man is out of a job he dearly loved, to which he had given of himself unstintingly for many, many years
  • The church has had some mighty big shoes dumped in its lap; filling them will be no simple task
  • Finding a replacement will also take a lot of time, I expect; it will be arduous, time-consuming, and will demand much of the congregants charged with getting it done—just more uneccessary cost imposed

    • It is unlikely in the extreme that the new director will be anything close to as diligent, as devoted, as musically talented, and as personable as the man they just lost for no good reason at all

This is exactly the sort of nonsense that can really wreck a church community, creating intra-personal rifts and a general miasma of unpleasantness and distrust, inflicting serious wounds that will be a long time healing. Ultimately, we can chalk it all up as yet another gratuitous cost extracted bythe Plandemic, one among innumerable others. This one in particular may look to outsiders like small beer when compared to the loss of one’s job, one’s life savings, one’s business, or one’s home. But neither is it nothing and should not be dismissed as such, if only because it was all so completely unwarranted. Tot up the final bill, and the Fauxvid Tyranny Test Run looks more and more like being a bona fide atrocity, a shoo-in for the title of Crime of the Century.

The homunculous Falsi and his abominable cohorts must all be made to pay for the havoc and misery they so cruelly wrought, and I mean pay goddamned dearly, too. Decades-long prison terms—in a REAL prison too, not some vacation enjoying the posh amenities of Club Fed—ought to be the least of their worries. Nobody seriously expects any such thing, of course. No, they’ll skate away clean, every man Jack of them—which might well be the greatest crime of all.

System of spoilage

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How to drain a Swamp.

Virtually all Americans believed, until the inauguration of Donald Trump as president on January 20, 2017, that when someone became president, he could begin to implement his agenda. Certainly Old Joe Biden’s handlers have done so with a vengeance since they took over; but when Trump became president, he immediately began to encounter resistance from entrenched members of the government bureaucracy who refused to do as he ordered. Some worked actively against Trump, while the establishment media assured us that these self-appointed “deep state” saboteurs were the courageous guardians of “our democracy.” At his South Carolina rally Saturday night, Trump continued to tease a 2024 run and made a new promise about how he would break the power of the unelected “deep state.”

“We will pass critical reforms,” Trump said, “making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”

It’s a commonsensical solution, as Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance pointed out. “Everyone is losing their mind about this, but I’ve been calling for it at every town hall I do. Either the president controls the executive branch or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, we don’t live in a Republic, we live in a civil service driven oligarchy.”

Ummm, hate to be the one to have to tell ya and all, JD, but…

Quite so. And although the “deep state” only came to the attention of most Americans over the last few years, the controversy over the hiring and firing of civil service employees is one of the oldest controversies of the republic. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828 on promises to end the hegemony of a privileged aristocracy, and, to drain that swamp, he would need his own men in key positions. He removed a large number of civil service employees and replaced them with men of his own faction, which came to be known as the Democracy, or Democratic Party. This came to be known as the spoils system, after the old adage “To the victor belong the spoils.”

The spoils system essentially died with the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881. Garfield believed that the spoils system was an unending source of government corruption and pushed for measures that would end it, only to be shot by a man who publicly proclaimed that he was doing so because he belonged to the faction of the Republican party, the Stalwarts, that supported the spoils system. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, was a Stalwart, but he demonstrated immense personal courage and honor in choosing to carry out the wishes of his slain predecessor rather than implement his own contrary agenda. His decision to do this effectively ended his political career, as he almost certainly knew it would, and yet he stood firm.

Can anyone even imagine a modern ProPol sacrificing his almighty DC sinecure solely on principle? Oh HELL no. America was indeed a very different country then, and Americans were very different people.

The proponents of civil service reform never envisioned a situation in which unelected and unaccountable opponents of a sitting president in the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere would be determined to destroy the president — or at the very least make it impossible for him to carry out his policies — and could not be removed from their jobs because of civil service regulations.

Wouldn’t government work more smoothly, and the executive branch be able to operate more effectively in the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it would, if the president were able to clear out the employees of these agencies who opposed him and replace them with people more in line with his vision?

The spoils system has no defenders today, and has had none for over a century. It should have more. Trump is on the right track.

Perhaps, perhaps. However, that Swamp creatures were willing to do murder to preserve their spoils-system perks and privileges all thE way back in 1881 probably tells you all you need to know about just how likely Trump’s proposal really is to ever see the light of day today. There’s no indication that Swamp critters have moderated their determination to defend their prized Ruling Class status, not that I’ve ever seen. Anybody truly serious about ending the spoils system of legalized graft and corruption had best be prepared to commit violence in the attempt; it’s a lead-pipe cinch they’ll have plenty of it visited upon them by those who hope to thwart any meaningful reform.

Corn for food, not for fuel

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An idea whose time has come, gone, and circled all the way back ’round again.

Typically, when supply disruptions roil markets, political leaders can’t do much about it. But in the coming food crisis, the U.S. actually has a powerful policy lever. With a single bold move, the Biden administration could free up food supplies while also reversing a policy blunder that hurts consumers, increases greenhouse-gas emissions, and damages ecosystems across the U.S. It would require some political courage, but Biden could move to suspend—and push ultimately to repeal—the Renewable Fuel Standard.

nacted as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the RFS program was meant to increase U.S. fuel supplies and promote green-energy innovation by requiring that transportation fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel contain growing portions of renewable biofuels. In 2007, Congress expanded the program and set even more ambitious targets.

But problems emerged from the start. For one, the program is mind-bendingly complex, delineating four types of biofuels, setting annual targets for each, and awarding refiners various credits for meeting their “Renewable Volume Obligation.” The EPA has the authority to change or waive these rules at whim, making the program “unpredictable and arbitrary,” writes Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Mario Loyola in The Atlantic. According to one estimate, RFS “compliance alone is adding about 14 cents to refiners’ cost per gallon of gasoline and diesel.”

Though mostly invisible to the public, the RFS program affects the lives and pocketbooks of all U.S. consumers and has remade the face of American agriculture. Today, roughly one-third of U.S. soybean oil production is used to make biofuels. Corn-based ethanol has an even bigger footprint. Virtually every gallon of gasoline sold in this country contains 10 percent ethanol, the maximum allowed by law. (A small number of gas stations also sell E85, an 85 percent ethanol blend that can only be used in specially designed engines.) Growing the corn to make all that ethanol requires a staggering 38 million acres, an area larger than the state of Illinois. If used to grow food for human consumption, Loyola writes, that acreage could feed 150 million people.

By diverting about 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production, the RFS program drives up food prices across the board. Since corn is a critical livestock feed, higher corn prices have inflated meat prices. The cost of ground beef has climbed almost 100 percent since the program began. Wheat and rice prices have also gone up as many farmers shifted to growing corn instead. As Loyola concludes, “The ethanol program functions as a hidden food tax—the most regressive of all taxes.” Those effects are felt not just in the U.S., but around the world.

So, just your typical Big Government dumpster fire, then— unforeseen consequences strewn extravagantly across the landscape; costs far outstripping any meager benefits; the whole disastrous burden plopped squarely onto the usual shoulders: those of the Normie schlubs who will be required to pay for it all, of course and as always.

Get the sugar out of our gas tanks and back onto the dinner table where it belongs, I say. Just think of the engine damage that will be averted by ditching this piss-water fuel, if nothing else. As for those costs I mentioned, well…

Given all those costs, one would assume the RFS program must have some powerful benefits that justify its continued existence. But recent research shows the mandates don’t even achieve the two things they were meant to accomplish: reducing fossil-fuel use and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. If anything, it worsens these problems. Planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn and then processing it into ethanol requires lots of energy. Researchers debate whether the resulting gallon of ethanol contains a bit more energy than went into it or a bit less, but the balance appears to be a wash at best. Rather than replacing fossil fuels, then, the RFS program simply converts those fuels into a more expensive form. Corn ethanol also backfires when it comes to reducing emissions. According to the new DOE study, “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

I repeat: your typical, Mark 1 Mod 0 Big Goobermint boondoggle. No less, no more.

Whatever the political challenges, reforming the RFS program is the right thing to do.

Damned skippy it is…which is another reason why it ain’t happening.

“RFS is a misuse of hyper-productive American agricultural land,” Smith says. “Food inflation domestically and the potential for food shortages in other countries should make it obvious that agricultural lands should be used to produce food.” This would be a good time for President Biden and his team to remember that Obama-era mantra: never let a crisis go to waste.

Okay, you’re just being silly now. Biden’s minders are perfectly happy to keep the ethanol, and for them, what’s not to like about it? It damages internal combustion engines both large and small; its various detriments subtly discourage automobile ownership and use; it helps keep the price of gasoline artificially inflated; and it serves as a properly-bended knee to demonstrate a becoming fealty to the Enviro-nuts, who are much too useful to risk giving offense to. Somewhat related:

The average price of one gallon of regular gasoline in the United States rose by a dollar, to $3.31, during Joe Biden’s first year in the White House. Now, supercharged by war in Ukraine, the price has soared to $4.27 per gallon. That average, though, is misleading. The actual price of gas at the pump varies widely by state, with nearly a $2-per-gallon difference between the costliest and the least expensive states. While some of those differences have to do with geographic factors that affect distribution costs, state policies—including taxes and regulations—also play a significant role in the vastly different burden consumers face around the country.

The highest gas prices are found disproportionately in high-tax, heavily regulated Democratic states, while the lowest gas prices show up in so-called red or purple states. California leads the way at a whopping $5.78 per gallon, followed by Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York among the lower 48 states (Hawaiian and Alaskan geography make any comparisons with the rest of the country difficult). At the bottom sits Kansas, at $3.81 per gallon, followed by Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

The price of a barrel of oil accounts for about 56 percent of the cost of this gas. Taxes on average compose about 15 percent of the price, and distribution and marketing costs amount to the rest. State gas taxes are an obvious culprit, but extraordinary fuel standards beyond the national level force up prices, too—as do regulatory constraints on building pipelines and refineries, which inflate distribution costs.

There are several ways we might think of all this:

  • Just deserts
  • Getting what you voted for—good and hard
  • Reaping what you’ve sown
  • What goes around, comes around
  • Hoist on your own (enviro-nut) petard

Now isn’t that FUN? Feel free to post your own in the comments. Don’t be shy, you’ll enjoy it. Meanwhile, who’s really behind this latest spurt of fuel-ish frenzy, anyway? Take a wild guess.

President Joe Biden and prominent Democrats blame Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, alleged oil-company collusion and even COVID-19 for today’s sky-high gas prices. They refuse to take responsibility for this monumental mess of their own design.

Revealing either an Olympic-grade lack of self-awareness or a perjury-strength talent for lying, President Biden said: “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”

While running for president, Biden repeatedly promised to do exactly this.

“I guarantee you,” Biden told New Hampshire voters on Sept. 16, 2019. “We’re going to end fossil fuels.”

Follows, a long timeline of shitlib quotes vowing to kill off the fossil fuel industry, each item with the price per gallon at the time it was excreted parenthetically appended at the end. It’s a handy, helpful reminder that can be printed out and waved under their noses whenever they start in lying about it again.

All good things

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Say it ain’t so, Duck Duck Go.

Diet Google: DuckDuckGo Will ‘Down-Rank’ What It Decides Is ‘Disinformation’
Popular privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo, commonly considered an alternative to Google, has announced that it will be “down-ranking” sites associated with “disinformation,” along with adding “information boxes” to “highlight quality information.” The announcement received widespread backlash from DuckDuckGo supporters, who view the changes as adopting the censorship policies of the Masters of the Universe.

In a recent Twitter post, the CEO of privacy-focused search engine DuckDuckGo announced that the company would be downranking “sites associated with disinformation,” which has been a popular tactic by Google for years to reduce user access to content it considers objectionable.

DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg tweeted about the decision, stating that it was an effort to reduce Russian disinformation online. “Like so many others I am sickened by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the gigantic humanitarian crisis it continues to create. #StandWithUkraine️,” Weinberg stated, adding: “At DuckDuckGo, we’ve been rolling out search updates that down-rank sites associated with Russian disinformation.”

Weinberg goes on to say that DuckDuckGo will also be placing news modules and information boxes at the top of certain search results to highlight “quality information for rapidly unfolding topics.” This was a method used by many search engines and social media sites during the coronavirus pandemic to push official government narratives and information — that regularly changed drastically — to internet users.

Many were quick to point out that DuckDuckGo’s democratic approach to information was one of the major selling points of the website in the first place.

I must confess that the biggest selling point for me was simply that they weren’t Google. I’ll stick with DDG, at least for now, but won’t be cheerleading for them the way I had been until this move. It’s like this:

DuckDuckGo is apparently deciding that it has the judgment and authority to define and determine what is “relevant,” just like every other search engine. The company’s argument is that privacy and propaganda are two separate matters. Consequently, it appears the only difference between it and other search engines is that, by refraining from tracking its users, DuckDuckGo won’t know who they are censoring and propagandizing. And, per Weinberg’s “I Never Promised You a Rose Garden” defense, if any user expected more that’s on them, not on DuckDuckGo.

Perhaps. But what is on Weinberg is the fact that, like others in a lengthy line of morally weak Big Tech titans, he evidently can’t resist the temptation to shape how and what his users should consider and conclude.

As for dissatisfied DuckDuckGo users and countless others around the world, the key question remains: Where can they find a search engine that both respects privacy and rejects censorship?

Ain’t one, I’m afraid. Hopefully some enterprising soul will step up quickly to fill this new gap.

USA Today announces this year’s WOTY selection

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The moment we’ve all been waiting for, I’m sure.

‘Be true to yourself’: A message from the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official

*groan*

Rachel Levine is one of USA TODAY’s Women of the Year, a recognition of women across the country who have made a significant impact. The annual program is a continuation of Women of the Century, a 2020 project that commemorated the 100th anniversary of women gaining the right to vote. Meet this year’s honorees at womenoftheyear.usatoday.com.

I’m fine with it, really, except for that whole “She’s a fucking MAN” part.

Levine, 64, a trained pediatrician, became the nation’s highest-ranking openly transgender official last March when the Senate confirmed her as assistant secretary of health. Levine has spent her professional life in medicine – as an academic, a clinical researcher, a primary care physician and as Pennsylvania’s physical general and secretary of the Pennsylvania Department of Health – but she admits her current role has proven to be the most challenging.

Beyond the pandemic, Levine said she is concerned about the challenges women and girls face related to body image. She ran an eating disorder program at Penn State University and was struck by the pressures of social media related to appearance.

“We need to be welcoming and celebratory for women of all aspects, of all sizes and shapes,” she said. “And we have to work towards that compassion for all women and not put such an emphasis on thinness and appearance. I think that we need to work as a culture in the United States, but also globally, to be more compassionate and more accepting of girls and women, no matter what their size and shape.”

Still, Levine believes that women are largely responsible for the positive changes we are seeing in society.

Because of course he does.

“Women are absolutely critical in terms of promoting healthy behaviors for themselves and their families and our communities,” Levine said. “I think women are often the creators of change. In terms of the changes that we see in our society and our culture, I think that women are those change-makers.”

Gotta give the mentally-disturbed freak this: he really knows how to tickle all the shitlib erogenous zones, don’t he?

Via Miguel at GFZ, who quips “Nothing says, “Women’s History Month’…Like awarding a dude the title of Woman of the Year.” Ain’t it the truth.

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Stuff and nonsense

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Nobody brings the steaming, smoking codswallop quite like L’il Petey Buttplug.

SEC. BUTTIGIEG ON PELOSI’S CLAIM THAT SPENDING REDUCES DEBT: ‘IT IS TRUE’
“Well, I mean, first of all, if you look at our fiscal policy, it is true. And amazingly, a lot of people don’t even know this, that the deficit has gone down and down by a remarkable amount. So, I think part of it is an expression of that. I think also part of it is pointing to the fact that some of the investments that we make help with inflation. I mean, that’s definitely true with the infrastructure investments, right, because we know how infrastructure is related to supply chain, supply chain is related to inflation.”

And we all already know what great shape the supply chain is in, don’t we?

Delusional, stupid, or merely a habitual liar scrambling to cover his ass? It’s a rare three-fer in the “Embrace the healing power of ‘and'” pantheon, methinks. Kudos to Mr/Mrs/Miss/Whatthefuckever Buttplug for making this remarkable hat-trick look so dang easy.

Wait, whuuuuuh….

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Looks like Gropey’s off his meds again.

Biden says he bets everybody knows somebody who’s had their naked photos shared online
Biden said:

“So we’ve established a new civil rights cause of action for those whose intimate images were shared on the public screen. How many times have you heard…I bet everybody knows somebody, somewhere along the line that in an intimate relationship, what happened was the guy takes a revealing picture of his naked friend, or whatever, in a compromising position and then literally, in a sense, blackmails her or mortifies that person.”

Um no, I don’t know anyone who this has happened to…nope. But I bet Biden is really talking about his son, Hunter.

Ditto. Speak for yourself there, Gropester. My own personal closet is free of skeletons of that particular stripe, thenksveddymuch. Well, okay, as far as I KNOW, it is. If anybody out there knows otherwise, please keep it to yourself, mmm’kay? Actually, I can’t recollect anybody ever even suggesting I let them take a few snaps of me in the buff, and can’t imagine why anyone would even want to. The worst and most bizarre Innarnuts “gotcha” on me is at Urban Dictionaruy, of all places, and I’m rather proud of it. Here, see for yourself:

The Mike Hendrix

A sex move where the male The Hendrix leaves the female The Chick halfway through coitus to make and eat a sandwich. When confronted about leaving the room, offer to make The Chick one as well.

The Mike Hendrix can be performed by announcing (“I’m gonna go make a sandwich”), or by virtue of leaving, but The Hendrix must make and consume a sandwich to be considered valid.

We were having great sex, but then pulled the Mike Hendrix on me.

Never have I done any such thing, I solemnly swear, not even once. So it may not even be me they’re talking about. But I kinda hope it is, to be perfectly honest.

Strongest, most effective military on Earth?

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The Lone Superpower.

Navy Refuses to Deploy Warship While Commander Remains Unvaccinated
U.S. Navy officials have said a warship can’t be deployed because its commander has refused the COVID-19 vaccine.

The service said an East Coast guided-missile destroyer is “out of commission” after a Florida federal judge ruled that the Navy and Marine Corps cannot remove its officer for being unvaccinated against COVID-19.

The warship now remains docked in Norfolk, Virginia.

It comes after U.S. District Judge Steven Merryday, a George H. W. Bush nominee, ruled on Feb. 2 to bar Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and all other military officials from taking punitive action against the unnamed Navy officer, who sought religious exemptions to the military’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

Merryday wrote that the Navy’s rejection failed to note that the branch has separately granted hundreds of medical exemptions to the COVID-19 vaccine mandate

Annnnd…Cut! Print! That’s a wrap, people! We have now officially reached peak Covid stupidity, I do believe.

Top military officials determined that the commander’s religious beliefs were sincere and that they would be “substantially burdened” by being forced to get vaccinated, but also claimed that granting the exemption request “would have a predictable and detrimental effect on the readiness of you and the Sailors who serve alongside you.”

Oops. Looks like I mighta spoke too soon.

Admiral Daryl Caudle filed a statement on Feb. 28 saying that the Navy “cannot have a Sailor who disobeys a lawful order to receive a vaccine because they harbor a personal objection any more than we can have a Sailor who disobeys the technical manual for operating a nuclear reactor because he or she believes they know better.”

DAYUMMMM, dude, this Covid-stupidity hole is deep enough already! So stop digging, willya?!? Bill, with all the analysis of this risible nonsense you’ll ever need:

The American Dream will end in farce.  And then nightmare.

Not quite there yet, Bill. From where I’m sitting, it ended in farce a goodish while back. And as I’ve been saying, the nightmare part has already begun.

Update! Here’s a link to the original article, hat tip Bill, just in case anybody has problems with the archive.is one. I never have had any trouble with ’em myself, but I’ve heard from others who have here and then.

Blowback for Brandon

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Hey, if the shoe fits…which, y’know, it does.

BREAKING: Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers BLAST Joe Biden for LYING about American oil production

Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers had choice words for President Joe Biden in a Fox News segment Saturday. Focusing on soaring gas prices across America, the segment included interviews with a group of laid-off workers.

“We should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question,” one worker told Fox News.

The Fox News reporter then asked: “If we want to get the price of gas down right now, we want to drop the price of gas, what do we need to do right now?”

“Put us to work right now. And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it,” the worker replied.

Workers then turned attention to Biden. “He’s pushing for solar and wind power, but it’s been proven over and over, that’s just not as efficient as burning natural gas, refining crude.” Another worked continued, saying: “We are sick of hearing, ‘This is Putin’s price hike.'”

Plenty more where that came from—every word a gem, every word the plain and simple 24-karat truth, the most salient insight helpfully emphasized above by moi. Brandon and his co-conspirators should be made to own their intentional sabotage of American energy independence, though. After all, it’s not as if they haven’t lectured, hectored, and pimped their silly, emasculated electric toy “cars”—along with the whole kit and kaboodle of their obsolete and unworkable “sustainable energy” folderol—long enough for everyone to know their true colors by now: Green, and Red.

It’s not as if they don’t realize the damage their lunatic jihad against fossil fuels—the most efficient, reliable, easily-gleaned and -managed energy source there is as of right this minute, the only one even remotely capable of powering a robust industrial economy—has and will do to the US, its economy, and ordinary Americans, mind. They know full well. It’s just that they don’t give a flying fuck at a plate-glass window about it, that’s all. At this point, they appear to have lost all patience, abandoned the gauzy illusion of logical persuasion and fair debate, and have moved on to openly waging economic war against the legitimate interests of the nation and her people—a most cruel and abominable war indeed.

Alas, but this is who they are. This iswhat they do. For the Left, the Almighty Agenda—raw, untrammeled power and control—always and forever comes first, overriding all other concerns. T’was ever thus, or nearly so. The last honest, honorable, and sincerely patriotic Democrat expired along with JFK or thereabouts, leaving us with the bizarre degenerates we’re saddled with at present. The modern bumper crop of amoral, hedonistic Democrats are an affliction, a cancer, one that must be excised completely, by whatever means necessary, if the body politic is ever to be restored to some semblance of health. Mike Walsh knows the score…mostly.

A specter is haunting America—the specter of the Democrat Party. Like an evil spirit that cannot be exorcised, the Democrats have been plaguing the United States since Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Ferociously pro-slavery, the Democrats divided the country practically from its inception, blocked the path to abolition and eventually took up arms against the nation after the election of the first Republican president, firing on Fort Sumter and seceding en masse from the Union. And, a week after they had lost that war, one of them assassinated Abraham Lincoln, elevating a Democrat from a Confederate state to the presidency, and plunging the country into more needless turmoil.

With a track record like this it’s a wonder the party is even still legal.

It really shouldn’t oughta be, and I mean that with every fibre of my being, literally and sincerely. No nation-state with the least regard for its own legitimacy is in any way obligated to tolerate the existence of a powerful political party flatly sworn to undermine, weaken, and injure said nation-state, even as it is diligently beavering away at that self-same project. As for the tyrannies, look to history to provide numerous examples of just how forgiving a dictator and/or ruling cabal usually is when it comes to clutching national parties fomenting unrest and insurrection fondly to its bosom, allowing them to carry on unmolested.

Hell, in those places you’re liable to the get the chop merely for walking around in public view with the smallest, most respectful and innocuous protest sign conceivable hoisted over your shoulder. Anything more radical than the most obsequious and Milquetoast-ian dissent, and the State’s bullyboys will fall on your doomed head like a crap-ton of sizeable rocks. Won’t be no dragging of the feet about the matter, either. The absolute least such an igner’nt fool can anticipate is to wake up next morning chained to a wall of a damp, noisome cell enjoying a ferocious headache; a seriously split lip; a whole passel of fresh new aches, pains, and deep-purple bruising scattered about his body; and little to no memory of how he got himself into this sorry state.

Make no mistake: rhe more strident you wax in your political agitation, the worse things are going to get for you. Count on it. Far better to just keep your lip zipped; walk with a bit of a stoop and a shuffle, no hint of any confident strut showing through; accept whatever Authority gives you without question or complaint; and make sure you’re always securely tucked into the middle of a crowd of other people, safely out of easy sight whenever you’re out and about, and you’ll be all right. Probably. Think “grey, ordinary, bland” so hard you actually project that image bodily, so that the aura of your shy, harmless nature rises off of you in visible waves.

For more on this, you want to take a leisurely stroll through the indispensable Julie Kelly’s AmGreat Jan 6 “riot” archive. These columns are an unflinching examination at the mid-to-late stages of America’s godawful descent from more-or-less proper governance into Tyranny Most Dire, vital material for anyone with a stomach strong enough to handle them. It’s dismal, ugly stuff, trust me it is—achingly painful reading for any poor naif still clinging to the battered belief in the ongoing existence of his cherished but long-extinct Republic, however far afield it may have strayed from the golden dreams of its Founders. Be sure you have a fifth of something stout handy when you do this. Trust me, you’re going to need it.

And yet, after the bloodiest war in our history—and with a sizable component of “peace Democrats” in the North actively rooting and voting against Lincoln in the election of 1864 while supporting his opponent: the failed Union general George McClellan—they’re still around to plague us. It wasn’t until the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant as commander of all the Union armies in 1864 that Honest Abe found the right man for the job: someone who would mercilessly crush the life out of the Democrats and their armies, destroy slavery, and reunite the states.

The midterms are still eight months away but Real America is crying out for succor right now.

Well, DUH. They’re worried, they’re out of work, the grocery-store pickin’s are mighty slim. Which is no real issue anyhow: even if there WAS food on those shelves like in the Goode Olde Days of yore, they couldn’t afford to buy any thanks to Bidenflation. Certainly, a few gallons of gas for the drive over is WAY out of reach. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans are confronting real deprivation and want, after long luxuriating in the plenitude created by the system they passively watched being ruined a-purpose, when they weren’t actively helping destroy it. Worse, as I’ve said before, this is only the beginning of our national nightmare. When it will end, IF it will end, is known only to God Himself.

I only wish I could believe that this planned disaster, with its concomitant needless suffering, would be enough for Americans to finally and fully understand what the bitter, toxic fruits of Demonrat rule have been for nigh on a century, and to firmly decide they don’t want anything more to do with the lousy bastards. If the howling hell-storm now unfurling all around us finishes the criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party for good, erasing all traces of their malignant misrule forever, I’d consider it well worth the suffering. Sorry, but I can’t.

Hoping that their Uniparty partners-in-crime might be taken down along with the Dems is just bugfiucknuts. Oh, I suppose it’s barely&mdas;BARELY—possible, sure. But it’s wildly, grotesquely improbable. Nobody should waste any time fantasizing about it, lest such useless woolgathering obscure or distract us from the arduous real-world work required to actually get the thing done.

Gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, natural gas—the prices continue to soar, already past the point of recent plausibility and heading into economic terra incognita. Millions of illegal aliens pour across the nearly erased southern border. A befuddled Joe Biden threatens to sleepwalk us into an armed conflict with the ghost of the old Soviet Union in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and disinformation is rife on both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine. In a parliamentary system, Biden’s government would have fallen right after the debacle in Afghanistan—but barring a miracle we’ve got another three years to suffer.

For just over a year, Americans have watched with admirable patience as their economy collapsed, their legal system was perverted to serve the interests of a few, their nation’s military degraded, and their freedom of speech subverted via the government’s fascistic and unconstitutional co-opting of the social media sites. Meanwhile, woke corporations and a thoroughly compromised media crack down on the commercial and personal privacy of anybody that runs afoul of the New Normal while manic Greens demand a return to the days of three-masted schooners and windmills. Such relentless cultural and economic sabotage would be considered an act of war if done by anyone else—but here it goes by the fellow-traveler names of “dissent,” “patriotism,” and “progressivism.”

Walsh goes on from there to lob a few undeserved stinkbombs at Trump as if he was still at all relevant, and then this:

The other is Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Smart, pugnacious, and unflappable, DeSantis has emerged as the chief thorn in Joe Biden and the Left’s side. After his narrow win over a guy who was later found dead drunk in a Miami Beach hotel room he was sharing with a gay porn producer who had overdosed on crystal meth, DeSantis has cemented his hold on the former swing state, turning it solid red. Unlike Trump, who at the moment is powerless, the squeaky-clean DeSantis upstages Biden and the Democrats on a regular basis; his canny and unflappable handling of the “pandemic” has given rise to a new nickname for the Sunshine State: the Free State of Florida.

DeSantis, 43, can make no public noises about seeking the presidency at this point. He must get past his re-election for governor in the fall first and hope the voters rally to take back control of Congress from the narrowest-of-narrow Democrat majorities. With his wife, Casey, now seemingly recovered from a bout with cancer, he is sitting pretty.

It’s widely thought that if Trump declares, DeSantis will wait his turn in 2028. But why should he spend four years on ice behind a lightning rod with no further political future? Polls already show him creeping up on Trump and a smashing re-election victory will only gain him more prominence. Lots can happen in three years, especially when his possible primary opponent is getting on in years. After Biden, will America want another geriatric president? Or will the voters prefer a guy 32 years younger, with nothing but upside?

I hope and pray he stays on in Florida instead. DeSantis can render the remaining handful of non-authoritarian fragments of what was once the great American republic far greater service there than in Mordor On The Potomac, where the Deep State’s legions of orcs, trolls, and winged Nazgul will rip him to bloody gobbets of raw meat as they did Trump.

Sorry, Mike, but there really, truly is no voting our way out of this. However it comes about, something far more direct, proactive, and potent than toodling on over to the local polling place to cast a meaningless ballot in a systemically corrupt “election” is gonna be required of us. Possibly, a way may yet be found short of actual, violent revolution against the bloated, evil Federal Leviathan. We should all pray for that. But it WILL involve some level of violent upheaval, of that I’m certain. The yawning divide between us is simply unbridgeable to allow for anything less, and unless and until the Left’s marrow-deep megalomania is well and truly extinguished the conflict will rage on, even intensify.

For my own part, I find myself losing interest more and more in national politics and the DC doings. After all we’ve witnessed since Inauguration Day 2016, the DC charade and rot so gallantly exposed by Trump has left me largely indifferent as to who might be installed in the now-tainted White House as figurehead-of-state, beyond whatever entertainment value one can derive from it. Our self-declared Masters are gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless, leaving the workaday schlubs to pay the freight for their disastrously inept folly as per usual. Until they’ve been thrown off, by hook or by crook, there really isn’t a whole lot for the little guy to do other than just grin and bear it.

Update! More on Brandon’s wholly-intentional and pre-planned fuel-price assault on America.

Nonprofit food deliveries concerned cost of gas could price out volunteer drivers
It’s never been more expensive for volunteer food drivers to make deliveries for nonprofits. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high.

Meals on Wheels volunteer driver Sal Depasquale brings food to 89-year-old Frances Crowder once a week.

“He’s always on time,” Crowder said. “Oh boy, I don’t know what we’d do without Mr. Sal.”

Inserted betwixt the above paragraph and the next one, we find one of those ubiquitous clickbait links to another related article, which I found modestly amusing:

BIDEN: ‘CAN’T DO MUCH RIGHT NOW’ TO LOWER SOARING GAS PRICES, ‘RUSSIA’S RESPONSIBLE’

Gratifying to see this hapless liar floundering so desperately, innit? Allow me to translate Dopey Gropey’s usual ham-fisted prevarication into Truth:

  • Say not “can’t,” Gropey. Say “won’t,” or if that doesn’t suffice to keep the risible, pathetic attempt at deception semi-viable and your lying ass covered, try “have no desire to” instead.
      • Okay, the closing schnauzer-slodder is getting quite damned stale at this point. After so many years watching you blaggards fellate your beloved USSR, all dewy-eyed and face lovingly aflush as you were gratingly demanding the US hew closely to its horrid example, later compounded by your latest beloved candidate for Token First Female President’s use of the Rooskies to underhandedly, illegally, even treasonously slither her way into the White House, your sudden volte face into frothing hatred for all things Russia and/or Putin has a distinctly malodorous aroma wafting from it. As for Putin himself, I just can’t make myself jump into those waters along with everybody and his sister’s cat’s grandmother, seemingly. Yes, yes, yes: dictator, strongman, warlord, thug—got it, granted, so stipulated. So what the bloody deuce did y’all expect from Russia, anyway? I mean, it’s Russia, ferchrissake. Throughout its history, whenever they’ve slipped up and allowed somebody who really WASN’T one or all of those things to take power as head of state, they’ve bestirred themselves to correct the error toot sweet. I do heartily disapprove of his jumping poor Poland, yes; I would much prefer the valiant, indomitable, and admirable Poles to remain free and independent. But is there a soul so innocent and/or oblivious as to have been at all surprised by it?

      His deplorable Ukraine incursion aside, though, which I’m confident will be undone sooner rather than later, I must confess I’m just a wee mite fond of Putin. His sneering, openly-expressed contempt for President Mommy Jeans I thoroughly enjoyed; his proud basking in traditional masculinity and its multitude of related sins, with none of the obllgatory genuflecting and fashionable groveling towards the LGBTQIXN39Whatthefuckever herd-orthodoxy I find refreshing. He’s something of a throwback to an earlier era, a more clear, natural, and honest age. I must say, if the choice was offered of either Putin or the decrepit bleeding hemorrhoid we’re suffering under now as the US president, I’d take the unevolved Rooskie trog any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. We could use a strong, no-bullshit leader like ol’ Vlad right about now, I think.

In any event, Brandon’s odd reflex to blame anything and everything on Russia has not a thing to do with reality and everything to do with Gropey’s will to somehow survive politically, to stanch the copious bleeding of his innumerable self-inflicted wounds. But enough of that, back to the original topic we go.

Meals on Wheels is a nonprofit food delivery service. Depasquale has been a volunteer driver for more than 10 years. 

“It’s a valuable service, and it helps people who need help,” Depasquale said.

It’s never been more expensive for drivers to make deliveries. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high. Depasquale makes three or four deliveries every week. He’s concerned if prices continue to skyrocket, volunteer drivers like him will drop out. This could dramatically increase his workload and pain at the pump.

Cross Services, Meals on Wheels’s parent company, is watching gas prices around the country. The company still has enough drivers to make deliveries, but are afraid that could change if prices stay this high.

“Hopefully we’ll retain them,” said Cross Services Senior Services Coordinator Mary Jo Buettner. “But, again it depends on how long that price of gas stays up so high and keeps going up.”

As long as Democrats are in charge, be assured that that is precisely what they’ll do. For them, this situation is no disaster, no terrible problem that must be remedied. It represehts the successful implementation of a long-standing policy goal—a win, not a loss or mistake. The misery will not just continue, but increase…until they have been removed from power. Far from being complex or difficult to understand, it really is just that simple, folks.

Want to Make America Great Again, Heritage Americans in flyover country, small towns, and suburban enclaves? You have to Make Democrats Afraid Again, then see to it they stay that way. Like it or not, it’s the only way; nothing less will do the trick.

A final note: my brother tells me that his conversations with other truckers indicate that, should diesel passe the five-dollar/gallon mark, a large number of his fellow independents and owner/operators intend to shut ’em down. They’ll do it too; they’ll have to, they won’t have any choice in the matter. My brother his own self is near that point already; he told me the other day that his every-other-day fillup, formerly around 250 to 300 dollars, cost him well over eight hundred bucks last time. No business can go on hemorrhaging that kind of money for very long before quickly bleeding out. Think the huge truck-driver shortage, a genuinely dangerous situation, couldn’t possibly get much worse than it already is? Think the price of every good, every commodity, can’t keep rising so insanely? Think this is a crisis we’re in now? Just you wait until thousands more trucks, the lifeblood of our economy, have been taken off the road for good.

Again: only the beginning, now unstoppable, needless and nonsensical. All of it, every last bit, a man-caused disaster created entirely and intentionally by Leftard Democrats, for nefarious purposes. That’s the long and the short of it. I won’t be lending my endorsement by participating further in American “elections,” as if they were above-board and credible, thereby granting tacit, open-ended license to my oppressors to do as they please, rather than the bread-and-circuses theatrical distraction they in fact are. But I do wish someone who feels differently about it would sit down and explain to me how ANY decent, reasonably intelligent and informed adult—seeing all that we’ve seen, knowing all that we know, at least nominally awake and of sound mind generally—could even hypothetically justify voting for a Democrat, ever.

And yet.

Where such people are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes, when I’m in a twee coffee bar or near a spontaneous drum circle, I can feel them.

The mind, it boggles.

7

No matter how paranoid you are, you ain’t anywhere near paranoid enough

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Coming soon to an Orwellian nightmare-nation all too near you. Quite nigh upon us, in fact. Like Sandberg’s fog, it crept in on little cat’s feet—inch by inch, over the course of many decades—and is now well-established and will be extremely difficult to overthrow. Even moreso, sickeningly, since so many so-called Americans actually support it. The Covid trial run showed that clearly enough.

Yesterday, when a December 2021 news article was belatedly linked at (ironically enough) Citizen Free Press, I saw The Perfect Citizen come one giant step closer to reality. Under the title “Worldwide Social Credit Industry – Infrastructure to Support Social Credit Systems Represents a $16.1 Billion Opportunity by 2026,” the article matter-of-factly discusses the great money-making opportunities now possible in the emerging field of police-state surveillance of the citizenry. After listing some of the multinational corporate giants competing for market share in our future slave-state, it summarized the “opportunities” in a set of bullet points:

“The COVID-19 pandemic has facilitated substantial interest in citizen monitoring solutions…

  • Cameras and other optical equipment for social credit systems will reach $723M globally by 2026
  • Advanced computing will be used in conjunction with AI to provide nearly flawless identification and tracking
  • Various forms of biometrics will be used for identity verification as well as verifying the presence/location of people
  • Starting as tangential to public safety and homeland security, the social credit market becomes mainstream by 2026
  • Social credit systems represent the ability to identify (mostly people but also some ‘things’) and track activities for purposes of grading behaviors and applying ‘social credit scoring.”

While no mention is made of the Maoist origins and goals of “social credit” ideology, the article admits that “most systems will have socially acceptable behaviour at their core…government, companies, and society as a whole must determine ‘good’, ‘bad’, and ‘marginal’ behavior within the social credit market…[S]ystems will ultimately be used for a variety of commerce and lifestyle-related issues…accessibility within public places such as concerts, sporting events, and other assemblies. High social scoring individuals within the social credit market will be granted preferred access to both real and digital assets…[T]he convergence of … disparate technologies…will facilitate value within the social credit market…sensors, biometrics, cameras, and other optical devices, computer vision systems, and other advanced computing platforms.”

Ah, the banality of evil as our natural rights and freedom die not in a blaze of glory on a battlefield but by slow-motion absorption into a real-life “Matrix” of cybernetic transhumanism facilitated by financial advisers.

If the familiarity all this doesn’t leave you with chilled blood and gooseflesh, you aren’t paying attention. The title mentions “war propaganda,” but for some reason the author barely even mentions it in the piece. Bill takes up his slack for us:

The Basic Principles of War Propaganda – Wikipedia

Contents

1 Contents
1.1 1. We don’t want war, we are only defending ourselves!
1.2 2. Our adversary is solely responsible for this war!
1.3 3. Our adversary’s leader is inherently evil and resembles the devil
1.4 4. We are defending a noble cause, not our particular interests!
1.5 5. The enemy is purposefully committing atrocities; if we are making mistakes this happens without intention
1.6 6. The enemy makes use of illegal weapons
1.7 7. We suffer few losses, the enemy’s losses are considerable
1.8 8. Recognized intellectuals and artists support our cause
1.9 9. Our cause is sacred
1.10 10. Whoever casts doubt on our propaganda helps the enemy and is a traitor

Seems relevant.

Follows, just one contemporary example, with no further commentary either provided or necessary from Bill. The accompanying image spells it out well enough.

Well done, Mister LaForge

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The ones they want to ban most are the very ones they ought to be forced to read, up to and including putting a gun to their empty heads if that’s what it takes.

Literacy advocate, Star Trek star, and game show host LeVar Burton wants people, particularly children, to read banned books. The former Reading Rainbow host appeared during a segment about banned books on The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. In the piece, Burton attempts to read some seemingly innocuous books only to get cut off because of a book banning for one contrived reason or another. Eventually, Burton runs away after hearing sirens nearby, but not before encouraging folks to read banned books “because that’s where the good stuff is.” You can watch the entire The Daily Show segment below.

The topic of banned books reached new heights when a Tennessee school district banned Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus, which chronicles the cartoonist’s father’s experiences in a concentration camp during the holocaust. Many have rallied against this movement, including author and CBLDF supporter Neil Gaiman, who wrote, “There’s only one kind of people who would vote to ban Maus, whatever they are calling themselves these days.”

They can call themselves anything they damned well please, but the song always remains the same with creatures like these. and always will.

5

Milestone reached

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Anybody remember when State Media ran those somber “grim milestone” reports each and every night on the TeeWee “news,” reminding everyone of Shrubya’s totally unacceptable body count in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Nah, me neither.

The total number of adverse reactions reported in the USA is 1,084,457 as of that date. Over one million adverse reactions…yet the media, and the medical establishment, trumpet how “safe” the vaccines are! If that’s “safe”, then I’m Mata Hari! (The reports for Europe are just as bad, if not worse in certain countries.) Of particular importance is the incidence of heart problems (particularly pericarditis and myocarditis) encountered among the vaccinated. Another looming issue is the rise in stillbirths among vaccinated pregnant women: “We are currently on pace to see a yearly total of 2,838 recorded fetal deaths following COVID-19 shots, while the yearly average of recorded fetal deaths following the vaccination of pregnant women for the past 30 years has been an average of 74 fetal deaths per year.”

Do bear in mind that those record-setting numbers come from the VAERS numbers, which even the CDC itself has admitted almost certainly amounts only to a fraction of the real total.

Medical “science” is racing to explain away those reactions (which, as the bottom graphic above shows, are worse than all previous vaccines of any kind since records began to be kept). Guess what excuse they’ve just invented?

Oh, I’m sure it’s a good one. The deadly OMIGAWD!!™ variant? White supremacists? Trump? The heartbreak of psoriasis? WHAT?!?

Guess what? It’s not the vaccines’ fault at all – it’s stress! That’s why so many vaccine recipients are dropping dead with heart problems!

Note, too, that this excuse will also be used to motivate more money for the medical establishment: “without at least doubling the current funding, the NHS will not be able to tackle the ‘trauma timebomb’, which could have potentially fatal consequences for those suffering with long-term PPSD”. Yeah, riiiiiiiiight. It’s not the vaccines’ fault, so go on foisting their poison on as many people as possible – and give us more money while you’re at it, so we can treat a wholly invented, non-existent stress disorder!

D’you ever get the feeling that the medical establishment as a whole is trying to play us all for suckers?

Sure, and why not? It seems to have worked out extremely well for them so far.

If you haven’t, I suggest you don’t understand the reality of the situation. Do they really think we’re that stupid?

Of course they do; who could possibly imagine otherwise? Have they ever given anybody a single reason to think that they don’t? The big question here is: ARE we? Because frankly, having put up with everygottdamned thing they’ve done over the last nigh-on two years at the very least without a murmur of complaint, I’ve not seen just a whole lot of evidence so far that says they’re wrong in that insulting assessment.

In all the previous pandemics in human history, nobody ever even thought about, or postulated, or theorized, or investigated this syndrome…yet suddenly, out of nowhere, it’s a major factor in fatalities among the vaccinated?

Hate to say it, but in a very sad way there may be a fairly plausible argument in support of the idea, especially when you consider the lamentable reality that the vast majority of Americans today are NOT the sort of stout, independent-minded, indomitable souls their forebears were. Not even close, they ain’t. In a nation populated shore to shore with thoroughly steercotted fruits, flakes, and nuts who get their panties in a bunch over some sane person offhandedly referring to them as “he” instead of “XHRSHIMX” or some other stupid horseshit, the real shocker is that falling over stone-dead because OHHH, I JUST CAN’T EVEN!!! isn’t a lot more common than it is.

1

A night in Hell

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BCE posts on his stay in one of THOSE hotels; most of the saltier old road-dogs among us will need no explanation of what I mean by that, I trust. Naturally, BCE’s nightmarish and all-too-familiar story put me in mind of one of the single most atrocious dumps I can remember staying at: the Admiral Benbow Inn, in Memphis Tn. Regrettably, I made the mistake of DDG’ing the God-forsaken pit and wound up falling into the dreaded Search Engine Sinkhole, hitting links like a blow-junkie lab rat fiending for another sweet, sweet hit, sucked in by article after article chronicling the poor old Benbow’s rise and fall. Never woulda thunk it, but there’s some truly interesting history there, great gooey gobs of it. The backstory:

Dear Vance: Who the heck was Admiral Benbow, and what happened to all those motels here that were named after him? — J.F., Memphis.

Dear J.F.: Just like Colonel Harland Sanders with his Kentucky Fried Chicken empire, John Benbow (1653-1702) was a real person, an admiral in the British Royal Navy. During a long career at sea, he served as the commander of several vessels against various enemies, ranging from Barbary pirates to the French fleet, and I don’t have the time or energy to go into that here. Benbow died from injuries received in battle, with a biographer noting the cause of death was “the wound of his leg, never being set to perfection, which malady being aggravated by the discontent of his mind, threw him into a sort of melancholy.”

The admiral was buried in Jamaica, and his fame was so great that Robert Louis Stevenson, author of the 1883 classic, Treasure Island, named a tavern in his book the “Admiral Benbow Inn.”

Many years later, another enterprising gentleman in Memphis would do the same.

Allen Gary was born in Tupelo, Mississippi, in 1913. Somehow he ended up in Memphis, as so many men and women from the Magnolia State do. In the mid-1930s, he attended Central High School and Southwestern at Memphis (now Rhodes College). At some point, he met up with a business partner, George Early, and together they converted a nineteenth-century stable on Bellevue into a popular eatery called, quite naturally, The Stable. When it opened in 1941, it might be considered one of this city’s first theme restaurants. Not only was it decorated, inside and out, like a rustic barn, but the menu for this “Dispenser of Southern Horse-pitality” included such dishes as the Stagecoach, Hack, Hansom, Buggy, Surrey, and Sulky.

By all accounts, the Stable, located at Union and Bellevue, was a success, and quite a few readers have asked about it over the years, remembering good meals and good times there. But Gary and Early decided to branch out, forming other enterprises. Gary had befriended two of this city’s leading “hospitality men” — motel king Kemmons Wilson and drive-in operator Harold Fortune — and after serving for a time as manager of Fortune’s Belvedere, one of the chain’s largest and fanciest locations, Gary worked out an arrangement with Wilson to open restaurants at Holiday Inns around the South.

This wasn’t quite enough, though. In 1950, Gary and Early converted a brick cottage at Union and Willett into a cozy restaurant that they named the Admiral Benbow Inn. So the first Admiral Benbow in Memphis, or anywhere else for that matter, wasn’t a motel. Newspapers admired the new venture, noting that “its interior furnishings are completely modern in contrast with the fifteenth-century atmosphere.” Even though the tiny building sat just 20 feet from Union, “in the Terrace Room, eating pleasure blends with the busy traffic scene.” Just like in the fifteenth century!

At some point, it seems Early dropped out of this enterprise; I don’t know why. By 1960, Gary was operating 18 restaurants, an accomplishment that earned him a place in American Restaurant magazine’s Hall of Fame. A story about Gary in that publication — perhaps you saw it? — observed, “A restaurant operator whose receipts his first day in business totaled $7.10 [they are talking about the Stable] is today doing a business volume that exceeded $2 million in the fiscal year that just ended, operating restaurants in hotels in six Southern states.”

That still wasn’t enough for Gary. He next conceived Benbow Snack Bars, free-standing diner-type establishments, which often had little more than a counter and 12 stools, much like the nationwide chain of Toddle Houses. These were designed to be erected near motels that had no restaurant of their own, you see, but I was never able to determine how many Benbow Snack Bars were actually constructed. American Restaurant magazine, packed with helpful information, does say that Snack Bars “have been added in Memphis and in Laurel, Mississippi, and Gary is currently studying sites in 10 states” but didn’t say where, exactly, the Memphis locations were.

In 1960, Gary returned to his roots. He tore down his first venture, the old Stable, and erected the first Admiral Benbow Inn — this time a motel — at Union and Bellevue. The modern styling was certainly eye-catching, with lots of white concrete, bright colors, and suspended walkways linking what was considered this city’s first two-story motel. Of course, it included a restaurant along with a lounge called the Escape Hatch. He soon opened others — on Summer, next door to Imperial Bowling Lanes, and on Winchester, close to the airport.

As you can see from the images here, the Admiral Benbow Inn was certainly a nice-looking place and stood out from most of the hum-drum motels being constructed at the time. During its first years, it boasted occupancy rates of 100 percent. But for reasons that I don’t fully understand (since the Lauderdales never frequented such places), the motel developed a bad reputation. In fact, by February 2000, Admiral Benbow had declined to the point where my pal Jim Hanas wrote a Memphis Flyer cover story about his brief stay there. With a title of “Broken Palace: The Last Days of the Admiral Benbow,” you can tell it’s not a flattering portrait.

It was here, in fact, at the Admiral Benbow in Midtown that a fellow named Malcolm Fraser woke up one morning in 1986 to find himself without clothes, luggage, or money. Now this would be disconcerting for anybody, but Fraser just happened to be the former prime minister of Australia, in town for a business visit, and was supposed to be staying at The Peabody. The whole matter was never sorted out, but it’s typical of the decidedly unusual events that seemed to plague the Admiral Benbows in Memphis over the years.

So what happened to them?

Okay, so far, so…well, so dull, honestly. Aside from the mysterious Fraser saga, it’s the sort of dry, aggressively mundane stuff only a Memphian with an obssessive local-history fetish could find interesting, or maybe somebody who was being paid to act as if he had such a fetish. Hang in there though; we’re just about to hit the motherlode.

Memphis celebrates, occasionally even enshrines, its motels. The Lorraine has been encased for future reference as the National Civil Rights Museum; the Heartbreak Hotel, once a mere metaphor in the spiritual neighborhood of Lonely Street, now stands in literal glass and stone on Elvis Presley Boulevard; and the success story of Kemmons Wilson and Holiday Inns Inc. is eclipsed only by that of Fred Smith and Federal Express in the local mythology.

Even the dutiful Gideons have abandoned the Admiral Benbow at the corner of Union and Bellevue, however. There is no trace of either testament in the several drawers in room 245, one of which has had its front torn off and placed neatly inside it where the Bible ought to be.

The television is cockeyed from a failed attempt to rip it from its security mooring, although it doesn’t work so well anyway, and like most everything else in the room, it is rutted with burns from careless cigarettes and/or crack-pipes.

Seven doors down, a man was once stabbed with such a pipe by his so-called boyfriend, or so he said when, out of breath, he waved down a police cruiser at the corner of Madison and Cleveland. The boyfriend told a different story. He himself had been savagely beaten with the room’s telephone by the first man, he said, who had then stabbed himself with the crack pipe. He was only giving chase, he explained, so he could help.

The phone in 245 looks as though it may be the veteran of a beating or two. The plate over the keypad has disappeared, and much else in the room has been either picked clean or otherwise rendered useless. The cover of the heating duct leans beneath the sink. The bathtub faucet leaks hot water and cannot be made to stop. Pee-colored formica peels from the sway-topped sink and the flesh-colored stucco walls crack indiscriminately. The door’s security latch is no longer secure (nor any longer technically a latch, really), the hidden workings of the light switch are not hidden, and the peephole — the one you’re supposed to look through before, ever, ever opening the door — has been plugged with a tiny piece of cloth.

And not a Bible in sight, here when you really need one.

Unlike Memphis’ celebrated motels, the Benbow does not represent anything prized about the city or its history, anything people actually draw paychecks promoting. It is not a monument to the civil rights movement, the birthplace of rock-and-roll, or Memphis’ role as a universal crossroads.

Instead, the Benbow represents another side of the city, a side people draw paychecks keeping quiet, a side that’s as old as the city’s days as a rough river town and crime capital of the known universe.

It’s here that Little Pete, a 19-year-old gangsta from South Memphis, got pinched for shooting a man just off Elvis Presley Boulevard. Where a man once celebrated Valentine’s Day by flying into a drunken rage, trashing his room, and slapping his girlfriend around, all before 10 a.m. Where guests have occasionally tried to off themselves with excess anti-depressants, detergents, and razor-blades.

If, as everyone seems to agree, the Mississippi Delta begins in the lobby of The Peabody, then it just might end somewhere in the tomblike parking lot here at the Admiral Benbow.

The Benbow’s seediness comes only in part from its dilapidation. Part of it is a matter of architecture. The elevated rooms, once a clever parking solution, create a claustrophobic above-ground subterrain ricocheting with shadows and echoes. A series of catwalks connecting the motel’s four buildings makes you feel as though you may already be in prison, so, well, what the hell anyway. In urban planning lingo, these effects might be described pathologically, symptoms of a property that is “sick.”

Once, when the Monkees stayed here, the parking lot and catwalks were overrun by screaming, teenaged girls.

A half-naked woman lies bloody and motionless beside the bed. G-men let a tabloid photographer into the room to snap some shots of the corpse, of the spectacle of blood and breasts and the 9mm cupped in a cold hand.

Nothing serves to verify the Benbow’s status as a dive — with all the campiness that implies — quite like this scene from The Sore Losers, the burlesque allegory from local cult filmmaker Mike McCarthy.

Mid-scene, there is an establishing shot of the motel’s neon sign and marquee, and audiences are expected to get the joke. “Cheap applause for the local crowd,” McCarthy explains.

Everyone knows you haven’t slummed until you’ve slummed at the Admiral Benbow.

Although McCarthy had his car vandalized while filming at the motel, it didn’t keep him from putting out-of-town talent up here during the filming of his latest movie, SuperStarlet A.D., at least for a night.

“The surreal charm wears off when we realize the doors are broken,” co-star Gina Velour writes of the place in her diary of the shoot, which appeared in Hustler’s Leg World last year. “The moldy ceiling is hanging like fog, and there is a single, bare 60-watt bulb, just like in the movies. It’s the worst night I can remember in all my travels. I can’t do this for the next three weeks.”

And she doesn’t, demanding from McCarthy better digs in the Red Roof Inn up the street.

“They didn’t share my sense of humor,” McCarthy admits.

Evidently camp has its limits, even for aspirant B-movie starlets.

I have to say, Ms Velour’s Admiral Benbow experience closely corresponds with my own.

Even more fascinating Admiral Benbow lore at the linked articles—some of it amusing, some of it terrifying, none of it in the least shocking or too far out for Benbow survivors. And we are legion, because some years back just about every bar, theater, or other mid-level and below music venue in Memphis, as well as independent bookers and promoters, made it their practice to book hotel rooms for bands on tour at the Benbow. The place was filthy. It was dangerous. It was run down, literally falling apart in whole sections. And it was positively crawling with drunks, junkies, crackheads, hookers, johns, flim-flam men, muggers, and other fascinating specimens from every strata of Memphis lowlife, criminality, and dysfunction. There are roaches crawling up the walls of the rooms as big as your thumb—bigger, even. Go ahead, ask me how I know.

But for promoters and venue owners and such, the Benbow wasn’t entirely without its charms nonetheless. It was dirt cheap, and for people working that side of the music-biz street, cheap trumps all else. Especially when you know you don’t have to spend the night there your own self.

The first time a promoter tried to shoehorn us into the Benbow box, we took one look at our assigned room, looked at each other in horror, and agreed immediately that we would NOT be staying at this wretched shitpit after that night’s show, taking it upon ourselves to speedily flee to someplace fit for human habitation and just foot the bill ourselves, even though our contract rider called for two double-occupancy hotel rooms, comped. If I remember right, we ended up at a Red Roof not far away, likely the same one Gina Velour wisely decamped to.

Our next time in town, the guy who had booked us met us at the venue seeming quite pleased with himself at having procured our two rooms already, saving us the trouble of checking in. We pounced without delay: might these rooms happen to be at the Benbow, perchance? Sensing there was trouble afoot, his cheery face fell as he admitted that it was so. We informed him sharply that no, we would NOT be staying at the Admiral Benbow, neither tonight nor ever again. As a compromise measure, we WOULD be willing to hold off on starting the show until he got us rooms at an acceptable hotel, so he wouldn’t habe to miss anything.

It’s common knowledge in the rock and roll universe that when two touring bands hit the road together, even if only for a few days, there is a kind of accelerated bonding between the two camps which takes place, formed initially around all the experiences they have in common: days on end eating nothing but horrible food and the inevitable distress that comes along with it; hot, easy women in specific cities; crippling hangovers and how best to deal with ’em; where the closest liquor store might be, and who’s going to have to shag his ass over there after sound check but before downbeat to fetch a jug for the green room, and such-like topics. Included among these topics: the Admiral Benbow, and how incomprehensibly skeevy it was.

I mean, ALL of our peers knew the place; everybody had a horror story, each more grisly than the one before, and not a one of us doubted for a moment that every word was gospel truth. No one that had actually been there doubted, at any rate. Those who had lived to tell the tale KNEW the truth, having survived the trauma, learned the lessons, and earned the scars. The rest? Well, they’d be finding out soon enough, poor things.

Any hard-touring band that’s put enough miles under their asses can tell you that there are indeed places dotted all across the American road atlas which no normal person knows about, nor will ever see. We’ve all spent our share of sweaty, sleepless nights tossing, turning, and scratching our fresh insect bites in hotels and motels Normals wouldn’t even believe exist. But they do. Those squalid dens are indeed out there…WAITING.

Be afraid. Be very afraid.

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