Disasters Near and Far

“There’s No ‘Supply-Chain Shortage,’ Or Inflation. There’s Just Central Planning”

Posted on November 5, 2021November 6, 2021 by Mike

Put another way, it’s just government, doing what governments always do once they’ve been allowed to slip the leash and run amok.

The supply lines of February 2020 were impossibly complicated structures that no politician could ever hope to design. Think billions of individuals around the world pursuing their narrow work specialization on the way to enormous global plenty. Put another way, the shelves in economically free countries were heaving with all manner of products based on economic cooperation that was staggering in scope. Brilliant as some experts claim to be, and brilliant as some politicians think they are as they look in the mirror, they could never construct the web of trillions of economic relationships that prevailed before the lockdowns. But they could destroy the web. And they did; that, or they severely impaired it.

In which case let’s please not insult reason by talking about “shortages” or “inflation” now. Let’s instead be realistic and talk about central planning. We know from the 20th century that when politicians, authoritarians or both substitute their intensely narrow knowledge for that of the marketplace that immense want for very little (and lousy) supply is the logical result. Yes it is. When we’re not economically free, bare shelves are the inevitable result.

Conversely, product and service abundance is a certain consequence yet again of the infinite actions and trillions of economic relationships entered into by billions of people. These commercial tie-ups were constructed by consenting individuals over many years and many decades only for them to be wrecked by a political class arrogantly seeking to protect us from ourselves. That’s what happens when command-and-control replaces voluntary order. The remunerative ties that bind us fray, or vanish altogether. Consenting, profitable economic activity was suddenly illegal. Yet politicians and other experts are only now wringing their hands about a lack of supply?

Really, what did they think was going to happen?

They thought they’d get richer, more powerful, and would attain even tighter control over their hapless subjects. Tragically for all of us, they were right about that. Don’t fall into the common mental trap of believing they give so much as a lumpy Brandonfart about anything whatsoever else, please. The erroneous assumption that their goals and intentions are even remotely in harmony with those of the people they misrule is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

We don’t suddenly have an inflation problem. To say we do is the equivalent of saying that the Soviets had inflation because all the goods worth getting were both difficult to find, and incredibly expensive if they could be found. In our case we’ve had a lockdown problem care of nail-biting politicians that suffocated commercial cooperation around the world. And with work divided less than it used to be care of government force, productivity is naturally lower than it used to be.

Please consider modern productivity in terms of Smith’s pin factory example yet again, and ask what it would do to supply. The only thing is supply shortfalls are not evidence of inflation. A rise in one price due to lack of supply implies a fall in other prices. Yes, we have a central planning problem. Were he around today, Adam Smith could diagnose this in seconds.

Anyone with a lick of sense could, really. It’s not difficult or complicated for those adequately schooled on an inflexible, ironclad principle our Founders knew very well: The sole raison d’etre of government is to attain, consolidate, and expand its own power. And that, folks, is absolutely, positively IT—period, full stop, end of story. Which makes it of primary importance that any government Constitutionally established and constrained must never, never, never be allowed to exceed its explicitly specified limits.

Once government has been allowed to escape its proper box, it quickly becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to force it back in again without the spilling of blood. The unloosed beast grows at an incredible pace, in every dimension and direction it can. Having bloated, engorged, and extended itself to monstrous proportion, it will naturally resist every attempt to trim it back to a more manageable size ferociously, using all its considerable might and cunning to maintain its own untrammeled freedom even as it continues to gluttonously devour the few remaining scraps of yours.

The price of freedom, as Jefferson cautioned, is eternal vigilance. We are about to find out what relaxing our vigilance costs.

Update! Blast it, forgot to include the “Via…” link earlier, which was good ol’ Divemedic. Sorry ’bout the slip-up, buddy.

Brandon drops a deuce

Posted on November 2, 2021November 2, 2021 by Mike

It was bound to happen, and it was always gonna be gut-bustingly hilarious no matter what august personage ended up bearing witness to it.

Internet Dumps Its Best #PoopyPantsBiden Memes As Rumors Swirl Puppet President Sh** Self at Vatican

I never, ever dared to dream I’d live to see a headline as delightful as that, but incredibly, the subhed is better still.

Just a typical day for the Biden administration.

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAOOHHHHHSHIT!! Ummm, uhhh……

Oh, dammit all. S’cuse me just a sec, folks. CLEANUP ON AISLE THREE, STAT!!!

Joe Biden made headlines in all the worst ways during his meeting with Pope Francis in Rome over the weekend.

After the Vatican cancelled a livestream meeting with Biden over a media dispute, rumors quickly began spreading online that the cancellation was due to Biden…*ahem*…pooping his pants in front of the Holy See.

Thereby providing me with all the excuse I’ll ever need to run this unforgettable scene from the classic film The Pope Of Greenwich Village.

Eric Roberts has never been better than he was in The Pope, nor will he ever be. Same goes for Mickey Rourke with great big bells on, and possibly even veteran character-actor colossi Burt Young and Jack Kehoe too, among several other notables in the cast. Pope was a quiet little gem that came and went quick without much fuss at the box office to remember it by, failing to even make back its production costs if I remember right. Be that as it may, I saw the flick in the theater way back when, was completely charmed by it, and have adored it ever since. Read the book too, more than once, which was a good bit darker and heavier than the movie was, particularly the ending.

But back to, umm, business, shall we say. Richly blessed as we already have been by this kingly gift of a news item, the boons and benisons don’t stop there, playgoers.

Those rumors soon evolved into dank memes, which were dumped all over social media.

A big ol’ butt-load of funnies follow, none of which you will want to miss. I’ll limit myself to just one embed, difficult as the choice was to make.

#PoopypantsBiden no other president has had the courage to shit himself in front of the pope. I salute you sir. pic.twitter.com/pTaI8V2Tll

— Jerry Sienfeld official (@JerrySienfeldo1) October 31, 2021

Looks as if ***”President”*** Brandon has cranked the stink pickle heard ’round the world, a real stinkburger of a faux pas to put the cap on a long and noteworthy career of blunders, gaffes, and general self-beclownment with one he’ll never, ever be able to live down. How perfect is it that, after interminable decades in desperate, obsessive pursuit of an office he always was manifestly inadequate to successfully occupy, the corrupt old bunco artist finally did somehow manage to hoodwink his way into it…only to find it almost certainly the most miserable, excruciating experience of his entire worthless life?

Think of it: to ascend to the Presidency in his dotage—AT LONG, LONG LAST!!!—via a process so thoroughly tainted and corrupt that not just half the country but half the entire WORLD is deeply suspicious of his regime; has absolutely no respect for him or his plainly-usurped mantle of authority; and scornfully revels in his every successive misstep, on the vanishingly few occasions when people bother to even pay attention at all.

Yep, I think it’s safe to say that being POTUS has NOT turned out like ***”President”*** Brandon hoped or imagined it might, he nor his grabby, grubby show-wife either one. Not at all. They had imagined a plush, highly-remunerative sinecure being obsequiously pampered in the White House, the envious gaze of one and all focused on them with awe and admiration for their nation’s esteemed Chief Executive and his lovely First Lady. Instead, the miserable wretches are caught in the iron clutches of living nightmare, a sweaty horror from which there is no awakening.

And now the raddled old cretin has gone and publicly shat himself, in close physical proximity to the fucking Pope, ferchrissakes. Which Pontiff quietly noted this absolute nadir of humiliation, this total loss of all control of one’s person—even as the thick, fetid stench wafted far enough to invade the Papal nostrils all too swiftly—and dropped the decrepit oaf from his busy schedule posthaste, without offering any official explanation. Not that anybody needed one, after the nasty truth had, umm, leaked.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer asshole, if you ask me.

Losing it

Posted on October 30, 2021October 30, 2021 by Mike

What. The. Actual. FUCK.

Biden Meets the Pope and Utters One of the Most Embarrassing Lines Ever Said by a President

So far, strictly dog bites man stuff. But then ***”President”*** Brandon sez, “Hold my beer.”

Now we know why the Pope canceled a live broadcast with Biden on Thursday. When Joe Biden met with the Pope, he uttered a line that is so awkward that it defies belief.

“You’re the famous African-American baseball player in America.” The fuller context can be watched below…

And then Gropey REALLY went off the rails.

Biden may have meant it as a joke or it was another slip of the tongue about the gift he handed him, but the Pope laughing shows this is what he said. After a 75 minute meeting. This is not the behavior of a serious person, let alone one of the two ‘most powerful Catholics’ in the world.

The remark happened after they exchanged gifts at their meeting on Thursday. Biden spoke to the pope about Satchel Paige, the trailblazing Black baseball pitcher, and made a joke about their ages, CNN reported.

“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you were? You’re 65. I’m 60,” Biden said.

Annnnnd that’s a wrap, gang. Pudding cups and diaper changes all around!

As reported on Tuesday, the Pope suddenly canceled a live broadcast with the U.S. president without providing an explanation.

Did the Pope take one look at the beleaguered U.S. president and decide that it wasn’t worth the risk going live? Was there a personal disagreement? There were no reasons given.

At this point in Brandon’s™ rapidly-accelerating deterioration, is there really any need for one?

Doomed

Posted on October 24, 2021October 24, 2021 by Mike

Taiwan on its own.

According to Russia’s Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced, “Just like the overwhelming majority of other countries, Russia views Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China. This is the premise we proceed from and will continue to proceed from in our policy.” At the time of this statement, Russian forces were conducting joint naval exercises with Chinese forces in the Pacific—culminating in a 10-ship joint formation sailing through Japan’s Tsugaru Strait on October 18.

This, following a series of unprecedented Chinese military aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, has rattled Taiwan and America’s other allies in the region, namely Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. During the first week of October, over 150 aircraft, including advanced SU-30 fighters and H-6 heavy bombers, flew into Taiwanese airspace. An unprecedented 56 tactical aircraft penetrated Taiwan’s airspace in a single 24-hour period on October 4, the highest single day total to date.

China has already taken control of multiple islands claimed by these allies in an effort to access vast oil and natural gas resources, as well as project its military power in the contested territorial waters of the South China Sea. China’s ongoing trade dispute with Australia has also ratcheted up tensions in the region.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has rushed to assure Taiwan and its other allies that the United States intends to honor its regional security agreements. Of late, Joe Biden has publicly pledged to defend the Japanese Senkaku islands, which China claims as its territory.

BWAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! The notion of the ever-more-enfeebled FUSA actually leaping into the fray to make war against the ChiComs in defense of our RoC allies is ludicrous, and has been for a while now. Realistically, it’s inconceivable that any president since Reagan at least would have dared to honor the explicit US treaty commitment to act militarily in defense of Taiwan against ChiCom aggression—today, the idea is even more bizarre. For numerous reasons, it’s gone from inconceivable to…well, ludicrous.

Thanks to past U.S. economic and domestic policies, we allowed our manufacturing base to be exported to China. While offshoring American jobs to cheaper labor in China was good for U.S. multinational corporations, it resulted in China effectively capturing the bulk of American industrial capacity for consumer goods. This gives China immense leverage within the U.S. economy.

Look now at the supply disruptions spreading across the United States, which result in no small part from our inability to offload Chinese consumer goods at West Coast ports. Consider how U.S. sanctions against China might create an even greater disruption in the supply of goods that the U.S. no longer has the ability to produce. This dynamic gives China considerable sway with a U.S. political donor class that derives its wealth from Chinese industrial capacity. It makes the idea that the Biden Administration would have the will to impose crippling U.S. sanctions as a check against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan unrealistic.

In contrast to China’s relative position of strength, the world has watched as America lost two wars in our failed Global War on Terror. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was exceptionally humiliating, not just to America, but also to our allies. It was so bad, the UK parliament held Biden in contempt for his mishandling of the withdrawal. Americans swallowed hard when it was revealed that the U.S. general in charge of the evacuation asked the British SAS commander to stop conducting rescue missions to retrieve UK citizens because it was embarrassing the airport-bound U.S. military. We went on to leave thousands of U.S. citizens behind in Afghanistan with only a shrug of Joe Biden’s shoulders.

Today, the United States is a deeply divided nation on the brink of open internal conflict. The Biden Administration is gleefully running down a list of ill-conceived policies that historically have resulted in civil unrest and rebellion. Oblivious to its own incompetence or the concerns of working-class America, it has labeled half the population domestic extremists, including parents angry that their children are being indoctrinated into woke-Marxist ideology. Just this past week, Biden’s national approval rating hit 38 percent and is dropping rapidly. It’s no secret that he appears to be suffering from cognitive decline and who, exactly, is running the country has yet to be revealed. America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices.

Numerous reasons, as I said, but the boldface bit is the one that dwarves all the others. As the American populace has grown ever more complacent, indecisive, and vacuous, their will to victory—their willingness to even countenance making war at all, for any reason—has proportionately withered as well, in mirror-like reflection. It’s unlikely in the extreme that present-day American lotus eaters in any great numbers would support military action to defend this country.

Taiwan? Shhyeeeaaah, pull the other one, whydon’tcha. It has a bell on it.

Which may actually turn out to be a good thing in the long run. Fact is, Real Americans have much bigger and more pressing issues confronting us right here at home—issues that will have to be dealt with, issues that simply cannot be back-burnered, ignored, or blithely waved away. Hate it for Taiwan and all, but the rip in our national fabric is so profound that it’s no easy thing to define the FUSA as a nation at all anymore, except in the loosest terms. In a great many minds, the Great Schism has already taken place. And in a non-trivial percentage of those, there is little or no desire to knit the country back together again.

With regard to a China-Taiwan conflict, the danger to America does not necessarily come from what happens to Taiwan. The danger comes from how radically the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific might change should China retake Taiwan by force in the face of U.S. opposition—or lack of opposition.

If the United States opposes China and fails to stop its move against Taiwan, then we will have shown ourselves incapable of fulfilling our security agreements in the Pacific.

Which is, y’know, true.

If the United States demurs and abandons Taiwan to the Chinese, then we will have shown that our security agreements are not worth the paper on which they are printed.

Which is also, y’know, true.

Either way, this likely results in the restructuring of alliances in the Pacific away from an impotent or feckless United States to accommodate the new global hegemon—China. The second and third order effects of our losses in the Pacific would reverberate across Europe, particularly in areas threatened by an expansionist Russia…which has opportunistically positioned itself for just such a situation.

This, too, could be looked at as a good thing from some perspectives, or maybe a not-entirely-disastrous one. The cold reality is that Amerika v2.0 is a paper tiger, a hollowed-out shell whose only resemblance now to the once-mighty military, economic, and geopolitical juggernaut I call America That Was (swiped from the finest TV show ever conceived, natch) is entirely superficial. As Morton points out, every imaginable Taiwan scenario ends badly for this third-rate power, worse for Free Taiwan.

The post-WW2 treaties promising pipsqueak nations a US defensive shield against Commie aggression now only serve to highlight the unpleasant fact that our antecedents wrote a lot of checks that the current generation hasn’t the means to make good on. The sooner our feckless, braggadocious ProPols admit this forthrightly, sit down, and stop running their fat yaps as if it was still 1947 the better I’ll like it. Because the sad delusion of an American colossus permanently astride the globe, omnipotent and unchallengeable, is getting to be pretty embarrassing at this point.

Supply chain SNAFU

Posted on October 24, 2021October 24, 2021 by Mike

An industry insider outlines the multifarious problem.

Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here’s a thread about what I learned.

First off, the boat captain said we were the first company to ever rent his boat to tour the port to see how everything was working up close. His usual business is doing memorial services at sea. He said we were a lot more fun than his regular customers.

The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow.

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis.

If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed.

WIth the yards so full, carriers / terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties.

Also containers are not fungible between carriers, so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up. This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now (as of 10/21) at his yards.

This is a trucking company with 6 yards that represents 153 owner operator drivers, so he has almost 3 containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team.

He can’t take the containers off the chassis because he’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether.

With the chassis all tied up storing empties that can’t be returned to the port, there are no chassis available to pick up containers at the port.

And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting off shore. This line is going to get longer not shorter.

This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy.

Alright how do we fix this, you ask? Simple. And we can do it fast now,

When you’re designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t choose it, you aren’t running an operation. It’s running you.

You should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. In a port that’s the ship to shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they’re waiting for another part of the operation to catch up.

The bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It’s yard space at the container terminals. And it’s empty chassis to come clear those containers out.

In operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t design for it to appear, you must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK!

Miscellaneous side angles I haven’t seen or heard mention of anywhere other than in casual conversations with my brother and several of his coworkers at Horizon Freight:

Chassis are extremely scarce currently; my brother has been working only two-three days/week over the last two weeks because there are just too few chassis in Charleston available for use—no chassis, no haulee containers
Amazon has taken to reserving way more container space than they need, then offering to resell it to shippers at eight to ten times the usual rate, which adds up to a lot of empty space in a lot of containers
Horizon has two dispatchers responsible for assigning chassis and containers to specific drivers who are charged with hauling them out of the Charelston and Savannah ports. These dispatchers are absolutely worn to a frazzle, working frantically to get these containers out of the ports and on the road to their destinations, for a damned good reason: there’s a firm deadline by which each container MUST be removed from the port, usually only two-three days after arrival. After the deadline, the dispatcher her own self gets whacked with a several-thousand dollar fine…compounded EACH AND EVERY DAY said container doesn’t move, applicable to EACH INDIVIDUAL CONTAINER

I repeat: in shutting down entire national economies on a pretext that grows more threadbare each and every day, politicians and bureauweasels have meddled in affairs much too big for them. Contrary to their personal God Complex delusions, the extremely complicated, intricately interdependent, and fragile systems they wilfully fucked up are FAR beyond their meager ability to restart or repair. The unbridled arrogance and conceit of ProPols have created a catastrophe that the entire world can only watch unfold with horror and dread. There is no power on Earth capable of stopping what’s coming now.

Here’s a simple plan that @POTUS and @GavinNewsom partnered with the private sector, labor, truckers, and everyone else in the chain must implement TODAY to overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate again.

Not one proposal of which plan is ever going to happen.

This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don’t need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.

We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can’t stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don’t work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.

The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it’s getting worse not better every day that goes by.

I’d be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government if asked. Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point.

Nope, nope, nope. One of BRM Peter’s commenters says it concisely and correctly.

government diddling caused this crap storm.

More government diddling will not fix it.

Nailed it. The one positive contribution federal and/or state governments might make here is also the one they’re wholly incapable of making: get the hell out of the way and allow the innumerable moving parts of the system of supply and logistics freely begin the slow and painful process of healing itself. Sadly, tragically for all of us, the self-styled Superior Beings who made this mess will never go along with it; such a thing is constitutionally beyond them, and goes against their nature. Their vanity, their bloated sense of their own importance, their every belief stands in direct opposition to the very concept. Indeed, they would resist any attempt at relaxing their grip on our throats to their dying breath. Which, y’know, can be easily arranged for them, and in fact ought to be.

Elsewhere, Karl digs down to unearth one of the deepest roots of our sorry situation.

I get it that everyone would like to just wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. There are people out there who claim they can — and have. They’re wrong. I may not be the CEO of Flexport but you shall see that going from a 2-stack to either 4 or 6 (depending on approvals) in the trucking company yards will solve nothing; the problem simply does not lie there.

The problem is that all the constraints have produced a labor shortage end to end in various places, including in warehouses, transportation hubs, drivers and similar. As a result the freight is not being unloaded and the empties not being returned on schedule.

When the ship gets here and unloads its several thousand containers those containers must ultimately return to the source to be loaded again. If the cycle is interrupted and there are none to load for the return trip then the source will run out. Unloading more containers into a chain of events that is constrained all the way through does not accelerate the rate of return for the journey back to the source!

You have to return the cycle from unload time to the return of the empty to the port to its expected rate and time in-transit or you do nothing. That means getting rid of the reasons that problem exists – which all revolve around labor and working conditions.

Some of those have been building for quite some time but a hell of a lot of them are external and imposed by governments related to lockdowns, mandates of various sorts and similar. The former ones building for quite some time will take some time to resolve but the others can be removed on an instant basis by the very government entities who placed them.

Phew—transcribing all of Karl’s characteristic bolds, underlines, and italics is hard work. But the man ain’t wrong about the scarcity of willing grunt-workers. Why, one might almost start to wonder whether—after going on two years of lockdowns, business closures, and being paid handsomely to lounge about at home in one’s jammies—this all might possibly be more than happenstance, coincidence, or sheer bad luck. Yeah, I know, I know, excessive paranoia, a ridiculous conspiracy theory, sorry I brought it up.

All the same, though, we might want to ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits, that is, from tighter control over individual freedom and mobility; reinforcement of fear, uncertainty, and doubt; making 24-7 surveillance and tracking of the Serf Class much easier; increasing Serf Class dependence and helplessness, among other things? We wonders, yes we wonders.

In the wrong hands Part the Third

Posted on October 24, 2021October 24, 2021 by Mike

I’m thinking this will probably be my final post on this topic, since my expectations going forward are as follows:

The armorer chick, being patently unfit for her job, is gonna take the hardest fall, which I consider only meet and just since the lion’s share of the responsibility for this needless tragedy is squarely on her;
Hollywood’s gun-safety record IS incontrovertibly quite good, especially seeing as how such a large proportion of its feature-film output over the last, ohh, seventy or so years has consisted of bang-bang shoot-em-ups of one genre or another; the jaw-slackening hypocrisy of so very many rabid hoplophobes getting filthy rich off of the very guns they abhor, then spending scads of their time, energy, and moolah lecturing people who’ve known more about firearms since they were 12 than any dozen Tinseltown asswarts put together ever will does rankle my baggy old ass some—but in the end, eh, whatcha gonna do; and
The worst ass-rankler of all, at least for me: Baldwin will donate a big chunk of his accumulated wealth from a lengthy career being filmed waving various and sundry E-Ville Guns™ around threateningly to Handgun Control Inc or the Brady Org or some other such outfit, after which TPTB will consider his debt to society paid in full

Being as confident of these developments as I currently am, there just ain’t a whole hell of a lot more that’s worth saying. The final word I’ll leave to Divemedic, with whom I am in total agreement.

I want to make something clear with regards to my disagreement with Aesop’s opinion on the Rusty Baldwin shooting. The disagreement that I have with him is about his opinion on this topic. Yes, he and I have disagreed in the past. We have also agreed on topics in the past. That is the nature of human interaction.

I still believe that he and I agree on more topics than not. Don’t take our little discussion as anything other than a disagreement between colleagues.

I don’t have a problem with him or his blog. It’s the nature of human interaction- we don’t always agree. We also have a tendency to circle the wagons when we want to defend our own opinions, which MUST be the correct opinion, or we wouldn’t have it, would we?

Well said, sir, and seconded from here. Transmission ends.

Yes, Virginia, there IS a truck-driver shortage

Posted on October 24, 2021October 24, 2021 by Mike

And it was intrusive government that created it.

After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.

He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.

I listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state.

I’m sure California’s meddlesome over-regulation isn’t helping matters any, but the truth is that the bigger, broader hand of FederalGovCo has done more damage by far. The driver shortage has been an issue since back when I was still trucking, and that was over fifteen years ago. I still talk now and then with a good few who are still out there on the job, including my own brother, and so am still more or less up on doin’s. And what’s crystal clear is that, due to numerous factors that all boil down to inept, staggeringly clueless government micromanagement, vanishingly few young guys have any interest at all in getting into the industry. Meanwhile, the increasingly-fed-up old hands are getting out just as quick as they possibly can.

Y’know, pretty much as has happened in every other corner of the economy that has felt the five-thumbed hand of government tightening around its throat for any significant length of time.

The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.

While I was riding home that night, California trucking companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry were paying attention or understood what that might mean.

2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.

Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority’s Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)

AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.

Over the summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now. While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.

AB5 was not only the assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental regulations on it.

It was not, nor was said assault limited to California or ever more onerous “Save Gaia!” measures. The willful destruction of the trucking industry is multifarious and complex, from the implementation of nearly incomprehensible tangle of hours-worked limitations to electronic-log requirements to the absurd Regen mandate, which is my personal fave. Regen is so pluperfect an encapsulation of FederalGovCo stupidity as to beggar belief. To wit:

There’s no such thing as a good time for downtime, especially when it’s unexpected. And one issue many fleet drivers don’t plan for is forced regens.

If you haven’t experienced this issue yet, consider yourself lucky. A forced regen occurs when soot builds up inside the diesel particulate filter (DPF) to the point that the vehicle is no longer operable. When this happens, a driver has to pull over and initiate a self-cleaning process that can take up to 40 minutes — valuable time that could have been spent on the road.

If that sounds confusing, it really isn’t. The DPF traps the soot; the DPF gets full; driver must pull over IMMEDIATELY for a “forced regen” when the warning light comes on, lest severe damage be done to the engine of a truck he just paid 150k or a good bit more to purchase.

Now, here’s where a sensible person’s head will start to spin like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Know what a “forced regen” is? Why, nothing other than the process of ALL THE PARTICULATES AND SOOT THE FILTER REMOVED FROM THE ATMOSPHERE BEING BLOWN BACK OUT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AGAIN. Only instead of it being done gradually, over a wide area, the gunk is expelled all at once, in a single spot. Whenever you’ve seen a big rig sitting on the side of the highway, a thick column of smoke belching skyward from the stacks, what you’re witnessing is the hand of FederalGovCo in action, just another Superstate Success Story™.

Ahh, but let’s not be offering any congratulations or humble thanks to our Lords and Masters on another Job Well Done quite yet, folks. Because as always, there’s more.

Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a “bold step to reduce truck pollution”. The bold step required switching to electric trucks.

“We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel,” Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.

Oh, is THAT what you think you’re “showing the world”? Because what the world is actually seeing looks not at ALL like what you just said. But hey, you do you, Poindexter. Live your truth, by all means. The snickering you’re hearing only means that we’re mighty impressed by your achievements, that’s all. Awestruck, even. Carry on.

While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California’s DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With “green” trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.

That was part of the plan.

Well, of course it was. These oozing chancres are always and forever working a Plan, a trait not limited to just the Califrutopia-localized sub-genus of the Rodentia Bureaucraticus species either. Bad as the worthless parasites have made our national situation already, the one certainty is that things are going to get much, much worse. That’s what they are, it’s what they do.

Putting it straight

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Mike

Not sure where I ran across this one—it’s been just sitting quietly on my desktop for days now, waiting for me to make some P-shop adjustments and then put it to good use here—and I can’t say I know who this Langan fellow might be, either. But I dunno, the part I highlighted in blue just tickled me no end.

Don’t hold back, Chris, tell us how you really feel.

The Thrubbles, American-style

Posted on October 21, 2021October 21, 2021 by Mike

Alarming parallels.

The Irish Troubles is one of six models I’ve identified that could have (loosely) an American equivalent.

Of course, I’m not talking about Catholics versus Protestants, but a sectarian conflict featuring sporadic armed political violence where the government’s primary mission is peacekeeping followed by counterterrorism.

The Irish Troubles resulted in over 50,000 casualties and 3,500 deaths over a 30-year span (1969-1998). Armed violence was widespread across Northern Ireland, but this map illustrating the deaths of civilians and British Security Forces gives us a good glimpse of where casualty-producing attacks occurred.

One of my key assumptions for this model remains that armed political volence would be geographically limited. I wouldn’t expect much from, say, central Nebraska or northern Alabama, for instance, just like many areas of Northern Ireland had very few instances of armed violence over a 30-year span. I expect most places to remain… well, pretty quiet as far as fighting is concerned. (Criminality is another matter!)

A few things… First, civilian deaths are roughly equal to deaths of all belligerents. High civilian casualties are the norm for domestic conflicts, going all the way back to at least the 1500s. As French Renaissance philosopher Michel de Montaigne (1532-1592) observed, “In truth a forraine warre is nothing so dangerous a disease as a civill.”

Second, while the 1970s were by far the most violent, war-related deaths continued to stack up over the following decades. The total death toll of 3,483 works out to an average of 116 deaths per year, or roughly one death every three days. For 30 years. Low intensity conflicts, especially insurgencies and guerrilla wars, are often protracted. Nothing happening in the United States today signals that our own domestic conflict would be short lived.

Third, I’m still compiling the numbers of fighters as a percentage of the overall populace. The end result will show that a small percentage was actively engaged in the fighting at any given time. As we see in most low intensity conflicts, a small percentage actually takes part in the fighting, followed by maybe 5-15% of the total population involved in active support at some level, and everyone else is just trying to live their lives. I suspect that the American Troubles would be similar.

The real problem for most Americans will be the economic, financial, and monetary destruction that results from armed conflict. While you’d think that high unemployment would enable the mobilization of millions of military-aged males, the disruption to transportation, shipping, and production likely means that many Americans will be focused on week to week survival, as opposed to actively fighting.

The greater the operational tempo and mass of fighters, the greater logistics you need. This likely means that the number of fighters remains relatively small compared to the efforts required to support them. Again, less than 5%, maybe even less than 1%, is likely to be engaged at any time. (That’s still a lot of people.)

On that note, the United States population today is some 200 times larger than Northern Ireland was from 1969-1998. So could we see 200 times the death toll? Certainly.

Although I still maintain that there is simply no possible way to accurately predict where this is headed or how it’s all going to end up, Culper’s comparison with The Thrubbles (hey, I’m Irish all to hell and gone on my mom’s side, so I can say it that way if I want to, dammit) seems entirely apt to me, and just as likely to yield some useful indications as any. At the end of the day, though, the one and only sure thing is that it’s going to positively SUCK.

(Via WRSA)

“The training and readiness of the ship’s crew were deficient”

Posted on October 20, 2021October 20, 2021 by Mike

Gee, ya THINK?!?

A cascade of failures – from a junior enlisted sailor not recognizing a fire at the end of their duty watch to fundamental problems with how the U.S. Navy trains sailors to fight fires in shipyards – are responsible for the five-day blaze that cost the service an amphibious warship, according to an investigation into the July 2020 USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) fire reviewed by USNI News.

The investigation into the fire aboard Bonhomme Richard, overseen by former U.S. 3rd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Scott Conn, found that the two-year-long $249 million maintenance period rendered the ship’s crew unprepared to fight the fire the service says was set by a crew member.

“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” Conn wrote in his investigation, which was completed in April and reviewed by USNI News this week.

“In the 19 months executing the ship’s maintenance availability, repeated failures allowed for the accumulation of significant risk and an inadequately prepared crew, which led to an ineffective fire response.”

Full props to ADM Conn for his desert-dry understatement. Fret not though, Squids, there’s a newly-minted admiral in town who’s SURE to unfuck the USN in a mere trice.

Assistant Secretary of Health Richard Levine, a man who identifies as a woman and goes by the name of Rachel, has been sworn in as the first “transgender” four-star admiral in America, as reported by the New York Post.

On Tuesday, the 63-year-old Levine was named as an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which is not one of the armed forces of the United States military. Following the swearing-in ceremony, Levine tweeted that he was “deeply honored and grateful to join the ranks of men and women across this great nation who have committed to defend the United States against small and large threats, known and unknown.”

Prior to his role at HHS, Levine had served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, where he oversaw a disastrous order to force COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, exposing thousands of vulnerable senior citizens to the virus. Levine himself came under fire when it was discovered that, upon the implementation of the order, he made sure to have his own mother moved out of such a nursing home and into a private facility. During his tenure, Levine also violated lockdown orders by secretly negotiating for a major exclusive car show to take place in Pennsylvania back in August, despite orders at the time banning such large gatherings.

Levine suffers from transgenderism, a mental disorder which leads people to believe that they are the opposite gender from the one they were born.

It remained unclear at presstime exactly how Mrxskkjnnxxx Levine plans to “defend the United States,” as per her HISTORIC!!! COURAGEOUS!!! statement, from her palatial office heading up a bureaucracy with no affiliation whatsoever with the US military. But I’m sure he/she/whatever will do a fine job of it nonetheless. In other news:

Meanwhile, China is expanding its nuclear missile silo field and just launched a new hypersonic nuclear-capable missile that circled the entire globe at low-orbit.

China’s new space nukes could evade the US’s missile defense systems.

While China is flexing its nuclear muscle, the “woke” Biden Admin is focused on white rage, maternity paratrooper suits, French manicures and promoting transgenders.

Levine, who previously served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, has a horrible track record.

The Coronavirus ravaged nursing homes across the US because of deadly Democrat policies of forcing people infected with COVID-19 back into the long-term care facilities.

Dr. Levine however made sure his 95-year-old mother was removed from the death box and transported safely to a hotel.

Okay, my apologies to ADM Conn for being overly sanguine just now. Actually, this looks like a most apposite time to begin fretting, sir, and to continue fretting away to your heart’s content. Wringing of the hands and gnashing of the teeth remain completely optional at this time, but are nevertheless heartily recommended. Carry on.

Publick Notice

Posted on October 11, 2021October 11, 2021 by Mike

To anyone who e-mailed me over the last several days at the mike@cf addy and didn’t receive a response yet (SteveF, I’n looking at you there, kid), there’s a reason for it—a reason NOT revolving around my usual lassitude, I mean. Some bizarre e-mail problems began cropping up late last week which rendered two different apps (Thunderbird and Apple Mail, to it) utterly incapable of pulling messages down off Ye Olde CF Mail Server for me to read. I think—THINK—I’ve finally managed to get things sorted out now. Feel free to re-send anything critical; I should be able to retrieve e-mail okay now, and will get back to you forthwith. Or so I hope.

Big, meddlesome government: is there ANYTHING it can’t fuck up?

Posted on October 3, 2021October 3, 2021 by Mike

The root of all evils.

On the surface, the supply chain crisis that’s left ships off both U.S. coasts facing a month of waiting before they’re unloaded is caused by bottlenecks following a post-COVID retail flush, rising shipping costs, and a lack of truckers available to unload containers waiting offshore (Redstate covered that angle here). That’s what labor unions told the Daily Mail, anyway, no doubt with the intent to remind everyone of their importance.

But scratch the surface, and supply chain problems are revealed to be much more complicated, driven by bureaucratic intrusion, and effectively look like a mini-war between shippers and carriers, one that the Biden administration and the Democrat-led House of Representatives aren’t interested in working on until at least November, making the problems we’re seeing today extend into the Christmas season.

Oh, those problems are going to be extending a whole lot longer than that, I’m afraid. As I said from the very start of the Covid clusterfuck: you can’t just shut an entire national economy down, as if the action was no more complex or potentially destructive than flipping a light switch off—for ~~fifteen days to flatten the curve~~ a year and a half to consolidate a tyranny and train a Sheeple—then nonchalantly flip the switch back to the “On” position, emboldened by a level of confidence only the truly witless ever get to experience, that things will just pick up and carry on as before with no lasting disruption and/or damage. Their monstrously inflated egos and delusions of omnipotence notwithstanding, the idiot ProPols badly overestimated their own smarts, competence, and capabilities—exactly as they always have—and now every damned man Jack of us is going to have to pay a severe price for allowing them to do it—exactly as we always have.

Part of the problem lies with the Biden administration’s “Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains,” issued on Feb. 24, 2021, which set up a “‘sectoral supply chain assessment‘ of six industrial sectors, including transportation. It requires the secretary of transportation, consulting with the heads of the department’s modal agencies, to submit a report to the president within one year of the executive order that assesses ‘the role of transportation systems in supporting existing supply chains and risks associated with those transportation systems.’”

See what I mean? My God, the EGOS on these little tin gods, daring to imagine that diddling around in affairs that are much too big for pygmies like themselves could ever lead to anything other than disaster, widespread human misery, and societal chaos. Any genuinely intelligent, sane person would have known better. Clearly, the professional politicians…don’t. Does that suggest anything about the advisability of restricting government at all levels to no more than the merest minimum of authority and power? Why, it seems so NO DUH! obvious, so self-evident and beyond argument, that I’m shocked that nobody ever thought of such a thing before now, nor attempted to codify, explicitly and in writing, how a government strictly and sturdily fenced by such restrictions might possibly be established. A real head-scratcher, that one is. Oh well, maybe someday.

While over 150 companies and trade associations have written a letter to encourage Congress to work on the bill, there’s some concern within the industry that the legislation would only create tension between shippers and regulators and carriers.

OH yeah, by all means let’s get Congress involved too! Having them waddle their fat asses on up and thrust their snouts into the slop trough will SURELY straighten this whole mess out with a quickness. Won’t it?

In short, government involving itself and imposing new regulations while also refusing to update existing regulations have played a familiar role in the slow down of a market that is trying to bounce back after COVID stopped the machine.

Update existing regulations, my baggy white ass. The one and only treatment for what ails us that stands a ghost of a chance of curing the affliction is to take a broadaxe and start chopping as many as can be reached into little, tiny pieces.

Apropos of not a whole lot, the Red State companion-piece mentioned in the first excerpted ‘graph is worth a read in its own right.

Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.

Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up, waiting to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacting railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.

This is a disaster about to blow up.

If you were trying to do-in the country, I’m not sure what you would do that the Biden team hasn’t been doing.

Hey, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

It makes for some pretty grim reading, all the moreso since there really is no way the Great Chaos Engine our damned fool politicians cranked up and set in motion can be stopped at this late stage. All any of us can do now is brace for the impact of the imminent crash. Hopefully, the survivors can come up with some way to repay them for all the wonderful things they’ve done for us.

Stalin’s war, Stalin’s win

Posted on September 29, 2021September 29, 2021 by Mike

Reviewing a book that offers a different perspective on WW2.

The goals of the Western Allies in World War II were to defeat Hitler and prevent a hostile power from entrenching itself in Europe and Asia, threatening the freedom and survival of the West. From a narrow perspective, the unconditional surrender of Germany and Japan in 1945 fulfilled this objective: it was a victory for the United States, the United Kingdom, and their allies, and we celebrate V-E Day every May 8 and V-J Day on September 2. But for a large number of nations that fought against Berlin and Tokyo, at enormous sacrifice, 1945 is a dark year that ended one tyranny only to be replaced by another one, the Communist one, which was (and continues to be) no less vicious and in fact was much more lasting and pervasive. Stalin replaced Hitler. Or, to put it in the context of World War II, Stalin was the clear winner of that conflict. It was his war, and he got the most out of it.

This is the argument of a new book, Stalin’s War, by a prolific and excellent historian, Sean McMeekin of Bard College. The author is already well known, having written highly readable and incisive books exploring the role of Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Germany in the origins of World War I. In his new work, he focuses on Stalin, his objectives, his tactics, his actions, and, above all, his ability to obtain from his Western counterparts everything (and more!) that he wanted. The book presents the story of Stalin’s success that brought an enormous human cost to his own people and to those who came under Communist domination, as well as an enduring geopolitical cost. Through this war, Stalin succeeded in anchoring Soviet power and influence over Eurasia, benefiting from the frailty of European powers. Germany was obviously reduced to rubble by 1945, but even the victorious powers, from France and the UK to the other smaller states across the continent, were mere shadows of their former selves. Stalin gained strategic real estate and the tools, looted from Europe or given to him by the United States, to turn Russia into an industrial superpower. The conditions for the Cold War were in place, and in the immediate aftermath of the war, the possibility that Stalin could become the master of Eurasia was not out of the question. And, for the U.S., victory in 1945 meant not a satisfying and prolonged age of peace, but the beginning of a new and massive investment in preserving its security and the stability threatened by the Soviet Union.

The story presented in such a way is not new, and its broad contours are accepted by most, except those who still see Communist ideology and the USSR as a benign progressive force or those who blame American post-war support of Western Europe for the Cold War. But McMeekin digs deeper and his goal is to change two pervasive myths. One presents Stalin as a paranoid dictator bumbling across the European chessboard, getting caught unprepared for Hitler’s aggressive intents, and then rising to the historic occasion and motivating his people to fight the “Great Patriotic War” to liberate Russia and the adjoining lands from the Nazis. In brief, a dictator to be sure, but a naive one with a great patriotic heart backed by a Russian nation willing to accept great sacrifices.

The other myth is of a strategically wise leadership of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, skillfully making their moves across the world’s map, negotiating with a vast array of strategic partners (including Stalin) and organizing bold military actions that ultimately lead to the 1945 triumph. Neither myth, however, is entirely correct, as McMeekin brilliantly argues backed by abundant facts supplied through impeccable research.

After a look into Stalin’s acquisitive designs on Western Europe, all undone by Hitler’s doomed invasion of the USSR in 1941, we direct our attention still further Westward.

McMeekin then focuses on how the Western allies, Churchill but especially FDR, abetted Stalin’s ambitions. This part of the book is fascinating and depressing at the same time. In a nutshell, Stalin obtained from FDR more than he expected: territory, influence, and materiel. And he did not give anything in exchange for it because FDR and his advisors never asked him for it. For instance, FDR supported the Lend-Lease program, putting his friend Harry Hopkins in charge. Under this program of military aid, the United States supplied a massive amount of weapons, trucks, airplanes, tanks, foodstuff to the Soviet Union in the months of its greatest need, as German troops were driving deep into Russia while the vaunted Soviet armies were melting away. Without such aid, the USSR would have likely been unable to stop the German onslaught and certainly would have been incapable of mustering the resources necessary to push westward. Hence, in this moment there was a good strategic rationale for the American support of Stalin’s defensive efforts against Nazi Germany.

But the problem was that FDR—and Hopkins—went much further than simply buttressing a collapsing Soviet power. The most stunning mistake—a policy willfully pursued by FDR—was that Stalin was never asked for anything in exchange for this material aid. The United States had the upper hand because the Soviets were desperate for any help and would have paid a price for these goods. As McMeekin comments, FDR “could have asked any price: payment in cash, by loan, or in kind; political concessions inside Russia; or promises from Stalin of better behavior abroad, such as abandoning his spying operations in Washington or offering token support for the US-British war against Japan. Instead, the Americans simply gave and demanded nothing in return aside from a vague, nonbinding promise of loan repayment beginning five years after the war was over, at no interest.”

Such a naivete could have been the result of FDR’s belief in his personal capacity to persuade people. But, at best, FDR profoundly misunderstood Stalin, despite the evidence of Soviet actions and even of Stalin’s own words and behavior toward the US President. FDR thought that he could build goodwill with Stalin. As he put it, “I think that if I give him everything I can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” This is the point where naivete became stupidity.

With certain classifications of Western liberal, the distinction between naivete and stupidity is so thin it’s not worth the bother of making. They’re conjoined twins, constantly shifting and bleeding over one into the other, staggering clumsily about like a dancer uncertain of his stage cues. Sooner or later, though, the Libtard can be relied upon to close this pointless ballet with both feet planted squarely on Stupid. In reality, though, is that he started there, and never ventured any meaningful distance from it. Read the rest for further details of Stalin’s willful humiliation of the hapless, grossly-overmatched clown Roosevelt, and what Uncle Joe’s deftly stolen victory ended up costing the entire world, in blood and treasure.

“Thank God For Rednecks—Who else could keep us from turning into Australia?”

Posted on September 27, 2021September 27, 2021 by Mike

I’m completely down with the sentiment, as you might expect. As nice a try as it is, though, the guy still misses the mark in places.

Last summer, when all this Covid stuff really kicked off, I got a call from a friend in rural Virginia. He told me a bunch of rednecks were going to grocery stores and gas stations, tearing down signs asking patrons to wear facemasks.

My friend was annoyed, and so was I. Hey, it’s private property! If Sal only wants to sell pizza to folks dressed like Little Bo Peep, and you don’t want to dress up as Little Bo Peep, go to a different pizzeria. Better yet, cook for yourself. It’s not that hard.

Now, I thank God every day for those rednecks.

A few weeks ago, a friend in Australia called and told me about the country’s new Covid app. Residents of South Australia are required to prove they’re in quarantine by using face recognition and geolocation on this app. If they fail to check in, the app will notify a bureaucrat with the state’s Health Department. That bureaucrat will then call the police. The police, in turn, will go to the citizen’s home and make sure he’s not taking an unauthorized walk so his dog can take a clandestine whizz.

“We don’t tell them how often or when, on a random basis they have to reply within 15 minutes,” said premier Steven Marshall. Fair warning, I guess.

Meanwhile, in neighboring Victoria, the government has implemented mandatory contact tracing. The state is forcing stores to force customers to “check in” before they shop. According to Victoria’s chief health officer, Professor Brett Sutton, “everyone recognizes that we have to do absolutely everything in our power to be able to chase down every single person who may be exposed because it is that one person who is not found who may be the one who spreads it.”

And you know what? Professor Sutton is right. Since the vaccines aren’t 100 percent effective, the only way we can be absolutely sure we eradicate the virus is by identifying every single carrier before they infect anyone else. If that’s Australia’s objective, they’re going to need a lot more than a smartphone app. I’m sure they’ll exhaust every resource.

That, and then some. It’s the tried and true Leftist bait-and-switch, that’s all. We’ll always and forever need their “assistance,” because their work (IMPORTANT work!) is not yet finished, and never will be. No shitlib proposal, program, or crusade comes with an expiration date; even measures explicitly sold as “temporary” responses to one “emergency” or another nearly always end up becoming permanent fixtures of “American” life—as predictable as the sunrise, as reliable as the tide. Even in the rare instances when the “temporary” program is allowed (or forced, due to public outrage) to expire, it’s a dead cert that the Left will summon it from its crypt again and again, in the nature of all vampires, to prowl for new victims and feed on them. Please see “Income tax, origins of” for further information.

I’m sure the Australians will let them, too; you can tell they’re descended from prisoners and prison-guards. Another Aussie friend once described his country as an ongoing experiment with Bentham’s Panopticon. Folks there are so worn down by constant government interference they can’t even imagine what true privacy feels like. It’s like boiling frogs—and when your country starts out as a penal colony, you’re pretty well used to the heat.

On the other hand, you can tell Americans are descended from free settlers and freed slaves.

Izzatso? How, exactly? To my eyes, most Americans look way more like un-freed slaves nowadays, and appear to be perfectly happy about it, too.

Our policy is, and always has been, “Leave me the hell alone.” It’s looking pretty good right about now, too, considering the alternative.

Boy, talk about damning with faint praise.

Look: we can get into those niceties about private property laws, and I’ll probably agree with you. I’m not saying they’re perfect. But I sleep better at night knowing the preppers, truthers, and talk-radio enthusiasts are out there, just waiting for an excuse to make life miserable for the government.

They’ve been handed all the excuse anyone could ever need and plenty more besides over the past year and a half, and that leaves out the last six or more decades altogether. They’d best get going on making life miserable for the government, before it’s too late to do any good.

Seriously, imagine if Ron DeSantis did an about-face and required everyone who shops at Publix to sign up for contact tracing. There would be riots. No, actually, there wouldn’t—because the good folks who work for Publix would refuse to comply.

One would like to think so, yes. But if the glares of outrage and terror I’ve gotten at Publix are any indication, they’re way more likely to riot over the sight of my raspy old self without a face-diaper on than anything else. If they don’t just fall over in a dead faint, that is.

And if the CDC tried to bring out a Covid app like South Australia’s, they would be mooned by thousands upon thousands of Americans every 15 minutes.

Okay, one would REALLY like to think so, yes.

When it comes to our civil liberties, the first line of defense is an old Marine with a Coors Light in one hand and a Remington 870 in the other. He’s got his mask pulled down over his chin and a Winston Red dangling from his lips.

If he’s got a mask on in the first place, however he might be wearing the damned thing, that Marine of yours most likely isn’t going to live up your overly-hopeful expectations, and shouldn’t be relied upon to defend anything of importance. Then again, sounds to me like you don’t have a whole lot of Marines in your circle of acquaintance, nor rednecks either.

He has eight Trump stickers on the back of his truck and one that says “Booty Hunter” just to mix things up. He’s got the Confederate flag tattooed on his left arm and—of course—he’s wearing a MAGA hat.

This specter haunts Washington: the specter of Middle America. Call him Old Red.

In a better world, it would. I see no evidence that it does in this one.

Old Red looms over every meeting of the CDC, the FBI, the DHS, and the ATF. They never speak of him, but they all see him. And the apparatchiks know the moment they overstep their authority they’re going to have to deal with hundreds of thousands of pissed-off rustics. Really, there’s no telling how many Beltway power-grabs were abandoned for fear of the Great White Rube.

Name three. Hell, name ONE. Because from where I’m sitting, I can’t recall a single Beltway power-grab that hasn’t been put through with vigor and enthusiasm, to a Jubilee of praise from our lords and masters in celebration of how wonderful it all is, how we lowly serfs ought to be humbly grateful for the way said power-grab is going to improve our sorry, lamentable lots for us.

As bad as things are getting here in the States, we can’t fathom how much worse things would be without these down-home heroes.

We’ll soon be finding out, you can count on that.

Sure, they might carry their paranoid anti-government theories a little too far.

At this late date, that’s impossible.

But their paranoia is far from unfounded, and even if they sometimes over-react, they keep America from falling into the opposite extreme: creeping tyranny, Aussie style.

A matter of degree, not of kind.

You can’t boil a frog if he flips out every time you reach for the knob.

Which is precisely why I STRONGLY advise said frog to get to flipping out, and fast. Because so far, he’s been perfectly content to just relax in that nice, warm water, drifting on off into a peaceful slumber.

Like them, I’d prefer the burdens of liberty to a warm, sterile despotism. And that seems like an old-fashioned, all-American instinct to me. I can’t see Davey Crockett “sheltering in place” because the Department of Public Health asked him to. I can’t see Teddy Roosevelt triple-masking. I can’t see Johnny Cash stanning Dr. Fauci.

I can’t see it myself. But those guys are all dead. And the other thing I can’t see is anybody willing to step up and fill their shoes.

So, my apologies to those anti-maskers in Virginia. I rushed to judge you last summer, and that was wrong. May you continue to resist any whiff of conformism with righteous fury. May you give no quarter to the elite “consensus” of elite “institutions.” And may you never stop being pissed off. It just might save this republic.

The Republic is well beyond resuscitation, having been murdered long ago. There’s no way of knowing what will succeed it, but if we don’t START being pissed off most ricky-tick, you can bet it won’t be pretty.

It’s turtles lies, all the way down

Posted on September 26, 2021 by Mike

Denninger blows the whole sordid mess all to hell and gone.

What was not proved was that Trump won. But what was proved was that there is no honest assertion that can be made that either of the two Presidential candidates in serious contention won. The margin of victory is within the margin of dispute and it has been proved that electronic records critical to validate what occurred throughout the election process were deliberately destroyed by persons(s) who had physical access to the systems in question, with at least one such person being allegedly identified by security camera footage.

There may well be more here — but what’s been discovered thus far and proved (and for which the evidence is now in the public domain) shows that:

The election in Maricopa County for federal offices, including President, was not conducted in accordance with Federal Law.

The results, based solely on the count of duplicated ballot envelopes (people who voted more than once), which exceeds the margin of victory for the Presidential Office, are not able to be confirmed since once duplicate ballots are removed from the envelopes it is impossible to identify them. Maricopa county claimed no such duplicates exist. We now know more than 17,000 in fact do exist and the envelopes still exist. What we cannot prove one way or another is whether the ballots inside those envelopes were counted and, if only one was counted, which one was counted. We thus have no way to know who won.

The persons running the election have made materially false statements on an intentional basis about the equipment never being connected to the Internet.

The persons running the election both deliberately destroyed data related to the election in direct violation of Federal Law and, as a separate and distinct offense, attempted to cover up that destruction and identification of the person who did so. This act, standing alone, demonstrates intent to tamper with the election results.

The vast majority of said deliberately destroyed data was not recoverable and likely is not recoverable.

By forensic evidence, not presented and unrebutted, the outcome of the election in Arizona was falsely certified.

What’s the remedy for this?

That’s a separate debate — but that this one county alone did in fact corrupt their election, did so intentionally, and did so in such a fashion that at this time it not possible to know what the result actually was is not subject to reasonable dispute.

It never really was, in any realistic or honest sense. As I said the other day, though, it STILL doesn’t matter. What DESPERATELY needs to be owned up to at this point is that there is no longer ANY possibility of “reasonable dispute,” because our adversary is not amenable to reason, and is supremely uninterested in “dispute” by means of honest, respectful debate. Don’t get me wrong here; “dispute” there will be, for sure and certain, but it ain’t gonna be what anybody would ever call polite. What it’s gonna be is bloody, brutal, and unrestrained. Hey, that’s obviously the way they want it, so that’s the way it has to be. Just this once, I am all in favor of giving them what they want—in fucking spades, all they want and then some, until they choke on it.

Happily, a stolen election isn’t the only sordid mess Karl tosses a fragger into the middle of.

Once Upon A Time…*
…in a not-so-tiny nation called Spain, a nursing home had a nasty virus get into it.

It was March of 2020. The nasty virus was called Covid-19. And this nursing home, like so many others all over the world, was full of elderly, morbid people. The mean age of residents was 85 and 48% were over 80 years old. It was a killing field, like so many others…..

Within three months 100% of the residents had caught the virus. Not presumed to have — proved to have.

How do we know this? Because almost every one of them seroconverted. All but three out of 84 of them, to be precise.

Think about that last sentence for a second.

Almost every one of them seroconverted.

How’s that possible? Many of them died, right? You can’t seroconvert if you’re dead.

No. Not only did nearly none die none went to the hospital either because they rapidly figured out how to stop the virus from killing people–and did exactly that.

You would have thought this would have been all over the news.

Nah, not at all. Their primary interest is in making sure news like this is covered up, not in reporting it frankly and objectively so Duh Peepul can know the truth. That’s what makes them “journalists,” see.

Read all of these two posts, natch, and kudos to Karl for his usual fine work on ’em.

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