Flotsam and/or Jetsam

Doing in diesel

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

As fossil fuels go, it just might be the most “problematic” of them all.

The $5.25 Per Gallon Canary in the Coal Mine

There may not be a shortage of diesel fuel yet but there is something else that amounts to the same:

Unaffordable diesel.

A gallon currently sells for about $5.25 per gallon on average.

Interestingly, this is about $2 more per gallon than the current cost of a gallon of regular unleaded. The Biden Thing has succeeded in temporarily tamping down the cost of the latter by draining the Strategic Petroleum Reserve – but diesel prices have not come down appreciably from their spring/summer high of about $5.70 per gallon.

Diesel cost less than half as much two years ago – just before the Biden Thing was selected president.

If you have a diesel-powered car (such as the excoriated-anathematized VW Jettas, Golfs and Beetles equipped with the TDI engines you can’t buy anymore) with a 15 gallon tank, you’re currently paying about $80 to fill ‘er up.

That’s not very affordable.

But not many people are driving diesel-powered cars – chiefly because the car companies haven’t been selling them for about seven years now, ever since the federal government sicced itself on VW for selling them. In italics to emphasize the true nature of VW’s “crime,” which was not “cheating” on government “emissions” certification tests anymore than Matt Strickland’s restaurant, Gourmeltz, was Hut! Hut! Hutted! the other day for supposedly selling alcoholic beverages without an ABC permit.

Alternatives always present problems for those who do not want others to have alternatives.

And now, they don’t.

Diesel-powered vehicles are problem vehicles – from the point-of-view of those pushing the electrification of vehicles. Not only because they go farther than gas-powered vehicles and much farther than electric vehicles – but particularly because it is possible to keep them going independently of a centrally controlled distribution apparatus.

Gas-powered vehicles require gasoline to keep on going. If there’s none at the pump, it is hard to refine your own. Gas does not store very well for very long, either.

Actually, it used to, but not since FederalGovCo foisted the ethanol-based shite on us all, which worthless crap will reliably convert itself into so much sugary glop in about, oh, an hour and a half or thereabouts.

So even if you thought ahead and stored 50 gallons in a drum for just-in-case, its shelf-life is limited.

Electricity is hard to generate independently in the quantity needed by electric cars. Even on 120v grid power, it takes a day or more to instill a charge in a 400-800 volt electric car battery. If the grid goes down, it will take much longer – unless you have a seriously mighty solar array on your roof or on your backyard.

Diesel, on the other hand, stores almost indefinitely. And many diesel engines can burn bio-diesel, which is “diesel” not made from petroleum. It is made from vegetable oil, animal fats and restaurant grease. In other words, almost anyone can make it.

Themselves.

This presents a dangerous alternative to those pushing “electrification,” which is really more about centralization.

Annnnnd BINGO. In other words, for our Deep State lords and masters, this is really about exactly what it’s always about: Power, and Control.

Update! Ernie drops a most interesting and informative comment.

Eric, you have a bit of a technical error. Natural fuels are refined using fractional distillation, the light stuff comes off first, then some gasoline, then kerosene, then progressively heavier grades of fuel oil, down to bunker fuel and asphalt/tar. In a barrel of crude oil there is inherently a lot more diesel fuel of various types than gasoline. Diesel fuel is inherently far more abundant and used to be far cheaper than gasoline- thus its use in heavy haulers like rigs, trains, and ships.

Also, old school mechanically injected diesels are inherently cleaner than gasoline engines until the 90’s closed loop engine management. As usual, pinheads saw occasional puffs of soot and assumed they had to be dirty, leading to a lot of prejudice against Rudolph Diesel’s “black mistress.”

Man, I’m so old I can remember back in the Olden Thymes of the late 70s/early 80s, when diesel was in fact so much cheaper than regular gasoline that people all over the country were dumping their old rides for diesel cars because of the savings they could realize from making the switch. My, how times have changed.

A Cuban missile-crisis Christmas?

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

FINALLY, another brilliant Steynmusic post.

Back in 1952, Gloria Shayne had been the pianist in the dining room of a New York hotel when a young man walked in, took one look at the gal at the keyboard, and went up and introduced himself. He was a Frenchman who spoke very little English, she was an American who spoke even less French. She liked pop music, he had come to America to be a classical musician. Yet within a month they were married. Flash forward ten years: Noël Regney’s English has improved, and, although he still hasn’t made his name in serious music, he’s learned to appreciate American pop music since his wife hit the jackpot with “Goodbye, Cruel World”. They even write songs together – usually with Noël writing the music, and Gloria the lyrics.

But not this time. Noël Regney had had a lively war. Born in Strasbourg, he’d been conscripted, after the German invasion, into the army of the Reich. And, although he soon deserted and joined the Resistance, he stayed in German uniform long enough to lead his platoon intentionally into the path of a group of French partisans, who wound up shooting him. After the liberation of his country, he went east to be the musical director of the Indochinese service of Radio France, and found himself in the middle of a new conflict. He thought the Second World War was so terrible that it must surely be the end of all war. But here it was – October 1962 – and as he saw it Washington and Moscow were playing a dangerous game of nuclear brinksmanship over Soviet missiles in Cuba. On the streets of Manhattan, he saw two infants in strollers being wheeled by their mothers along the sidewalk, and decided he wanted to write something for them. Not music, but words: A poem.He remembered scenes from his own childhood – sheep grazing in the pasture of the beautiful campagne – and he had the image he needed:

Said the wind to the little lamb,
‘Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite.’

He wrote a tune to go with it, too, but he decided it wasn’t right, and turned to his wife. “When he finished,” said Gloria, “Noël gave it to me and asked me to write the music. He said he wanted me to do it because he didn’t want the song to be too classical. I read over the lyrics, then went shopping. I was going to Bloomingdale’s when I thought of the first music line.”

It was only when she got home and played the tune for her husband that she realized she’d made a mistake, and had added one note more to that first line than the lyric required. But Noel loved the melody and didn’t want her to change a thing. So he went back to his poem and added a syllable for the spare note:

Said the night wind to the little lamb…

Gloria asked for one other text change: “A tail as big as a kite” didn’t sound right to her ears: somehow it wasn’t quite American English. But Noël put his foot down on that one: those words were staying, just as they were. “He was right,” she later told Yuletide musical archivist Ace Collins. “It is a line that people dearly love.” It’s perhaps the most vivid and memorable in the song, and a good example of how a phrase you might have no use for as a piece of speech can be transformed by music. The star dancing in the night with a tail as big as a kite is a rare moment of poetic imagery in a lyric that’s otherwise baldly descriptive. It’s slightly off-kilter – a tail as long as a kite, surely? – but “big” makes it more childlike and wondering.

The simple structure of the song is very effective – four verses, passing the story from the night wind to the little lamb, the little lamb to the shepherd boy, the shepherd boy to the mighty king, and finally the mighty king to the people. The repetition of “a star, a star/Dancing in the night” is matched by “a song, a song/High above the trees”, and “a child, a child/Shivers in the cold…” And at the end Noël Regney finally spelled out what was on his mind in that fall of 1962:

Said the king to the people everywhere,
‘Listen to what I say!
Pray for peace, people everywhere
Listen to what I say!
The child, the child
Sleeping in the night,
He will bring us goodness and light.

M and Mme Regney took their song to the Regency publishing company, and Regency immediately got hold of Harry Simeone. You can understand why. The Harry Simeone Chorale had had a huge hit four years earlier with “The Little Drummer Boy”, and to a casual listener “Do You Hear What I Hear?” can easily sound like “The Little Drummer Boy” sideways. Both tunes share a kind of simplistic formality, and the words of the later song echo the first: “Do You Hear?” reprises “Drummer Boy”‘s king and baby (actually, in the first song, the king is the baby) and one half of “the ox and lamb”, and the little shepherd boy is clearly a kindred spirit of the little drummer boy. So the Simeone Chorale recorded it, put it out for Thanksgiving 1962, and sold a quarter-million copies in its first week.

There were stories in the papers about drivers hearing it on the radio and pulling over on to the shoulder to listen to the lyrics. Regney and Shayne had written a song so powerful they couldn’t even get through it themselves without dissolving into tears. “We couldn’t sing it,” said Gloria. “Our little song broke us up. You must realize there was a threat of nuclear war at the time.”

But threats of nuclear war come and go; a good song is forever. What turned “Do You Hear What I Hear?” from a peace anthem to a seasonal standard was a recording the following year by Mister White Christmas himself, Bing Crosby. Bing’s warm dramatic baritone drew out the words in ways that the 25 voices of the Harry Simeone Chorale simply couldn’t. When I see these lyrics on paper, my mind’s ear hears them in Crosby’s voice:

Said the shepherd boy to the mighty king,
‘Do you know what I know?
In your palace warm, mighty king
Do you know what I know?
A child, a child
Shivers in the cold
Let us bring him silver and gold
Let us bring him silver and gold…’

Bing’s version sold a million copies, and the song never looked back.

“I am amazed that people can think they know the song,” said Noël Regney, “and not know it is a prayer for peace.” Ah, but most great popular art wiggles free of its creator. And so many if not most of those singing along to “Do You Hear What I Hear?” will have no idea that it has anything to do with some ancient flash point of the Cold War. Which is as it should be. Noël Regney and Gloria Shayne eventually divorced. The man who wrote those powerful words was hit by a stroke and ended his days unable to speak. The woman who wrote that melody was struck by cancer and unable to play the piano. But their song lives on, with a tail stretching across the decades:

Said the night wind to the little lamb,
‘Do you see what I see?
Way up in the sky, little lamb
Do you see what I see?
A star, a star
Dancing in the night
With a tail as big as a kite.’

Noël Regney: the first Noël to write an American Christmas classic, even if it took the Cuban missile crisis to inspire him.

Happily, Steyn includes what I myself agree is the best version yet recorded, by the aforementioned Der Bingle.

Wonderful stuff, no? And, as is so often the case, with an equally wonderful story behind its creation as well.

Whistling past the graveyard

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

There’s a larger point to be made about the Moore County power outage, and Denninger makes it.

Question: Why couldn’t this be immediately fixed?

Answer: They don’t have spares for the parts that were damaged.

Why do they not have the spares?

Because we sent our supply lines overseas, we made no provisions to have spares, and the regulators at the state and federal level sat on their hands and played with themselves instead of requiring that providers of critical services, such as electricity, had a sufficient stock of spares to cover both routine failures and those caused by weather or low-grade assaults perpetrated by small numbers of people.

This is the gross incompetence we have throughout our society. It is the manifestation of “oh nothing bad will ever happen so we don’t have to be prepared for it” that has shown up in all manner of other places, such as the cars that are completed except for chips in their engine computers without which they will not run, and thus they’re sitting in a field unsold.

Rather than insist that such critical items be produced here in the United States, including all precursor components over the last couple of decades we did nothing of the sort. We allowed the nickel to be “saved” and then pocketed by the shareholders, directors and officers while offshoring supply to China and other places which have no duty to US citizens.

We then went further in our official malfeasance and performed no audits or forced corrective action when the spares were not available and resupply looked possibly challenged, to the point that vehicles are stacked up and can’t be sold for want of a chip and now power is out in an entire county because the switchgear and transformers in two bog-standard substations that feed the area were damaged and the power company has no spares available to immediately replace them.

What you should learn from this is that this sort of disruption is tiny compared to what ever one hundred dedicated men, uncorrelated and thus unable to be interdicted in advance could do any time they decided to.

Further, while I’m sure they’ll find the parts somewhere in the US and restore power if the damage was to fifty counties instead of one the odds are high that said parts would not exist at all in the United States and might not be available in sufficient quantity to actually restore service to everyone for months or even longer.

A commenter over at Aesop’s joint hammers it in deeper.

Just in case you all are not aware of the reality of our power grid and the companies that maintain them. Regional depots have maybe 1 or at most 2 of those larger HV transformers sitting in a warehouse, these are the ubiquitous monsters about 10×10 ft that convert the high tension down to more usable voltages for local distribution in our towns and factories. The smaller pole mounted units, perhaps in the few hundreds per depot, seeing they are a more common failure point due to heat, leaks, lighting strikes, trees falling or wayward ordnance.

What this means is that if there is ever a real effort to damage our grid by enemies, foreign or domestic, there is not enough replacement equipment on the ground in the entire country to fix it quickly.

Now the cute kicker or as they say, “and now the rest of the story”. Most of our grid maintenance parts come from, yep, the PRC. And guess who will conveniently have “issues” in ramping up production for the export market, especially when they themselves are using most of the factory output internally (remember those 5 new coal plants going live/week over there)? Yes good sirs, we are royally screwed if any untoward events suddenly ramp up.

Bayou Pete brings it on home for us.

As a former Civil Defense sector officer, trained in disaster planning and recovery, allow me to assure you, that commenter is absolutely correct. His words apply to every country on the planet. The electrical utilities simply can’t afford to stockpile large quantities of replacement transformers. The bigger and more expensive the transformer, the fewer they’ll have on hand. Even simple components such as the glass insulators used on high-tension electrical cables criss-crossing the country are only stocked in limited quantities. If random individuals were to pause alongside rural roads and shoot out, say, a thousand of those insulators, there’d be the devil to pay to replace them all in the short term. If they shot out ten thousand…forget about it. There aren’t enough power crews, let alone insulators, to repair that sort of damage in anything less than weeks, possibly months.

At this writing, there’s somewhere north of 35,000 North Carolinians sitting in the dark, in 30-degree weather, who won’t be getting their electricity restored until Thursday, as of the last estimate I saw. Not good. Not good a-TALL.

BOTTOM LINE: The US electrical grid, not just in semi-rural Eastern NC but nationwide, is fragile, hopelessly out of date, and entirely vulnerable to being taken down with preposterous ease—interminably, no training or specialized tools necessary, by any motivated passerby with a point of his own to make. Make of all that what you will. As Peter says: food for thought, indeed.

Update! AP puts it bluntly: “A LESSON IN ASYMMETRIC WARFARE IN MOORE COUNTY.” Pretty much, yeah, for anyone inclined to interpret it as such.

And YOU are there

Posted on December 4, 2022December 4, 2022 by Mike

Weasel links to a riveting helmet-cam vid shot from the cockpit hot-seat of a bona fide classic: the legendary P47D Thunderbolt Mk II (ie, the prettier, more elegant bubble-canopy version, not the razorback). When, at around 2:50 or so, the pilot turns the engine over and that Pratt & Whitney Double Wasp finally catches and comes rumbling and grumbling to life, I confess I wet myself just a little.

That tandem takeoff roll is pretty damned schweet too, as are the simulated attack runs on some kind of boat or barge in the river. The pilot proceeds from there to really put the Jug through its paces, albeit at relatively low altitudes (many of those who flew them in both the European and Pacific theaters held that the P47 performed best above 30,000 feet, despite its great success in the ground-attack role), and it’s great fun to watch as he does it.

From the looks of the river and the nearby city skyline, I suspect this was filmed at the annual Thunder Over Louisville airshow, which I was fortunate to kinda-sorta attend several times from a hotel room when I was there for the Knob Creek Machine Gun Shoot. See, the hotel we always stayed at was on the glide path to the airport nearby, which to my boundless delight also happened to be where the various planes staged from, before heading down to the river to do their fly-by passes for the show.

Any red-blooded American male with an ounce of affection for military aviation in his soul is bound to enjoy this video as much as I did myself, I’d imagine; it’s 44 and a half minutes of pure flyboy enjoyment, shot from a perspective that leaves you veritably gasping for breath at times. Mucho, mucho thanks to Weasel for hipping us to this.

The lesson of Thanksgiving

Posted on November 24, 2022November 24, 2022 by Mike

Very simple, very easy: eschew socialism.

Turns out, you can’t just ignore economics and human nature.

Socialism really does sound good on paper though, right? We’re all going to own everything together and take care of each other. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.“

It sounds so nice. And we all want to be nice, right? People are emotionally drawn to socialism because it sounds so good. It sounds fair. It sounds — nice.

But do you know what’s not nice?

Corpses.

That’s exactly what happened the Pilgrims got when they took a stab at socialism.

Most Americans don’t know that the Plymouth colony was originally an experiment in socialist utopianism and were it not for a complete 180 a couple of years in, we probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the bountiful feasts most of us will indulge in today. There would have been no Thanksgiving because there would have been nobody left to give thanks.

It just wouldn’t be Thanksgiving without including Rush Limbaugh’s classic recounting and analysis of the true meaning of the day.

“On August 1, 1620, the Mayflower set sail. It carried a total of 102 passengers, including forty Pilgrims,” now known as Pilgrims, “led by William Bradford. On the journey, Bradford set up an agreement, a contract, that established” how they would live once they got there. The contract set forth “just and equal laws for all members of the new community, irrespective of their religious beliefs,” or political beliefs. “Where did the revolutionary ideas expressed in the Mayflower Compact come from? From the Bible.

The Pilgrims were a “devoutly religious people completely steeped in the lessons of the Old and New Testaments. They looked to the ancient Israelites for their example. And, because of the biblical precedents set forth in Scripture, they never doubted that their experiment would work.” They believed in God. They believed they were in the hands of God. As you know, “this was no pleasure cruise, friends. The journey” to the New World on the tiny, by today’s standards, sailing ship. It was long, it was arduous.

There was sickness, there was seasickness, it was wet. It was the opposite of anything you think of today as a cruise today on the open ocean. When they “landed in New England in November, they found, according to Bradford’s detailed journal, a cold, barren, desolate wilderness. There were no friends to greet them, he wrote. There were no houses to shelter them. There were no inns where they could refresh themselves.” There was nothing.

“[T]he sacrifice they had made for freedom was just beginning. During the first winter, half the Pilgrims — including Bradford’s own wife — died of either starvation, sickness or exposure.” They endured that first winter. “When spring finally came,” they had, by that time, met the indigenous people, the Indians, and indeed the “Indians taught the settlers how to plant corn, fish for cod and skin beavers” and other animals “for coats.” But there wasn’t any prosperity. “[T]hey did not yet prosper!” They were still dependent. They were still confused. They were still in a new place, essentially alone among likeminded people.

“This is important to understand because this is where modern American history lessons often end. Thanksgiving is actually explained in some textbooks as a holiday for which the Pilgrims gave thanks to the Indians for saving their lives, rather than what it really was. That happened, don’t misunderstand. That all happened, but that’s not — according to William Bradford’s journal — what they ultimately gave thanks for. “Here is the part that has been omitted: The original contract” that they made on the Mayflower as they were traveling to the New World…

They actually had to enter into that contract “with their merchant-sponsors in London,” because they had no money on their own. The needed sponsor. They found merchants in London to sponsor them. The merchants in London were making an investment, and as such, the Pilgrims agreed that “everything they produced to go into a common store,” or bank, common account, “and each member of the community was entitled to one common share” in this bank. Out of this, the merchants would be repaid until they were paid off.

“All of the land they cleared and the houses they built belong to the community as well.” Everything belonged to everybody and everybody had one share in it. They were going to distribute it equally.” That was considered to be the epitome of fairness, sharing the hardship burdens and everything like that. “Nobody owned anything. It was a commune, folks. It was the forerunner to the communes we saw in the ’60s and ’70s out in California,” and other parts of the country, “and it was complete with organic vegetables, by the way.

“Bradford, who had become the new governor of the colony, recognized that” it wasn’t working. It “was as costly and destructive…” His own journals chronicle the reasons it didn’t work. “Bradford assigned a plot of land” to fix this “to each family to work and manage,” as their own. He got rid of the whole commune structure and “assigned a plot of land to each family to work and manage,” and whatever they made, however much they made, was theirs. They could sell it, they could share it, they could keep it, whatever they wanted to do.

“For young men that were most able and fit for labor and service did repine that they should spend their time and strength to work for other men’s wives and children without any recompense,’” without any payment, “‘that was thought injustice.’ Why should you work for other people when you can’t work for yourself? What’s the point?…The Pilgrims found that people could not be expected to do their best work without incentive.

“So what did Bradford’s community try next? They unharnessed the power of good old free enterprise by invoking the undergirding capitalistic principle of private property. Every family was assigned its own plot of land to work and permitted to market its own crops and products. And what was the result? ‘This had very good success,’ wrote Bradford, ‘for it made all hands [everybody] industrious, so as much more corn was planted than otherwise would have been.’…

“Is it possible that supply-side economics could have existed before the 1980s. … In no time, the Pilgrims found they had more food than they could eat themselves. Now, this is where it gets really good, folks, if you’re laboring under the misconception that I was, as I was taught in school. So they set up trading posts and exchanged goods with the Indians. The profits allowed them to pay off their debts to the merchants in London.

“And the success and prosperity of the Plymouth settlement attracted more Europeans and began what came to be known as the ‘Great Puritan Migration.’” The word of the success of the free enterprise Plymouth Colony spread like wildfire and that began the great migration. Everybody wanted a part of it. There was no mass slaughtering of the Indians. There was no wiping out of the indigenous people, and eventually — in William Bradford’s own journal — unleashing the industriousness of all hands ended up producing more than they could ever need themselves.

So trading post began selling and exchanging things with the Indians — and the Indians, by the way, were very helpful. Puritan kids had relationships with the children of the Native Americans that they found. This killing the indigenous people stuff, they’re talking about much, much, much, much later. It has nothing to do with the first thanksgiving.

The first Thanksgiving was William Bradford and Plymouth Colony thanking God for their blessings. That’s the first Thanksgiving. Nothing wrong with being grateful to the Indians; don’t misunderstand. But the true meaning of Thanksgiving — and this is what George Washington recognized in his first Thanksgiving proclamation.

No wonder shitlibs loathe and despise this quintessentially American holiday so intensely. The Thanksgiving story revolves around gratitude; humility; pluck; human fallibility. It is a glorious confirmation of human resilience and adaptability. Above all else, it stands as a resounding condemnation, in the most practical and readily comprehensible of terms, of their preferred ideology: socialism. For your typical, garden-variety shitlib, what’s to like?

Be it hereby resolved

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

Washington’s Thanksgiving proclamation.

New York, 3 October 1789

By the President of the United States of America. a Proclamation.

Whereas it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the providence of Almighty God, to obey his will, to be grateful for his benefits, and humbly to implore his protection and favor—and whereas both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me “to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer to be observed by acknowledging with grateful hearts the many signal favors of Almighty God especially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to establish a form of government for their safety and happiness.”

Now therefore I do recommend and assign Thursday the 26th day of November next to be devoted by the People of these States to the service of that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be—That we may then all unite in rendering unto him our sincere and humble thanks—for his kind care and protection of the People of this Country previous to their becoming a Nation—for the signal and manifold mercies, and the favorable interpositions of his Providence which we experienced in the course and conclusion of the late war—for the great degree of tranquillity, union, and plenty, which we have since enjoyed—for the peaceable and rational manner, in which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of government for our safety and happiness, and particularly the national One now lately instituted—for the civil and religious liberty with which we are blessed; and the means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge; and in general for all the great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.

and also that we may then unite in most humbly offering our prayers and supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of Nations and beseech him to pardon our national and other transgressions—to enable us all, whether in public or private stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly and punctually—to render our national government a blessing to all the people, by constantly being a Government of wise, just, and constitutional laws, discreetly and faithfully executed and obeyed—to protect and guide all Sovereigns and Nations (especially such as have shewn kindness unto us) and to bless them with good government, peace, and concord—To promote the knowledge and practice of true religion and virtue, and the encrease of science among them and us—and generally to grant unto all Mankind such a degree of temporal prosperity as he alone knows to be best.

Given under my hand at the City of New-York the third day of October in the year of our Lord 1789.

Go: Washington

Well said, sir. Of course, and as always.

Best wishes to all

Posted on November 24, 2022 by Mike

The very happiest of T-days to all CF Lifers wherever they may be, along with a heartfelt happy birthday to my brother-in-arms-and-everything-else Big Country as well. May your days be merry, and bright.

The gay communist future

Posted on November 18, 2022November 18, 2022 by Mike

If, as they say, the children are the future, then ours is gay and communist.

Study Shows Kids Who Are Homeschooled Could Miss Out On Opportunity To Be A Gay Communist

U.S. – Education experts are warning about the detrimental effects of homeschooling, as it may cause children to miss out on their opportunity to be gay communists.

“The two essential roles of public education are to turn kids into communists, and then make them gay,” said AFL-CIO President Randi Weingarten. “If education fails to accomplish both of those things in the life of a child, it has failed miserably.”

Studies show that while homeschooled kids may excel in advanced mathematics, literature, history, Latin, debate, civics, religion, music, art, theoretical physics, and physical fitness, most kids educated by their parents fall woefully short in essential subjects like Communism and being gay.

“We need common-sense regulation of homeschooling to ensure our nation’s kids are sufficiently perverted by gender theory and fully ready for the violent overthrow of the Republic to usher in a glorious communist utopia,” said Weingarten. “No child should be left behind.”

Lawmakers are discussing programs to send drag queens to the homes of homeschoolers but insisted they will have to repeal the 2nd Amendment and take away all the guns first.

And since it’s the Bee and all…

We're back. Let that sink in.

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) November 18, 2022

That sound you’re hearing is shitlib hearts from coast to coast breaking into little, tiny pieces.

Look back in anger

Posted on November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 by Mike

American “elections” have always been every bit as “free, fair, and honest” as they remain today. Which is to say, not at all.

The Electoral College solidified former Vice President Joe Biden’s win in the 2020 general election this week. Despite President Trump’s frequent claims, no evidence of widespread voter fraud has been found in swing states such as Georgia or Pennsylvania or any other state, including Illinois.

And blah blah blah woof woof. Ignore that standard-issue, Mark 1-Mod-0 MSM horseshit, it’s not worth bothering about.

But in 1960, some irregularities in Illinois votes, specifically the ones in Chicago, prompted calls for an investigation from Republicans over then-Sen. John F. Kennedy’s victory. The saga played out in the pages of the Chicago Daily News.

Voter fraud in Cook County certainly wasn’t unheard of at the time, but did Republicans have a case? According to scholar Edmund F. Kallina’s article in “Presidential Studies Quarterly,” the answer is yes, but also, no. His research found that Nixon was not “cheated out of Illinois’ electoral votes.”

For a deeper dive into the plan of a few Republicans to hijack the Electoral College, check out this report from the Washington Post.

Yeah, no. Thanks but no thanks for your surely non-partisan recommendation there, pal. As you might expect, the above short Enemedia recap leaves the juiciest, most sordid bits out. Not so with this next account.

A lot has been accused but there hasn’t been any hard-hitting proof that Kennedy actually used the Chicago outfit to obtain the electoral college in Illinois, right? Well according to “The Dark Side of Camelot” by Seymour Hersh, Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. (JFK’s father) set up a meeting with Chicago mob boss Sam Giancana to obtain Giancana’s support for Jack Kennedy’s run for the White House. But one boss? That is just one guy, what is Kennedy going to do with one vote? Well, unlike most people, the Mafia played dirty and they did it by buying votes, Hersh tells us.

You can’t exactly pay voter by voter to cast a ballot for the liberal politician, because the money would run out in a heartbeat with no guaranteed results. Instead, Giancana funneled money to lower-level street thugs as “walking around money.” Nothing illegal there, in fact, Sam just looks like a nice guy, which cannot be further from the truth. But that payday came with an implied promise, “Mafia” reports. The people performing their civic duty would be “persuaded” to vote blue. What made this possible was not only harassment of poll goers but each gangster had a “territory” they ruled. A territory could be as little as a hundred people or as large as thousands, all of which listened to their criminal neighborhood boss. Not exactly from respect or friendliness but out of fear.

Funneling cash to buy votes and harassing conservative voters was among their many tactics to steal the election in Illinois. Combine that with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley’s alleged ballot stuffing political machine and the state was Kennedy’s. Illinois was won by nearly 10,000 votes and John F. Kennedy was the new President of the United States. But wait, there’s more.

The Mafia Podcast lists testimonies of various anonymous (out of safety) gangsters claiming to have helped also buy the Virginia primary for Kennedy. Giancana even loudly bragged about buying local politicians new office furniture and paid bar owners to keep Frank Sinatra’s campaign song, “High Hopes,” playing frequently throughout pubs.

But one doesn’t contact an unknown gangster for help, which is correct. However, Giancana and the Kennedys had more ties than you’d think. The first being previously mentioned Frank Sinatra, a man who was very familiar with the mafia and a close friend of the Kennedy’s. He was said to be the go-between man for the two during the West Virginia primary rigging according to Larry Sabato, a University of Virginia professor and author of The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy. Sabato also highlights the connection by citing the story that Joseph Kennedy asked for Giancana’s help over a dispute with another mobster, Frank Costello, and offered “the president’s ear” in return. This is all backed by Sinatra’s daughter, Tina Sinatra, in a “60 Minutes” story, summarized by CBS News.

Tina adds that Joe Kennedy arranged the West Virginia primary rigging through Giancana. Who boasted the request was “a couple of phone calls away.” But the gangster, after all his hard work and dedication was not rewarded with the president’s ear and was turned on through the hiring of Robert Kennedy. While the Kennedy’s didn’t seem to care about the cut ties between the mobster, Sinatra was hung out to dry and was not in Giancana’s good graces, somewhere you never want to be. But Tina Sinatra confirms the beef was squashed by Frank who played in Sam’s night club, Villa Venice, twice a day for an absurd eight straight nights, bringing “Rat Packers” Sammy Davis, Jr. and Dean Martin along.

But Sinatra isn’t where the connection stops. All That’s Interesting tells us Kennedy, Sinatra, and Giancana all shared a common mistress, making a go-between connection much more likely. The black-haired beauty, Judith Exner, first enjoyed the presence of Sinatra after a vacation in Hawaii for two. But her life changed dramatically after February 7th, 1960 when she caught the eye of then-Senator John F. Kennedy. Exner spent the next day with Kennedy at Sinatra’s place. Exner claimed that Kennedy called her every day for a month following that encounter in Las Vegas. On March 7, 1960, the night before the New Hampshire primary, Kennedy and Exner made love for the first time in New York City, according to her account. She also testified to be a go-between for the mob for an unprecedented 10 times, where it’s theorized she began another romantic relationship with, this time, Giancana.

As you might be able to see, there are way too many connections between the Kennedy’s and the mob on multiple occasions for something not to be fishy.

Of course, and as usual. Proving yet again, as if further proof were needed, that in big-time American power-politics, it’s filth, sleaze, fraud, and corruption all the way down.

The devastatingly talented crime noir novelist James Ellroy’s great American Tabloid presents an intriguing alt-history theory regarding the skullduggery behind both JFK’s 1960 “election” and his assassination three years later: Kennedy had run afoul of so many rough, violent men and entities like Giancana, the CIA, J Edgar Hoover, the Castro government, and others that the real wonder would have been if he HADN’T been assassinated for his perceived betrayals and broken promises.

Ellroy, in the way of the very best writers, takes a close look at the motivations of all these potential hit-men without ever specifying who the likeliest culprit might actually have been, leaving that to the reader’s imagination. American Tabloid, like nearly all of Ellroy’s work, is an excellent, gripping read, one I can’t recommend highly enough.

Hearty congratulations to all involved

Posted on November 9, 2022November 9, 2022 by Mike

A dark, disappointing day for those folks eagerly anticipating a Red Wave that never quite materialized, certainly, but not without its sunnier side all the same. First on the list of reasons for every American to stand up and cheer themselves hoarse: the honest, wise, and true voters in the Peach State have overwhelmingly reelected Stacy “MBT” Abrams to her second glorious term as Georgia’s governor!

Republican Gov. Brian Kemp Declared Winner Over Stacey Abrams

Waitwaitwait, WHAT? WHAAAT?!? How did THAT preposterous, counterfactual nonsense get up there? Stop LYING, you LYING LIAR BASTARDS!

Decision Desk HQ projects Brian Kemp (R) re-elected governor in Georgia.#DecisionMade: 9:30pm EST

Watch our livestream: https://t.co/94KbTlKwRz pic.twitter.com/zo2miMxdpX

— Decision Desk HQ (@DecisionDeskHQ) November 9, 2022

NOOOO!!! What the fucking FUCK are you Fake News Election Denialist Tarrrumpapumpumkins trying to do to us here with these transparent fabrications, anyhow?!?

Governor Brian Kemp wins Georgia!

Follow along with us for more election updates: https://t.co/Z4mb5KdWbx pic.twitter.com/ARfCNME5zM

— Townhall.com (@townhallcom) November 9, 2022

Sweet bleeding Christ on a pogo stick, it’s like one of those horrible bad dreams you just can’t wake up from, no matter what you do!

“No one in Georgia’s history has done more to create jobs, cut taxes, restore sanity to your schools, put criminals behind bars, protect the unborn, and secure all the God-given liberties enshrined in the Constitution of the United States than Gov. Brian Kemp,” former Vice President Mike Pence told a crowd in Georgia.

“We’ve been doing good in this day because we have been saying no to Stacey Abrams,” Kemp said. “We were listening to you, and because we’ve done that, we’ve got an incredible economy. We’ve got the most people ever working in the history of the state, the lowest unemployment rate in the history of the state.”

Stop it! For the love of God, will you people please just STOP IT ALREADY!!! I can’t even…good Lord, it’s as if…why, it’s…it’s…

AT LONG LAST, HAVE YOU NO DECENCY?!?

A-feuding we will go

Posted on November 8, 2022 by Mike

Although I do still like DeSantis, I wholeheartedly agree with Trump on this one.

Fresh off of the backlash for calling Florida Governor Ron DeSantis “Ron DeSanctimonious,” Donald Trump doubled down on stupid by warning DeSantis that if he runs for president in 2024, he will dish dirt on him.

In an interview with Fox News Digital after his Monday night rally in Ohio, Trump said that even though there is no “tiff” with Ron Desantis, he would be making a “mistake” by running in 2024.

“I don’t know if he is running. I think if he runs, he could hurt himself very badly. I really believe he could hurt himself badly,” Trump said. “I think he would be making a mistake, I think the base would not like it — I don’t think it would be good for the party.”

“Any of that stuff is not good — you have other people that possibly will run, I guess,” Trump added. “I don’t know if he runs. If he runs, he runs.”

Then Trump said that if DeSantis does decide to run, “I would tell you things about him that won’t be very flattering — I know more about him than anybody — other than, perhaps, his wife.”

Make no mistake about it, Trump feels entitled to the 2024 GOP nomination, and Ron DeSantis is the biggest threat to Trump winning the nomination, should both men run. So far, DeSantis has not indicated that he will run for president in 2024; clearly, Trump doesn’t want him to. Maybe DeSantis won’t; that’s his decision, but he certainly isn’t talking about 2024 while he’s running for reelection in 2022.

As I’ve said lots of times already, even going so far as to email the lovely, gracious, and extremely talented Christina Pushaw about it not long ago, I fervently hope DeSantis foregoes a Presidential run in 2024 myself. We need him right where he is now, so’s those of us on Team Liberty will have a viable place to flee to when everything goes pear-shaped on us, as it surely must.

Publick Notice

Posted on November 8, 2022November 8, 2022 by Mike

Even though I had originally declared my intention to test this header-image-swapping hoopajoob for a cpl-three days and then, once I’d confirmed everything worked as it ought to, reverting to the usual Angry Guy blue CF theme for the remainder of November, I am now thinking of reneging on that. I’d forgotten just what a tedious, time-consuming pain in the ass this whole business was. Plus, as I said before, ol’ Scrooge Picard and now the lovely SantaBettie make me smile. So, well, I dunno; give me another couple days and we’ll see what develops, aiiight?

Perpetual escalation

Posted on November 6, 2022November 6, 2022 by Mike

When they say “mission creep,” this is one of the things they’re talking about.

Ridiculous — *Trust the CDC, they alway know what’s best for you*

Via Chief Nose Wetter and Aesop, who is horrified, and rightly so:

I’m not anti-vaxx per se, unlike Jenny McCarthy-level nutters (vaccines have utility, and wiping out smallpox worldwide was no petty accomplishment), but pumping this quantity of shit so often, and so young, has long since crossed the line into sheer lunacy, and has a lot to do with how you ever got to Covidiocy now. This nonsense should’ve been nipped in the bud about thirty years back.

Just one among many, many other things that should’ve been as well. The Founders knew and greatly dreaded a home truth that we have, to our great detriment, allowed ourselves to either forget or perhaps ignore: perpetual escalation is the way of all government. Give government a single inch, and it will eventually take everything you have.

Questions, questions Vol MCLXVIII

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Mike

Our old bud Jeff Goldstein, via his posh, dee-luxxe new Substack joint Protein Wisdom Reborn, has ’em.

You are being told that your hate speech is the proximate cause of a politically motivated attack on the husband of the House Speaker. Simultaneously, you’re being condemned for not simply flagellating yourself for your sins of believing in deregulation and lower taxes.

But something wonderful is happening. The accused here are clapping back. Without contrition, and with pro-active venom. They are asking specific questions that a coordinated narrative driven by legacy media / Democrat party in lockstep, collaborators not used to being challenged without the ability to simply cancel the challenges, has proven ill-prepared for.

Early reporting of the attack included a few details since walked back by media outlets and SF police — from the number of people in the house, to the state of dress of the attacker, to the relationship, if any, between the attacker Paul Pelosi was able to identify by name, according to dispatch records, and Mr Pelosi himself.

Pelosi called police from inside his bathroom but then went back out into the house where the attacker was. Why would he do that? And what attacker gives his prey a bathroom break?

The offender — whom the legacy media insists represents all Republican voters — appears to have been living in a hippie commune, complete with a Rainbow BLM flag and a dilapidated school bus, known to neighbors as a drug den. He’s been described as a drug-addled nudist and sometimes male prostitute whose erstwhile life-partner, a self-described “progressive,” is in prison for stalking a 14-year-old boy. Is the attacker even a citizen? Is he in the country legally? Can he vote in US elections? If he’s simply crazy, how does that comport with legacy media reporting that those of us who haven’t attacked Paul Pelosi — or anyone else, for that matter — are responsible for his actions? If he was truly motivated by politics, and he was lucid enough to express that fact, how is he any different from a Bernie Bro who shot up a Republican baseball practice? Or the guy who ran over and killed a teen he suspected of being a Trump supporter after Biden’s speech from Hell’s mouth? Or the person who traveled across the country prepared to assassinate Kavanaugh? Or the monster who severely beat a young canvasser for the Rubio campaign? Why is one instance considered by the legacy media and Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, fully representative of a political party, while all the others are….not?

These are all legitimate questions, many of which could be answered with video and police body camera footage. Or even a press conference — which, as we saw in the wake of a Texas school shooting, we should still take with a grain of salt. But none of this has been forthcoming. Why is that? And how is it, in lieu of these questions having no clear, agreed upon answers, that the legacy media feel confident enough to report on the attacker’s motives? Or even what actually transpired that evening?

What we don’t deserve are unfounded generalized recriminations based on our political affiliations.

What we do deserve are answers.

And in the post-fascist Twittersphere, we’re going to keep demanding them.

Threatening to cancel our speech is off the table now. And we have zero fucks about the progressives’ phony outrage left to give.

The times, they are a-changing.

Thank God.

Kuenstler has a few questions himself, for which he provides some speculative answers that comport a hell of a lot better with Occam’s Razor than any of the cockamamie crapola they’ve tried to get the more gullible among us to swallow so far.

If David DePape didn’t walk fourteen miles from Berkeley to Pacific Heights, or take a cab (expensive), how did he get there? Here’s a theory: he rode the BART subway from Berkeley to the Church Street and Mission station in the city, a five-minute walk to the Castro, San Francisco’s fabled gay district. Sometime before 2:00 a.m. closing time, he met up in a bar there with Paul Pelosi, who drove DePape to the Pelosi house in a car not equipped with an interlock device. That is to say, David DePape was let into the house by Mr. Pelosi.

The police and the news media have theorized that DePape broke into the place by smashing a glass door in back. Uh-huh…. Ask yourself: would there not be an alarm system at least on all the ground floor windows and doors in the house? Would there not be security cameras on the back side of the house — the side that burglars might prefer, if they could get over the wall? Would the Speaker of the House, with a discretionary budget on top of a $300-million fortune, and in a time of epic political rancor, not have a team of security guards in place at her private home?

Initial news media chatter had both DePape and Paul Pelosi dressed in their underwear, struggling over a hammer which turned out to belong to Mr. Pelosi. Not until the police entered the house did DePape wrest the hammer from Mr. Pelosi and commence to brain him with it. What does the arrest report actually say about the two men’s state-of-dress? It is not public information. How and why were the police just watching until DePape assaulted Mr. Pelosi — who was hospitalized afterward and had surgery on his cracked skull? (Uh, how did a blow that literally broke his skull not kill the elderly Mr. Pelosi?)

The news media initially suggested that somebody — a third person on the scene — opened the door to let the police in. Now they are saying no such person was there. Was the front door unlocked? (Weird, considering the general threat level for a public figure of Nancy P’s stature.) Or, did police break the glass door in the rear of the house to get in? (However, photos of the door show the glass being broken from the inside and shards spread over the outside.) Odd, also, that such a wealthy and powerful couple would not have hard-to-smash security glass on such a door. (It’s easy to buy.) Odd, too, that there was not one human security guard on the premises. The house had security cameras all over the exterior and interior. No mention in the news media or from the SFPD of what might have been recorded by these cameras at the time of the incident.

My assessment of this bizarre episode as follows: Paul Pelosi was out drinking late the night of the incident. He hooked up with David DePape, a hustler he might have been previously acquainted with, and took him back to the house in Pacific Heights. Something went wrong with the transaction. Considering that DePape exhibited psychotic behavior at times, it might have taken little to set him off. All the authorities involved are playing it coy, but failing to construct a narrative that adds up.

Nope, because they can’t—it’s all just too convoluted, too bizarre a script for suspension of belief to ever hope to cover all of it, featuring a cast of jaded, Dionysian, über-wealthy sexual deviants American Normals can’t relate to at all, and have no real desire to. Which speaks well of THEM, at least.

Is EVERYBODY involved in the Pelosi bludgeoning a sicko degenerate?

Posted on October 30, 2022October 30, 2022 by Mike

It’s beginning to look that way, yeah.

The nudist ex-lover of the man who attacked Paul Pelosi is a pedophile who attempted to kidnap a 14-year-old boy and allegedly bought sex dolls for her sons to use.

Oxane ‘Gypsy’ Taub, 53, the former lover of David DePape who is charged with attacking Pelosi in his San Francisco home, was convicted in 2021 for child abuse.

Prosecutors said Taub, who once protested naked in front of San Francisco City Hall, had been stalking the boy, sending him emails and messages and trying to lure him to secretly meet with her.

Following his attack on Pelosi, DePape has been accused by his daughter of sexually assaulting his three children when they were kids.

Y’all may remember Paul Pelosi’s arrest a few months back for nearly killing a girl while driving drunk—on which charges this rich-boy child of extreme privilege skated without doing a single day in jail, after not even bothering to show up in court for his “sentencing”—but I bet you didn’t know this carefully-excised part of the story:

It’s been a rumor for years in SF that Paul Pelosi is gay. David Depape is said to be a Castro Nudist. “The lunatic who allegedly assaulted Paul Pelosi is a Berkeley resident and a ‘Former Castro Nudist Protester’ and hemp ‘jewelry maker’ …sounds totally MAGA Republican to me. 🤣🤣” this from Twitter.

When Paul Pelosi was busted for drunk driving accident earlier in the year, he had a young man with him, and that too was covered up by the police and the press.

Bold mine, and every bit as hinky as the rest of this loony-bin shit-circus is. EXPLAINER: this “Castro Nudist” thing is basically a small group of gay male prostitutes with a penchant for parading around the streets of SF wearing nothing but maybe a cock-ring, not that there’s anything wrong with that.

So okay, yeah, obviously all of the reprobates in the Pelosi Skull Cracking cast of characters are not merely ordinary, everyday weirdos, but are truly, deeply depraved. Back to the revelations from DePape’s nekkid former lover.

SAN FRANCISCO (KGO) — The former partner of the man accused of violently attacking Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband at their San Francisco home on Friday is revealing new details about the suspect.

“Hello this is Gypsy Taub. I am the ex-life partner of David DePape and the mother of his children,” said Oxane Taub, calling from the Californian Institution For Women in Corona, California.

“He is mentally ill. He has been mentally ill for a long time,” said Taub, who last year was found guilty on 20 counts, including the attempted abduction of a 14-year-old boy near his Berkeley high school.

She described a time DePape returned home after disappearing for a year.

“He came back in very bad shape. He thought he was Jesus. He was constantly paranoid, thinking people were after him,” Taub said. “And it took a good year or two to get back to, you know, being halfway normal.”

Tara Campbell: “Did he ever show any aggression towards politicians, were his political beliefs extreme in your opinion?”

Taub: “Well when I met him, he was only 20 years old, and he didn’t have any experience in politics, and he was very much in alignment with my views and I’ve always been very progressive. I absolutely admire Nancy Pelosi.”

Uh oh; there goes the Usual Suspects’ hastily cobbled-together narrative, that DePape was a violent Rightwing Extremist MAGA Nazi, looks like.

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