Flotsam and/or Jetsam

Austin clawback underway?

Posted on March 24, 2025March 24, 2025 by Mike

P’raps possibly, yeah. T’is a consummation devoutly to be wished for what was once a helluva fun Texas town.

Austin started to lose population in 2023, as the crush of exhausted citizens fleeing the “blue dot in a red state” started to exceed the number of incoming settlers. It wasn’t a huge number, just 2,500 net out-migration that year, but it was still significant in that the net incoming tide of people had been reversed.

While news of Austin losing population was shocking at the time, the trend has continued to accelerate. There was a net loss of 13,400 people in 2024.

With residents fleeing, there is a glut of houses for sale, and prices are plunging as the real estate bubble bursts. This is also deflating prices on homes in the surrounding suburban and exurban counties.

To the tune of ~20% or so in some places. Too bad, so sad. Onwards.

It is my hope that some of the depopulation is because of blue state colonizers returning to their natural coastal habitats, thus leaving Texas a little bit redder overall. Of course, there is also a steady exodus of regular people from Austin – those who just can’t take it anymore. From personal experience, I know that it is a goal of many normies to leave the oppressive and theocratically woke eco-leftism of Austin, as well as the social disorder it has wrought. My wife and I were among them.

Back when Austin was simply weird, it was a delightful melting pot of politicos, educators, hippies, rednecks, musicians, and regular suburban Texans. Music bound those groups together. I can attest that I spent a lot of evenings in my younger days at joints like the Broken Spoke, Continental Cafe, and Green Mesquite, catching great new acts, some of whom went on to significant success.

Unfortunately, Austin has also been pretty effective in killing off its legendary music scene. Apparently, tech bros and AWFLs just don’t foster a music scene the same way that hippies and rednecks once did, and now even the legendary SXSW Festival is largely ditching the music aspect that got the whole thing going.

You can never go home again, but I’ll always enjoy that musical legacy. Which reminds me, I probably need to put some Rusty Wier or Jerry Jeff on my stereo bluetooth, it’s been too long.

Jerry Jeff Walker, Rusty Weir? No offense, but screw that noise, buster. You want a true taste of the good old Austin music scene, now sadly defunct, ain’t but one place you really need to look for it.

Gott DAMN, man: Jimmy Vaughan, Preston Hubbard, Fran Christina, the inimitable Kim Wilson? Texas blues just don’t come no more Texas blusier than that right there.

I was privileged enough to have the great Kim Wilson autograph not just one but TWO (2) of my beater-classic Ford dashboards after we opened for the Fab T-birds, the 61 Galaxy and, later on, the 67 Fairlane. Should be pics around here someplace or other, but damned if I’m gonna go digging around on this hard drive to find ‘em right now. Enjoy another T-birds clip as compensation.

Justice, DONE

Posted on March 19, 2025March 19, 2025 by Mike

Aww, that’s a doggone shame.

BREAKING: Greenpeace Loses Dakota Access Pipeline Trial, Faces Bankruptcy and Extinction
In 2016 and 2017, the left vented its shock and fury at Donald Trump’s unexpected victory by, among other things, protesting the construction of an oil pipeline in North Dakota. The “mainstream” media claimed that Energy Transfer was ramming its Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) through all sorts of sacred Native American lands and that no one wanted it.

n fact, Energy Transfer went out of its way to work with natives and locals, and most were glad of the opportunity and prosperity DAPL would provide. Nonetheless, environmentalist activists co-opted a protest by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, making it into the face of the spurious claims. Professional protestors from near and far got into the act, throwing sand into the project’s gears at the construction site, at funding sources, and in the PR sphere. In the end, these actions delayed the project by five months and added approximately $350 million to the cost, Energy Transfer claimed in a lawsuit it launched in 2019.

Energy Transfer named three Greenpeace entities — Greenpeace USA, Greenpeace International (based in the Netherlands), and Greenpeace Fund — as the organizers and funders of this sabotage. And on Wednesday, a North Dakota jury found that the infamous non-profit must pay the price for its actions.

The jury found in favor of the plaintiff on almost all counts, ruling that Greenpeace must pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. The loss is expected to bankrupt the half-century-old environmentalist nuisance organization.

There will doubtlessly be an appeal — Greenpeace’s Senior Legal Adviser, Deepa Padmanabha, said, “We know that this fight is not over.” But at any rate, this is a great day for Americans and people everywhere who are sick to death of environmentalists, BLM, and other disruptive, violent, and destructive Marxist mobs upending their lives under the guise of the right to protest.

Join me as I raise a glass to Energy Transfer and DAPL — Bravo!

Yes indeedy. Also, encore!

UNEXPECTED! ™

Posted on March 19, 2025March 19, 2025 by Mike

Gee, what a shocker: Professional shitlib “male feminist” turns out to to be sicko stalker.

So Another Male Feminist Turns Out to Be a Social Media Perv
Give some credit to young Democrat hustle(r) Harry Sisson, reluctant as you may be, for turning some small amount of social media savvy into a lucrative career as a progressive influencer — not to mention all those sweet young ladies that the 23-year-old professional Democrat has reportedly tried to con into sending him their most intimate photos of themselves.

Sisson likes to play a male feminist on social media, you’ll be shocked to learn.

“America failed women tonight,” Sisson posted to X after Donald Trump won reelection last November. “Trump bullied, assaulted, and stripped reproductive rights away from women all across the country, and instead of standing up, we let it happen.”

That’s the kind of “insight” Sisson regularly posts that has somehow amassed him 1.7 million TikTok followers and nearly 300,000 on X.

Sisson seems to have enjoyed a childhood of privilege — he spent parts of his early life in Dubai and Dublin before settling down in the U.S. at 17 — but the identity and occupation of his parents seem to be unavailable. Nevertheless, his net worth is estimated at anywhere from $800,000 to $8.5 million. Even the low end would be impressive for someone who has yet to hit the quarter-century mark and who doesn’t seem to have ever produced a good or service in the private sector.

Exactly what he does aside from attending New York University and posting on social media I can’t tell.

Oh, yeah — he also creeps on women while playing the male feminist.

There’s nothing new about young men of means trying to bed various women, and there has never been a lack of women willing to bed young men of means. Human nature is what it is. But doing so while posing as a noble defender of women’s rights is too hypocritical to let pass.

A few important things for these women to remember here: 1) at some point, those photos are going to end up splashed all across the am-pr0n Intarwebs, a near-inevitability that even Sisson himself will be powerless to prevent; and 2) as all the cool kids say, Teh Intarwebs is forever—which means your XXX twat-shots (“private”? It is to laugh) on PornHub and such-like sites ain’t ever going away. Which in turn means that yes, your kids, grandkids, and great-grandkids, if any, will be just one (1) easy-peasy Google, Duck Duck Go, or Luxxle search away from running across them some fine day.

Sorry, ladies, but no amount of weeping, wailing, and/or gnashing of teeth is going to change any of the above. Have a nice day.

(Via Steve Green)

Update! Ace notes an amusing aspect:

The surprising thing isn’t that a male liberal influencer is a pervert and user.

What’s shocking here is that Harry (S)isson is… straight? Sort of?!

A real stunner of a surprise of a jaw-dropper, I agree.

Updated update! Just noticed another amusing aspect. To wit:

“America failed women tonight,” Sisson posted to X after Donald Trump won reelection last November. “Trump bullied, assaulted, and stripped reproductive rights away from women all across the country, and instead of standing up, we let it happen.”

Don’t know if you’d call the bit I boldfaced a misnomer or an oxymoron or just what, but I has questions. For one thing, slaughtering your gestating infant “women’s health care” is NOT any kind of right. For another, how can it be “reproductive” when the whole point of the exercise is to avoid reproducing? I know, I know, I need to try harder to keep up with shitlib Doublespeak, linguistic inversions, and wilfull reversal of the meanings and definitions of plain, ordinary words. But still.

Truly, truly pathetic

Posted on March 12, 2025March 12, 2025 by Mike

I downloaded a vid intending to upload it to my WP Media Library, then embed it here, but no dice; the Media Library file size limit is a paltry 2 megs, but the video in question clocks in at 4.1, thereby breaking the bank, so to speak. In any event, you very much need to head on over to Phil’s place and watch it, it’s mind-blowing. To quote my own comment over at Bustednuckles:

Whiny little baglapper. The problem with sniveling douchetools like this is that their cities have never been bombed, they have never been seriously hungry, cold, or afraid, and they were never spanked as children.

It’s that last item that’s most pertinent of all, IMHO. I also enjoyed Phil’s recommendations:

I would Rattle Can my old truck Green, Rattle Can the Sprite British Racing Green, (even though I hate that fucking color) paint the fucking sidewalk green and find a used John Deere riding lawn mower again just to fuck with this pretentious asshole.

I’m betting a guy could find some green Mylar window covers if he looked hard enough too.

This fucker would melt down in the middle of the street before he even got close to my front door before I was done.

A fuggin’ MEN, Phil. Alternatively, you could always just punch the whinging dorksnort right in the fucking mouth. Once he’s on the ground, kick his ribs and upper torso area until he’s helpless to do anything other than lie there and quack like a duck. Lather, rinse, repeat, each and every time he so much as looked like he was about to set foot in your yard or driveway.

Good reads

Posted on March 12, 2025March 12, 2025 by Mike

Apropos of not much, really, I just wanted to mention Tactical Hermit’s brief summation of the fire-bombings of Dresden and Tokyo towards the end of WW2, both events the impetus of a great deal of Allied angst and self-recrimination even today. Doubtless historians, scholars, and pundits will be arguing the same unanswerable questions from now until Doomsday: Were the bombings ineffectual, perhaps even pointless and unnecessary? Can we ever truly know if they hastened the final collapse of Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan by so much as a single minute? Should they be thought of as simply part and parcel of modern warfare, albeit profoundly regrettable? Or were they in fact atrocities, crimes against humanity perpetrated by unfeeling monsters against blameless civilians?

The reason I bring all this up tonight is nothing so weighty as all that, thank merciful Heaven. See, it just so happens that, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Unlimited, I have on my sail foam a seriously gripping historical-fiction novel in ePub format titled The Air Raid Killer (Max Heller, Dresden Detective Book 1). It’s one hell of a page-turner, as author Frank Goldammer’s Detective Heller doggedly pursues a mad, quasi-human serial killer through the dead, burned-out streets of once-beautiful Dresden just before, during, and after the city’s immolation and utter destruction by several thousand RAF/USAAF HE and incendiary bombs.

Steve Anderson’s translation is absolutely flawless—not often the case with ePubs, alas. In the usual run of things, the editing and/or conversion from dead tree to ePub is so godawful it can be an active nuisance, yanking you right up out of the story by your ears to leave you staring blankly at the nearest wall. You can but shake your head in sorrow, anger, and confusion, hoping against hope that whoever committed this heinous crime against lit’ratchure wasn’t getting paid for the job. Oughta be in jail, more like.

Didn’t realize it until just now, but there’s a sequel to ARK. Yclept A Thousand Devils, Book 2 features Max Heller plying his trade in the same locality two (2) years after his hometown’s nightmarish destruction. Gonna have to add that ‘un to the ol’ KU library toot sweet and give it a look-see, soonest.

Problem, meet solution

Posted on March 11, 2025 by Mike

Ah, the wondrous possibilities fairly well leap from the page, wildly waving their arms and demanding attention.

Watch: Drag Queens Surround the Kennedy Center in Protest of Trump’s Takeover
Hundreds of protesters — many of them clad in big wigs, makeup, and lots of leather — descended on the Kennedy Center on Saturday as part of a “Rally & March for Drag.” It was the latest in a series of protests in response to President Donald Trump’s ban on Kennedy Center drag productions, many of them aimed at LGBTQ+ youth under 18.

“This president is demonizing a marginalized community in order to control the arts in America. It’s shameful, immoral, and weak,” drag artist Tara Hoot told The Advocate before the event. “At a time when our artists and LGBTQ+ communities are under attack more than ever, we need to show up and speak up against this fascist takeover of the arts.”

Last month, President Trump ousted Joe Biden-appointed board members and named U.S. envoy Richard Grenell the organization’s chairman.

“Just last year, the Kennedy Center featured Drag Shows specifically targeting our youth — THIS WILL STOP,” Trump wrote on Truth Social on February 7. “The Kennedy Center is an American Jewel, and must reflect the brightest STARS on its stage from all across our Nation. For the Kennedy Center, THE BEST IS YET TO COME!”

How very disappointing, that I have yet to see even one daring soul suggest rounding up all the annoying, tucked-peenie protesters, sealing them up inside a cargo bay of one of Elon’s Falcon 9 rockets, and launching them directly into the Sun forthwith.

(Via Joe)

End of an era

Posted on March 10, 2025March 10, 2025 by Mike

And good riddance.

BLM Plaza in DC dismantled after 5 years as bill threatens to withhold city’s funding
Work to dismantle the Black Lives Matter Plaza street mural in Washington, DC, that was put up in 2020 following the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor began on Monday.

Reconstruction at the site of the huge, yellow-painted letters close to the White House follows calls to withhold the city’s funding unless it removed the mural and renamed the location “Liberty Plaza.”

“The mural inspired millions and helped our city through a very painful period,” Bowser said.

“But now we can’t afford to be distracted by meaningless congressional interference. The devastating impacts of the federal job cuts must be our number one concern. Our focus is on economic growth, public safety, and supporting our residents affected by these cuts.”

Plans by House Republicans to scrub the divisive BLM mural were revealed in a Post exclusive earlier this month.

Monday’s dismantling of the mural was greeted with triumph by many conservatives — and slammed by those on the left.

“The world is healing,” wrote the Libs of TikTok account on X, run by pro-Trump influencer Chaya Raichik.

“The only people celebrating the dismantling of the Black Lives Matter Plaza in DC are racist fragile white people,” wrote another.

Let’s see now: racist, check; fragile, check (if you hit me in the face with a brick, do I not bleed?); white, check. Yup, ya got me—guilty as charged, on all counts. NOW what, fuckface?

New category for this sort of thing, inspired by the awesome, blistering Minor Threat song.

Update! For more of the impossibly brilliant DC hardcore of the legendary Minor Threat, check out this complete MT discography on YewToob. All the Minor Threat classics are here: I Don’t Wanna Hear It, Filler, 12XU, Small Man Big Mouth, Bottled Violence, Screaming At A Wall, et al. There really never has been anyone quite like ‘em, I must say.

Gat review

Posted on March 5, 2025March 5, 2025 by Mike

The Smith & Wesson Bodyguard .380, v2.0.

S&W’s Bodyguard 2.0 .380 Pistol – One Tiny Lifesaver!
The new S&W Bodyguard has earned its “2.0” status. To put it bluntly… the original 6-shot Bodyguard .380 left much to be desired. The new 2.0 version fixes what was wrong with its predecessor.

Now as it happens, I own a pre-24 (ie, v1.0) Bodyguard pocket rocket myself (this here one, with built-in Crimson Trace red-dot laser), and that “left much to be desired” remark ain’t no bull—specifically, the flimsy, way oversprung, absurdly long-throw plastic trigger, which rendered the little popgun damned near useless unless you were gonna throw it at an assailant’s head or something.

Happily though, thanks to the fine folks at Shepherd Tactical Supply, the fix for that design flaw was cheap and easy-peasy to avail myself of: an under $30 aluminum, adjustable trigger anodized in red (if I remember right, they had ‘em in plain black and silver-grey also, but once I saw the red I was hooked), which tightened everything up nicely, looks great, and made the cute li’l booger a delight to shoot.

I’d never attempted a trigger swap before, which Big Country cautioned me can be a tricky project if you don’t know what you’re doing. Was there a man dismayed? HA! Forward the Light Brigade!

In the event, the job took me no more than about twenty minutes to complete successfully with ordinary hand tools I had lying around just begging to be useful; it was a snap, no lie. Since the trigger swap, then dialing the Crimson Trace in so’s it no longer pointed up into the sky and off to the left, I’ve run a cpl-three boxes of Hornady Critical Defense through the little beastie out in the backyard—no problems, no issues, no hassles, no complaints.

The STS trigger took the Bodyguard from feeling like a cheap, shoddy kid’s toy to something a lot more like a real pistol should be. Thanks to the trigger upgrade, what had once been a dust-covered, neglected nightstand adornment has become my EDC piece. Nowadays, I never leave home without it.

The Bodyguard kit included a bottom-shelf S&W gun rug and two (2) 6-round magazines: one with the all-important pinkie extension piece on the butt plate, and one without. Take my word for it, the pinkie-rest mag is the way to go; assuming I ever do get my hands on a spare nickel again, I really need to hit Nichols Store not far from my house (FANTASTIC gun/ammo/accessories shop, one of the very best I’ve ever been in) and see about getting another one of ‘em. Then I can toss that shorty, flat-butt PoS into the sock drawer and forget it ever even existed.

Hey, a man can dream, can’t he?

Truckers’ wisdom

Posted on February 28, 2025March 1, 2025 by Mike

Found this over at Bayou Peter’s joint, and it’s mighty intriguing.

Hopefully that’s not too small for older eyes to be able to read; if so, there’s a bigger version at BRM you might try. For his part, Peter modestly admits:

I don’t regularly drive on ice and snow (thank you, Texas weather!), but from my (very) limited exposure to it, I know I don’t do well under those driving conditions. I’d never considered the hazards of commercial vehicles, particularly 18-wheeler truck/trailer combinations, when their drivers have the same problem. Now that drivers can come in from Mexico (where snow isn’t exactly commonplace, to put it mildly) and drive all the way to the US/Canadian border or even further north, I can see that would make for…interesting times on the highway.

“Interesting” in the apocryphal Chinese curse sense, he means.

In my own case, me and several friends of mine took advantage of a snow-day school cancellation when we were teenagers to get out on our high school’s expansive, snow-and-ice-coated parking lot to spin donuts, lock up the brakes and slide, and just generally act like idjits all afternoon, intentionally teaching ourselves how to drive on the slippery stuff. Ever since then, I’ve had no problems driving on anything but actual black ice, which nobody can really drive on anyway, not even experienced, highly-skilled Hollywood stunt drivers.

Update! It occurs to me that some of y’all might be interested to hear more about the truck driver’s trials and tribulations on snow and/or ice, from the perspective of someone who’s been there and done that. When it comes to operating a standard-sized sleeper tractor/53’ trailer rig on snow and ice, it all boils down to one simple word: DON’T. Not if you can possibly avoid it, at any rate. No matter how skilled you are, how well-trained, how experienced, nothing good can ever come of it.

Regardless of how slow, attentive, and careful you are behind the wheel, maintaining control on the slick stuff is a matter not of ability but of sheer, unadulterated luck. That’s it, that really is all there is to it. Tap them gingerly, stomp them (NEVER a good idea, actually), gently press and release over and over again, I never could find a way to keep the brakes from locking up in snowy/icy road conditions. Whereupon the trailer would begin to slooooowly jackknife, and there was not one damned thing you could do to keep it straight and following behind the tractor where it’s supposed to be. Fully loaded or empty, didn’t matter: the trailer had a mind of its own, and did not respond to any of my increasingly-desperate inputs from the cab. I had always figured having some weight behind me would be helpful in such straits, but nope.

There is/was no horror quite as paralyzing as having almost the entire side of my trailer appear in the side-view mirror, freewheeling along willy-nilly without a care in the world. One time, creeping down the mountain-top from Hendersonville pulling a just-unloaded trailer, I looked on in helpless terror as my empty trailer hove into view in the right-side mirror, sweeping majestically around as if it intended to scrub the poor little old man in a mid-sized car I was passing right off the highway and into the deep valley below. Steering and counter-steering like a madman, mildly stab-braking trying to get my rogue trailer back into proper alignment, nothing I tried seemed to have any real effect.

Meanwhile, the old guy was completely unaware of the life-and-death drama unfolding all around him. Somehow, some way, the trailer DID straighten back out again without making contact with the other vehicle, and I continued on down the mountain switchbacks bathed in a flop-sweat as the huge flakes kept falling thickly, intensely grateful for the miraculous sparing of that poor oblivious geezer’s life…THIS time. A bona fide miracle with which I had nothing whatsoever to do, one way or the other.

I still have nightmares about that little misadventure. Which is just jake with me, honestly; coulda been a hell of a lot worse, I know that.

From bad to worse

Posted on February 25, 2025February 25, 2025 by Mike

Stephen Green shares some deeply disturbing news.

I Could Live With the Egg Shortage, but NOT THIS… NOT THIS
We can argue all day and all night over whether the massive poultry cull was necessary or not, but two things are 100% certain. The first is that fewer birds producing fewer eggs gave us yet another massive spike in the price of eggs, typically an affordable and easy-to-prepare protein depended upon by jillions of people. The second is that I just learned of something worse.

Actually, let’s talk about that bird cull for just a moment. I did a little research on that a couple of weeks ago, thinking I might get a column out of it. I gave up on the column because half the reports I read indicated that the bird flu test is subject to false positives and that massive numbers of egg hens were unnecessarily slaughtered. The other half indicated no such problem. So I threw up my hands and abandoned the column.

But on reflection, since the cull was an act of the Biden administration, and since everything it did was either wrongheaded, spiteful, or both, I’m going to ignore half my research and just tell you that it was the wrong call. “I was going to buy eggs, but then escrow fell through” is the fault of the Biden administration, and it didn’t have to be that way.

I feel better now. But we’re both about to feel worse — if, like me, you have a minimum two-cup-a-day coffee habit.

As consumers, we’ve been lucky so far. Coffee, I learned today, is the second-most traded commodity after oil. If you want to know what the planet really runs on, it’s two very different kinds of black liquid, both packed full of energy. What it means for coffee drinkers is that the source and price of the cup you’re sipping right now were locked in months ago, maybe longer. What it also means is that as those futures expire and traders lock the new ones in, higher prices get locked in, too. Maybe much higher. Maybe double.

It’s already happening.

As Stephen goes on to detail, it is indeed—and for some of us, that’s terrifying. Personally, I share our old friend Steve’s view on the matter: eggs I can live without, coffee…ehh, not so much. I never have much enjoyed eggs unless they were scrambled, covered in shredded cheddar, and doused liberally with Tabasco, usually sharing a platter alongside a double order of hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, peppered, and diced at Waffle House during one of those bleary-eyed noontime “breakfast” stops as the band was heading out for the next town.

Denny’s, you ask? Don’t make me laugh.

Ever since eggs went from Source Of All Bad Things Including But Not Limited To Heart Attacks, Climate Change, and Raycissismism to Nature’s Perfect Food practically overnight, I’ve taken to hard-boiling the yucky things (NO runny yolks, not EVER), slicing them in half, and then sprinkling each half with Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning before sending them down the hatch, one per day strictly to keep the doctor away. Go messing around with my beloved Luzianne w/ chicory, though, and me and you gon’ FIGHT.

Just trying to get ahead

Posted on February 24, 2025February 24, 2025 by Mike

Only one real reason I’m running this story at all, and if you haven’t figured it out by the second or third paragraph…well, I just don’t really know what to tell ya about that.

Elon Musk’s ultimatum email to federal workers sets up power struggle in DC, among top Trump officials
Elon Musk is finding himself locked in a power struggle with top Trump administration officials over an out-of-the-blue email blast to federal workers Saturday demanding that they list their professional accomplishments last week — or risk being fired.

Multiple Trump-appointed agency and department heads — including the Department of Defense, State Department and FBI — have instructed their employees to ignore the email despite the billionaire’s public warning that “failure to respond” by 11:59 p.m. Monday “will be taken as a resignation.”

Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has already pushed for sweeping personnel cuts across the government, with the latest move raising concerns that the Tesla CEO intends to make more personnel decisions based on replies to the missive.

“If Elon Musk truly wants to understand what federal workers accomplished over the past week, he should get to know each department and agency, and learn about the jobs he’s trying to cut,” moderate Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-Alaska) griped on X.

“Our public workforce deserves to be treated with dignity and respect for the unheralded jobs they perform. The absurd weekend email to justify their existence wasn’t it.”

Uh huh. Poor put-upon souls, with all those difficult, demanding “unheralded jobs” they for some mysterious reason don’t seem able to describe, delineate, or even speak about in any way, shape, or form. And now, the entirely obvious video embed.

Heh.

Churmany defeats itself…again

Posted on February 24, 2025February 24, 2025 by Mike

In case any of you were laboring under the delusion that Germany will somehow be able to politically right itself and save themselves from—well, themselves, actually, Ace provides this helpful, handy-dandy explainer as to why that simply isn’t so.

The fake “center right” party won the election. They made noises about cracking down on illegal immigration, but, as you can see in the video below the fold, their leader and the next German PM vows that “no one is talking about closing the borders.”

The “far right” party, AfD or Alternative for Germany, came in a strong second at 20%, receiving its highest vote share ever, will have… zero participation in the new government.

That’s because the CDU vowed to not form a government with the “far right” (they’re far right because they oppose unlimited eternal mass migration from the third world) AfD.

The “Center right” party, the Christian Democrat Union or CDU, is the party of Andrea Merkel, whose “Wilkomen” policy of allowing mass migration without even the most basic vetting has plunged Germany into crisis.

Note that they do not have a majority of the seats in Parliament, or the Bund I guess the huns call it, so that means they will have to form an alliance with another party to secure a majority and form a government.

Because the CDU abides by the “cordon sanitaire” or “firewall” policy that all the Euro Regime countries do, refusing to form governments with any party that’s “far right” (again, meaning “against unlimited mass migration from Islamic countries”), that means that this “center right” party will form a coalition government with… either the German Socialist Party and/or the German Green Party, who are themselves big champions of unlimited third-world mass migration.

You might wonder: Why not just start a new party that isn’t “far right” but still opposes open borders?

Well, silly, because any party that opposes open borders is “far right” and subject to the “firewall” policy of excluding closed-border parties.

So the “center right” party will be pursuing a socialist, mass-migration open borders agenda.

But they’ve kept those dirty “far right” voters out of power.

And what happens when the German government collapses again because the “center right” party cannot agree with its socialist and green partners?

Well, we go through the same process again: a government is allowed to govern without a majority, citing an emergency, and they stage another election in which the will of the people will again be thwarted, and the “center-right” party again forms a coalition with the leftwing open borders parties.

How long can this inherently unstable situation persist for?

Right offhand, I’d say it will until all of a sudden…it won’t.

Oversight on purpose

Posted on February 19, 2025 by Mike

Somehow, for some unfathomable reason, the people responsible for the “Official portraits of Presidents and First Ladies since 1965” (no link, because fuck them) made one glaring omission, which (presumably deliberate) omission AoSHQ’s Scampydog helpfully addressed. Ladies and germs, I give you the indisputably loveliest, most stunningly beautiful First Lady not just since 65, but in US history entire.

Melania 2025.

MAN, what a dish! Class, style, looks, brains, breezy self-confidence—whatever Melania doesn’t have we don’t need, and will assuredly never miss. She’s a First Lady all Americans can be proud of, and damned well ought to be. A real headscratcher, innit, how the White House Historical Ass’n couldn’t lay their hands on the above Official Portrait no matter how hard they “tried,” but a lowly blogger-dude somehow managed it.

Pure poetry, plus…ROCKETS!

Posted on February 18, 2025February 18, 2025 by Mike

One of Glenn’s finest, funniest posts EVAR, reproduced below in its entirety (links and all, for once):

HOW’S THAT SPACE PROGRAM COMING ALONG? NASA says ‘City killer’ asteroid now has 3.1% chance of hitting Earth.

Flashback:

O it’s Elon this, an’ Elon that, an’ “Chuck ‘im out, the cad!”;

But it’s “Elon, please, a rocket!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.

When the rocks are lookin’ bad, my boys, the rocks are lookin’ bad,

O it’s “Save us, Mr. Elon!” when the rocks are lookin’ bad.

Heh. Indeed.

The “Health” Racket

Posted on February 16, 2025February 16, 2025 by Mike

I must say I was kinda surprised to read Steyn’s take on all this. It wasn’t quite what I would’ve expected from him, although perhaps I should’ve.

I rejoice in the confirmation of RFK Jr as the US Secretary of Health and Human Services (no thanks to longtime Chinese asset Mitch McConnell). “Make America Healthy Again” is the indispensable component of “Make America Great Again” – because the most obvious sign of what’s gone wrong in the country is to take a walk down any main street. No one would bet the future on a country that has debauched its human capital the way the United States has.

As Bobby Kennedy pointed out on The Mark Steyn Show, Americans are the most medicated people on the planet and are the unhealthiest in the developed world; in particular, as RFK also noted on our show, our children are the world’s most medicated children, and have accelerating rates of childhood obesity, childhood diabetes, childhood heart disease. A grade-school diagnosis of diabetes can take up to two decades off your lifespan.

So what’s the answer? Further enriching Blue Cross-Blue Shield? Americans pay more for health care than anybody else, and have lousier outcomes, starting with the most basic indicator of all – life expectancy: According to the UN, from the Swiss to the Australians, the list of peoples that enjoy an extra half-decade of life over Americans lengthens year on year. In the 2023 UN rankings, the United States comes in at Number Fifty-Five on the life-expectancy Hit Parade; for purposes of comparison, Albania – where the men smoke seventy a day and accessing the health-care system requires swimming to Italy – is at Fifty-Three. By 2022 America’s annual spending on health care was twelve-and-a-half grand per capita; Albania’s was under five hundred bucks – which is less than your co-pay on a Covid anal swab; the word “co-pay” does not exist in Albanian.

Four years ago, we first had RFK Jr on the show mainly because no one else wants to talk about this. If you’re wondering why, it’s because his late friend Roger Ailes, of Fox News, told him that in non-election years three-quarters of Fox’s ad revenue comes from Big Pharma.

Five years ago, the state and the pharmaceutical companies joined forces for an unprecedented experiment on you – to damage almost every aspect of daily life, including even more damage to a generation of children. There has yet to be an accounting for that.

And THAT’s what really stings about this, at least for me. Although admittedly, the only way We The Peepul will ever get an accounting is to r’are up on our hind legs at long, long last and demand one. Not “request” one; not ask politely for one; not hold a referendum and vote on whether or not we’d like to have one at some later, unspecified date; but straight-up remind our “public servants” of their proper place in the grand scheme of things, get ‘em skeered and keep the skeer on ‘em, and inform them in no uncertain terms that there is by God going to be one, or we’re gonna damned well know the reason why not. T’was ever thus, ain’t nothing whatsoever new.

More, and even worserer:

I was also glad to see, in the above clip, RFK trash USAid, which was after all founded by his uncle. As noted earlier this week, it’s now a near parodic example of the racket that the federal government has made of everything it touches. According to the above-mentioned Daily Telegraph, Trump has only been in office for three weeks but he’s already killing grannies:

US aid freeze claims first victims as oxygen supplies cut off

Seventy-one-year-old woman dies after being sent home from USAID funded hospital.

This story is by Sarah Newey, the Telegraph’s “Global Health Security Correspondent” in Bangkok. In my day, the Telegraph didn’t have a “Global Health Security Correspondent” in Bangkok or anywhere else. It’s not funded by USAid, is it?

Oxygen isn’t really that expensive. A member of the Steyn team required it at an event in Colorado a couple of years back. It certainly isn’t that expensive if you’re the “International Rescue Committee” and have revenues of over a billion dollars per annum. Of course, like everyone else on the take from USAid, the International Rescue Committee pisses away a lot of its dough. It pays its president, David Milliband, over a million bucks a year. No, not Ed Milliband, the talentless prat who serves as His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Net Zero. This is his brother, David, the talentless prat who was British Foreign Secretary back in the Gordon Brown era and parlayed that into a seven-figure salary with this IRC racket. As I always say, the “non-profits” are where the big bucks are.

The racket goes on. Uniparty warmonger Victoria Nuland was last heard of on The Mark Steyn Show warning that the zillions of US-funded biolabs in Ukraine could easily fall into Russian hands. Why are American taxpayers outsourcing gain-of-function to Kharkiv and Odessa? Well, they’re world-renowned experts in developing a new strain of monkeypox with fewer homophobic overtones…

The good news is that the all-war-all-the-time queen, who’s even more bloodsoaked than David Milliband, has just been appointed to the board of the “National Endowment for Democracy”. Ms Nuland is an expert in democracy, having ended it in Ukraine. “NED” was founded back in the Eighties, at taxpayer expense, to “export the American way of governance” – so that every nation may enjoy the blessings of paying former foreign parliamentarians a seven-figure salary to kill l’il ol’ ladies.

That’s the point. Whether you’re a Thai gran’ma, a Ukrainian infantryman or a New Hampshire grade-schooler, Nuland-Milliband-Big Pharma government is killing you. I wish RFK and the other Trump 47-iconoclasts all the best.

As should we all, whether we find Trump’s personal swashbuckling, over the top style grating or not.

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