Questions, questions Vol XXVLLIII

Kunstler has a few.

How and why else has the evidence of those crimes been so sedulously suppressed when it should have been served up to a grand jury post-haste in 2019, as soon as Hunter Biden’s laptop surfaced? The darn thing was absolutely stuffed with a rich documentary record of crime from the lowest (drugs and whores), to the highest (payoffs from foreign actors). The extraordinary lengths that the DOJ and FBI traced to hide it, or pretend to not look inside it, is one of the most transparently degenerate acts ever seen in US history — and continues to this day.

And now, all of it unwinds rapidly, all the organized deception and lying. You could argue, perhaps, that US government agencies, this aggregation of interests we call the Deep State, just went plumb insane from guilt, fear, and shame over its own long-running, rampant criminality, but even that fails to answer how come, for instance, the CDC is still pushing booster shots of a toxic bio-engineered cocktail that maims and kills people. Are they aiming to reduce the US population on-purpose — at the same time that the DHS is ushering millions from other countries across the border illegally? Is the Deep State working China’s will against us and the rest of the West? Did we collaborate with our adversaries in our own collapse?

A: Yes.

Stand down, serfs!

Nobody is coming for your guns gas stoves. Except when they are, that is.

Oregon’s Eugene Council Bans Natural Gas Hookups in New Residences

City says it aims to be free of fossil fuels despite strong public opposition

Wasn’t someone saying something about “for the Greater Good” just a moment ago? Why yes, I believe someone was at that.

After more than two years of debate, the Eugene City Council voted on Feb. 6 to ban natural gas hookups in new residential construction, becoming the first city in Oregon to prohibit new homes from using gas furnaces, water heaters, or appliances.

During a closed meeting, the council first decided to deny a request by opponents to put the issue on the May ballot. According to DHM Research, 70 percent of those surveyed oppose the ban.

The council then voted 5-3 in favor, citing concerns about climate change, and public health, and saying the ban would reduce carbon emissions, and eliminate the air quality hazards of gas stoves.

And thus is it established, beyond all further argument or discussion, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has indeed perished from the Earth.

It did not die of natural causes, mind; it was murdered, by people who have names and addresses. That ought to be borne in mind, not just by the people of Eugene, but by every last man Jack of us who still like to think of themselves as Americans.

Update! When it comes to the larger issue here, the song remains the same: it’s the Leftism, stupid.

The Power-Mad Utopians

America needs a broad popular front to stop the revolution from above that is transforming the country

What happens in politics when one major party, or a major faction in both parties, commits itself to doomed utopian projects of social and economic engineering and seeks to capture and use government to impose its vision from above? In such cases ordinary political consensus and compromise become irrelevant. What is needed, in such cases, is the broadest possible coalition to defeat the mad and impossible schemes of these utopians.

Which coalition must stand resolved to do violence on behalf of themselves and their stolen liberty—not to merely die for freedom, but to kill for it. Y’know, exactly as our Founding Fathers were, hallowed be their names.

As Buck Throckmorton notes, the above-linked article is a long ‘un. And, as I will note, it suffers from the by-now-obligatory insistence on a purely political solution to problems caused by politics—a misguided, impossible dream truly Quixotic in its gross proportions. Those things stipulated, it’s still worth a look anyhoo.

The Forever Plan(demic)

More “experts,” God help us.

Are there places you should still mask in, forever? Three experts weigh in

There are still hundreds of thousands of COVID cases reported in the U.S. each week, along with a few thousand deaths related to COVID.

“Cases,” yet. Another word redefined for the convenience of shitlib tyrants and wannabe despots. “Related” to Fauxvid—do I detect the faintest pitter-pat of the wretched orphan Honesty, coming in on its little cat-feet? I mean, they for once didn’t claim these deaths were from Fauxvid, y’know?

But with mask mandates a thing of the past and the national emergency health declaration that will expire in May, we are in a new phase of the pandemic.

No, we are not. There is no longer a “pandemic,” the “pandemic” is over. Even Pedo Jao Bai-Deng said so, back last September. Not exactly a source one would want to count on in the normal run of things, of course. But hey, even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Life looks a little more normal here in the U.S. than it did a few years ago, but decisions on how to deal with the virus aren’t over yet.

And they never will be, not as long as Americans remain tolerant of your precious “experts” making all their decisions for them.

China had a huge increase in cases last month after abandoning its zero COVID policy, and another variant prompted renewed recommendations in some airports. Researchers estimate that more than 65 million people are struggling with the effects of COVID — a disease we still have to learn about.

Speak for yourself, and the rest of the pussified and pusillanimous. The intelligent, observant, and independent of mind know everything about The Virus The Virus The Virus!™ they’ll ever need to, thenksveddymuch.

Wondering if and when you should still be masking up? NPR asked some experts.

“Experts,” forsooth.

Said “experts” tell us everything you would expect from them, and nothing you wouldn’t: Be afraid, be very afraid, every minute of every day, for the rest of your micromanaged existence, until you are given permission to do otherwise by Proper Authority. For the Greater Good, as always.

The rest of the NPR piece amounts to a rhetorical firehose-nozzle spraying metric tons more of this patent horseshit over all and sundry, which shouldn’t come as any great surprise to anybody; it is, after all, NPR—Official State Media, the Mouth Of Sauron—we’re talking about here.

I have to confess, I’m beginning to be as pessimistic about the likelihood of Heritage Americans ever rising up to throw off the yoke of this oppression as our good friend Wes usually is.

(Via Ace)

The Great Debunkening

Looks like the science is finally settled.

I’m pro-science. That’s why I’m anti-mask

The landmark Cochrane study shows that the mask skeptics were right

I believe in the scientific method: make an observation. Ask a question. Form a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Listen to the answer. Insisting on the answer before pursuing this methodological approach is not science, it is propaganda.

And “masks work” was never more than propaganda — rooted in mechanical plausibility, not actual science — furthered by public health officials, left-leaning government leaders, the press and the party faithful starting in 2020 and continuing to the present day.

The left is holding fast to the idea that masks do work, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In fact, as of February 6, mask mandates have been reinstated at four elementary schools in Marin County, California.

Will there be redemption for those who had the audacity to challenge authoritarian public health bureaucrats? No, it seems. Will there be a change in policy now that the science is clear? Again, no, it seems.

Will there be a doubling down, with the self-proclaimed pro-“science” crowd continuing to insist masking works despite the scientific evidence showing us that they don’t? Yes. It appears so.

What seems clear is that the enthusiastic, religious devotion to the dogma — “masks work” — signified adherence to a set of beliefs: I mask therefore I am good. I mask my children therefore I am loyal to the Democratic Party and public health diktats. I mask therefore I care. I am a loyal follower of “the Science.” My faith is unwavering.

Those who claim to be on the side of “the Science” will continue to push unscientific policies in order to prove that they were right all along. This is the sunk cost fallacy writ large. Don’t admit mistakes. Ignore the actual science in favor of “the Science.” And continue to punish those who challenge. As well as those most vulnerable who simply aren’t in a position to challenge at all.

“Science” has apparently been rebranded by the left. It is now a slogan — a tagline — shouted at heretics to signify one’s moral superiority and loyalty to the party. What we have now is “science” that ignores the scientific method, which means “the science” is a cult. And a dangerous one at that.

Yes, it most certainly is. That is neither coincidence nor happenstance.

The larger issue here is that Leftists, having by now promoted their misbegotten ideology on up to de facto religious-cult status, while also being constitutionally incapable of leaving anything under the sun imaginable alone and untampered with, must therefore pretzel actual science into “The Science” in order to bring it into compliance with their contradictory catechism.

They’d adamantly deny there’s any religious-cult aspect to their beliefs, natch, particularly as it applies to the Church of the Eternal Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ denomination. But the truth couldn’t be more obvious to any reasonable, thoughtful person.

Which is not to suggest that science and religion are incompatible, mind. It’s just that they’re two very different things, that’s all—distinct modes of thought whose focus is on two separate realms, which we might think of as the practical and the ethereal. Religion is definitionally a matter of faith, and matters of faith are NOT amenable to empirical proof. That built-in contradiction in terms is just another of the myriad reasons why, intellectually speaking, shitlibs can’t help but trip over their own dicks fifty times before lunch every day.

Intellectually speaking.

The aforementioned Cochrane study is here, and says this:

One of the largest and most comprehensive studies on the effectiveness of masks found they do almost nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

The study reviewed 78 randomized control trials—experiments that have long been considered “the gold standard” for medicine—which assessed the effectiveness of face masks against flu, COVID-19, and similar illnesses. It found that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” for the general public, no matter what kind of mask is used. Even N95 masks, considered the most effective at filtering airborne particles, showed no clear benefit for health care workers.

The study was published on January 30 by the Cochrane Library, a world-renowned medical database that is famous for its high-quality evidence reviews. It comes as a battering ram to the recommendations of the U.S. public health establishment, which urged children as young as two to wear masks throughout the pandemic.

“This amounts to the scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates,” said Kristen Walsh, a clinical professor of pediatrics in Morristown, New Jersey. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that some schools are still actively forcing children to wear masks, much less children who need to see faces to learn.”

You shouldn’t try; it makes sense only when you recognize that the Scamdemic entire wasn’t really about health or safety, but about the twin pillars of authoritarian tyranny: power and control.

(Via Ed)

Free speech: dead as the dodo

The incomparable John Hayward’s latest.

A generation after the supposed triumph of classical liberalism at the “end of history,” free speech exists nowhere on Earth as a matter of principle. Every single tech mogul’s commitment to free speech evaporates when powerful authoritarians demand censorship.

Authoritarian foreign regimes know they only need to threaten blockage of Western social media services to make their management comply with censorship demands. Some push back harder than others, but in the end, they all cave. They can’t afford to lose access to growing markets.

Tech moguls rationalize to themselves that they can still do some good in oppressive countries by complying with some censorship demands – it’s better than being silenced completely. Any way you rationalize it, it’s a power calculation that limits the speech of the powerless.

Domestically, we’ve seen government officials using economic leverage and ideological affinity to limit speech in collusion with their Little Partners in the private sector. The ruling left-wing Party has operatives in tech companies that did much of the dirty work.

The power calculations have shifted a little lately, especially after Musk bought Twitter, but they’re still power calculations, not adamant defenses of free speech as a matter of principle. The variables changed, but the equations remain.

A troubling percentage of the free world’s population evidently believes censorship IS free speech – as though speech were a limited resource that must be allocated by the State with an eye toward “justice” and “equity.” Only by silencing some can others be truly free to speak.

“Hate speech is not free speech!” is a pure power calculation: those with power will decide what constitutes “hate speech.” They invariably rule that disagreement with their ideology and political demands is “hateful” and must be silenced.

How utterly convenient for them.

In America That Was, the very place where such forgetfulness was never supposed to happen, we somehow lost sight of the fact that “offensive” speech is the very embodiment of free speech—that once we’ve allowed TPTB to stifle speech they deem “offensive,” the hourglass has been turned over, the countdown to the inevitable loss of yet another Constitutionally-enumerated right has begun. Thus:

Speech is vital to political organization – in the Internet era, they are nearly synonymous. Twitter mobs have a direct pipeline to real political power via lazy, biased legacy media – provided they agree with the ruling Party. That pipeline is tightly shut against dissidents.

“Disinformation” is also a crude political calculation, not a high-minded and principled commitment to protect the population against fraud. We see examples every single day of disinformation that is tolerated, and boosted, when it comes from members of the ruling Party.

As with hate speech, the powerful decide what constitutes actionable “disinformation,” and they cannot resist the temptation of heavily tilting those scales against dissenters and speakers of forbidden truth. Party apparatchiks are never banned or reprimanded for disinformation.

The “end of history” was actually the triumph of authoritarianism, not classical liberalism – political scientists and commentators were just too giddy over the fall of the Soviet Union to see it. Individual rights, beginning with free speech, have steadily eroded since then.

It’s Doc Zero; reading it all isn’t mandatory, but you’re going to want to nonetheless.

It’s settled

The Science™ has spoken.

Fauci: now he tells us

Fauci lied, and now he is admitting it. In writing. In a peer-reviewed journal.

To be clear, Fauci is not claiming that the vaccines were utterly worthless. He still maintains that in certain specific cases–atypical, but the ones that generally kill you–the vaccines serve as a sort of pre-treatment. Not a great one, but a somewhat effective one. But he flat out admits that the claims about the vaccine possibly preventing infection and transmission are simply bogus and always were.

No, I am not exaggerating. He even admits that flu vaccines would never meet the standard to pass muster for use if they were for any other virus. Fascinating. And hardly how they are advertised.

Ace follows up.

Here’s one quote from the paper:

As of 2022, after more than 60 years of experience with influenza vaccines, very little improvement in vaccine prevention of infection has been noted. As pointed out decades ago, and still true today, the rates of effectiveness of our best approved influenza vaccines would be inadequate for licensure for most other vaccine-preventable diseases. Even decades-long efforts to develop better, so-called “universal” influenza vaccines–vaccines that would create more broadly protective immunity, preferably lasting over longer time periods–have not yet resulted in next-generation, broadly protective vaccines, although a large number of experimental vaccines are in preclinical or early clinical development.

He writes that the successful true vaccines for measles, mumps, and rubella gave rise to hope that similar vaccines could be developed for respiratory viruses.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

But he then points out that “Science,” represented in his physical body, has long known that respiratory viruses work differently and could never be truly vaccinated against.

In stark contrast, the non-systemic respiratory viruses such as influenza viruses, SARS-CoV-2, and RSV tend to have significantly shorter incubation periods (Table 1) and rapid courses of viral replication. They replicate predominantly in local mucosal tissue, without causing viremia, and do not significantly encounter the systemic immune system or the full force of adaptive immune responses, which take at least 5–7 days to mature, usually well after the peak of viral replication and onward transmission to others.

In other words: Because these viruses incubate in the mucosal tissues (nose, lung tissues) and not the bloodstream or the body as a whole, they do not encounter the body’s immuno defense system until after they’ve already begun sporing off out of the mucosal tissues to infect other people.

So: No vaccine injected into the body will ever be of much use in keeping mucosal viruses from spreading person-to-person.

And he always knew this, he says now.

Just another thing he lied and lied and lied about, in his role as Science Personified, to achieve the political objective of Making People Do What a Power-Mad Bureaucrat wants them to do.

Yep, that’s just about the size of it. The Scamdemic was a political maneuver, a bare-nake power grab, right from the very beginning. The only real surprise here, for those of us who realized that sorry fact early on, is that Fauci is actually ‘fessing up now.

Another FederalGovCo cash grab

The goobermint is your enemy.


Hey, no need to fret, it’s a purely “voluntary” program. For now.

The burning question

TL asks it.

If Not War, Then What?

One cannot be loyal to the United States of America, that government is gone, overthrown, dismissed. The only thing left of it are the documents that rightfully informed the people of their God-given rights and some formative departments and offices that maintain the structure of the government, but without the effectiveness or responsibilities thereof. Our government is performance art, nothing else.

What can be done? What can we do about it? That’s a question that, in truth, has a violent answer. When a people have been stripped of every aspect of privacy; had their wages and incomes (completely different things) subjected to digital confiscation at any moment; are being forcefully injected with poison; watched the past generations being snuffed out in nursing homes and their children and grandchildren either killed outright or chemically altered to prevent reproduction; have come to know that the future is even more oppressive, violent and hostile and that the process of altering that formulation of caustic actions against them is now politically impossible, the only thing left is to recognize the enemy and engage them.

Since I cannot imagine a commission of demonic acts greater than that to which we have already been subjected, I doubt anyone will do anything no matter how vile and vengeful our illegitimate government is. We are stuck in a 1950s frame of mind about America and being subjected to a 1984 dystopian reality without the will or ability to engage in a 1946 Athens, TN response.

So, what’s left?

Fret not, TL. People just have to get good and hungry, that’s all, and there aren’t enough of those people quite yet.

Until then, all we can do is wait…and watch. The concept of Constitutional liberty, as an issue, has faded almost completely from the picture for the majority of Americans (In Name Only); some don’t really care much either way about it, some are actively, openly hostile to it. Many of those who might once have been motivated to action by it have been lulled to sleep by indolence, sloth, and relative comfort and ease. Even those who recognize how truly awful the situation has become nonetheless feel no urgency, no impetus to risk their homes and lives to finally do something about it.

Yet.

Yes, the notion of the Former USA as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is now nothing but an obscene joke. But as with all aspects of life on this poor Earth, these things too are by no means permanent. Once their children are going hungry—wailing out loud from the physical anguish that comes along with too-long-empty bellies—and they can no longer find either the means or the ability to put food on the table for them…well, we might all be surprised at just how powerful a wake-up call that is, for all parents with the least shred of dignity and self-respect left to them.

A future so bright

We have to be dragged into it against our will, kicking and screaming.

Road Trips in Our Long-Term EVs Have Been…Interesting

Broken chargers, full charging stations, single-digit temperatures, and optimistic range estimates have tested our patience.

While winter has seen many travelers stranded at airport check-in counters this year, MotorTrend editors have been braving the open road in our expanding fleet of long-term electric cars, trucks, and SUVs. During road-trips, MT’s Slack channels often become a de facto logbook of our exploits, capturing the headaches and small victories of long-distance EV driving in real time. Here’s a lightly edited look at how our drivers have fared in the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning, the 2022 Rivian R1T, the 2022 Volkswagen ID4, the 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance, and the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 when holiday travel peaked, the weather and temperatures turned nasty, or they simply headed to far-flung destinations.

If you thought that was tons o’ fun, just wait till our antiquated and way-overtaxed power grid crumbles into pieces-parts under the weight of all these state-mandated struggle buggies. The only practical answer? This.

Chris Reed: I’m going to still drive the same vehicle I am now in 2040. I won’t be alone.

Assuming you’ll be allowed to, that is.

People routinely go down memory lane when they see decades-old vehicles — lovingly and ingeniously kept up for years despite replacement parts no longer being readily available — still on the streets long after they typically would have been consigned to scrap heaps. While wealthy collectors of older vehicles focus on classic sports or muscle cars, those with economic motives often prefer those they grew up with, such as the Volkswagen Beetles first sold in 1949. It was the best-selling car in the world in 1968 — popular in the U.S. in large part because of its countercultural associations, popular elsewhere more for its durability, affordability and excellent (for its time) gas mileage. In 1972, the Beetle passed the original Ford Model T to become the most manufactured vehicle in history.

Now there is an increasingly strong chance that this phenomenon — of aging vehicles still being a common sight long after they were first sold — will just keep growing in the United States, and that it could be strongest of all in California.

So I guess they’ve finally gotten it done, then: we are all Cubans now.

Gainless employment

The latest in Mike Walsh’s continuing “To save America…” series.

To Save America, Abolish the Civil Service

I must say, I’m liking it already.

Over the past few months, we’ve been considering the wholly negative history of the so-called “Progressive”-era constitutional amendments, none of which did anything to improve the nation but did much to undermine its founding principles. Until the end of the Civil War, the constitution had only been amended twice since the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791: the obscure, jurisdictional 11th Amendment, (1795), which had to do with lawsuits involving state and federal courts, and the 12th, (1804), which partially clarified the procedures for presidential elections. Then, between 1865 and 1870, came the three Reconstruction amendments, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment for a crime, such as a prison chain gang) and giving African-Americans citizenship and voting and other rights.

And then after a 43-year break, came the Progressive Era and its assault on Americans’ money and personal freedom, the radical changes in how the Senate is selected, Prohibition of a formerly legal substance, and finally the extension of the franchise to women, in defiance of all historical norms going back to the ancient Greeks, on the theory that it wasn’t “fair.” All have been proven disasters.

It’s not just the constitutional amendments that have contributed to the decline of the Republic, however: it’s also the actions of an ever-burgeoning federal government, which has simultaneously abandoned its core fiscal, executive, judicial, and legislative responsibilities, and extended its intrusive reach into almost every facet of our existence via the creation of the regulatory agencies, which now essentially control every aspect of a citizen’s public and private life.

Created by Congress, often at the urging of the president, these independent, immortal bureaucratic golems are a second form of government that co-exist with the constitutional system most Americans think we have. Being “independent,” they are at once legislative in function but also judicial in essence: their wishes have the force of law (often written by themselves), tried before administrative law judges, and enforced at gunpoint by their private police forces when necessary. They are effectively beyond the direct supervision of all three legitimate branches of government, to the extent that they now form a fourth branch of government.

Like most things involving the feds, they are largely staffed by members of the Civil Service — nearly three million employees and counting. Many, if not most, belong to one of some one hundred civil-service unions, through which they bargain with the IRS-funded government regarding their wages and working conditions; you, the taxpayer, have no say in the matter. So it’s no surprise that over the past hundred years, jobs in the “public” sector now pay better and have greater benefits, including more time off and greater job security, than do jobs in the private sector. So what if it’s become the employer of last resort for a significant portion of the population? They vote, en masse, for the folks who pay them.

I’ve been saying for years now that basically, the federal G amounts to a sort of wink-nudge employment program for Nee-grows who are too stupid, lazy, or just generally incompetent to hold down a job that’s actually, y’know, useful at all.

Unworthy world order

If the over-optimistically misnomered “free world” is no longer anything like free, what about it could possibly be worth striving to save?

Why Preserve a ‘World Order’ Without Freedom?

It has become fashionable now for lawmakers to demand accountability for the social media site TikTok because it is finally being correctly acknowledged as both an intelligence-gathering net and propaganda fire hose for the Chinese Communist Party. The irony, though, is that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search provide the U.S. government with identical tools. The D.C. Deep State does not mind if Americans are spied on and psychologically manipulated by government actors; on the contrary, it seeks a total monopoly on such influence operations.

To enjoy personal liberty free from the arbitrary intrusions of government nosy-bodies, you have to get pretty far away from the shadow of State authority. Even then, because the national security surveillance structure is pervasive, an isolated campfire in a remote wood is still most likely being caught by somebody’s overhead satellite for some unknown reason. If you are unable to escape from the watchful eyes of the government’s complex monitoring system, then the inner mind becomes the last refuge for any freethinker — so long as those personal thoughts are not communicated out loud.

So freedom is chased farther and farther away from hubs of government tracking, farther and farther into the recesses of one’s mind, until it can be exercised only in the silence of one’s imagination. Make no mistake: the imposition of “silence” is intentional. Governments understand that the best way to prevent the spread of ideas that might threaten their grip on power is to prevent those ideas from ever being spoken out loud. To silence dissent is to squash opposition. To criminalize thought is to enslave the mind. That’s the “freedom” enjoyed by a prisoner, not a living, breathing citizen of any “free world.” If you have been corralled into a mental prison against your will, though, then the best question to ask is this: what would you be willing to do to escape?

Cameras, computers, artificial intelligence — there’s just no way out! Do you know that every generation of humans confronted with new technological weapons has said the same thing?Their cannon are too powerful! Their ships are too many! It is futile to resist! Yet people do resist, and over time, they realize that it is ultimately not the technology that threatens their freedom, but rather the governments that would choose to use that technology without respect for human rights or natural liberties.

Precisely, indubitably so. Over the course of my life, I’ve heard the exact same bitching and moaning over the advent of color TV, then cable TV, then VCRs, then the Innarnuts, then cell phones, then smart phones and tablets, etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseam. No, no, and oh hell no. No grumpy comment-section Neo-Luddite screaming “we must get rid of (insert name of new tech here), we must get rid of (insert other new tech here)!” is at any real hazard of being enslaved by said new-tech devices. Not as long as they retain the intestinal fortitude to simply put the blasted thing down, they ain’t.

Bottom-line summation: it’s the government, stupid.

To create and sustain a “free world,” citizens actually have to be willing to stand up to their governments and say, “No, you cannot do that; you do not have that power; now go away.” Usually, governments (which exist purely because they assert a monopoly over the legitimate use of force) then load their cannon and surround rebellious ports with an overwhelming number of ships as a demonstration of how their “legitimate” force somehow justifies the theft of others’ freedoms. For the citizenry on the receiving end of such violence, this translates to nothing more than “might makes right.”

What they learn in the process is that government power untethered from principle is neither righteous nor worth preserving. The harsher and more unjust governments become toward their citizens, the more likely movements for freedom take hold. When scrappy underdogs prevail over unbeatable foes and “turn the world upside-down,” they do so with tremendous help from their tormentors’ hubris.

Lindsey Graham is right about this much: the world order is at stake. Freedom around the world is under attack from those governments sworn to protect it, and their betrayal imperils peace. I saw a headline recently that blared, “Rogue Hog Turns Tables, Kills Butcher.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the news had nothing to do with politics. Although, given that the homicidal hog had been repeatedly shocked with a stun gun and kept in a tiny enclosure on his way to becoming BBQ, his story could be a prudent allegory after all.

Freedom ain’t free; never has been, never will be. It is not a gift from some benevolent and wise government; no government in history has been willing to even pay lip service for very long, as ours no longer bothers about doing, to “preserving” and/or “defending” it as it grows ever larger and more intrusive. The priceless jewel of freedom can only be seized and then scrupulously maintained, nearly always by force of arms wielded by strong, determined lovers of individual liberty resolutely unwilling to ever take “no” for an answer.

“Violence is not the answer”? The hell you say. It’s the ONLY answer, once a certain line in the sand has been stepped over. Unfortunately for us all, in Amerika v2.0 that grim threshold was crossed long ago.

This essay is depressing as all hell, but it’s also one of the estimable JB Shurk’s very best yet, of which you’ll surely want to read the all.

Checking into Hotel USSR

Just emailed Oleg Atbashian to tell him I finished reading his autobiographical tome, Hotel USSR, and am now going through it a second time to make notes for use in my review of it here, which I should have up probably in another week, maybe two. And MAN ALIVE, but this book is powerful indeed! It’s written in a straightforward, matter-of-fact style, which only serves to intensify the impact of the relentless brutality and inhumanity chronicled therein.

I’ve been reading and excerpting Oleg’s People’s Cube humor blog for years now, and never realized that he grew up in the Ukraine, and was born the same year I was. Our upbringing and youthful experience as Children of the 60s and 70s couldn’t have been more different, alas for him.

No matter how well-informed you might be, how carefully and thoroughly you’ve educated yourself about what life might be like under full-bore totalitarian tyranny, Oleg’s story comes at you like a sharp punch in the gut. As far along the same dismal road as the US has come, let me assure you that we have no idea what it was like for the victims of the heartless thuggery and oppression that was simply the stuff of everyday existence in the Soviet Union. It’s monstrous, no more nor less. How people like Oleg managed to get through it all with their souls and spirits still relatively intact and functioning is far beyond my ken.

Yet more baffling, and infuriating, is our domestic Useful Idiots who continue to this day to lobby hard for a Made In America emulation of this abominable regime. The clueless dolts know not what they wish for, a truth that Hotel Russia makes perfectly clear. God forbid that they should ever get their way. Every last one of them should be forced to read it, with a gun at their heads if need be.

More to come as and when, folks.

A coup, if you like

Just now noticing it, are ya?

Jeremy Clarkson: We’re in the midst of a coup. Who the hell’s behind it?

Not in the middle of one; it’s long since been over and done with, I’m afraid. As to wondering who’s behind it, you can’t really be serious about that one.

My son came over for a father-and-son pre-football supper the other day, and as he fussed over the Aga, making a particularly fine stir fry, we laughed about what innocuous word had been banned that day and who’d been cancelled. And then, after a pause, he said with a solemn face, “You do know there’s a war going on, don’t you?”

He wasn’t talking about Ukraine. He was talking about a full-on left-wing campaign to unstitch and burn the fabric of Britain. And the genius is that no one really knows that what they’re doing is serious. We laugh as they change the name of the Sir Francis Drake Primary School to something less slavey. We think it’s all a big joke. But it isn’t.

Think about what typically happens in a military operation and then look what the woke left has done here. It’s seized control of our television and radio stations to such an extent that last week Sophie Raworth said, on the BBC News at Six, with a straight face, “And over now to our LGBT and diversity correspondent …”

And TV drama? Unaffected? Right, and when was the last time you saw a fictional police force hunting a gang of Muslim extremists? It’s always the far right. And it’s the same story in comedy. Say anything you like about Boris or Rishi and the laughter track is turned up to 11. Make a joke about she/him pronouns or Greta Thunberg and they’ll blow a piece of tumbleweed across the stage.

You probably think, because you don’t know this war is going on, that when you drop little Johnny off at the school gates he’s going to learn the nine times table that day. No, he isn’t. He’s learning that he might actually be a girl, which is why there are probably tampon dispensers in the boys’ lavatories.

When some young people with green hair glue themselves to the road, large numbers of officers are dispatched to stand around looking at them. And they are only ever removed from the tarmac if they promise to go immediately to the nearest art gallery and throw some soup at a painting.

You’ll definitely want to read all of this one, folks. Even though he’s writing about Jollye Olde, across the pond we’re tailgaiting them down the same sorry road ourselves.

Why we call it Once-Great Britain

So very much wrong here it’s tough to know where to even start.

Britain’s top food watchdog recently warned that bringing cake to the office is comparable to subjecting coworkers to second-hand cigarette smoke.

So-called “second-hand smoke,” like so much else these days, is the bunk.

Professor Susan Jebb, chair of the UK’s Food Standards Agency, told The Times Health commission, “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment,” adding that “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Yeah, thanks be to God that you took care of that whole “making a choice” problem for good, eh?

“With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment,” Jebb argued. “But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

Oh, so THAT’s what we’re calling “authoritarian meddling” now, I gather.

Well, maybe that’s because food in the office only affects the individuals who eat it — unlike second-hand smoke, which is inhaled by everyone in close proximity to the smoker.

Sorry, but again: no.

Jebb went on to say that junk food ads are “undermining people’s free will,” yet claimed that restrictions are “not about the nanny state.”

Oh my NO, perish the thought. Sheesh.

These are the same people who are trying to make us eat crickets and believe that cauliflower tastes like rice. And the same people who told us to eat margarine for our health before reversing course and saying it will kill us, and now claiming that it’s good for us again.

And they have the exact same right to do so now as they did then: none whatsoever. Which is the REAL point at issue, not whether they’ve ever gotten a damned thing right, since ever. Or it ought to be, anyhow.

But yeah, you Limeys go ahead and forego that cake, it’s bad stuff. Plus, it’s difficult to eat with those bendy, non-scary plastic knives and forks your NotANanny State has forcibly relegated you chumps to.

Expert me no experts

Jeff Goldstein tears Sam Harris and Scott Adams a new one.

If you haven’t yet encountered it, here’s the new orthodoxy on vaccine hesitancy from self-styled public intellectuals Sam Harris and Scott Adams (paraphrased): the science as it unfolded suggested that the vaccine hesitant had no valid rational basis for that hesitancy; while those who promoted mandates were wrong only accidentally, given that they were basing their position on the science as it had been reported to them by those most credentialed to do so.

For instance: Harris argues that had certain pandemic variables been changed, no room for a debate on vaccination programs would have been allowed — and that under those hypothetical circumstances his would-be authoritarianism would have been perfectly justified, while others’ hesitancy would have been rightly demonized, and their cooperation in a mandatory vaccination regime properly and morally commanded by force.

The position Harris and Adams hold is at root that accepting uncritically (or to the extent criticism is deemed valid) the “expert” scientific consensus in a potential doomsday emergency is both required and righteous —making those who do not do so outliers whose arguments hold no persuasive weight; and that because the data refuting a worse case scenario wasn’t immediately available except through limited observational studies and anecdotal evidence, the proper position to take was to act as if the worse case scenario were indeed taking place, and that the “experts” were entirely unbiased and had no incentive other than the reliable interpretation of data to reach particular set of conclusions.

Except that they did have incentives to reach certain conclusion(s). Hospitals most certainly and provably were incentivized to diagnose Covid; to admit people based upon that diagnosis; to treat the virus in a way that was institutionally enforced; to secure a course of treatment using Remdesivir; to ventilate patients; and to reject — and demonize — any care that didn’t pursue this specific course of treatment. So it was not “accidental” that some people saw this early on. Similarly, it was not an accident that some people early on determined that the long history of acquired immunity’s providing protection against a virus wasn’t all of a sudden scientifically untenable simply because Anthony Fauci began insisting it was. That’s not how science works. So when public health agencies and their experts must literally change an established definition to create the conditions for a therapeutic to continue its claim to “vaccine,” one would be entirely negligent to dismiss such linguistic maneuvers as innocuous, or their purveyors as well intentioned. And yet that’s exactly what so many self-styled public intellectuals did.

In this case, both Harris and Adams fell for the Eric Stratton gambit (“You fucked up! You trusted us!”), and they simply cannot accept that anyone without their public plaudits and claims to genius could have rationally rejected the credentialed narrative, save by pure blind luck. If the unwashed, conspiratorially-minded anti-vaxxers somehow got it right this time, the argument goes, they did so not by distrusting this particular science, but rather by adopting a conspiratorially-minded worldview that in random instances may align with reality as it comes to be revealed later on. Whereas those with Big Brains, while they may have gotten this one wrong, did so only because they used the best evidence available to them to reach their initial conclusions. They were wrong only because their process was both correct and unimpeachable!

Not only is this affected argument presumptuous (and not a little elitist ), but worse still, it’s just plain wrong. Plenty of credentialed experts who were being deplatformed and silenced by the government / media / big tech fascist troika sounded the alarm early on about a campaign of mass vaccination: vaccinating into an active pandemic is bound to give those mutated variants that resist the vaccine an evolutionary advantage toward dominance, prolonging the pandemic; that repetitive vaccinations — boosters — could lead to immune exhaustion or even antibody-dependent enhancement; and that within the mRNA program itself, unproven in humans and at best unreliable in laboratory animals, plenty of viable potentialities — many of them negative — needed to be examined, especially given the very early signal of serious adverse reactions to the shots, be they cardiac or neurological. Covid didn’t occur in a vacuum. Historically, our health agencies have established certain benchmarks for vaccine harm that would require a specific product to be halted and removed from the market. In this case, those previous benchmarks were ignored — and those who pointed to them demonized as anti-science.

In short, both Harris and Adams have nestled themselves into the welcoming folds of the Tom Nichols Fallacy: credentialed experts often know the most about a subject in which they are credentialed, therefore those same credentialed experts are likely to be correct in their assessment of anything that falls within the purview of their credentialed field.

As Mitch Hedberg once noted, “every book is a children’s book, if the kid can read.” A comic’s quip, sure, but one filled with a profound insight about the nature of meritocracy. To those who were able to read studies on their own, or even have them filtered through credentialed experts whom they’d come to trust, nothing being revealed today relating to the inefficiency of the Covid vaccines, their potential (current) adverse effects, and their potential future long term effects, is new, surprising, or “accidentally” understood. In fact, those are the people who predicted every step of the way how this pandemic would resolve itself.

Why, thanks, Jeff, I’ll take that as a direct personal compliment. Although seeing where all this was headed early on wasn’t all that difficult a feat to pull off, really. Anybody even halfway cognizant of the true nature of despotic government, as explicitly described by America’s Founding Fathers—its innate tendencies and ambitions; its usual go-to methods in consummating them; its essential ruthlessness, amorality, and arrogance—could have easily foreseen what was coming at us.

Update! OHHHH yeah, I’m sure the intentions behind this terrifying development are completely pure and good.

The US Meat Supply May Soon Be Widely Contaminated With mRNA Proteins From Biotech “Vaccines”
Editor’s Note: The reason we launched an organic freeze dried chicken company last year was anticipation of what you’ll read in the article below. They’re attacking our food supply from multiple fronts. It behooves my readers to use promo code “jdr” whether buying long-term storage chicken or a premium protein bucket. With that said, here’s Mike Adams…

There’s soon going to be another reason to either choose vegetarian food options or get your meat from local, trusted sources: mRNA vaccines are about to be heavily implemented across the meat industry, with cattle, chickens, pigs, goats and other livestock targeted for regular mRNA injections.

As we’ve seen with human beings, mRNA injections can:

  1. Circulate throughout the entire body and end up in blood and organs.
  2. Cause the body to produce toxic proteins which can cause toxic effects.
  3. Clog arteries and end up killing or harming people from strokes or heart attacks.
  4. Alter chromosomes and cause permanent genetic changes to the organism.

Hypodermic needles, it turns out, aren’t the only way these mRNA instructions can be introduced into the human body. They can also be swallowed, or they can enter through skin contact. Merely handling raw meat contaminated with mRNA products is likely the equivalent to being exposed to “shedding” from vaccine recipients. And even though stomach acid likely destroys mRNA sequences, there is absorption that takes place in the mouth, under the tongue, which is why many medications and supplements — including CBD oils and zinc — are often best absorbed under the tongue rather than being swallowed.

Thus, merely introducing mRNA-vaccinated animal meat products into your mouth, if not fully cooked, may expose you to a kind of “food shedding” of mRNA products that can be absorbed into your blood and circulated throughout your body. This can include proteins which are alien to the human body.

Don’t worry, you can trust them. And if you don’t believe it, hey, just ask ’em.

Whether they bought into the hype and hysteria over the “threat” posed by the Coof or not, it ought to be obvious by now to even the meanest intelligence that the Plandemic has pretty much run its course. Yet still, The Power remains absolutely determined to get this dangerous gene-altering chemical introduced into as many circulatory systems as they can possibly manage. At this point, every rational person must ask him/herself: WHY?!?

STRONG HINT: Knowing what we know about them, we can quite safely assume it is NOT because they love us, care deeply about our welfare, and just want us to be happy.

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