TruckerDoom followup

So in phone consultation with BCE earlier, he mentioned that Bayou Pete had taken notice of one of my earlier posts wherein I quoted my brother’s dire warning that, if diesel prices rise much more (which, they’re gonna), thousands of drivers will be giving up and getting out of the business. Here’s a portion of Pete’s lament:

What does that mean in raw figures?

  • Owner-Operators primarily operate Class 8 Trucks (33,001 pounds and greater). There were approximately 2.9 million registered combination trucks (tractor-trailers) in 2018.
  • There are approximately 350,000 owner operators driving in the United States today…Owner Operators make up 9% of the truckers on the road today.
  • Nearly 1.5 million people work for the 124,320 employer businesses in this industry, and another 587,000 are self-employed, or “nonemployers” … These nonemployers (assuming one person per business) make up nearly 29% of the workers in the industry.

So, if independent owner-operators have to park their trucks because they can’t recover their fuel costs from their customers, we’re talking about a 10% reduction in the number of trucks available to haul freight – this on top of an existing supply chain crunch that’s got every truck running as hard as it can, all day, every day, just to try to keep pace. We’re also talking about a quarter to a third of those involved in the trucking industry being out of work.

Our supply chain simply can’t handle such losses. It’ll be crippled.

Yep, t’will…along with just about everything else. Remember the trucker’s mantra: If you have it, a truck brought it. Sorry to say, but today my brother had more bad tidings. His current rig, a Freightliner Classic XL with rebuilt engine and tranny, a new clutch, and some other goodies, to include oversize 150 gallon fuel tanks (those big chrome drums you can see on most all trucks under the doors on eah side, unless they’re hidden behind some plastic covers). This afternoon on the way back from Charleston it cost him nearly 700 smackers to fill just halfway up.

As of about a half hour ago, Little Bro hasn’t decided whether he’s gonna work tomorrow yet.

Be sure to click through to catch Peter’s closing ‘graphs. It’s just as he says: all these things—trucker shortages, bare store shelves, absurdly high fuel costs, systemic Bidenflation—have a common root cause, which can be found in Mordor On The Potomac.

Strongest, most effective military on Earth?

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

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

A night in Hell

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.

Money shot!

Wasn’t gonna bother with this one originally, since it’s just not the sort of “news” item I give a crap about ordinarily. But then I read the New York Post’s write-up, which is so wonderful I just can’t help myself. First, you get the archetypical Post grabber-headline.

Woman fires gun at her vagina in cam show crotch shot gone horribly wrong

Heh. You begin to see what I mean right off the bat, I betcher. Right smack in the Post’s wheelhouse, a real gopher ball for those guys. But then, this IS the iconic tabloid that gave us the most famous headline in newspaper history, after all. On to the, umm, juicy bits.

Georgia webcam model Lauren Hunter Daman, 27, redefined “crotch shot” after discharging a firearm into her vagina during an alleged sex stunt gone awry.

“The female had shot herself in the vagina accidentally,” paramedic Brittany Rivers reportedly told responding police officers of the incident, which reportedly occurred on the morning of Nov. 9 at a residence in Thomaston, per a report by the Upson County Sheriff, the Smoking Gun reported.

Later interviews with witnesses revealed that the sex pistol-turned-gunshot victim was apparently alone in her bedroom when the weapon — a 9mm handgun — went off.

Officers were first alerted to firearm fiasco after receiving an “accidental gunshot wound” call from the residence, according to the police report. Upon arriving at the scene, a sheriff’s deputy encountered EMS Rivers, who was holding the unloaded handgun and a spent bullet casing in her hands.

She told the officer that Daman had blasted herself in the netherregions.

Police then conducted interviews with Daman’s three housemates, two of whom were present during the accident, to try and shed light on the alleged boudoir backfire.

Jordan Allen, the reported owner of the firearm, told officers that he was “in the kitchen walking back to the bedroom when he heard the gun go off.” Upon reaching the bedroom, Allen discovered Daman with “a small amount of blood” on her leg, at which point she reportedly informed him “that she shot herself accidentally” and apologized.

Meanwhile, a second witness named Cody Starnes told deputies that his mother Addie Ruth Johnson came into his bedroom and reported that “Daman had been shot.”

Allen revealed to officers how her inadvertent vagino-blasty allegedly transpired.

“Boudoir backfire”? “Inadvertent vagino-blasty”? COME ON, MAN!!! Pure, classic Post-age right there, and no mistake about it.

Now, like most of you miscreants and ne’er do wells out there in CF Land, I wouldn’t give a greasy Biden-shart if every last “newspaper” in America went under and ceased all publishing operations by mid-morning tomorrow—excepting the New York Post. Them, and only them, I would truly hate to see close up shop, and would mourn deeply if they did. The loss of such a wonderful news outlet would be a grievous one indeed, a bona fide catastrophe not just for NYC but for the entire nation. Long may those rascals wave, I say! America needs the Post, now more than ever before.

Fire In The Hole update! Pics of Miss Smokin’ Snatch—the Vented Slotte Girl, Kid Kordite Krotch herself—over at the Daily Mail. I have to admit, she’s rather cute in most of ’em, in that gormless-yet-worldly, slutty-naif way you often come across in the better, more upscale trailer parks. Way more so than I expected she would be, anyhoo.

3

So you wanna play in the streets, do ya?

Best make it count for something, then.

We’ve told people, multiple times, not to play in the street. But they were soooooo much smarter than we were. Right up until the ambush was sprung, and the whole idea blew up in their faces.

And then they got played again, at the Capitol last January, just to drive the point well home.

If you’re not going out to play with the express intention of racking up a body count in the mid four figures, you shouldn’t be going out to play in the streets at all.

I’d say that’s about where we’re at, yeah. We didn’t come voluntarily, perhaps, and aren’t in the least happy about having been dragged to this place. Which objections, plus more besides, have been rendered entirely moot by current circumstances. The one and only thing that matters at this point is seeing to it, for sure and certain, that the ones who brought us here pay for their miscalculation, in fullest measure, so that they don’t ever make the same mistake again.

Nothing you seek to win is up for grabs there, and like this verdict, when the dust settles, you’ll be eating a 20-foot-long party sub sh*t sandwich. Every last bite of it.

If you couldn’t figure out better uses for $26M, you’re definitely not bright enough for what’s coming. There’s a million things you should be doing, and not one single one of them is “go to a protest march”. Which same haven’t worked once, since ever.

In a better, non-dysfunctional country protest marches and such might be useful—a country, say, in which the consent of the governed mattered a whit; in which the nation’s elected “leaders” cared one iota about the opinions and desires of the citizenry; a country whose national elections were anything more than pure theater; a country in which the words “public servant” hadn’t become bitter satire, an obscenity.

Alas, this is NOT that country.

The key bit, the crucial bit: Nothing you seek to win is up for grabs there. In the properly-governed Constitutional republic envisioned by our Founders, all the things a free citizen might “seek” from his central government would have remained attainable via the institutions and processes established for the purpose: honest elections; petition for redress of grievances by lobbying or direct contact with one’s Congressional representative(s); lawsuit; even public protest when/if it came down to that. The rise of our present-day ProPol Ruling Class would never have been allowed to happen, nor would men of integrity, duly sworn to promote and preserve the interests of those who voted them into office, have dared to consider the rights and liberties of their constituents to be “up for grabs,” in ugly contrast to the vile reprobates who molest and abuse us today.

Again, this is NOT that country. Three of the famous Four Boxes have failed utterly and are now of no further use to us, leaving just the one to work with—the last desperate resort of men who would live in the ennobling glow provided by the Lamp of Liberty rather than under Tyranny’s grim, suffocating shadow. Which brings us all right back ’round to those “million things we should be doing” again, now don’t it?

7
2

Ominously irresolute

Looks like poor, doomed Kyle might’ve stopped shopping around for a defense attorney sooner than was good for him.

Kyle Rittenhouse’s attorneys asked the judge on Wednesday to declare a mistrial without prejudice before the jury reaches a decision, arguing that the prosecutors sent them an inferior version of a key video. A mistrial with prejudice means Rittenhouse could be tried again if the judge were to grant the request. Judge Bruce Schroeder did not immediately rule on the request, the second mistrial motion this week.  On Monday, the defense filed a mistrial motion with prejudice.

Defense attorney Corey Chirafisi argued that the defense team would have done things differently had they received the higher quality video earlier. Although neither video shows Rittenhouse aiming his gun at the Ziminskis, the defense team is suggesting that the state manipulated critical evidence.

Assistant District Attorney James Kraus argued that it was not the fault of prosecutors that the file got compressed when it was received by the defense.

“We’re focusing too heavily on a technological glitch,” he said.

Uh huh. Die in a fucking fire, you lying, soulless son of a bitch. This next bit grabbed my attention.

Although Kraus claimed to have no idea how to compress a video, a video software app called Handbrake was spotted on his laptop during the hearing on Wednesday.

Handbrake calls itself  an “open source video transcoder” that converts video from nearly any format.

The program is used to compress and downsize videos, but in doing so, it reduces the quality, tech experts say.

I haven’t been called upon to do a whole hell of a lot of video editing over the years and have little if any aptitude for it, but coincidentally enough I have Handbrake on the Trusty iMac myself, have even used it a good few times. It’s an excellent application, user-friendly and by no means a bridge too far to be learned and made useful for any reasonably intelligent person.

As for reduction in quality, that comes hand in glove with ALL compression utilities and/or devices. Actually, reduction in quality is an unavoidable part of the compression process, whether it’s video, audio, or data; in a way, it’s the whole point of compression. You can’t reduce a file, vid, or audio track to a smaller size without sacrificing at least some sharpness, clarity, and detail along the way. Life on Earth just ain’t that way, sorry.

Loss of quality is hardly the point at issue in this case anyway; intentional deception is. By concealing the existence of a higher-res version from the defense—which, by the way, is against the fucking law in American courts, explicitly and specifically so—until the very last hours of their little Kangaroo Court, the grubby, transparently dishonest persecution team added yet another tier of blatantly unethical manipulation atop what was already a ziggurat of illegality. The rest of us can only hope and pray that the standards, qualifications, and practices for DA offices in their own localities haven’t quite scraped the bottom of the barrel yet, as those in Wisconsin clearly have.

In any event, this is NOT indicative of the defense team’s confidence in winning an acquittal. No lawyer, I, nor do I play one on TV, but it looks to me as if they’re floundering and flailing here, casting about for any hook they can hang a “Not Guilty” hat on. I am hardly the Lone Ranger on that view, either.

“Without prejudice” means a new trial. They base this on not having the best quality video. They say they would have prepared their defense differently.

This could just be setting up an “in case” situation if Rittenhouse is found guilty.

But this also means the defense thinks that Rittenhouse will be convicted.

If the prosecution agrees to this, then the judge is likely to grant a new trial. I suppose the judge COULD, MAYBE deny the motion, but it’s hard if both defense and prosecution agree.

Prosecution opposes — because they think that the jury, by asking to see the “raises gun” video, is thinking about convicting.

I disagree with that, actually. When a jury wants to see something, sometimes it’s just to clear their last doubts. The OJ jury wanted to review the testimony of the chauffeur who said that he kept ringing OJ’s doorbell and OJ didn’t answer for a half hour (because he was showering after killing his wife), IIRC. People took that to mean they were going to convict. I, smartly, thought it meant they were reviewing it in order to dismiss it.

But this does not look good, my friends.

Indeed it doesn’t. It almost doesn’t really matter, though—not this particular incident of prosecutorial malfeasance and criminality, not all the myriad others already seen, not even which way the verdict itself goes. Kyle’s life is almost certainly ruined already. As the ugly Amerikan truism says, the process is the punishment in our irredeemably warped (in)justice system, which means that from here on out, there are two possibilities, neither of them at all palatable:

  • If convicted, Kyle spends the rest of his days behind bars in a maximum-security prison, therefore rendering his life expectancy quite brief
  • If acquitted, Kyle spends the rest of his days in court, desperately fighting off as many civil trials, personal injury lawsuits, and miscellaneous other lawyerly harrassments as the Evil Left and George Soros can cobble together to throw at him

Now admittedly, one of those outcomes is objectively more tolerable than the other. But both are decidedly unpleasant, to put it delicately; both redirect an innocent and exemplary young man away from probably a productive and worthwhile life and towards a life of frustration, futility, and hopelessness; both bear about as much resemblance to the concepts of fairness and true justice as I do to this poor little guy:

Tranny bear
TrannyBear, a/k/a the Bear of Shame

And, well, here we all are. I say again: this abominable trial should never have happened at all. As for Rittenhouse’s Soros-bought-and-paid-for persecution team, I’ll let Herschel deal with them.

One more time, the entire team of prosecuting attorneys needs to be flogged in broad daylight, stripped naked, and marched to the town square and put in stocks as an example to children everywhere.

A capital idea, but the very least the bastards deserve. I’d prefer a dead-of-night ceremony involving tar, feathers, riding on rails, being splashed about in a lake a bit, the evening’s festivities topped off with a length of thick rope and a tall, sturdy tree myself. But I’m perfectly okay with some light drawing and quartering and/or dragging them around for miles at high speed behind an old pickup truck also, if that would suit other folks better. Hey, I ain’t hard to get along with. Easygoing, agreeable, open to reasonable compromise, that’s me all over.

Pivot point

ZMan Wins Teh Intarnets today with the most penetratingly insightful, comprehensive, and above all beautifully-written Rittenhouse analysis yet.

The Kyle Rittenhouse trial has gone to the jury after both sides presented their closing arguments and the state presented its rebuttal. Wisconsin stacks the deck against the accused by not only allowing the state the final word but giving them a chance to address the closing argument of the accused. That means before the jury got the case, they had to sit through a long day of the state making unfounded claims about their case as well as the case of the defense team.

Putting that aside, the trial has not exactly riveted the country, but it has become a symbol of the problems facing America. For example, there were the howler monkeys of the new religion writhing in agony whenever the judge enforced the basic rules of criminal procedure. Immediately they labeled the judge a white supremacist fascist and issued a fatwa against him. The death threats came pouring in and he is now under police protection. Welcome to America.

On the other side of this you have people slowly waking up to the reality of the situation, who are glued to the case. They hold out hope that the jury does the moral thing and clears Rittenhouse of all charges. They do not want to see an innocent man condemned for holding the wrong opinions, but mostly they do not want to see the ugly reality of this age piled onto the head of a baby-faced young man. This trial offends the decency of the remaining honest men in this society.

Of course, that brings up the confused audience in this tragic drama. Most white people are trying to avoid looking at this trial. The grotesque nature of it turns their stomach, as it should. The ugliness of the human condition is on display. There are the savage calls for mob vengeance and the cruelty of fanaticism. This trial is a human sacrifice carried out by a mob of fanatical lunatics. Most white people thought we had evolved beyond this sort of thing. Welcome to America.

It is a good reminder of something said by John Stuart Mill. “Let not any one pacify his conscience by the delusion that he can do no harm if he takes no part, and forms no opinion. Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing. He is not a good man who, without a protest, allows wrong to be committed in his name, and with the means which he helps to supply, because he will not trouble himself to use his mind on the subject.”

This has been the story of the last five years. The overwhelming majority of people in America, regardless of race or national origin, just want to live quiet lives enjoying the benefits of their circumstances. They are Burkean conservatives in that they do not want to flip over the tables and begin anew. That understandable and justifiable desire for stability and normalcy easily gives way to passivity in the face of evil. The story of the last five years is a nation of good men doing nothing.

This trial is probably a pivot point. The good men looking away do so with the certainty that their fellow citizens on the jury will do the right thing. They still trust the system even though they see the systemic corruption. If the jury sends this young man to prison many more eyes will be opened to the reality of this age. Not all, as some people put all of their efforts to remaining blissfully unaware. Theirs is a life of willful ignorance and a selfish disregard for the suffering of others.

On the other hand, the just verdict will allow most people to extend their holiday from reality a bit longer. They will comfort themselves in the belief that the system still works, despite what they have seen. Like a high wire performer who miraculously survives a fall and returns to his act, these people will learn nothing. Thoreau was right about most men living quiet lives of desperation. It is just that most men desperately wish to live outside of the great currents of history.

For those who have made the journey to this side of the great divide and see things as they are, this trial is just another opportunity. If the jury does the right thing, then the issue is why this kid was persecuted by these ghouls. If he is found guilty then the issue is the grotesque injustice at the hands of a savage mob of fanatics. The dissident is an opportunist, using every event to press a partisan case. The Rittenhouse case is just one more story in a long struggle for Western civilization.

Precisely so. Frankly, I don’t see how any reasonably aware, historically-literate person could see it any other way. The deep, dark connections between the Rittenhouse case and all the other calamities, collapses, and controversies swamping us of late are readily discernible, as hard to miss as boxcars on a passing train, clanking and groaning as they slowly trundle by in front of your stopped car. ZMan seems maybe a touch too flippant with his final line; the Rittenhouse shit circus is way more significant than “just one more story,” or seems so to me. Although I do also concede that the passage of time and the change of perspective that is its inevitable by-product—bringing as it does fresh new outrages and disasters to shift our attention away from those confronting us today—could easily prove me all wet about that.

Rittenhouse roundup

Both Tucker and Ace are right around the corner, but not quite all the way home yet.

Tucker Carlson explained the entire point of this show trial: The Regime wants you to know that Antifa and BLM are its unofficial but quite official paramilitaries, and that they own the streets, and that when they roll up to burn your business or invade your home, you’d best bet salute smartly and let them carry off your valuables and your wife.

If you attempt to interfere with The Regime’s unofficial but quite official paramiliatry armies, The Regime’s official-official armed enforcement squads will come battering down your door to put you in prison for the rest of your life.

I ain’t disagreeing, really; that is indeed true as far it goes. Which ain’t far enough. The point about the Left’s go-to goon squads being given carte blanche to indulge in their rioting, looting, burning, assault, and murder activities is well taken, but offers too narrow and specific a focus. There’s a much broader agenda in play here, a bigger target being drawn down on. Among several other things, this is no more nor less than a full broadside, with every 16-incher at sea as part of TF Shitlib being fired at the God-given right to self-defense via firearm—a direct, all-hands salvo directed against the 2A itself, one of The Enemy’s most fiercely hated yet elusive targets for decades.

U.S.A. –-(AmmoLand.com)- As the defense rested in the murder trial of Kyle Rittenhouse—the teenager who shot three people last year during a riot in Kenosha, Wisconsin, killing two and wounding the third—a question that hasn’t been asked by any pundit is whether it was just the defendant on trial, or was the real target of this trial the act of self-defense?

Separate the lack of wisdom on Rittenhouse’s part for even being in the middle of a riot in the first place, from the awful moments of confrontation with people he believed were intending to or physically trying to gravely injure or kill him.

Where would any other ordinary citizen be in the same situation, faced with the same set of circumstances, knowing what he or she knew at the time? This is where the Rittenhouse trial, and potential verdict, could have a direct impact on the act of lethal self-defense anywhere in the country.

The media has frequently raised hackles over self-defense related issues, especially the passage of shall-issue concealed carry statutes, and in more recent times, the adoption of so-called “Constitutional carry” laws.

If Rittenhouse is acquitted, it should reinforce the argument that armed private citizens have the right of self-defense even to the point of taking another life.

If he is found guilty, the concern will be how the rights of every other armed citizen could be subsequently jeopardized based on what would likely become known as “the Rittenhouse rule.”

Whether Kyle is acquitted as he damned well should be or not, however much or little the unalienable right of self defense is reinforced—these things won’t matter in either the short OR the long run, not one whit. Our gun-grabbin’, goosesteppin’ oppressors’ attacks on our rights and freedoms will go right on as if nothing has happened. Nothing will change. No reprieve, no pause, no slowing of their pace nor slackening of their frenzied resolve shall be seen. More from the Federalist.

The obscene part is that the charges of capital murder brought against him were entirely politically motivated to appease the very mob he and the others were defending against. But his fate now rests in the hands of a group of citizens who were also at risk from that same mob during the riots, just like Kyle.

The goal of the media provocateurs is to delegitimize this most basic right to protect our communities and ourselves in the absence of official security forces. They are perfectly fine with the mobs looting and destroying things, and even invented the shameful euphemism of “restorative justice” to describe it. Those terms are not acceptable.

They most certainly are not, yet somehow they’ve been accepted up til now. And if/when Kyle is found guilty as I expect, with no response from Real Americans more strenuous and aggressive than a shrug of the shoulders and an “ehhh, whatchagonnado?”—perhaps at the very most a truly peaceful demonstration here and there, after which the park or city square is cleaned shiny whilst a few of the protesters are cut out from the shelter of the group to facilitate being beaten savagely with bicycle chain, spiked sections of lumber, lengths of iron pipe, and various blunt, heavy, sharp, and/or pointy found-objects right straight into the nearest ER or morgue, as the cops look passively on and do nothing in the way of hindering it, as ordered—those unacceptable terms will have been formally graven in bloody granite. Onwards.

There is no official obligation to act as a member of the militia, but there is a moral one. Those unwilling to stand against lawlessness, or at least support those who do, may still have the title of citizens but are really baby possums riding on the backs of their betters.

Rather than a murder trial, Kyle should have been given the keys to the city. It is a sign of our moral and cultural decay that we have had to witness the farce perpetrated by the feckless, fauxhawk-wearing Binger. His disgraceful actions have brought shame on his office and himself.

Kyle will be vindicated since the partisan nature of the charges paired with the incompetence of Binger and crew have led them to make the defense’s case for them. It was self-defense in the face of a mob left uncontrolled by city forces.

But we as freedom-loving Americans must be equally vigilant to push back against this attack on the very right to preserve our lives and livelihoods. It is preferable for that to be done by the forces that take our taxes with the promise to do so. But the Founders foresaw that may not always be the case and provided us a right to do so ourselves in extremis.

WILL BE vindicated? Kyle was vindicated long ago, irrefutably so. He was exonerated in full by the criminal actions of his attackers that very night, crimes they themselves have lately admitted to in open court. Most of the video, pictures, and eyewitness accounts entered into evidence over these last days have been publicly available since a few days after the events occurred; there have been no new surprise developments, no game-changing revelations since.

Abundant evidence of Kyle’s good character presented in the trial, as well as the appalling and complete want of same amongst the loathsome vermin who tried to murder him, provides further support for the righteousness of this vindication, although there should be no need for any such by now. The truth remains as simple, clear, and obvious as it has been from the very start: this abominable show trial should never have taken place at all.

Kyle Rittenhouse is innocent of all charges filed against him by a politically-motivated, frighteningly unethical DA’s office. THEY are the ones who should be on trial, along with the worthless dregs of society who decided cold-bloodedly murdering a blameless teen would provide a perfect coda for the night’s lawless orgy of rioting, burning, wanton destruction of property, and all-round thuggery.

Divemedic concisely sums up.

I have watched nearly every minute of the Rittenhouse trial. With my understanding of the law, I think that this was a legitimate case of self defense. With that being said, I don’t think that the law today (especially in politically charged cases like this one) is being practiced in anything close to the manner in which it is intended.

If Rittenhouse is convicted of those killings, we can be sure that self defense in particular, and the justice system in general, are no longer operating in this nation. The best thing to do from that point forward is to run if you are ever involved in a use of force incident. The Ritttenhouse defense fund is in the millions of dollars. If that isn’t sufficient to win a case that is this clear cut, there is no hope for those of us who only have concealed carry insurance.

He ain’t wrong about that, I’m afraid. But this is really nothing new either, and so shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody. The sad, shameful truth is that we’ve been steered in this direction for a very long time, and are about to arrive at the final destination of our journey. That said, all hope should not be abandoned. There are still options available for us to take, things we can still do to fix our problem. One of Divemedic’s commenters helpfully lays ’em out for us.

It’s an either/or situation if Kyle is found guilty (the Chauvin trial proving that cops are guilty of a violent offender’s self-inflicted death) of murder for defending himself.

Either go totally silent, run away, hide, never ever ever ever react or defend yourself or your people.

Or.

Furk them all. Go for broke. Gonna take out one? Take them all out. Go on a full-blown killing spree/vendetta/bloodletting that would make even a commie blush in shame. Kill them all, God will know His own.

One skateboarder or head-kicker or pistol-armed idiot amongst a pack of hell-bound rioters and looters comes to attack you? Kill the attacker, kill the people supporting the attacker, kill the rest of the burn-look-murder group. Kill the ones on the front lines. Kill the ones in the back passing stuff forward. Especially kill the ones holding the cell phones up and who are calling the shots. Kill. Kill. Kill. Why not? What’s the worst they can do to you? Give you 20 death penalties that will take 30-40 years for the courts to work out all the appeals and issues. 30 life-sentences? Gee, past a certain point, what does it matter?

What matters is if they make self-defense illegal, then who cares. Take everyone out. Go down the local lefty enclave and pop the judges, the prosecutors, the city commissioners, the mayors, the teachers, the lawyers, pop everyone. Get the doctor who called for the vaxx. Get the nurse who wouldn’t admit a loved one because they were unvaccinated. Pop everyone who’s supported all the wrong decisions in the last 40 years. Biden bumperstickers, BOOM. Hillary stickers or Obama stickers? BOOOOM BOOOOM BOOOOM. FBI agent? BOOOOM. BATFE agent? BOOOOOM and burn with fire. DEA? BOOOM. TSA? BOOOM.

Past a certain point, what can they do to you? If they’re going to hang you for self defending, then they might as well hang you for everything else.

They don’t understand that the concept of self defense is the last thing holding the (to them) great unwashed idiot inbred flyoverists and red staters from just saying “Copulate this” and expending a lot of their personal horde of freedom seeds and flammable objects.

Screw it. Gonna kill the rule of law? Then you’d best be ready for a lot of righteous killing.

My heartfelt endorsement in response to these sentiments was immediate and enthusiastic: This is the greatest fucking comment I have ever seen. I meant it, too. Hey, as Sam Spade liked to say, they can only hang you once. That being the case, might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, right?

8
1

Another name added to the Must Be Avenged list

A voice from the Great Beyond.

Michael “Mike” Anthony Granata of Gilroy, California | 1965 – 2021 | Obituary

Michael “Mike” Anthony Granata February 21, 1965 – November 1, 2021

Michael, a longtime resident of Gilroy, passed away on November 1, 2021. Never a kinder more gentle man did I know than my husband, Michael.

For those who knew Mike, you know that he was a good and honest man. He was kind, considerate, and always polite.

Mike was adamant that people know what happened to him that caused his early and unexpected death. Message from Mike:

“Many nurses and non-nursing staff begged me and my wife to get the truth out to the public about the Covid-19 vaccines because the truth of deaths from the vaccine was being hidden within the medical profession. I promised I would get the message out. So, here is my message: I was afraid of getting the vaccine for fear that I might die. At the insistence of my doctor, I gave in to pressure to get vaccinated. On August 17th I received the Moderna vaccine and starting feeling ill three days later. I never recovered but continued to get worse. I developed multisystem inflammation and multisystem failure that medical professionals could not stop. My muscles disappeared as if to disintegrate. I was in ICU for several weeks and stabbed with needles up to 24 times a day for those several weeks, while also receiving 6 or 7 IVs at the same time (continuously). It was constant torture that I cannot describe. I was no longer treated as a human with feelings and a life. I was nothing more than a covid vaccine human guinea pig and the doctors excited to participate in my fascinating progression unto death. If you want to know more, please ask my wife. I wished I would have never gotten vaccinated. If you are not vaccinated, don’t do it unless you are ready to suffer and die.”

Mike did not deserve the pain and suffering he endured. He was a good man and deserved better.

Granata’s needless death was caused by a relentless campaign of manipulation and deceit perpetrated by his own government; its “health care” and “science” bureaucracies; the pharmaceutics industry; Establishment Media; Murder Gnome Anthony “Little Mengele” Fauxci, to name but a few. Mike is one among many other innocent victims of a nefarious plan or program whose ultimate goal remains unknown, but whose results are increasingly obvious. May his death—may ALL their deaths—be not in vain.

Which, y’know, is all up to the rest of us.

2

Irreconcilable differences

JKB says what we’re all thinking.

Anyone who actually watched the Rittenhouse trial with anything remotely close to an open mind cannot help but come to the inescapable conclusion that not just did the prosecutor not prove that Kyle is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt but proved that Kyle is innocent beyond a reasonable doubt.

An eye witness testified that one of the people Kyle shot has said “fuck you” to Kyle and grabbed at his gun before catching a couple of pedo repellent pills.

There was video shown in court of the other dead attacker hitting Kyle in the head with a skateboard before getting ventilated.

Lastly, one of the victims testified that he didn’t get his bicep “vaporized” until he pointed his loaded gun at Kyle first.

The evidence of self defense couldn’t be clearer.

Not on social media, however.

Follows, a stinking pantload of the usual Leftard fact-free jibber-jabber, a veritable Your Show Of Shows compemdium of lunacy brought to you live and in color from whichever alternate universe these reality-challenged space cadets inhabit. There is but one logical conclusion to be drawn from this chaotic clusterfuck of a trainwreck of a shitshow of a dumpster fire.

I don’t know what percent of American this represents buy what I can tell you is this:

There is absolutely no commonality I have with these people.

None.

They have no interest in evidence.

For them, justice is purely a function of political alignment.

Kyle’s guilt is assured because he was opposed to the rioters and therefore opposed to their politics.

This is how the Soviet Union, East Germany, and every Communist country in Asia and Latin America operated.

This is what they want here. The justice system to be an enforcer of political ideology.

Those on their side have charges dropped regardless of evidence of guilt and those who oppose them are guilty regardless of evidence of innocence.

We cannot share a country with these people.

It’s impossible for two such divergent value systems to cohabitate in a single nation.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Over at his joint, BRM Peter elaborates.

I’m hearing from more and more friends, acquaintances and contacts who’ve recently traveled through (or moved from) “blue states”. They describe life there as a dreary existence, regimented, masked, dictatorial, with precious little of the freedom to be oneself that previously existed. Almost without exception, they describe coming back to “free” or “red” America as a liberation, a release, a joyful experience, where life can be lived free from fear.

We no longer live in the same America as they do. They see themselves as an irresistible force, imposing their ideology willy-nilly on everybody else. The rest of us see ourselves – and our constitution, and our traditions – as an immovable object that will not be dominated.

In the absence of common sense, compromise and good will, there can be only one outcome of that conflict. One side will have to go to the wall.

Well…if that’s how it has to be, so be it. As long as I’m alive, it won’t be the side of freedom. I’ve seen at first hand, in all too ghastly detail, what it does to a country when totalitarianism triumphs. I won’t see it happen here.

This is where all of us who love freedom must align ourselves with our founding fathers, who “mutually pledge[d] to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor” in the same cause. Many of them fulfilled that pledge at the cost of their lives and/or prosperity. We should expect, and can do, no less. Not to worry. We’ll be in good company.

Well and rightly said, brother. The Useful Idiots have sown the wind, heedless of the evil and calamity they were cultivating. Harvest time is nigh upon them, yielding only the bitterest of fruit.

7

Screwed, blued, and tattooed

As my one and only post so far on the topic made pretty clear, I am nothing like as sanguine about the chances of True American Hero Kyle Rittenhouse being accorded any semblance of justice from his persecution-by-law as a great many of my esteemed colleagues seem to be. The mistake my more-optimistic colleagues of mine are making, in my view, is one I’ve brought up hereabouts before—a mistake so common that even I sometimes don’t pick up on it right away myself. This malady consists of estimating the outcome of specified events, actions, or policies based wholly on an incorrect assumption, the defective assumption or premise itself being the product of a habit of mind so deeply embedded in the thinking of many if not most of us that those affected by it maybe don’t even realize what’s going on, or how the closely-entwined mental processes work together to lead their victim astray. Both habit and assumption are incredibly difficult to rid oneself of, particularly since so many simply don’t want to. An attempt to bring the topic up for discussion with someone in the subset of people who are completely unaware of the self-generated delusion could conceivably provoke red hot anger, perhaps even physical violence, in reactions.

And really, I’m more or less okay with what we might label the American Reality Dysfunction; after all, the assumption a pleasant, soothing one, certainly no crime or transgression. Even though en masse indulgence of this cozy delusion might prove costly in the long run, disastrous even, it also serves at least one useful purpose: it must eventually lead to sober reflection regarding precisely what kind of country this now is; what kind of country it was, and was NOT, intended to be; why it was designed the way it was; how drastic the transformation has been, and what ought to be done about it.

The habit, the pattern of thought I refer to here, of course, is the assumption that this country, as grotesquely butchered, battered, and chawed-up as it is, is nonetheless still fundamentally the same dear old America we all grew up in and cherished. There are quite a few issues where this little mental hiccup leads some astray; applied to the Rittenhouse trial, it demands that the demonic farce must surely end justly, fairly, and reasonably, with integrity and fidelity to the core principles of our legal system diligently honored and upheld by all who administrate it, manage it, and sustain it. For those more powerfully infected by this mental-error virus, how could it possibly be otherwise? The evidence supporting acquittal on all charges is as abundant as it is compelling. In the eyes of America That Was, the kid did absolutely nothing wrong, and quite a bit right.

Alas, this is NOT that country, and this trial is NOT being held in one of its courtrooms, adjudicated and presided over by the kind of people who, though certainly imperfect, nonetheless still believe America to be a nation of laws and not men. Who loved their country and revered its bedrock ideals. Whose rage on discovering the systemic corruption and debasement of the legal system entire would be a fearful thing indeed.

Nope—not that country, not that courtroom, not those people. There are incontestably two sets of laws today; one that applies exclusively to the Left’s revered totems, icons, and heros (Mid Level), officially approved Pet Victim Groups and/or perpetual dependents (Bottom-Level), and the wealthy, famous, and/or politically connected (Top-Level). Then we have the much colder, grimmer, more ruthless one used to punish, cow, and ruin beyond hope of redemption the unenlightened, savage, intolerable Deplorables like poor Kyle Rittenhouse. Which is to say, y’know, ALL OF US.

So yeah, could be I’ve reached Peak Cynical at this point, I think. Which has left me unimpressed by the jubilee of celebration each apparent blunder by the prosecution over the last week brought on, and likewise leaves me unsurprised by this development.

Up until Friday, the Kyle Rittenhouse trial was very clear: easily understood videos and witness testimony (including testimony from the prosecution witnesses) showed that Kyle, despite trying hard to avoid conflict, was attacked by a crazed child rapist, whom Kyle shot as the rapist was grabbing Kyle’s gun, at which point a mob went after Kyle. He then shot and killed a domestic abuser trying to bash his head in with a skateboard, and shot and wounded a felon aiming a loaded, illegal gun at his head. On Thursday, however, the court allowed prosecutors to enter into evidence a fuzzy photo from a late-produced drone, an image prosecutors argue shows Kyle “provoking” the attacks against him. Provocation destroys Kyle’s assertion that he acted in self-defense.

Andrew Branca explains how well the prosecution did on Friday. The “unicorn” evidence that the prosecutors successfully fought to get admitted is the drone footage that they just coincidentally found at the last minute before the trial. According to the prosecution, an incredibly fuzzy photo that was computer-enhanced (meaning that A.I. made “educated” guesses about where pixels should go) shows Kyle pointing his gun at Joshua Ziminski, who fired the first shot that saw Rosenbaum, who had earlier threatened to kill Kyle, chase the boy.

The problem for Kyle is that, under Wisconsin law (as is the case under most states’ laws), a person who provokes an attack may not then claim self-defense. If the jury accepts the drone footage as showing Kyle threatening people with the gun, then it was he who triggered (pun intended) all subsequent events, including his shooting three people. However, Wisconsin law also holds that even if someone provokes things, if he withdraws from the fight but pursuit continues, he can regain the self-defense privilege. In that regard, much of the footage shows Kyle desperately running away.

The drone video, of course, is just something for the jury to hang its hat on. The case was always going to boil down to the claim that Kyle provoked the attack merely by showing up at a “protest” with a gun. The gun itself was a provocation as far as the left is concerned, and that was a point that the defense repeatedly tried to make through the trial.

Writing at PJ Media, Victoria Taft explains that, in more bad news for Kyle’s defense, the judge allowed the prosecutors to add several lesser charges to the more serious charges already pending against Kyle. This is disastrous for Kyle because it allows the jurors — who are fully aware of the baying mob that will greet them outside the courthouse and follow them to their homes — to assuage their consciences by finding Kyle guilty of the lesser charges. He’ll still go to prison but not for life. Of course, once in prison, unless he’s kept in solitary, his life will probably be short.

What happened to Kyle is just one more piece of the leftist politicization of law in America. 

…All of these were and are purely political prosecutions aimed at destroying the Democrats’ political opponents. With the mob pushing on one side (and invariably getting a pass from government institutions) and the government itself pushing on the other side, conservatives are getting squeezed out of the public square. Social media silence them, the political institutions criminalize them, and the mob physically threatens them. As General Flynn said on Tucker Carlson’s Friday show, this cannot and will not end well.

More precisely, it won’t end well for the losers. The winners, on the other hand, will be more or less okay with how things worked out.

I read Andrew Branca’s scholarly breakdown cited by Andrea above, the very first of Branca’s minutely-detailed series on the Rittenhouse show-trial I bothered to take a look at. It’s actually very, very good, albeit completely depressing, seeing as how Andrews’ most recent analysis strongly suggests a bleak outcome for young Master Rittenhouse is in the offing. While I’d be most happy to be proven wrong, I fully expect Rittenhouse to be convicted on at least one or two of the non-crimes he’s spuriously charged with. Perhaps the jury will convict using the lesser-charges ploy as Branca carefully cautions, but still plenty enough to destroy an innocent youth’s future prospects for the rest of his life. Charged, tried, convicted, sentenced, and imprisoned is the way to bet—all for actions that, in a better, less twisted and corrupt nation, wouldn’t even be crimes at all. A true obscenity is unfolding in the state of Winsconsin, right before our very eyes.

The trial of Kyle Rittenhouse will be over in a few short days, a senseless ordeal perpetrated by a lawless, cruel State acting far outside the civilizing boundaries of moral authority, common sense, human decency, and a sense of propriety and justice so completely out of whack that if it was compass, the needle would be spinning so fast it would be visibly smoking, the metal case so hot you couldn’t hold it in your hand without raising a blister. No matter how the revolting farce concludes, there will likely be trouble following in its wake. If Kyle is acquitted—which I just can’t see happening without Divine intervention, and I mean that quite literally—the Left will surely go all feral again, as is their savage wont. The thing that matters most when the riots and the looting and the gang-beatings, along with all the usual trimmings which are de rigeur whenever the Left doesn’t get their way is not so much that they do all that, but whether normal folks have gotten so fed up with their adolescent horseshit that they’re just not willing to put up with yet another round of it, rising up to meet the Enemy on the mean streets to put an end to it.

Should Kyle be found guilty—and trust me, barring that miracle I mentioned before, he will be regardless of what the law tells you; what the material evidence tells you; what your own eyes and ears tell you; what the nature and conduct of the conniving DA’s, the vicious, half-bright, duplicitous dregs of society they called as witnesses to make their halfassed and reprehensible case for them, and the fiendish curs yapping and snarling with primal fury when the defense team seemed to score a point, anybody at all dared to express so much as mild dissent from their anti-Kyle, antigun, anti-American, anti-propriety and virtue, anti-civil order canon—what all that tells you about just who it is that any properly ordered society would correctly feel were the ones who should actually be denied all further contact with upstanding people—through involuntary confinement within securely-locked cages, tucked deep inside sturdy walls which are patrolled continuously by squads of armed, well-trained, and watchful guards—for purposes of protecting said society from the irredeemable predators who would make them their prey, destroying every last inspiring, beautiful, or ennobling thing created by far, far better men than themselves, men who desired to make some constructive contribution to their society. Structures, adornments, and artworks which the predators would wantonly smash, burn, or otherwise desecrate if they’re foolishly allowed the freedom to do so?

I’ll repeat what I’ve already said after all too many similar injustices: I deeply and sincerely wish young Kyle had ended every goddamned one of these animals, and plenty more of their ideological and ethical litter-mates besides. I find it a crying shame that this Grosskreutz excrescence survived, although it’s no small compensation to know that the filthy bastard will suffer excrutiating pain and significant physical impairment for the rest of his days. What we desperately need is one hell of a lot more Kyle Rittenhouses, and one hell of a lot fewer Gaige Grosskreutzes. As I stated in the immediate aftermath of the righteous Rittenhouse rat-shoot: Rittenhouse is a hero, not least for providing an example worth emulating and showing us the way forward.

Kill. Them. ALL. God will surely know His own, and straight to Hell with the rest.

3

Breathes there a man with soul so dead

That a story as delicious as this one doesn’t give him a sharp frisson of delight?

Rodgers In, Roethlisberger Out: ‘Fully Vaxxed’ Steelers QB Out with Covid as Unvaxxed Packers QB Returns to Action

Y’all begin to see what I mean already, I bet.

Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers is cleared to return to action Sunday after sitting out with Covid-19. He drew plenty of controversy after saying he was vaccinated, then having to admit that he wasn’t when he tested positive.

Now, another future Hall of Fame quarterback is out. Pittsburgh Steeler Ben Roethlisberger also claims that he’s vaccinated. We’ll soon know if that’s true since he’s out for Sunday with Covid. According to NBC Sports:

The Steelers will have to try to win their fifth game in a row without their starting quarterback. According to Steelers spokesman Burt Lauten, quarterback Ben Roethlisberger has been placed on the COVID-19 reserve list. He’s out for Sunday’s game against the Lions.

Roethlisberger becomes the second high-profile quarterback to miss a game this month due to COVID. If he’s vaccinated, he’ll be able to return after generating a pair of negative tests at least 24 hours apart. If he’s not vaccinated, he’ll miss at least 10 days.

Last week, Roethlisberger said he’s vaccinated. (Then again, so did Aaron Rodgers.) If Roethlisberger truly is vaccinated, the outcome suggests that he developed symptoms and was tested.

Alll just one more example of the ludicrous fuck-uppery brought to you by the most prolific producers of ludicrous fuck-uppery of all time, our very own Powers That Be. Three groans for ’em, folks.

Y’know, for villainous, evil despots possessed of the finely-tuned code of morality and ethics of a honey badger in rut; the compassion and restraint of Vlad the Impaler; the warmth and sensitivity of Don Rickles; and the simple human decency of Maximilien Robespierre, our would-be lords and masters sure seem to trip over their own dicks a hell of a lot, don’t they? Instead of sinister, near-invincible Bad Guys like, say, Doc Ock, the Green Goblin, Lex Luthor, or Professor Moriarty, these FederalGovCo assclowns more closely resemble Elmer Fudd, Gilderoy Lockhart, and Wile E Coyote. We expect the James-Younger Gang. The goobermint gives us The Shakiest Gun In The West as a stand-in.

I mean, really now. Deadly, bioweapons-lab-grown plagues that aren’t actually all that deadly, more nuisance than plague. World-beating, multirole stealth fighters that won’t fly, aren’t terribly stealthy, are extremely delicate and unreliable, can only carry enough ammo to fling two or three seconds worth of Combat Sadness at its opponent before fleeing the furball to RTB and reload. An extravagantly-financed, high-tech military force whose soldiers are far too dainty and Evolved to fight, under the command of a flag-rank officer corps more intently focused on enforcing the PC catechism than defeating our adversaries, its Navy apparently unable to navigate the seas without slamming into another ship, a dock, or a random terrain feauture. Mandatory electric automobiles entirely incapable of fulfilling the needs of a vast, widely-dispersed populace whose typical daily commute to work and back covers mileage more than sufficient to drain its batteries—cars which will be wholly dependent on a huge network of public charging stations that simply doesn’t exist. Which, as it happens, is of no great importance anyway because the nation’s outdated, overtaxed power grid simply cannot shoulder the increased load, being dangerously strained to keep the lights on already.

All the above is but a small sampling of the neverending cavalcade of stupidity, gross incompetence, unanticipated knock-on effects, and even worse calamities these retards insist on afflicting normal people with…For Our Own Good, natch. And now these Supergenii, these self-proclaimed “Experts,” these shambolic, all-thumbed, pig-ignorant droolcases have outdone themselves at last: a miraculous Vaccine!! so effective, so safe, so all-round beneficial for one and all that they not only had to mount a full-court-press propaganda effort, but also make submitting to it a non-negotiable requirement in order to keep one’s job, leave one’s home, or just generally be allowed to participate in society without being aggressively vilified, attacked, and/or thrown into the Gulag forever to get the concoction into American bloodstreams.

And just look what happens next. Not only did History’s Deadliest Plague fizzle badly on ’em, now the already-wheezing PTB Klown Kar is stalling out from rapidly-mounting evidence confirming that this shady “vaccine” they’ve pimped so frantically is in fact NOT effective, NOT beneficial or even benign, and absolutely, positively NOT SAFE. The propaganda campaign was already floundering, having been nowhere near convincing enough to persuade skeptical Americans to place their trust in a government medical establishment whose treachery and untrustworthiness had long since been established in the original chain of lies and manipulation used to spark the contrived “crisis” nearly two years ago. One can only wonder at what their next desperate gambit might possibly be, and what bonehead move on their part will bring their latest house of cards tumbling down.

I dunno, somehow I always kinda figured that Evil Incarnate would be way more skillfull and capable than these boobs have turned out to be. Oh well, my bad. After nigh on five decades of paying close attention to the antics, habits, and rituals of the ProPol Class in its native environment, I really should’ve known better than that.

4

One war, two sides

One must win, one must lose.

Choose.

One of the great semantic debates of the past decade has been the ongoing attempt to muddle the definition of “Left vs Right” in the American political sphere. For example, a lot of people who are new to the liberty movement (people who became active during or after the Trump campaign in 2016) have heard of the “false left/right paradigm”, but they have no clue what it actually means. If you think it means there are no legitimate political sides in this fight and that the entire conflict is theatrical or manipulated, then you are misinformed.

The false left/right paradigm specifically refers to the fake division at the VERY TOP of the political pyramid among elitists in government. There are certainly Republicans that are conservative in their rhetoric but not conservative in their actions or policies, and they tend to support or side with politicians on the left regularly when it comes to big government spending and big government power (just look to the Republicans that voted in favor of Joe Biden’s recent infrastructure bill).

Democrats and leftists don’t have to pretend. They base their entire platform on collectivism and centralization. This is no secret. The only theater is in their motives. Top Democrats claim they are fighting for the “greater good” of the masses when they are actually elevating and benefiting a tiny minority of wealthy elites. They do not care at all about the lives of their constituents.

Things change dramatically when we start talking about the bottom of the pyramid among regular people. The political spectrum is not as broad and nuanced as some people would have us believe and the sides are much easier to discern. There are exceptions to every rule and to every group, but to say the groups do not exist is an act of denial.

There are also people who call themselves “moderates” because they think this makes them more impartial and more open-minded. They don’t want to appear as if they are moving to one “extreme” end of the spectrum or the other. But, ultimately, there are only two sides in this fight: Either you are in favor of intensive government dominance of people’s lives, or you are not. And, the vast majority of people in favor of government tyranny herald from the left side of the political spectrum. They revel in the totalitarianism, even when they don’t necessarily benefit from it.

The bottom line is that proof is seen in action: Red states are free, blue states are enslaved. There’s no way around that.

The debate is over, at least in terms of left vs. right. The differences are stark and painfully obvious. Places with majority conservative populations are still fighting the mandates while places with a majority of leftists are perpetuating tyranny. It cannot be denied. It cannot be argued. This is reality. In this day and age if you want to be free you make sure you are surrounded by conservatives, or you become a conservative.

There is not a single blue state in the country that is not on the war path to enforce Biden’s vax mandates. There is not a single blue city in the country that is not trying to subversively teach CRT in schools. And, there is not a single blue region in the country that is not obsessed with wokism and globalism. The truth is, America has split into two completely different cultures with two completely different social objectives.

There are principles and ideals which are mutually exclusive; they cannot exist within the same society at the same time. There are moments in history when tribes form and cults rise, and generally these groups grow from either a desire to control others or a desire to remain free. We are living in such times.

We are indeed, although it’s also obvious that many if not most of us are not reconciled to that harsh reality just yet. But like it or not, they will be, probably sooner than any of us might imagine or wish. Which is where an even harsher reality shoves an oar in.

And that, folks, is foremost among numerous reasons why I unequivocally, categorically insist that there will be no secession, no geographical or political division, no “national divorce” without violent conflict—not EVER. Which, mind, does NOT suggest that there ain’t gonna be a division. In fact, I’m entirely confident that there will be, and that right soon. Actually, it seems apparent to me that, as Brandon says, it’s already in progress, whether we realize it or not. But the pattern of history indicates that our Great Schism enjoins all participants to wade through a veritable ocean of blood before the transition from purely theoretical into daily reality will be established.

5

Tooting his own horn

An ill wind that blows nobody any good.

He is supposed to be committed to reducing emissions – but when President Joe Biden produced a little natural gas of his own at the COP26 summit, it was audible enough to make the Duchess of Cornwall blush.

An informed source has told The Mail on Sunday that Camilla was taken aback to hear Biden break wind as they made polite small talk at the global climate change gathering in Glasgow last week.

‘It was long and loud and impossible to ignore,’ the source said. ‘Camilla hasn’t stopped talking about it.’

This summer, Johnson praised Biden as being ‘a big breath of fresh air’ on climate change compared to his predecessor.

Appropriately, Biden has urged world leaders to cut methane gas emissions by 30 per cent by the end of the decade. Cows and other livestock contribute substantially to global methane levels.

The White House declined to comment last night.

Oh, I just bet they did. What’s there to say, after all? Here we have this decrepit old near-cadaver, fraudulently installed as “leader” of the “free” world, in so advanced a stage of decomposition and decay he’s utterly helpless to prevent himself from shitting all over the friggin’ Pope—staggering around all befuddled and confused, muttering incoherently, tripping all over every set of stairs he wanders within ten feet of—so who among us is gonna bother complaining about the occasional sounding of the ***”Presidential”*** butt trumpet?

I must admit, as entertaining as President Trump was, the sheer hilarity Flatulent Zombie Brandon brings to the table puts ’em all in the shade. Every successive self-beclownment makes it seem more and more as if God Himself was exacting Heavenly Justice from the raddled old crook for all those years of unpunished kiddie-diddling, graft, and sundry petty crime. In fact, if you listen hard enough you might just hear Him laughing right along with the rest of His Chilluns.

9

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

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Correspondence

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Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
—Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
—Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
—John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
—Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
—Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
—Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
—David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
—John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
—Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
—Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
—Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
—NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
—Bill Whittle

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