Can you say “weaponization of government,” boys and girls?

I knew you could.

EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs
Whistleblower: ‘It’s almost unbelievable to think that somebody in the federal government would think that’s okay’

Pshaw. To YOU, maybe. Me, the only thing I find surprising is that you’re surprised—that ANYBODY would be.

A federal disaster relief official ordered workers to bypass the homes of Donald Trump’s supporters as they surveyed damage caused by Hurricane Milton in Florida, according to internal correspondence obtained by The Daily Wire and confirmed by multiple federal employees. 

A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire. 

The government employees told The Daily Wire that at least 20 homes with Trump signs or flags were skipped from the end of October and into November due to the guidance, meaning they were not given the opportunity to qualify for FEMA assistance. Images shared with The Daily Wire show that houses were skipped over by the workers, who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”

It is unclear whether the same guidance was issued elsewhere in the country. The employees were part of a Department of Homeland Security surge capacity force team, meaning they volunteered from other DHS agencies to help an understaffed FEMA as it dealt with a second major hurricane in a span of just a few weeks.

The guidance came as the Biden administration was criticized over its sluggish response to Hurricane Helene in rural areas across the country. In Roan Mountain, Tennessee, for example, locals told The Daily Wire it took nearly two weeks for FEMA to show up. The town is located in Carter County, which voted 81% for Trump on Tuesday. 

HOME TRUTH: This is who they are, it’s what they do. Get your head around that, or get clobbered by it. Search for a better, more palatable option all you like, but there ain’t any.

Infuriating update! After reading Ace’s post on this same topic, it occurred to me that I really needed to include this bit here, if only in fairness to the fine folks at FEMA. See, it’s not as if the morally-handicapped degenerate responsible for this mind-blowing indecency wasn’t duly punished. Not a-tall. From the original article, which was updated after the above post with an official statement from FEMA. To wit:

After publication of this story, a FEMA spokesperson told The Daily Wire it was “deeply disturbed” and “horrified” by the employee’s actions, and that it has “taken extreme actions to correct this situation.”

“We are horrified that this took place and therefore have taken extreme actions to correct this situation and have ensured that the matter was addressed at all levels. Helping people is what we do best and our workforce across the agency will continue to serve survivors for as long as it takes.”

Bold mine. So what, you might wonder, does FEMA consider “extreme actions” in this instance of bureau-rat arrogance run completely amok, then? What does this spokesbeing mean by “addressed at all levels,” you ask? Was the vicious BiQ (Bitch in Question—M) reprimanded? Forced to undergo in-house “counseling?” Suspended without pay? Fired? Arrested, fined, imprisoned? Put to death? What, what, what, what?!?

Oh, just this.

The employees say that Washington has not been punished for the guidance, but has been shifted to another county in Florida.

WOW, they really brought the hammer down but good on this wayward but fundamentally decent, caring “public servant,” didn’t they? Poor dear, I do hope she’s okay after being punished so harshly for her “mistake.”

Fuck me runnin’. In the spleen, with a rubbing-alcohol soaked cattle prod set on Incinerate.

I repeat: You don’t hate these FederalGovCo shitbags NEARLY enough. You can’t, it’s unpossible.

Updated update! Ron the Great isn’t what you’d call entirely happy about this petty, vindictive bureau-shite.


“Show more” cirumvention.

At my direction, the Division of Emergency Management is launching an investigation into the federal government’s targeted discrimination of Floridians who support Donald Trump.

New leadership is on the way in DC, and I’m optimistic that these partisan bureaucrats will be fired.

Here’s hoping your optimism turns out to be justified, Gov; after so many years of watching them come to naught at the federal level, I can’t honestly say I have a hell of a lot of faith in government “investigations” anymore.

Frankly, it would suit me better if half the goddamned goobermint was summarily flogged, ridden on a rail, splashed about in the Potomac, dragged behind a pickup down Pennsylvania Ave, and flayed alive at high noon tomorrow on the Washington Mall. This twice-yearly whoopjamboreehoo—call it the People’s House Cleaning Carnival, say—would close out with an open-to-the-public pissing-upon of whatever is left of the miserable worms.

After the beatings are done and the meat wagons have been loaded and are headed on back to the county morgue, we’ll throw an open-bar BBQ blowout on the White House lawn (real Eastern NC BBQ, that would be: smoked oinker doused to taste with Texas Pete, not that ketchup-slathered brisket glop which lesser breeds without the Law embarrass themselves by calling “barbecue”—either Sun Drop or draft beer to wash it down; any fool who requests Pepsi, Mountain Dew (shudder), or some nasty energy drink that tastes worse than the sweat off a hippie’s unwashed scrotum-sac will receive one (1) complimentary throat punch for being a blaspheming dorksnort), a daylong par-TAY which will include many popular attractions such as:

  • Live music performed by bands who are actually, y’know, good
  • The Globe Of Death
  • A Coney Island-style freakshow tent
  • Another tent with smoking-hot strippers
  • Dunk-A-Senator booths; feature dunk-ee appearance by the Right Honorable (???) Lindsey Graham at five PM, don’t dare miss it
  • A big-ass dance floor
  • A fireworks show when darkness has fallen
  • Funnel cake
  • Tilt-A-Whirl!
  • Demolition Derby, open to all—run whatcha brung, first come, first served; helmets, goggles, gloves, and other safety equipment for drivers will NOT be provided; bring your own, or don’t—it’s your ass, pal, we can’t be assed about it one way or the other. What do we look like, anyhow, your fuckin’ mama or sumpin’?
  • All-female hot dog-fellating contest; age 18-32 ONLY, valid proof of age must be submitted to a registrar at the sign-up table. Nathan’s Bun-Length Franks are contest standard-issue; footlong dogs are also available by request; any contestant who so requests will have extra-credit points added to her score immediately, for showing proper competitive spirit, aspiration, will to win, and spunky, fun-loving attitude
    1. Approved participants must remove any/all shirts, brassieres, vests, two-piece swimsuit uppers, tube tops, robes, or other waist-up garment of any kind before her scheduled time-slot to mount the stage; clean, never-used cardboard containers with each individual contestant’s name written legibly in black Sharpie on the top will be arranged backstage for convenient storage of shucked clothing until such time as contestant is ready to cover up her fun-bags again
    2. BOTH nipples shall remain fully exposed and open to easy view throughout the event, even if a contestant has been defeated or disqualified and has left the stage. Rule of thumb: whenever the entrant is inside the roped-off contestants’ area, contest rules require her to let them puppies breathe
    3. Any premature, unsanctioned concealment of either both or one (1) of contestant’s nipples—even partially, even inadvertently, accidentally, or unwittingly—shall constitute sufficient grounds for disqualification if, and only if, the infraction was personally witnessed by a contest official, who, at his or her own discretion, may or may not report the infraction for further action; third-party verbal reports will be disregarded as unconfirmed
    4. Luscious, good-looking babes ONLY, please; plug-uglies, manatees, withered old hags, and scary, brick-faced bull daggers need NOT apply
    5. Bonus points will be awarded to minimally freckled, well-built, juggalicious redheads by our contest judges
    6. A car show: rat rods welcome; no trailer queens; vandalism and/or mechanical sabotage of foreign makes, irrespective of vintage and/or condition, will be not just tolerated but actively encouraged
    7. Absolutely NO (0) mimes, clowns, jugglers, cutesy arts ’n’ crafts peddlers, annoyingly persistent, piss-drunk-by-noon caricature artists, evangelical vegans, or unfunny standup comics allowed—we mean it, don’t even try

This hellacious hullaballoo is intended pour encourager les autres, as per usual. This incredible event, offering something for all ages, interests, backgrounds, and tastes, is shaping up to be one for the record books, folks, an entertainment extravaganza not to be missed. Get here anyway you must—fly, drive, spit on your ass and slide, crawl on your face over broken glass—just make sure you DO get here!

THERE. Now if that wildly eclectic bill of fare isn’t rambunctious enough to make DC’s last surviving bureau-rats take to their heels and flee to more congenial environs, then I’ll cheerfully eat my hat.

Worst President EVAR

Reviewing the most deplorable in a very big basket of ‘em.

Woodrow Wilson made democracy unsafe for the world
Let’s stop kidding ourselves. The U.S. role in World War I had disastrous consequences.

Wilson was narrowly re-elected in 1916 based on a campaign slogan, “He kept us out of war.” But Wilson had massively violated neutrality by providing armaments and money to the Allied powers that had been fighting Germany since 1914. In his war speech to Congress, Wilson hailed the U.S. government as “one of the champions of the rights of mankind” and proclaimed that “the world must be made safe for democracy.”

American soldiers fought bravely and helped turn the tide on the Western Front in late 1918. But the cost was far higher than Americans anticipated. More than a hundred thousand American soldiers died in the third bloodiest war in U.S. history. Another half million Americans perished from the Spanish flu epidemic spurred and spread by the war.

In his speech to Congress, Wilson declared, “We have no quarrel with the German people” and feel “sympathy and friendship” towards them. But his administration speedily commenced demonizing the “Huns.” One Army recruiting poster portrayed German troops as an ape ravaging a half-naked damsel beneath an appeal to “Destroy this mad brute.”

Wilson acted as if the congressional declaration of war against Germany was also a declaration of war against the Constitution. Harvard professor Irving Babbitt commented in 1924: “Wilson, in the pursuit of his scheme for world service, was led to make light of the constitutional checks on his authority and to reach out almost automatically for unlimited power.” Wilson even urged Congress to set up detention camps to quarantine “alien enemies.”

Wilson unleashed ruthless censorship of any criticism. Anyone who spoke publicly against military conscription was likely to get slammed with federal espionage or sedition charges. Possessing a pamphlet entitled Long Live the Constitution of the United States earned six months in jail for a Pennsylvania malcontent. Censorship was buttressed by fanatic propaganda campaigns led by the Committee on Public Information, a federal agency whose shameless motto was “faith in democracy… faith in fact.”

The war enabled the American equivalent of the Taliban to triumph on the home front. Prohibition advocates “indignantly insisted that… any kind of opposition to prohibition was sinister and subversively pro-German,” noted William Ross, author of World War 1 and the American Constitution. Even before the 18th Amendment (which banned alcohol consumption) was ratified, Wilson banned beer sales as a wartime measure. Prohibition was a public health disaster; the rate of alcoholism tripled during the 1920s. To punish lawbreakers, the federal government added poisons to industrial alcohol that was often converted into drinkable hooch; ten thousand people were killed as a result. Professor Deborah Blum, the author of The Poisoner’s Handbook, noted that “an official sense of higher purpose kept the poisoning program in place.”

The war provided the pretext for unprecedented federal domination of the economy. Washington promised that “food will win the war” and farmers vastly increased their plantings. Price supports and government credits for foreign buyers sent crop prices and land prices skyrocketing. However, when the credits ended in 1920, prices and land values plunged, spurring massive bankruptcies across rural America. This spurred perennial political discontent that helped lead to a federal takeover of agriculture by the Roosevelt administration in the 1930s.

And the rest, as they say, is history. As Glenn mordantly reminds us: Well, worst President so far.

Can you say “War on Men,” boys and girls?

I knew you could.

Perhaps it’s a predictable irony that in an election cycle that could realistically deliver the first female president, so much of the commentary has been about men. Or rather, not about men exactly, but about “masculinity.” Because somehow, in 2024, we still find ourselves unable to talk about men and boys without using masculinity as the basic frame of reference.

The electorate is faced with a choice, the story goes, between two models for masculinity. Toxic versus positive. In response to the vein-popping, furious, felon model of the right, the left is offering us a more morally upstanding and expansive “positive masculinity.”

“Positive masculinity” has been around for a while. Most likely coined in early 2000s by psychologists as a way of working with male patients in therapy… Masculinity has had an unfairly bad rap, its proponents argue, becoming permanently shackled to the word “toxic.” Positive masculinity is an attempt to rebrand and reinstate it for the next generation, often with the claim that unlike the insecure posturing of the shirt-ripping strongmen, this is in fact “real” manhood.

The model is not a radical departure. Positive masculinity still draws on all the old trappings and anxieties of traditional manliness, the same belief that there is such a thing as a “real man” and the same fears of falling short. As its political standard-bearer, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Tim Walz, is still required to constantly prove his masculine credentials.

Sorry and all, but that’s ‘cause Tampon Timmeh the Pillsbury Doughpyrsynz’s© “masculine credentials” straddle the line, reverse-cowgirl style, betwixt “laughable” and “nonexistent.” Whatever no-ball, cringing caricature of American manhood the preposterous Harris/Doughboy campaign plans to portray as “masculinity,” their dumpy, thoroughly emasculated Veep candidate is sadly lacking in anything resembling it. Case in point:


Jeezum M Crow. It’s a dead cert that not one of these phony-ass punks has ever hunted pheasant—or owned a shotgun, for the matter of it—in his/her/its entire life. The paid actors/stunt hunter stand-ins all look like they just dragged a credit card through the Mordor On The Potomac (or possibly Minneapolistan) Cabela’s or Bass Pro Shop to gear themselves up with a brand new Serious Outdoorspyrsynz!™ costume for the filming of this pathetic, wholly-fraudulent joke of a campaign ad. I love what one X wag had to say in response to the question implied above: What’s missing in this video? A: Testosterone. Good one, pal.

NOTE: Link is to the Ace place, not to the original NYT article. I would never subject you good people to the horror of an NYT link, no way.

Update! Ed Driscoll reels off another knee-slapper.

OLD AND BUSTED: “Can I get me a hunting license here?”

—John Kerry, October 2004.

Heh. Indeed, Ed.

It’s not just worst than you thought…

It’s worse than you can imagine.

Large area’s of western NC are destroyed. The roads are GONE. The power is off, for months at best, years more likely. Many of the power substations were destroyed and we have no capacity to replace them.

The destruction is WORSE than that caused by war conditions. People are completely cut off. There is no food and if there were they cannot get to it.

Entire mountain towns are DESTROYED. The lively-hood of the people in the towns are destroyed. There is nothing left.

This happens on rare occasion but always in a small area, one town or two has devastation. This is across the entire western part of the state.

This is without question the worst disaster in American history. Did you know that?

Who are our friends and who is our enemy? I have absolute contempt for our state and federal government that does nothing. Every resource at their disposal should have been mobilized, and CRICKETS.

It’s clear who the enemy is.

I have a customer in the area. I’ve had one text from one person, “It’s really bad”. That’s it.

Spruce Pine, Little Switzerland, Burnsville – these are all communities at or near the top of the mountains, imagine that if they are destroyed that what is below is just hell –

ONE MANS JOURNEY

SCREAM LOUDLY TO ANYONE THAT CAN HEAR – DEMAND THE GOVERNMENT DEPLOY THEIR ASSETS TO HELP THE AMERICANS IN DIRE NEED

UPDATE:
I’m not the only one that notes the obvious:

…I can confirm that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ response to this round of mass suffering has been orders of magnitude worse than federal actions taken after Katrina.

UPDATE Deux:
“Biden, likewise, could have mobilized the 101st and 82nd Airborne Divisions the morning after Helene to deliver food, medical supplies, and evacuate stranded citizens by helicopter.”
And the Democrats are, by calculation, waging war against the dying citizens of western North Carolina.

UPDATE Trois:
I am entirely convinced that we just witnessed the greatest natural disaster in modern U.S. history…

There actually would have been backup transformers available to fix all these broken substations had President Biden not just sent off the nation’s strategic stockpile of them to Ukraine so Volodymyr Zelensky can use them to advance his interests.

UPDATE Quatre:

I drove from outside Charlotte NC down Interstate 85 to near Georgia Monday morning. I am happy to report that help is arriving in the form of tree company trucks and power company service trucks. I passed at least one hundred of them headed south* in a 2.5 hour drive. Shout out to the states of Indiana, Ohio, and Michigan as there were quite a few trucks with tags from those area’s. There is a shortage of hotel rooms in the Greenville and Anderson (SC) area’s due to the out of town help that has arrived. These are some seriously capable folks.

*I left the house at 6:30am, so the number arriving through the day is probably in the hundreds, maybe more. And yes literally, I passed a truck nearly every minute of the trip. It was crowded.

They’re from the government, and they’re NOT here to help

Tonight’s Eyrie post is on the thuggish FederalGovCo rakehells’ ham-handed interference with well-organized and effective private rescue efforts in and around Lake Lure and Asheville, specifically centering on Elon Musk’s (!) repeated run-ins with the infamous FEMA. It’s blindingly obvious to all but the most wllfully purblind fief-guarding tyranno-Fed that those poor people need every last bit of help they can possibly get, and aren’t overly concerned about whence it originated. Not that the Fedgoons give a tinker’s damn, of course.

That said, our friend of many years standing and fellow Carolinian Herschel Smith (maybe I’ve mentioned it here before, but his lovely daughter [or maybe niece? dunno, I was zonked out on pain meds at the time] kindly paid me a seriously morale-boosting visit at the thoughtful behest of her pop when I was laid up in rehab center durance vile not long after I’d become the World’s Greatest One-Legged Blogger™) has plenty to say on that score his own self. Read of it, for It. Is. Good.

The Hurricane Helene Hall of Shame
Following up on my post How Helene Affected The People Of Appalachia, there are a number of shameful things that we’re learning about the official response.

Let’s begin with this terrible report of a man who used his own helicopter to rescue stranded people above Asheville, N.C., and who was told if he continued, he would be placed under arrest.

The responsible officials are Dustin Waycaster – Fire Chief, and Chris Melton – Asst. Fire Chief. Congratulations men, you’ve made the hall of shame. It would take an entire article to examine the moral implications of preventing the rescue of men and women in danger, but we’ll leave it at that and cover it later. Suffice it to say that it sounds like you were discomfited by someone showing you up and “interfering with your operation.” Although it’s likely a manifest lie to say that anyone was really interfering with anything.

An eminently safe bet, I should think. Lots, lots more where that came from, of which you absolutely must read the all. Those taking nitro-glycerin pills for heart issues will definitely want to have their ‘scrip close to hand, and peruse Herschel’s piece in a cool, calm, and collected state of mind, preferably while seated. You won’t be any of those things for long, trust me on that one.

The HHHoS is populating itself all too quickly to suit me.

Update! Is it all about the lithium, perchance?


Several Lake Lure denizens calling in to the Rise Guys program yesterday and today said that great swathes of land on which private homes and/or neighborhoods formerly stood have been preemptively declared FedGovCo property. Lord knows the batteries in all those useless, dangerous EVs Harris/Biden & Pals are determined to cram down our throats are gonna require lithium aplenty. SO, then: fact, or merely the sort of paranoiac rumor that tends to fly around in extreme circumstances such as this? Is it really a case of Federal ad lib opportunism run amok, in essence a spur of the moment land-and-lithium grab?

Given what we’ve learned over the past several years regarding the far-less-than-benevolent nature of Amerika v2.0’s central Leviathan, it doesn’t take a cynic to think the whole thing a mite suspicious, at the very least.

Updated update! Re: those aforementioned chopper jocks, it bears mentioning that it’s not as if they were all just flying around willy-nilly, hither and yon, endangering themselves, their rescuees, other SAR personnel, and unwary shell-shocked survivors with their ill-considered blundering about. Oh HELL no!

These are fucking experienced helicopter pilots we’re talking about here, people—trained, capable, safety-conscious, procedure-oriented, highly intelligent. They are assuredly NOT the kind of vacuous ninnyhammers constantly tripping over their own dicks and guffawing a la Disney’s Goofy at their own gormless stupidity; quite the contrary, these are qualified civil aviators who’d never even DREAM of doing anything at all without a plan.

From what the pilot I heard on the radio yesterday morning said (and what I saw later in photos), the ‘copters were all arrayed in a neat line on the tarmac of a nearby airfield; every pilot was in close, constant communication with the others as well as with ground control; all had properly detailed flight plans filed with ATC before a single engine spooled up.

FEMA has attempted to portray these men as chuckleheads, amateurs, and gloryhounds—which, being arrogant, officious Überstadt pricks, is how THEY see them, certainly. But as anyone who has ever personally known either a fixed- or rotary-wing aircraft operator will attest, it just ain’t so. Turns out the bureau-rats are every bit as full of shit as they always are, have been, and forever will be. Imagine my surprise.

Update to the updated update! My brother-from-another-mother BCE reports on what I consider a most felicitous development. To wit:


Well. Well, well, well, well, well, well, WELL. Fancy that. Billy follows up:

And the reason for it?

No hard evidence but the general story is Mr. Director from Virginia got shitty with a woman and her three lil kids and wouldn’t let them get any water/food or supplies. She melted down and this asshole was all smug about it…

The local men didn’t like that much.

“That’s an asswhuppin’!!!”

Personally, I’d go for hanging, but I’ll get into that more in a few…

Me and you both, my friend, me and you both. Additionally, and perhaps mo’ betta still, we have this.


Damned skippy. Nice to know that, even in times as parlous as these, enough is still enough, by God. Back over to Big Country for a ding-dong doozy of a denouement.

And then, the very fact that low level midwit fucktards have been interfering in the “real work” that ‘non-sanctioned’ groups have been doing, and doing fucking well infuriates me at a core level that I forgot I had.

My rage as of late is so bad that I have recently thought that the best way -someone- could contribute is to go down there with a good scoped hunting rifle in the ubiquitous 30-06 caliber, and start ‘working their way through’ the assholes in the FEMA vests to start with.

Case in Point:

That soon-to-be-X Fire Chief, Dustin Waycaster of Lake Lure who demanded that the free-flying Rescue-Ranger Chopper Jockey cease and desist DESPITE his overwhelming success rate in his previous rescues and threatened to arrest and impound his bird?

My question:
Why is he (the ‘chief’) still alive?
Why is his dwelling still standing?
Why is his family still alive?

Hard times call for DRASTIC Measures. I’m not, per se, calling for any violence against this miserable toolbag fucktard nor his domicile or fam…. HOWEVER, I AM all about questioning his current apparent good fortune in these trying circumstances… That he, who, in truth as the “Lead Asshole in “Incompetence on Parade”? is still drawing O2???…. and that HIS domicile is untouched as is his job???

Took the words right out of my mouth, B.

As is entirely apparent, the swaggering Überstadt douchenozzles have become all too accustomed to being kowtowed to, groveled before, and unquestioningly obeyed by the lowly Serf Class oafs they lord it over so contemptuously. Might it be that, in such extraordinarily grim circumstances, a righteous if long overdue reckoning is now at hand? Might it be that, against all odds and expectations, our would-be Masters could now find themselves set upon by cruelly savaged Carolinians who no longer have anything left to lose? Might this be the first faint rays of sunlight which herald the dawning of a glorious new American day? Might the appropriate relationship between Public Servant and Citizen at long last be restored? Might horrific catastrophe, destruction, and human suffering yet turn out to be our salvation?

We shall see.

The Opposite Rule

In full effect, as always.


For more on the Opposite Rule, please see Mike’s Iron Law #462.

Got Haitians redux

By way of being a follow-up, kinda sorta, to tonight’s Eyrie offering.

‘What Has My Town Become?’: Springfield Residents Say It’s Falling Apart Amid Haitian Influx
FEATURE: What I saw in Springfield, Ohio

SPRINGFIELD, OHIO — The city has a certain charm, a small-town feel dotted with grand buildings. It’s an all-American scene fit for a postcard — and one residents worry they are at risk of losing.

Residents of Springfield didn’t expect that their community would be tossed into the center of one of the most consequential elections in American history. They also didn’t expect the town of 58,000 to receive as many as 20,000 Haitian migrants in just a few short years, ushering in a shift that’s left many Springfielders feeling like foreigners in their own home, and worried for their economic prospects.

The surge of Haitian migrants came during the Biden-Harris administration, when more than 300,000 Haitians who crossed the border into the United States were offered temporary protected status, allowing them to live and work in the United States without becoming citizens.

The people of Springfield were never asked if they wanted the migrant influx, and voted overwhelmingly for Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. But now that the migrant surge is here, many are eager to tell their stories.

“You walk into a store and you feel like your language isn’t the predominant language. It’s kind of weird,” one lifelong resident of Springfield who asked not to be named said over a cup of coffee. “If you’re willing to go to a new place you need to invest your efforts into learning that and becoming acclimated and accustomed to it as well.” But it isn’t just the cultural differences that have him on edge.

“There’s no section of this town that I feel safe in,” he added. “I don’t even like my wife to shop here. We try to go grocery shopping in other cities.”

The article carries on in like infuriating vein from there, of which you won’t enjoy reading the all but definitely should anyway.

Historical illiteracy: it’s not just for the Left anymore

Man alive, obsessive JOOJOOJOOOOOphobia sure does lead some of us who really ought to know better into some pretty odd places, intellectually speaking.

No, Churchill Was Not the Villain
The historian Darryl Cooper has argued in an interview on Tucker Carlson’s show that Winston Churchill “was the chief villain of World War II,” which would be both interesting and indeed shocking were his thesis not based on such staggering ignorance and disregard for historical fact that it is safe to disregard completely.

Cooper’s first argument was that Churchill “was primarily responsible for that war becoming what it did, something other than an invasion of Poland.” Yet in the moment that Adolf Hitler invaded Belgium, Holland, and Luxembourg at dawn on May 10, 1940, Winston Churchill was not even prime minister. Unless Mr. Cooper is arguing that from his position as First Lord of the Admiralty—the head of Britain’s navy—Churchill was somehow able to force Hitler to unleash Blitzkrieg in the West, his first argument falls to the ground.

Hitler had planned his surprise attack through the Ardennes—the “Sickle-cut” maneuver—with senior generals such as Erich von Manstein, Erwin Rommel, and Gerd von Rundstedt several months before the attack took place. They bear responsibility “for that war becoming what it did,” not Churchill. Furthermore, they also bear full responsibility for the unprovoked invasion of neighboring Poland itself, about which Cooper and Carlson were silent.

In April 1939, when Churchill was not even in the cabinet, the British government guaranteed Poland’s security, so Hitler had no right to be surprised when Britain went to war with Germany when he flagrantly disregarded that guarantee.

Cooper’s next egregious error was to blame Operation Barbarossa on Hitler’s perception of a threat from Stalin, or a Soviet plan to capture Romanian oilfields, completely ignoring the genuine reason, which was the Nazi demand for Lebensraum—”living space” in Eastern Europe, especially in Belarus and Ukraine. One wonders whether Cooper has ever read Mein Kampf, in which Hitler’s ultimate intentions were made plain. Elsewhere in the interview he makes the outlandish claim that Hitler “no longer thought of Russia as an international Communist movement,” which contradicts all the evidence of Hitler’s public and private statements prior to unleashing Barbarossa.

Cooper next claimed that the millions of Soviet prisoners of war who died in German captivity did so because the Nazi leadership “had no plans for POWs,” ignoring the obvious fact, well supported by the sources, that in fact the deaths of millions of Soviet POWs were the deliberate Nazi plan for what to do with them.

Cooper goes on to castigate Churchill for not accepting Hitler’s peace proposals during the Phoney War from October 1939 to May 1940, stating that Hitler “didn’t want to fight France or Britain.” Yet by then he had invaded Poland, and had no intention of disgorging it, so the original casus bellum remained.

“The war was over and the Germans won by the fall of 1940,” Cooper states. Not so. The Germans had indeed forced the British from the Continent at Dunkirk by June 1940, but it is to Churchill’s everlasting and untarnishable glory that he kept Britain in the war until Nazi evil was extirpated. The war at sea was continuing, as was the war on the North African littoral. Greece came into the conflict in April 1941, drawing German forces south two months before Barbarossa. The battle was lost by Britain, true, but the war was far from won by Hitler.

Cooper’s wailing that Churchill rejected Hitler’s peace offers also fails to take into account the fact that had Britain made an ignoble peace in 1940, Hitler would have been able to concentrate all his forces on the East in his invasion of Russia in June 1941. Instead, he was forced to keep 30 percent of the Luftwaffe and considerable land forces in the western part of Europe. It was perhaps Churchill’s greatest act of statesmanship, that of a hero rather than “the chief villain of World War II.”

When Cooper blames Churchill for “demonizing [Neville] Chamberlain” in 1940, he is presumably ignorant of the fact that Churchill in fact asked Chamberlain to join his War Cabinet, where he worked closely and cordially with him, and then gave one of his greatest speeches as his eulogy to Chamberlain in November 1940.

“Churchill wanted a war,” claimed Cooper. “He wanted to fight Germany.” Not so. From the moment Hitler came to power in Germany, Churchill warned of the threat the Nazis posed to world peace, and how weak the West was militarily, but his solution was to rearm, not to monger war. He had fought in the trenches in the Great War and had lost too many friends in it to want another war, but he was willing to undergo it if the only alternatives were disgrace and dishonor.

Cooper then alleged, again without any evidence, that Churchill wanted war because “the long-term interests of the British Empire were threatened by the rise of a power like Germany.” Again, not so. All senior British policymakers recognized that the threats to the Empire came from Japan in the Far East, Fascist Italy in northeast Africa, and Russia in the Near East. Germany had no contiguous borders with the British Empire anywhere. A glance at a map would have shown Cooper that.

Cooper gave what Carlson called “the wryest smile I’ve ever seen” when he answered Carlson’s naïve question as to “What was [Churchill]’s motive?” in wanting to fight World War II. The true reason was that Churchill knew he needed to extirpate Nazism, but according to Cooper it was because “Churchill’s got a long and complicated history” that needed “redemption” because “Churchill was humiliated by his performance in the First World War.”

This ludicrous piece of cod psychology simply does not stand up. Churchill’s performance in World War I included being the man who got the Royal Navy ready for the war, who transported the entire British Expeditionary Force to France without the loss of a man in August 1914, who defended Antwerp during a crucial period that October, who undertook 30 trench raids in no man’s land as a lieutenant colonel, and who was the minister of munitions who provided the British Army with much of the weaponry necessary to win in 1918. The idea that the Gallipoli disaster, for which Churchill was ultimately though not solely responsible, made him feel a need for “redemption” a quarter of a century later is hogwash.

Cooper then describes Churchill as “a psychopath,” which surely says more about his own state of mind than Churchill’s. He goes on to make the accusation that Churchill “was a drunk,” which he was not, although he certainly drank a lot. Churchill could hold his liquor, and there was only one occasion during World War II when he was drunk, an astonishing achievement considering the pressure he was under.

I’ve not the vaguest clue what could have possessed Tucker the C to have this assclown on for an interview and treat with him as if he were actually a sane, sensible sort whose ahistorical revisionism was worth taking at all seriously, but I very much hope he gets over whatever it is and starts to feel better real soon.

Perhaps the single most crotch-chafing aspect of this spectacular, wide-spectrum self-beclownment—the Platonic ideal of what political pundits are talking about when they call some foolishness or other an “unforced error”—is the smear-fodder it hands, gratis, to salivating shitlibs, who will assuredly not let any moss grow on them before jumping in with both feet to take fullest advantage of the golden opportunity gratuitously provided them by Tucker, his out-there interviewee, and likeminded Jewphobic nitwits.

Not that I, you, or anybody else gives a fat rat’s patoot about what those “people” think, about anything. But still. To wit:

The shameful Nazi apologism of the Very Online right
Tucker Carlson’s chat with Darryl Cooper was a new low for the crank right.

Forget that toothless crackhead who says he had sex with Barack Obama. Never mind the lowlife pimp who cosplays as a lifestyle guru, Andrew Tate. This week Tucker Carlson scraped even lower in the barrel of cranks to find a guest for his chat show on X. He had on Darryl Cooper, a historian, podcaster and – wait for it – apologist for Adolf Hitler. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, we’ve now reached the ‘Were the Nazis really the bad guys?’ stage of contrarian online blather.

Tucker’s chat with Cooper has caused a storm. As well it might. Also known as ‘Martyr Made’, Mr Cooper is a notorious historical revisionist. He has huge beef with Winston Churchill. Churchill, not Hitler, was the true villain of the Second World War, he says. He’s a giddy promoter of the myth that Hitler made a peace offer in 1940 but Churchill rejected it and insisted on plunging the world into war. Hitler the peacenik – who saw that coming down the pipeline of online bollocks?

What Cooper told Carlson was insane. Churchill was a ‘psychopath’ kept in power by Zionist interests, he said. As for all those poor Jews in the camps – they ‘ended up dead’ because the stretched Nazis lacked the time and resources to care for them, he insisted. Depicting the Nazis’ industrialised slaughter of the Jews of Europe as an accident, just a sad, regrettable byproduct of their being too busy, is sick. It’s a species of Holocaust denial. That Carlson nodded along to such rancid revisionism is shameful.

For the true measure of Cooper, consider what he said in a recent post on X, since deleted. Paris under the Nazis, he tweeted, was ‘infinitely preferable in virtually every way’ to the Paris of the Olympics opening ceremony. To drive home his fascistic point, he put a photo of Hitler and his henchmen surveying the spoils of Paris next to a screenshot of that plump drag queen who formed the centrepiece of the Last Supper pisstake at the opening ceremony. Look, I hated the opening ceremony, but – I can’t believe this needs to be said – Paris of 2024 is preferable in every way to the Paris that was conquered by the marauding inhuman racists of the Nazi regime. This is where we’re at, folks: having to explain that a drag queen on your TV is less bad than a Jew-murdering machine taking over your country.

And this, mind, not from a wild-eyed Leftard, but the more-or-less moderate Brandon O’Neill.

Be that as it may, the inexplicable Carlson/Cooper lovefest suggests a question or three. Namely: Have the asswipes both Left and Right really dragged Western Civ to the point where it must only be one or the other? That—Roosevelt, Churchill, and presumably De Gaulle having been stricken from eligibility in the “heroes” category because the (Not) Smart Set has re-evaluated them as WW2’s Worst Monsters—we’re reduced to a binary choice between either Hitler or *gulp* Stalin? Either it’s Nazi thugs marching or Manwoman degenerates prancing down the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, no in-between option to be found anywhere along that wide, history-steeped thoroughfare? SRSLY, people?!?

Thanks a pantload for this stellar contribution to the public discourse, Tucker. New category for annoying twaddle such as this: Dem pesky ((((JOOOOOOOZ!!!))))

Ready or not, here they come

It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.


And, apparently, geese and ducks in plenty to slaughter, dress, and eat publicly.


When they aren’t camping out on people’s front lawns and menacing them, that is.


The “Show more” link transcription, because it’s truly, truly infuriating.

Springfield, Ohio woman says homeless Haitians are trying to camp out on her front yard, says she “wants out of this town.”

“I have men that cannot speak English in my front yard, screaming at me, throwing mattresses in my front yard.”

“Look at me, I weigh 95 pounds. I couldn’t defend myself if I had to. My husband is elderly.”

“I don’t understand what you expect of us as citizens. I understand they’re here under temporary protected status and you’re protecting them, and I understand that our city services are overwhelmed and understaffed, but who’s protecting us?”

“Who’s protecting me? I want out of this town. I am sorry. Please give me a reason to stay.”

Whatever would you do, Springfieldians, without Stretch Pelosi’s “spark of divinity” types, eh?


And there you have it. Bottom line: I don’t care how you much you hate D卐M☭CRATs, people, I assure you you do NOT hate them enough.

Boeing: the long, slow death of a legend

The Woke mind-virus, as Elon Musk hath so aptly dubbed it, claims another formerly-distiguished victim.

Boeing Employees Humiliated That SpaceX Will Rescue the Astronauts Stranded by Starliner
“We hate SpaceX. We talk s**t about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.”

Over the weekend, NASA finally made the decision to return Boeing’s plagued Starliner without a crew on board. That means stranded NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams will now have to wait for a SpaceX Crew Dragon to return them from the International Space Station in February, stretching an eight-day journey into an eight-month one.

In other words, the aerospace giant’s first crewed test flight has been a disaster, with technical issues afflicting Starliner’s propulsion system proving insurmountable and putting the company in the position to be “rescued” by its biggest competitor in space tech.

Unsurprisingly, NASA’s decision to return the capsule with no crew on board has been a major blow to morale. As the New York Post reports, Boeing employees were left “humiliated” following the announcement.

Worse yet, it’s not just Starliner’s messy test flight — Boeing has been dealing with numerous crises, from passenger jets falling apart mid-flight to reports of major mismanagement.

“We have had so many embarrassments lately, we’re under a microscope,” one Boeing worker told the NY Post, speaking under condition of anonymity. “This just made it, like, 100 times worse.”

“We hate SpaceX,” he added. “We talk shit about them all the time, and now they’re bailing us out.”

Fran deftly puts paid to that whiny-ass horseshit.

Oh, you hate SpaceX, do you? You should be overpoweringly glad that SpaceX doesn’t hate you. If Elon Musk were similarly minded toward you, he’d leave your astronauts in space until you could retrieve them. How do you think that would look to the flying public, on top of all your other recent disasters?

Uglier’n the proverbial mud fence, I’d bet, if the rest of the flying public thinks anything like the tiny fraction of it sitting at this h’yar desk o’ mine does. Gee, wonder what these weepy, wimpy Boeing diversity-hires might look like, just out of pure idle curiosity?

Oh. Exactly like one would expect them to look, then. As Bob Bishop pithily puts it: Houston, we have a problem.

We do at that. But hey, at least OUT! cupcakes such as the two above-depicted Stunning, Brave HEROES!!!© feel “seen” and “heard.” That’s what really matters, right? Especially when it’s manned space flight, meeting the myriad challenges of exploring the Final Frontier, and the rigors of cutting-edge science and engineering with actual human lives on the line we’re talking about.

Four or five more years of this and the intentionally enfeebled Boeing Company will exist only in memory—just another proud American icon brought low by Wokester dweebs ’n’ feebs, their relentless PC ethos, and the Long March Through The Institutions. Then, for Gus, Casady, and their noxious ilk, it’ll be onwards and upwards to the next target slated for destruction.

Seriously, who gives a tinker’s damn about space nowadays? What did space exploration ever do for anybody? Any chest-thumping American Supremacist with a selfish hankering to burn tons and tons of (fossil!) rocket fuel so’s they can go fiddle-futzing around out in the Vasty Black Nowhere can always hitch a ride with the Rooskies, the (dot-not-feather) Indians, our bosom chums the ChiComs, or some other space-faring nation-state.

Hell’s bell’s, I never liked Tang anyway; the stuff tastes like warmed-over doo-doo with a fistful of used litterbox sand stirred in.

To Civil War, or NOT to Civil War?

On Amerika v2.0’s self-evidently fraudulent “elections.”

Of course the propagandists gaslit everyone – election fraud was a conspiracy theory, it was the most secure election in history, and so on and so forth. That this was the precise opposite of what they’d been saying for the previous four years – that Russia had hacked Our Democracy – was neither here nor there. Later Time Magazine bragged that they had ‘fortified’ the election, which everyone understood to as an admission that they’d stolen it.

Election fraud in America utilizes a variety of tactics: ballot stuffing, ballot harvesting from senile seniors, registering illegal immigrants and other non-citizens to vote (which, as everyone knows, is why the regime is so hostile to voting ID laws), electronically forged ballots, and forged mail-in ballots. Definitive evidence of any one form of electoral fraud is extremely difficult to obtain, requiring painstaking forensic work. Even when such evidence is found, it will only pertain to one form of fraud, in one or a few locations. This enables regime respecters to claim that fraud is rare, and does not occur on a large enough scale to swing elections. Somehow they never say that any cheating at all is unacceptable. Funny that.

Not everyone fell for the fraud, of course. Outraged rallies began to spontaneously rise up across the country, ultimately converging on DC for the doomed J6 ‘insurrection’.

It didn’t matter.

The propagandists called Trump’s supporters terrorists. Those who entered the Capitol were arrested, imprisoned, subjected to various forms of psychological torture.

The regime stole the election in broad daylight, grinned with its hands in the cookie jar, looked the country right in the eyes with crumbs dribbling down its wobbling chins, grinned “What cookie?”, and dared anyone to call it on their blatant lies.

The regime got away with it.

It is obvious that they are doing the same thing again. It worked the first time, so why would they not? The Biden administration proved that you don’t need a charismatic candidate, or even a minimally competent one. All you need is a warm body that can be wheeled in front of the cameras every now and then. The compliance of the propaganda organs renders any embarrassing behaviour from the warm body wholly irrelevant. Enough of the population is so thoroughly brainwashed, so completely incapable of evaluating reality, so utterly prostrated before propaganda, that they will believe whatever they are told to believe and they will do so with the whole of their hollowed-out hearts. Not everyone, to be sure … but enough. Particularly as those most completely captured are the Single Woke Females, the professional-managerial class aparat-chicks that infest the institutions.

In the confusing months between November 2020 and J6, there was rampant speculation Trump would take some sort of bold action – a military coup d’etat, or even a Civil War. There’s no question that if he’d given the word his supporters would have turned out in their millions. Everyone sensed that it was go time, and they were ready to go. In the end, after some half-hearted lawsuits and a few rallies, the big man lost his nerve. Go home, he told his supporters. Go in peace. It’s over.

He may well have been right to do so. The Biden presidency was disastrous for America. The economy has fallen apart; inflation has wiped people out; the leaking border has shattered, letting in tens of millions, many criminals, many very possibly much worse than criminals; America has found itself embroiled in wars all over the world, which threaten to turn nuclear. The last four years have been an almost unprecedented national humiliation. Biden is, without a shadow of a doubt, the worst president America has ever had.

But was the Biden presidency worse than a Civil War?

Think about that.

And that really is the question, isn’t it? In effect, it amounts to the same quandary I’ve been struggling with here for a very long time now—or it FEELS like a very long time, at any rate. To wit: Is it better to fight back against metastasizing Überstadt tyranny to the last drop of Patriot blood, or to maintain the illusion of notional “peace” and tacitly accept defeat? In the end, I think, the hard nut of our dilemna comes down to this:

And there you have it. The rest is just applesauce.

Update! Having linked/excerpted him a cpl-three times now, the time has come to grant the planet-hopping Jeddak of Helium John Carter his rightful place of honor in Ye Aulde CF Blogrolle, methinks. Done, done, and done.

Updated update! And with the addition of the Warlord of Mars to our CF blogroll section, it occurs to me that a thorough scouring/refreshing/reshuffling of said section to update changed URLs, delete abandoned or extinct blogs, and put in new (if only to me) blogs/sites/portals—a tedious albeit essential routine-maintenance chore I dread like an ass-whuppin’, thus encouraging my lifelong habit of procrastination*—is way overdue. *le sigh*

* Did somebody say “lifelong” just now? I originally learned the word “procrastination” when my first-grade teacher wrote it on my very first report card, cautioning my parents to be on the lookout for my seemingly-innate inclination to it. I repeat: *le sigh*

“Joy,” eh?

Joy juice, more like.

Newsweek Says Republicans Are Spreading Rumors About Kamala Harris’ ‘Drinking Problem’
Forget all the rumors you’ve heard about Nancy Pelosi having a drinking problem — now Republicans are spreading rumors about Kamala Harris and her supposed drinking problem. We’ll have to read the piece to find just how widespread this is. We’ve heard rumors about Harris’ intelligence; Donald Trump has said she’s not a very smart person.

How would such a rumor get started, anyway? It’s not like Harris serves up word salad for every meal and cackles at her own jokes.

Frankly, it would explain a lot if Harris had a drinking problem. If this is her sober…

Of course, there IS one other possibility here.


Hey, you pays your money and you takes your choice, D卐M☭CRATs.


Another American icon bites the big Woke one

Gonna be a lot of serious re-thinking going on in American bikerdom thanks to this revoltin’ development.

Woke Harley-Davidson CEO Compares Himself to the Taliban
A Harley-Davidson rider can be almost anyone, from an actual Hell’s Angel to your kids’ orthodontist. While the company has had its ups and downs, the bikes have long been an American icon for riders with “a passion for the motorcycle lifestyle, valuing freedom, adventure, and camaraderie,” according to marketing experts Keegan-Edwards.

There’s an image that goes along with the iconic bikes, and although I hardly need to tell you what it is, I will.

That image is: “Islamic terrorist.”

Wait…wut?

In a video just made infamous on Wednesday by Robby Starbuck, Harley-Davidson president, CEO, and Chairman Jochen Zeitz says he became the “Taliban” when he became a board member and says his job is to “take on capitalism and redefine it.”

“It’s important that we create new leadership,” Zeitz said, “that we get others to join a new thinking of a more sustainable business, of a better business that is more equitable in every respect. Socially, environmentally, and financially.”

(For what it’s worth, German-born Zeitz came to Harley from luxury goods company Kering, where he chaired the Sustainability Committee.) 

Customers have noticed Harley’s descent into wokeism since Zeitz came on board in 2020, but comparing his role to the Taliban must count as a new low.

Indeed so. I never thought I’d see the day, and fervently hoped never to. Actually, it never occurred to me that such a thing was even possible. But sad as it is, deeply as it pains me to have to say it, I can only agree with this guy’s assessment.


Pathetic. Dismaying. Maddening. Sickening. Infuriating. William Harley, Arthur and Walter Davidson, the great Jay Springsteen, Chocolate George, Billy “Chains” Flamont, and Sonny Barger are all rolling in their graves like a Shovelhead stroker crank assembly at 6k revs. In their eternal disquiet, they shan’t want for old-school-biker company.

I pray to Almighty God that the Wokester wreckers and despoilers will someday be made to pay for their vile predation, their iniquitous disrespect, their illimitable arrogance, and their callow gormlessness. In at least one way, the usurpers and besmirchers of the proud Harley-Davidson legacy almost certainly will pay ere the end, as Stephen goes on to explain.

David “Iowahawk” Burge, a man who knows more about American car culture than almost anyone else you’re likely to meet, just called it the “Possibly single most hilarious corporate self-immolation of all time.”

It is. And yet I’ve reached the point where I’m not sure I can laugh over the destruction of yet another American icon.

Your typical Harley buyer is going to become like your typical Bud Light buyer: increasingly scarce, driven away by a brand whose management despises them and their values.

I’m forced to conclude that when Zeitz says he’s going to change Harley-Davidson “in a sustainable way,” he means he thinks he can milk the company for several years before the loss of market value and brand cachet forces the board to kick his can to the curb.

It’d be nice to think so, perhaps, but I very much doubt that’s how the story will end. Far more likely, I think, that the Motor Company succumbs finally to the Wokester mind virus, goes out of business, and is forever lost except in the fond reminiscences of people like me.

H-D has very nearly gone under a good few times over its well over a century of sometimes precarious existence. How Kafka-esque it is, then, that after having somehow managed to stay afloat through so many trials and tribulations—WW2; Korea; Vietnam; the late-60s/early-70s calculated flooding of the US motorcycle market by cheap imports from Japan’s Big Four (Hon-duh, Kawasucki, Sudookey, Yammahammablamma); the ginned-up fuel “crisis” of the mid/late 70s; the rise of Safety Naziism in the 80s; the slow strangulation of individual liberty, independent-mindedness, and the quintessentially American spirit of rowdiness, defiance, and devil-may-care ebullience; the crippling effects of economic mismanagement, FederalGovCo meddling, and general malfeasance under D卐M☭CRAT regimes—it should be PC/Woke/Leftardism that ends up killing Harley off once and for all.

Update! Just remembered: for anyone interested in further perambulations from li’l ol’ moi on the Motor Company’s serially abusive, exploitative, and/or contemptuous relationship with its most loyal customers, check it, yo:

I love Harleys. I hate Harley-Davidson. That seems to be the consensus among old-school biker types these days, and they just might have themselves a point, too.

The Motor Company has always had its problems keeping its hardcore fan base happy. It seems to have a special talent for stepping on its own crank and pissing off (or on) the very people who did the most to make it the institution it is today. Ever since I’ve been riding H-D’s (since ‘82), I’ve heard complaint after complaint, and seen the Powers That Be at H-D making the sort of bonehead moves, again and again, that regularly generate those complaints like some sort of whacked-out fuckup factory.

What the hell could they have been thinking when they decided to sue independent bike shops that used “hog” or some variation thereof in their shop name? I’m sure most of you remember that one. It ain’t as if Harley thought that “hog” business up themselves, after all. But they sure were willing enough to glom onto the idea—and then have their slickee-boy lawyers claim it as their very own private property.

That’s the opening ‘graphs from one of my Leatherballs columns—the very first of ‘em, in fact—for the now-defunct Outlaw Biker rag, the rest of which column can be read here. Last time I checked, which I admit has been a minute, the Compleat Leatherballs Archives are exclusively available here at Ye Aulde CF Blogge and absolutely noplace else, seeing as how the OB site went the way of the diplodocus some years back.

I confess to being right proud of the work I produced under the Leatherballs nom de villein, every ounce as much as I am of my twenty-plus years of award-winning, justly (in)famous creative genius at this palatial websty, so I think it only meet and just that the LB catalog should at last find its Forever Home rat cheer at CF. Do check ‘em out if you haven’t yet; even if

  1. You’ve never slung a leg over a leaky, squeaky, shaky, flaky ol’ Gnarley-D in your life
  2. Have not even a tiny, inoffensive, easily-concealable tattoo
  3. Don’t own any H-D dealership T shirts, engineer boots, chain-wallets, or black leather jackets
  4. Don’t drink beer, chase loose women, participate enthusiastically in barroom brawls, and/or have never spent so much as a minute behind bars

…and ain’t about to subject yourself to any of those things at this late stage of the game, I think you’ll find the Leatherballs experience a highly enjoyable ride anyhoo.

Updated update! Just a few more thoughts on the topic I seem to have wandered off to: namely, the Harley-Davidson Motor Company’s perennially-contentious relationship with its core customer base.

For starters, it must be noted that, until the advent of what we hardcores, ironbutts, and/or scooter trash dubbed the RUBbies (ie, Rich Urban Bikers, mimicking the once-ubiquitous “Yuppie” (Young Urban Professional) moniker), long-haired, bearded, burly Hog jockeys were usually welcomed at licensed H-D dealerships with open arms. Most of the folks who owned, managed, wrenched, manned the parts counter or paint shop, or what have you were dedicated, serious riders themselves; as such, they didn’t have a problem with biker trash, even patchholders, habituating their dealerships, whether buying parts or apparel, checking out the new Harleys on the showroom floor, or just hanging out with other bikers to socialize and shoot the breeze.

Growing up on Jap dirt bikes as a child, then graduating to the street with a Kawasaki LTD 550, I had always been intimidated, sometimes even a little bit afraid, of those big, bad, smelly, dangerous Harley outlaw-biker types. And the one constant throughout my entire life has been this bizarre attraction to put myself right in the middle of any situation, company, or environment I was scared of. It was like a compulsion, really. That being the case, being a-skeered of them biker ruffians and all, what else could I do but start spending my Saturday afternoons at the long-gone H-D of CLT shop on S Tryon Street?

To my astonishment and lasting delight, those big, gruff-talking outlaws were without exception some of the friendliest, warmest, most big-hearted people I ever have met. They took this 19 year old, wet-behind-ears shavetail in like a long-lost brother or son, encouraging my interest, offering to help work on or wash my Kawasaki, telling road stories, just generally making the newb feel welcome and entirely at home.

About two years or so of hanging around and establishing my rightful place among Harley enthusiasts, I bought my first Harley: a 1983 Sportster XLH (for nonitiates, an XL prefix=Sportster; FX=Super Glide, Wide Glide, Disc Glide, Lowrider, etc; FL=full-on Hog of fame and legend). It marked the beginning of my lifelong love affair with the smaller, leaner, more nimble sibling to the Big Twins. And incredibly enough, I continued to find the bikers I was meeting more and more of to be unfailingly friendly, outgoing, and quite mellow. In fact, several of the friends I made back then remain close, dear friends to this very day; I just missed a call from one of them, my brother Dean, due to my being in the can taking a whiz. I’ll call him back tomorrow, no worries.

In sum, then, the antagonistic attitude, the officiousness and contempt, wasn’t something I ever encountered at dealerships, independent shops, or bars catering to those scary biker thugs. Except one: an H-D dealership in upstate Virginia, only a mile or thereabouts from I-81 near the West By God Virginia line. The name of the ‘burgh whence this asshole enclave got its name I won’t mention here; the account of that misadventure is recounted in full here. But yeah, trust me on this: assholes, every man in that sorry excuse for a Harley shop was a pluperfect asshole.

Years later, I was told by folks from the area who would know whereof they spoke that I didn’t catch the dealership assholes on an off day; according to these people, the staff of this dealership was renowned for being snotty, obnoxious, and unhelpful. I was informed that, should I ever find myself in similar straits in that locality in future, there was a really cool independent H-D shop not far away on the other side of the I-81 overpass, a small, honest establishment which had nary an asshole, prick, or douchenozzle on the payroll.

I’ve had neither dealings with nor friends at the Motor Company itself, in any of its manufacturing facilities, warehouses, or administrative offices, at any level. What I DO have, though, is several friends who operate or did operate independent Harley shops here in CLT, in ATL, in North Myrtle Beach SC, and in Brooklyn—hell, as I’ve mentioned lots of times here, I spent more than a few years working in a CLT shop owned and operated by my close friend Goose. And those shop-owners and employees have given me a real earful about HDMC’s vicious, adversarial approach towards them.

As I related in the last-linked Leatherballs essay above, their relationships with the H-D knobs consisted entirely of threats, lawsuits, and legal, written, and verbal harassment. I never will forget the day Goose spent a good fifteen-twenty minutes enduring a barely-coherent harangue demanding that Goose posthaste and forthwith remove H-D’s fabled bar & shield artwork from our sign or face consequences most dire. Goose just sat there holding the phone out from his ear snickering quietly to himself until he’d gotten tired of it, whereupon he cut in to calmly and collectedly inform the frothing ass-clown that, y’know, thanks for your concern and all, but the fact of the matter is our shop doesn’t even HAVE a sign, never has had, much less any bar-and-shield logo painted, etched, engraved, or embossed thereon.

Goose slammed the receiver down onto its cradle, and we both proceeded to laugh ourselves sick at the ludicrous H-D dweeb, after which interlude we put the shop Rottweiler in his crate, locked the doors, and walked up the hill to the diner to grab lunch, still laughing all the way HA HA HA HA!

Out of, what, four (five?) proprietors of two-or-three-man independent shops in the CLT area I know well (lemmesee now; threre’s Dean-O, Smiley, Ben, Max, Eyeball, and Country Earl, so six), every one of them called us over the next few days to warn us of the impending telephonic onslaught from H-D’s rep in the York, PA Sporty assembly plant, informing us they’d had the exact same hostile long-distance interaction that exact same week as we two incarcerees of dear old McElhattan’s Machine & Rod had enjoyed, probably with that exact same besuited H-D numbskull, all concluding the exact same way: a thunderous hangup, a moment’s stupefaction over what the blue-black blazing hell THAT was supposed to be, followed by prolonged paroxysms of rib-cracking hilarity. For months afterward all any of us had to say to put the others on the floor rolling, kicking, and crying for mercy, was to launch into his best Goose impersonation: “But…but…but sir, our shop doesn’t even HAVE a sign! Not ANY!!!”

Remember, now, these independent businesses were the very people who had kept Harley going through the nightmare days of the AMF (Annoying Manufacturing Flaw) regency extending from 1969 to 1985, during which Harley’s manufacturing and assembly plants were auto-afflicted by a whopping 50% factory defect rate—which, translated from the book-keeperese, means every other Harley-Davidson motorcycle built and shipped to dealerships was a fucked-up piece of utter, hopeless shite. Your pardon, please: a fucked-up piece of utter, hopeless, EXPENSIVE shite.

Notwithstanding the unpleasant realities, the diehards hung in there with Harley-D, put up with the wallet-exsanguinating cost of parts and labor to get the overpriced lemone Harley had saddled them with running again, whereupon it would break down for the fifty-hundredth time that summer, be re-loaded into the pickup, and go back to the shop for yet another extended stay while the riding-season days ticked agonizingly by. As this soap opera continues, the payment to H-D Motor Credit continues to come due the first of each and every month.

I’m glad I wasn’t a Harley owner back then. If I had been, the urge to just throw up my hands and say fuck it, call the credit agency to please please pretty please come haul this overpriced, chrome-bedecked boat anchor off for repossession, thus freeing me to go buy the rice-grinding Honda I wish I’da bought in the first muhhfuggin’ place would’ve been crushing, totally overpowering.

“Ride With Pride”? Yeh, sure; pride is kinda hard to maintain when you spend more time pushing than riding, unfortunately. “I’d rather push my Harley than ride Jap crap”? In the AMF era, that oath would be put to the sorest of tests. “Better a sister in a whorehouse than a brother on a Honda?” Better ask your sister how she feels about it before you make a firm commitment to anything, bub.

Hey, I got a million of ‘em, ladies and germs. Be sure to try the chicken cacciatore, it’s so delicious it’d make your sweet old mammina weep from pure joy. I’ll be here all week folks, do come back for tomorrow night’s show. Of all the classic bumper sticker lines about Harleys, though, my personal favorite was, is, and forever shall remain: “H-D actually stands for Hound Dog, because they both love riding around in the back of pickup trucks and they both leave puddles where they ain’t supposed to.”

Vengeance is mine

Sayeth Southwest Airlines, and it’s pretty gol-danged schweet.

Apparently, it could be a genuine, bona fide SWA Tweet. Although the linked article pooh-poohs that out of hand, saying that SWA hasn’t posted anything at all on X since January in favor of (UGHHGAGBLECCHHH!) Instagram, I’m with Fox Mulder: I WANT to believe! Whoever is behind this, GREAT one, guys.

Government playing God

YET AGAIN, that is.

To save spotted owls, US officials plan to kill hundreds of thousands of another owl species
To save the imperiled spotted owl from potential extinction, U.S. wildlife officials are embracing a contentious plan to deploy trained shooters into dense West Coast forests to kill almost a half-million barred owls that are crowding out their cousins.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service strategy released Wednesday is meant to prop up declining spotted owl populations in Oregon, Washington state and California. The Associated Press obtained details in advance.

Documents released by the agency show up to about 450,000 barred owls would be shot over three decades after the birds from the eastern U.S. encroached into the West Coast territory of two owls: northern spotted owls and California spotted owls. The smaller spotted owls have been unable to compete with the invaders, which have large broods and need less room to survive than spotted owls.

Past efforts to save spotted owls focused on protecting the forests where they live, sparking bitter fights over logging but also helping slow the birds’ decline. The proliferation of barred owls in recent years is undermining that earlier work, officials said.

“Without actively managing barred owls, northern spotted owls will likely go extinct in all or the majority of their range, despite decades of collaborative conservation efforts,” said Fish and Wildlife Service Oregon state supervisor Kessina Lee.

The notion of killing one bird species to save another has divided wildlife advocates and conservationists. It’s reminiscent of past government efforts to save West Coast salmon by killing sea lions and cormorants that prey on the fish, and to preserve warblers by killing cowbirds that lay eggs in warbler nests.

“The Fish and Wildlife Service is turning from protector of wildlife to persecutor of wildlife,” said Wayne Pacelle, founder of the advocacy group Animal Wellness Action. He predicted the program would fail because the agency won’t be able to keep more barred owls from migrating into areas where others have been killed.

The shootings would likely begin next spring, officials said. Barred owls would be lured using megaphones to broadcast recorded owl calls, then shot with shotguns. Carcasses would be buried on site.

Sick, arrogant fucks. But don’t any of you Serf Class oafs be getting any bright ideas from this, mmmkay?

Public hunting of barred owls wouldn’t be allowed. The wildlife service would designate government agencies, landowners, American Indian tribes or companies to carry out the killings. Shooters would have to provide documentation of training or experience in owl identification and firearm skills.

Oh goodie, I feel better already! I’m confident it will all work out a-okay—y’know, just like every other one of their meddlesome, half-baked schemes has— now that I know that goobermint-vetted “experts” are involved. There DOES seem to be one other tiny, minor little problem though.

But there is more to this story than the “old growth” fabrication. Another misrepresentation is that the northern spotted owl is a unique species at all.

Endangered “northern spotted owls” are a “sub-species” of spotted owls, which means they are, in fact, the same species as California spotted owls and Mexican spotted owls, which also live on the west coast. Their difference is that geographic distance and separation have caused some differences in plumage and appearance. To call these spotted owls a different “sub-species” is like stating that Norwegians, Koreans, and Nigerians are different subspecies of homo sapiens. The notion of bird “sub-species” is actively rejected by many in the ornithology community.

This research piece from the Cooper Ornithological Society makes it rather clear that the spotted owl is all one species, noting that the northern spotted owl’s identifying features are based on a specimen from Puget Sound in Washington, while the California spotted owl is based on one from Southern California, but the identifying features of spotted owls gradually morph between the two locations.

In summary, two great lies are at the root of the environmental damage that has been done in the name of the spotted owl: 1) That logging was responsible for their decreasing spotted owl population in the Pacific Northwest; and 2) That there is even such a species as the “northern spotted owl.”

But hundreds of thousands of barred owls are now going to be killed in perpetuation of these lies. Considering that the “green,” anti-carbon advocates of the wind industry defend the senseless killing of millions of eagles, raptors, and migratory birds as a necessary religious sacrament, this proposed owl slaughter is consistent with the 21st Century environmental movement.

Ummm…OOOPS! Well, hey, ya wins some and ya loses some, I reckon. After all, it’s really the thought that counts, right?

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