Gangster Government

Occupied America

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Mike

The national character has changed, and not for the better.

Over the last two years in America, I’ve witnessed our own forces of evil with incredulity, despair, and rage. Corruption, blasphemy, and absurdity have been accepted by one-half of the electorate as the cost of doing business; as has the fear this acceptance generates. Does anyone actually believe that men change into women and women into men who can give birth, that the Earth is burning, the seas are rising, and we’ll all perish unless we cover our faces with strips of cotton?

No one does. These proclamations are an act of faith, in a new, as yet unnamed religion, and the vehemence with which one proclaims allegiance to these untruths is an exercise no different from any other ecstatic religious oath. They become the Apostles’ Creed of the left, their proclamation committing the adherent physically to their strictures, exactly as the oath taken on induction to the armed services. The inductee is told to “take one step forward,” and once they do he or she can no longer claim, “I misunderstood the instruction.”

Those currently in power insist on masking, but don’t wear masks. They claim the seas are rising and build mansions on the shore. They abhor the expenditure of fossil fuels and fly exclusively in private jets. And all the while half of the country will not name the disease. Why?

Because the cost of challenging this oppressive orthodoxy has, for them, become too high. Upon a possible awakening, they—or more likely their children—might say that the country was occupied. And they would be right.

Gandhi said to the British, you’ve been a guest in our house for too long, it is time for you to leave. He borrowed the line from Oliver Cromwell, and it’s a good one. The left has occupied the high places for too long, promoting dogma even as the occasions for their complaint have decreased (what position is closed to people of color, or women? Inclusion in all levels of the workforce; preference in higher education, a seat in the cockpit, in the Oval Office, in a movie’s cast, or admission to an elite school+? And yet the vehemence of their protests has increased, progressing into blacklisting and even rioting by those claiming to represent “the oppressed.”

Old-time physicians used to speak of the disease “declaring itself.” History teaches that one omnipresent aspect of a coup is acts of reprisal staged by agents provocateurs of the revolutionaries, and blamed on supporters of the legitimate government. It would be a historical anomaly if we were not to see such between now and the midterm elections.

For the disease has declared itself, and we are not now in a culture war, but a nascent coup, with its usual cast of characters. The Bolshevists could have been defeated by a company of soldiers in the suburbs of Moscow, Hitler stopped at Czechoslovakia, and the current horrors confronted at the Minneapolis police station or a meeting of the San Francisco school board. But those tragedies, and our current tragedies, were not just allowed but encouraged to run their course.

Yet I believe there is hope for reason and self-direction.

As you would expect, America’s Governor, DeSantis the Great, comes in for a mention shortly after that statement. As well he should. Mamet, that most rara of show-biz avii—ie, a recovered Leftist—himself, closes the piece with a question I find chilling:

Now, the disease having proclaimed itself and its dangers having become clear, it is time for us all to overcome the occupation by standing up to those tyrannies under which we are not prepared to live.

Time, and long past time. Just one leeeetle problem. These days, can we say with any confidence that there are ANY tyrannies under which the majority of “Americans” are not fully prepared to live? Because from where I’m sitting, they seem to have made themselves perfectly comfortable with pretty much all of ’em, braying incessantly in boastful praise of their precious “‘Murcafreedom!” while they bend over and spread dem cheeks so as to more easily take the latest high, hard one from their Überstaat ALL the way in.

The article’s subhed says “Brave dissenters willing to defy an oppressive orthodoxy are our country’s best hope,” and I can’t really disagree; such defiance was once part of the bedrock of the American nation, and must be nurtured in the breast of any person who intends to live his life as a free man. But how much hope is left to us, really, when we see less and less of defiance out there, and more of compliance?

Just because a population has convinced itself that surrender might be analogous to a kind of victory when contrasted with the horror, devastation, and death of even the most just and righteous war; that even a peace purchased via accepting the bit of subjugation can still be considered a bargain; that pacifism and nonviolence can still be honorable and noble stances even when there are tyrants, despots, and brutal monsters running amok, unopposed and unrestrained, amongst We The People—these things do NOT mean said population isn’t COMPLETELY FULL OF SHIT just the same. Not by a long yard, they don’t. Kinda the other way around, actually.

One nation, divisible

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Mike

Only a day old, and already this story has been overtaken by events. (the Biden junta, after initially indicating otherwise, has decided to further litigate the earlier decision). No matter though; the way Kruiser slices, dices, and juliennes the Fauxvid panic-ninnies is a thing of beauty nonetheless.

As we have often marveled in the last couple of years, the divisions in this country are clear, deepening, and probably permanent. Trump’s election in 2016 got the ball rolling and the Wuhan Chinese Bat Flu really helped clarify the battle lines in the family feud. I’ve occasionally been wistful for the days when I could hang out with people of all political persuasions and have a good time.

Now the people on the other side freak me right out.

I awoke yesterday morning to some news that I have been waiting for. Paula covered it:

A federal judge in Florida on Monday struck down the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) federal mask mandate for public transportation, granting summary judgment to the Health Freedom Defense Fund Inc., which had challenged the mandate.

U.S. District Judge Kathryn Kimball Mizelle, who was appointed to the bench by former President Donald Trump, ruled that the mandate “exceeded the CDC’s statutory authority, improperly invoked the good cause exception to notice and comment rulemaking, and failed to adequately explain its decisions.” Therefore, Mizelle wrote, “the Court declares unlawful and vacates the Mask Mandate.”

As a result, the judge remanded the mandate back to the CDC for “further proceedings consistent with this order.”

Of course, I’m not the only one who was waiting for the announcement. Sane people everywhere were.

Because we have the whole Two Americas thing going on, however, the news wasn’t met with universal applause.

Stephen then proceeds to present a truly toothsome Tweet of his own devising:

The progressive lust to be controlled by the government is some serious disturbed kink. Pipe down and keep your mask on if you want, femboi, most of us are opting for freedom. https://t.co/0qOSs0FkIq

— SFK (@stephenkruiser) April 18, 2022

Preach, brother, preach. My own answer to the inanely-formulated question so prissily posed by Miss Stern—who should decide whether air passengers must wear masks?—would be as follows, and to wit: Myself, and no damned body else, THAT’S who. But hey, I’m American like that, so you gotta make allowances. And that right there is the point where Meestah Kruiser really gets with it.

There were a lot of diaper-soiling reactions like that from the leftist mask fetish crowd.

It’s a kink with these emotional cripples. They crave being controlled by the government. It’s a turn-on for them. The thought of being left to their own devices terrifies their submissive, masochistic psyches.

From my perspective (which is always the correct one), this is like dealing with people who insist that the crazy person stab them in the eye because it’s more comfortable knowing where the knife is going than dealing with variables. These people are afraid of autonomy and making choices for themselves. Leftists loathe personal responsibility, which is why they leg-hump leaving that kind of thing up to bureaucrats.

There is almost zero science supporting the efficacy of the cloth masks people are wearing on planes. It’s as medically and scientifically sound as burning sage or relying on the judicious petting of one’s lucky kitten. The body of evidence proving these people wrong has been reaching Everestian heights recently. Those clinging to the “masks as Captain America shields” theory are not serious or mentally capable people.

Ixnay on that last, Steve, albeit partially; they’re definitely not mentally capable, right enough, but you better just believe they are one thousand and ten percent serious, as the briefest look at the current state of play in this sorely-beset nation will confirm. Don’t let’s be kidding ourselves that they’re anything but, nor that they aren’t also fully prepared to deal with those of us who have no intention of ever bending the knee to them and their detestable ilk, just as ruthlessly as they feel we need to be dealt with in order to yank us firmly into line with the program of the Reich. Count on it, come to grips with it, stiffen your resolve…and above all else, keep loading those magazines. The time is nigh upon us when a nice, tall stack of preloaded Magpul thirty-rounders is going to come in mighty useful, I think.

“AGAIN”?!?

Posted on April 18, 2022April 18, 2022 by Mike

Peters asks a silly question, which I will be happy to answer anon.

Will You Diaper Up, Again?

Nope, most assuredly not. After all, I didn’t last time, haven’t since then, and if anything have much less faith in the veracity of Official Authority™ (*spit*) NOW than I did THEN…and I had none at all THEN. That being so, and it is, then why in the ever-lovin’ blue-eyed world would I even dream of knuckling under to the same lousy bastards, on the same lousy issue, over the same overhyped, proven-nothingburger of a Scamdemic now, pray tell?

Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice – and the shame’s all mine.

As forced-wearing of the Face Diaper ramps up again, it is more important than ever to absolutely refuse to wear the loathsome things again. Unless you want to relive the past two-plus years again. Unless you want to let the people behind whatever’s left of “Joe Biden” steal another election, again.

Stop fretting the affronted feelings of mentally ill people – just as you would not stop wearing a gun for the sake of assuaging the feelings of those mentally ill people.

It is time to stop caring about the feelings of the mentally ill. Long past time. The time has come to resume caring – passionately – for facts and common sense and common decency. If you’ve already had enough, it is time to say – enough is enough.

Two-plus years ago, they fooled us with “two weeks to stop the spread” and all the rest of their lies.

Will they fool us, again?

Will you help them?

As I said: No, I most certainly will NOT. In fact, I think this time around, the craven Karens soothing their petit neuroses by shielding their wan visages behind a filthy, germ-sodden rag ought to be actively harrassed and ostracized, heckled and hooted at mercilessly until they’re literally too afraid to venture outside their homes at all anymore. Let mobs of jeering, fed-up Normals chase them down the streets or sidewalks, driving them like the bawling cattle they are in heart-racing terror. Let them be pelted brutally with rotten fruits and vegetables—the rank, stinking offal turning their designer outfits and expensive Italian suits into big piles of horribly-overpriced shop rags.

Let any atypically feisty Ken or Karen who, against all odds, scrapes up the wherewithal to show sign of resistance to the mockery and abuse be set upon by every nearby Normal to be beaten, stomped, and smacked around until he/she is bruised, bloody, and barely breathing. Commenter Raider Girl says it:

These freaking masks are going to get somebody shot!

I for one fucking well hope they DO, frankly; it’s a crying shame it didn’t happen back in the very earliest days of this simon-pure horseshit, thereby stopping the whole sorry mess in its fucking tracks. Sad as it is to have to say so, if a few governors, mayors, and certain other über-authoritarian dingleberries had been carted off to Boot Hill suffering from a terminal case of high-calibre lead poisoning THEN, I guar-on-gott-damn-TEE you we wouldn’t be talking about the Mask Of Shame and the sundry accompanying tommyrot NOW. It’s a pluperfect lesson in what always happens when you let some shit slide instead of nipping it in the fucking BUD like you oughta have. The descendants of Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, John Paul Jones, John Hancock, and Nathanael Greene should never have needed to be reminded of that common-sense rule, or so I believe.

“A Handgun Against an Army”

Posted on April 14, 2022April 14, 2022 by Mike

This deathless Mike Vanderboegh essay still pops back up now and again; I’ve linked to it three or four times since it first appeared myself, and almost certainly will again.

A friend of mine owns an instructive piece of history. It is a small, crude pistol [see the image at the top of this post], made out of sheet-metal stampings by the U.S. during World War II. While it fits in the palm of your hand and is a slowly-operated, single-shot arm, its powerful .45 caliber projectile will kill a man with brutal efficiency. With a short, smooth-bore barrel it can reliably kill only at point blank ranges, so its use requires the will (brave or foolhardy) to get in close before firing. It is less a soldier’s weapon than an assassin’s tool. The U.S. manufactured them by the millions during the war, not for our own forces but rather to be air-dropped behind German lines to resistance units in occupied Europe and Asia. They cost exactly two dollars and ten cents to make.

Crude and slow (the fired case had to be knocked out of the breech by means of a little wooden dowel, a fresh round procured from the storage area in the grip and then manually reloaded and cocked. It was so wildly inaccurate it couldn’t hit the broad side of a French barn at 50 meters, but to the Resistance man or woman who had no firearm it still looked pretty darn good.

The theory and practice of it was this: First, you approach a German sentry with your little pistol hidden in your coat pocket and, with Academy-award sincerity, ask him for a light for your cigarette (or the time the train leaves for Paris, or if he wants to buy some non-army-issue food or a half-hour with your “sister”). When he smiles and casts a nervous glance down the street to see where his Sergeant is, you blow his brains out with your first and only shot, then take his rifle and ammunition. Your next few minutes are occupied with “getting out of Dodge,” for such critters generally go around in packs. After that (assuming you evade your late benefactor’s friends) you keep the rifle and hand your little pistol to a fellow Resistance fighter so he can go get his own rifle.

Or, maybe, you then use your rifle to get a submachine gun from the Sergeant when he comes running. Perhaps you get very lucky and pick up a light machine gun, two boxes of ammunition and a haversack of hand grenades. With two of the grenades and the expenditure of a half-a-box of ammunition at a hasty roadblock the next night, you and your friends get a truck full of arms and ammunition. (Some of the cargo is sticky with “Boche” blood, but you don’t mind, not terribly.)

Pretty soon you’ve got the best armed little maquis unit in your part of France, all from that cheap little pistol and the guts to use it. (One wonders if the current political elite’s opposition to so-called “Saturday Night Specials” doesn’t come from some adopted racial memory of previous failed tyrants. For even cheap little pistols are a threat to oppressive regimes.)

They called the pistol the “Liberator.” Not a bad name, all in all.

It’s a perfect name, actually. If you haven’t yet read this important work, be sure you don’t fail to now. One of Mike’s most stirring, poignant passages:

The tyrant must be met at the door when he appears. At your door, or mine, wherever he shows his bloody appetite. He must be met by the pistol which can defeat an army. He must be met at every door, for in truth we outnumber him and his henchmen.

It matters not whether they call themselves Communists or Nazis or something else. It matters not what flag they fly, nor what uniform they wear. It matters not what excuses they give for stealing your liberty, your property or your life. “By their works ye shall know them.” The time is late. Those who once had trouble reading the hour on their watches have no trouble seeing by the glare of the fire at Waco. Few of us realized at the time that the Constitution was burning right along with the Davidians.

Now we know better.

We have had the advantage of that horrible illumination for more than fifteen years now — fifteen years in which the rule of law and the battered old parchment of our beloved Constitution have been smashed, shredded and besmirched by the Clintonistas. In this process they have been aided and abetted by the cowardly incompetence and venal avarice of the Republican party. They have forgotten Daniel Webster’s warning: “Miracles do not cluster. Hold on to the Constitution of the United States of America and the Republic for which it stands — what has happened once in six thousand years may never happen again. Hold on to your Constitution, for if the American Constitution shall fail there will be anarchy throughout the world.”

Stirring, yes, although perhaps not in precisely the same way as when it was first published on Vanderboegh’s old site, Sipsey Street Irregulars, so many years ago; there’s a certain bitter flavor to it now as well, as we’ve been content to just sit idly back and watch so very much of what Mike warned us about come to pass, washing over us like the most dismal of tides. One final excerpt:

As a Christian, I cannot fear my own death, but rather I am commanded by my God to live in such a way as to make my death a homecoming. That this makes me incomprehensible and threatening to those who wish to be my masters is something I can do little about. I would suggest to them that they not poke their godless, tyrannical noses down my alley. As the coiled rattlesnake flag of the Revolution bluntly stated: “Don’t Tread on Me!” Or, as our state motto here in Alabama declares: “We Dare Defend Our Rights.”

But can a handgun defeat an army? Yes. It remains to be seen whether the struggle of our generation against the tyrants of our day in the first decade of the 21st Century will bring a restoration of liberty and the rule of law or a dark and bloody descent into chaos and slavery.

If it is to be the former, I will meet you at the new Yorktown.

If it is to be the latter, I will meet you at Masada.

But I will not be a slave.

Mike Vanderboegh died on his feet and not his knees—something that, as America That Was slips deeper into darkness and our time drip-drip-drips away, becomes more and more difficult to do. He was a skilled writer, and a passionate advocate for his nation, its proud history, and its Constitution. He was also a for-real, genuine Warrior, in all the best senses of the word. He left behind a mighty legacy for True Patriots and Freemen to profit from.

May you forever be at peace, my friend, bless your valiant soul.

(Via WRSA)

Trust them not

Posted on April 14, 2022April 14, 2022 by Mike

For they are unworthy of such—faithless, manipulative, and bereft of moral rectitude.

Over the years, this humble blog has railed against the flood of lies discharged by our woke masters in government, and in the media, both legacy and new. It has become something of an obsession with your humble blogger; at the risk of becoming a one-note Johnny bore, I shall continue to rail.

Sorry, but, hey, it’s free of charge.

Our masters tell us so many lies that it proves difficult to pick one, or two, or three, or…whatever, to discuss. I will give it a try.

As you can see from my writings over the years on Putin and Russia, I have not become a Putin Puppet. In my view, however, Putin’s Moscow ranks as a second- or even third-tier threat to the US and the West; it certainly comes well behind the number two threat Beijing, and WELL BEHIND, far, far behind, the number one threat to our civilization, the Wokesters within our societies busily destroying our institutions and the underpinnings of our national identity and culture.
Amen to that.

None of us, outside of the top-most circles of Ukraine and Russia, has any good idea of events in the Ukraine-Russia war. What we, John Q. Public, know know proves very basic, VERY basic, indeed.

We know Russia has invaded Ukraine. We think we know that the invasion did not seem well-planned or executed. We know that this invasion, as true with any other of which I can think, has caused suffering and death to the people invaded, and, yes, by the way, I include in my list of invasions that transpiring along our own southern border. In the Ukraine case, we simply don’t know how much suffering and death; we must take the media’s “massacre” accounts with a fistful of salt. Look. Face it. It’s Russia; it’s Ukraine; it’s Eastern Europe. History shows that warfare there, though, of course, not there only, does not adhere to the Marquess of Queensberry Rules, much less to the Geneva Convention. I have no trouble believing, knowing (?), that innocent civilians or surrendering soldiers can and do face harsh treatment and even death at the hands of that day’s victors–and that the next day’s victors will reciprocate. I have no problem knowing that Russians and Ukrainians can act in a brutal fashion. Read about the two world wars, the Russian civil war, the Soviet wars with Poland and Finland, the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia, etc., and you can easily imagine brutality on the fields of battle and in the cities of that region. The Katyn Forrest massacre comes readily to mind.

On Ukraine, my big problem, and I assume (Right? Wrong?) that of many others, arises from the lack of objective reporting; the reports, for example, on Russian atrocities in Ukraine seem much like those in British, French, and American newspapers of German atrocities in Belgium during WWI. Just a little too convenient. The narrative from Ukraine appears calculated, edited, censored, and massaged to cause maximum outrage in the audience, and, of course, heighten US and international support for involvement in this war. This narrative looks like, well, a narrative, rarely a good thing.

I don’t like this manipulation, especially given the record of those doing it. We, for example, have a “leadership,” illegitimately occupying the White House, which has not come clean about the corrupt Biden family’s ties to Ukraine and China. We have a media, old and new, yet to apologize for its lies re Trump-Putin collusion, quid-pro-quo, Hunter’s laptop, Rittenhouse, January 6, the grifters of BLM, Kavenaugh, Covid-19, climate change, the 2020 elections, and on, and on, and on. I generally don’t believe what comes from these liars who wish ill on Western Civilization, and work to destroy it.

Nor should you, nor should any of us. No impartial, reasonably intelligent American who didn’t spend the last five-six years fathoms deep in Rip Van Winkle-like slumber could possibly be taken in by the utter nonsense we have shoveled at us all day, every day. Bad enough that our mass media has proven beyond all doubt that it can no longer be relied upon for honest, factual journalism; what moves the needle of our current situation from Unpleasant all the way into the Dangerous red zone is that the deceivers, multitudes of them, are also embedded at every level of government, rendering that wholly untrustworthy as well. Which leaves out entirely the GloboHomoCorp megaplex, consisting of pretty much every American business enterprise not owned and operated by the Ma and Pa Kettle types who first started the thing. Add it all up and what you end up with is big-D Danger well beyond the merely ordinary variety—Danger so extreme humanity has only rarely seen the like of it.

Diplomad closes his post thusly: Why trust anything these people say? Why indeed. In truth, none but an irredeemable fool would. Or could. Or, y’know, should. And that’s a big, big problem, for all of us.

A government so quick to deceive its own people—whose first impulse is never to come clean but to lie, obfuscate or conceal—is a government that’s well into the death throes, whether or not it’s aware of it. Such a government will not, can not, survive for much longer, for reasons that aren’t terribly difficult to discern. For one thing, the people will quickly come to regard it, its officers, and all its works with unbridled contempt. As government scrambles ever more frantically to exert ever more authority over its ever more casually scornful and restive subjects, ever more of those subjects will just ignore it to the greatest extent they possibly can: sidestepping whatever of its edicts and decrees is practicable, complying only grudgingly with those they can’t evade. None of these ratios—the gradual crumbling of governmental integrity, the number of people aware of it, the slow-burn radicalization from “mass dissatisfaction” to “mass resistance” to “mass civil disorder”—are static; all will only increase, until the government falls.

As a deceitful government’s “elected” officials, appointees, and hirelings try to wield ever greater authority over the peasantry, the government will ironically find that very authority trickling through its fingers and away like a fistful of water. The more fiercely the tyrant struggles to maintain his grip on power, the more speedily power will be lost to him. Such displays of government’s haplessness and ineffectuality will only heighten the people’s contempt—another deadly irony that portends the awful fate stalking the reeling, tottering system like a jungle predator does a field mouse.

A like irony attends the untrustworthy government’s attempts to hide its affairs and intentions from Da Peepul: the more corruption they try to conceal, the more they wind up revealing instead. A policy of openness and full disclosure, or at least as full as can reasonably be expected these days without exposing legitimate state secrets to the squinty scrutiny of foreign adversaries, would serve both the government and its people far better. Unfortunately, the deceitful government can’t see this, and its subjects no longer expect it, assuming they ever did.

Breaking faith with its people is a self-inflicted injury that, as the crisis spirals out of all control, will eventually reach a stage beyond which a government’s collapse can no longer be forestalled. Collapse and ruin are the ineluctable byproducts of societal depravity, decay, and dissipation, hastened along by narcissism and selfishness. All the factors feed off of one another, each helping to accelerate and intensify the rest. It’s difficult at best to determine from the inside how far one’s country has traveled along the path to destruction. One can only try to ride the whole process out, and hope he’ll survive the trip.

They’re baaaack!!!

Posted on April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 by Mike

Told ya so.

Philadelphia Reinstating Indoor Mask Mandate After Moving Into Level 2 Of 4-Tiered COVID-19 Response System
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) — Philadelphia has become the first major U.S. city to reimpose an indoor mask mandate. The city said Monday it’s reached the Level 2: Mask Precautions stage of its four-tiered COVID-19 response system, and that it will reimpose the mask mandate on April 18.
Health Commissioner Dr. Cheryl Bettigole said the city will provide businesses with a one-week educational period before the mandate goes back into effect.

“We hope by having folks whenever they’re in public, indoor spaces we can get ahead of the wave and keep it from reaching a peak like we saw in January with the omicron variant,” Bettigole said. “If we can do that, we can literally save the lives of vulnerable Philadelphians. At this level of transmission, we do not believe that there is any reason to panic or enjoy any activities that we enjoy and are important to use. Our city remains open.”

Gee, things must be pretty damned bad in Philly, with the hospitals filling up again, corpses lying in the streets, and all that, right?

RIGHT?!?

Under the city’s four-tiered system, to qualify for the Level 2: Mask Precautions stage, the average new daily case levels must be under 225, hospitalizations under 100 and cases up more than 50% over the previous 10 days.

The city on Monday reported 142 new cases per day, which is more than 50% higher than 10 days ago, Bettigole said.

Remember, now, that Expert Medical Professionals™ have changed what the word “cases” means, from the old and passé “actually getting sick enough to see a doctor” to the much more helpful “has antibodies in their system.” Still, though, there would HAVE to be a valid reason to extend Mask Kabuki’s run into what, a third blockbuster season, right?

RIGHT?!?

Bettigole said the number of people hospitalized with COVID-19 remains low, at 46 people.

Oh. Hrm. Well, okay then. NotTheBee’s Joel Abbott nutshells it:

Yes, the 1.6 MILLION residents of Philly are being held hostage by 46 people hospitalized with Covid.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. At the beginning of his post, Abbott flatly states The only way this ends is if we stop listening. Sadly, at this late date I’m not sure even a truly massive show of defiance would do the trick. To get these miserable, contemptible pussyfarts out from underfoot for good is going to require some shooting, it appears.

Meanwhile, others who live and work in the city say they don’t mind having to put a mask back on.

“It should be mandatory, at least in the buildings,” said Aimerey Beisembay, of University City.

As COVID-19 cases rise, some people are glad to have an indoor mask requirement coming back to the city.

“Because not everyone got their boosters,” Mia Gabdilova, of University City, said.

The new mandate doesn’t change the mask policy at Terrace Street Bakery & Cafe in Roxborough.

“We’ve never stopped,” manager Faith Brachelli said.

The manager says the bakery has kept its mask mandate for almost two years, which many customers appreciate.

“They just feel comfortable that everybody has to wear masks,” Brachelli said. “We wear masks. Everybody wears a mask until they sit down.”

Where they sit enshrouded in their own personal cloud of Smug, secure in the knowledge that having shown up at the restaurant, walked inside, and being shown to their table swaddled in an unsanitary bacteria-trap will have intimidated THEVIRUSTHEVIRUSTHEVIRUS!!! into staying well away from them, I suppose. Fucking morons.

The city says inspectors will begin going out to enforce the mandate beginning on Monday.

Yep, lots and lots and LOTS of shooting.

“With some luck, Ukraine will cease to be a threat to world peace”

Posted on April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 by Mike

Might there be a happy ending to the Ukraine distraction, against all odds?

The operation will probably end this month. My guess is that Mr. Zelensky will be allowed to remain president of what remains on the map, minus Donbas and the region along the Black Sea coast from Mariupol to Odessa. Mr. Zelensky will not have a functioning military to make trouble with. Other patches of Western Ukraine may be distributed among Poland, Moldova, Romania, and Hungary, leaving a large rump of Ukraine between Lvov and the Dnieper River devoted mostly to the growing of wheat. A stable, agricultural Ukraine will be a benefit to a hungry world, while it will no longer be in a position to launch hostilities or be of much use as a money-laundering facility. In short, with some luck, Ukraine will cease to be a threat to world peace.

Ukraine may have been “Joe Biden’s” last opportunity to screw things up on the world scene. As the military conflict resolves, Ukraine can’t be used by the White House as a shield to divert America’s attention from the political cancer of Biden family corruption, and the systemic illness of the nation’s institutions. Merrick Garland may not be able to contain the open case against Hunter Biden to mere rinky-dink tax violations — and if he tries to limit the US Attorneys in charge of the case, he will be setting himself up for an obstruction of justice rap some months from now. The laptop is out now, too many people have copies of the hard drive, and some are working diligently to make the mess of it more easily searchable. So, expect much more to come.

It won’t be easy for the Democratic Party to get rid of “Joe Biden.” Nobody can feature Kamala Harris in the oval office, and were she to somehow gracefully remove herself from the scene, next-in-line would be Nancy Pelosi who, in addition to being long-in-the-tooth, seems to be literally drunk half the time in her public appearances. And behind her: Patrick Leahy, Senate President Pro Tem, who is nearly as senile and incoherent as “Joe Biden.”

Lots of other spooky things are churning meanwhile in the zeitgeist. Overnight, with his blundering sanctions, “Joe Biden” killed the little credibility left in the shreds of Bretton Woods and gave a green light for Russia to start a world-wide move to gold-backed currencies. That could easily turn the current US dollar inflation from an annualized 8 percent to a runaway hyperinflation, where prices double in weeks or days. It’s becoming ever clearer that special counsel John Durham means business and many a swamp creature must be quivering in its burrow awaiting indictment. The controversy over the 2020 election will prove to be not as over as many have hoped and imagined. And we await developments on the after-effects of all those vaxxes and boosters carried out all over Western Civ. These dangerous currents amount to a huge riptide in global events that will carry many people and whole societies out to sea.

Poor Bill Kuenstler, still desperately flailing away at those Durham’s a-comin’!!/2020 election drums of his, blissfully unaware that the heads are busted all to tatters and flinders, the rims are out of round and rusted, and the cracks in the shells are getting bigger and bigger. A passage from the “abolish the FBI” piece I excerpted earlier this evening handily deflates any hopeful gasbaggery about what Durham is or is not liable to do.

According to a well-documented OIG report, (former FBI Deputy Director Andrew) McCabe repeatedly lied about leaking information during the 2016 presidential campaign in order to somehow deflect charges that he was in the tank for Hillary Cllinton. After months of stalling and obstruction, the Justice Department (not the FBI) finally fired McCabe just in time to slightly impact his retirement benefits. But the Democratic-aligned attorneys at the Department of Justice soon restored these retirement benefits and paid him a generous $200,000 in back pay…

(former FBI attorney Kevin) Clinesmith, likewise, insisted he falsified evidence for the FISA court with the full knowledge and participation of his superiors. He didn’t name names and thus far, Clinesmith is the only FBI employee to take the fall for the deception. He received no jail time and had his law license reinstated after just a short suspension. One would normally expect an attorney who falsified evidence for the purpose of deceiving a court to be disbarred. The Clinesmith case is particularly disturbing because it involves defrauding the court to spy on Carter Page, who was a political campaign figure.

Annnnd that’s the sum total produced by Durham’s “investigation” to date: reinstatement of his retirement package plus a cool 200k “back pay” bonus for McCabe; a brief suspension of his license, no jail or even disbarment for Clinesmith. You’ll forgive me if I don’t consider this cause for undue optimism in re: Durham going forward, I hope. I mean, it’s possible his slow-burn fiddle-fucking around might not mean all that much, and Durham could easily stun all observers and come roaring out of virtual hibernation to start slinging the subpoenas, the arrest warrants, and the perp walks around before lunch tomorrow. I wouldn’t be willing to bet so much as a plugged nickel on it, though.

As the frog boils

Posted on April 12, 2022April 12, 2022 by Mike

Government of the People, by the People, and for the People has now perished from this Earth, to be replaced by government by Imperial Decree.

BIDEN BYPASSES CONGRESS & CONSTITUTION – ISSUES NEW GUN CONTROL DICTATE WITH COMPLETE DISREGARD FOR 2ND AMENDMENT
On Monday, the White House announced a new crack down on American’s Second Amendment rights — entirely bypassing Congress — and ruling by executive decree instead. The new rule attacks individuals who build their own firearms at home.

In response to Biden’s new dictate, Congressman Thomas Massie of Kentucky lambasted the president’s decision to bypass Congress and attack one of the key components of the Second Amendment.

The Constitution does not authorize the federal government to prevent you from making your own firearm. This a fact that has been recognized for 200+ years. Also, Article 1, Section 1 (literally the first operative sentence in the Constitution) says Congress makes law, not POTUS!

According to the new dictate, “this final rule bans the business of manufacturing the most accessible ghost guns, such as unserialized “buy build shoot” kits that individuals can buy online or at a store without a background check and can readily assemble into a working firearm in as little as 30 minutes with equipment they have at home.”

The rule also dictates that gun stores can no longer destroy their records after 20 years. These stores must turn over lists to the ATF of every gun purchased at their store so the ATF can maintain a running database of American gun owners.

Second, the final rule requires federally licensed firearms dealers to retain key records until they shut down their business or licensed activity. At that time, these dealers must transfer the records to ATF, just as they are currently required to do at the end of licensed activity. Previously, these dealers were permitted to destroy most records after 20 years, making it harder for law enforcement to trace firearms found at crime scenes.

It is unclear how this administration will treat the millions of gun owners who currently have these custom firearms in their homes.

Think so? Because it sure seems obvious enough to me.

This blatantly unlawful arrogation of power by whoever has his hand up Biden’s shirt making his mouth move serves to underscore what I always say: If you have to apply to government for a license or permit in order to exercise some putative “right” or other, it isn’t a right at all; by definition, it is a privilege.

Burn it down

Posted on April 11, 2022April 11, 2022 by Mike

I’ve called a bajillion and three times for the FBI to be dismantled root, branch, and bough, but never thought of this particular angle before.

Abolish the FBI or Face an American Putin

Hm. Interesting notion, I must say. I also have to say that, if the American Pooty-poot remained consistent with Roosha’s version—by which I mean he was equally devoted to advancing his country’s interests, to increasing its influence, wealth, and power by any and every means, bar none—well, it would be such a refreshing change of pace compared to what the Shadow Men yanking Biden’s strings and making his mouth move have been doing right along, I could probably live with it.

Vladimir Putin, not unlike our current FBI Director Christopher Wray, got his start as a “reformer” known for mouthing reform slogans to parry public outrage over the many abuses of the national police organization. Like Putin, Wray has used the smokescreen of cosmetic reforms to amass great power at the expense of the democratic process he is supposed to protect. The FBI has proven over and over again to be totally immune to reform. It consistently fails to punish employees for violating the rules, so changing those rules has no effect.

The existence of the FBI has had no effect on the crime wave plaguing America. Contrary to the many dramatized depictions of the FBI, the Bureau solves an insignificant minority of crimes in America.

The FBI is more than a dysfunctional agency. If it merely failed to fulfill its mandate, it might be a tolerable nuisance. Instead, the FBI has proven to be the single greatest threat to the very Constitution it is supposed to serve and protect. Its domestic spying program and its network of unaccountable informants lead to few bonafide criminal cases but many wholesale violations of constitutional principles.

The FBI is and will forever remain exactly what it’s been since J Edgar’s day: a rogue, unmanageable menace to absolutely everything the Founders intended and hoped for America to become. As the author contends, it cannot be reformed. It can only be submitted to…or destroyed utterly. As with so many other of the perplexing issues that confront us today, it really is that simple; one or the other, there is no third way here.

The Black Gate opens

Posted on April 7, 2022April 7, 2022 by Mike

As our esteemed compatriot JJ says, the flinging wide of the Morannon to free political prisoner Michael Martin is most welcome news no matter how cynical or distrustful of authority you might be. Nonetheless, we’d all do well to keep certain inconvenient truths firmly in mind going forward:

— Not one single protester/rally goer who was unlucky enough to have entered the Capitol Building was armed. Ergo by definition, they could not and cannot be construed as having an intent to riot, let alone overthrow the government with their bare hands or buffalo helmets.

— As we have known almost since day one, the protesters inside the Capitol Building—as has now been proven in a court of law—were allowed in by Capitol Police who, after unlocking the doors lectured those they were about to let in to behave, as if they were talking to a group on a guided tour.

— The only acts of vandalism and violence that occurred were committed by a) known BLM and Antifa plants and confederates dressed in MAGA gear, such as this John Sullivan character, who were loudly exhorting the crowd to riot or b) uniformed Capitol Police officers and undercover FBI/DOJ “glowies” resulting in the death of innocent, non-violent and unarmed protesters including Ashli Babbitr and Roseanne Boyland. The death of officer Brian Sicknick was not because a “MAGA insurrectionist” bashed him on the head with a fire extinguisher but because of a heart attack not induced by any physical contact with anyone. Whatever injuries may or may not have been sustained by law enforcement and other security forces were because of unarmed innocent people defending themselves from winding up like Babbitt and Boyland.

— The actual “Stop the Steal” protest rally which featured President Trump and other notable politicians and pundits was legal, peaceful and taking place many blocks away from the government-caused mayhem at the Capitol. Yet the rally itself, and its purpose which, again was peaceful and legal, is being painted as the worst attack on “our precious democracy” (*vomit) than the Civil War, Pearl Harbor and 9/11 combined.

The scores of flagrantly contra-constitutional arrests and indefinite detention-without-charges in connection with the J6 “riots”—which we’re constantly reminded by the usual suspects was a heinous crime of “deadly violence” perpetrated by bloody-minded “insurrectionists” determined to “undermine our Sacred Democracy”—were all comfirmation enough that Real Americans shouldn’t forget to bring the guns along for their next DC get-together, if any. But this acquittal—by a judge appointed by Trump, natch—has me mulling over a leeeetle detail.

Martin, a former government contractor from New Mexico, told US District Court Judge Trevor McFadden he thought police had waved him into the building and didn’t know he was breaking the law when he entered.

Based on video from the scene, McFadden said Martin’s claim was “plausible” and that prosecutors failed to prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt.

“People were streaming by and the officers made no attempt to stop the people,” the judge said.

Curious, no? This has been the testimony of more than a few other of those currently languishing in durance vile as modern refuseniks in the Amerikan Gulag, and there’s plenty of video evidence that backs them up, too. But the part that has me thinking I put in boldfaced above, which raises a crucial question: Were those Capital Stasi goons holding the doors open and waving the protesters inside simply reacting without thought or instruction, merely reflexively responding as they would on any other workday, to any other non-threatening gaggle of tourists or meandering day-trippers?

Or, as seems MUCH more likely, were they acting under orders—orders which were part of a larger plan to turn those non-violent, peaceful, and unarmed Americans into useful tools for TPTB to take firmly in hand and use as grist for the Deep State propaganda mill—grinding out “credible threats,” wild-eyed fanatics and revolutionaries for normal people to clutch the proverbial pearls over? By making a passel of hapless Joe Lunchbuckets into Big Scary Monsters™ to keep the rest of the nation frightened out of its collective wits (if any) after an endless summer of state-endorsed BLM/pAntiFa rioting, looting, and burning, plus the state-fomented Fauxvid subterfuge—our hidden masters showed how completely they grasp the Bedford Forrest maxim which says, “get ’em skeered and keep the skeer on ’em” I’ve quoted so many times before here.

When Swamp creatures need to gin up a threat to cow the weak, deceive the gullible, and advance the agenda, nothing does the trick like spreading some more FUD around. It’s easy, it’s painless, and, once they’d gotten the great majority of us saddle-broke and trained to the bit, it has never failed them yet.

Update! Snitches get stitches. Or damned well ought to, at least. Otherwise, you just end up with more snitches, and you don’t want to be encouraging that.

American Stasi: ‘Citizen Sleuths’ Are Ratting Out Jan. 6 Protestors Who Haven’t Been Arrested
The Left’s phony Jan. 6 “insurrection” witch hunt isn’t going to die down anytime soon. The Democrats still hope to use it to stigmatize and marginalize virtually all of their opposition as “insurrectionists” that all decent lovers of “our democracy” (that is, the Left’s hegemony) should shun. And although it is now almost a year and a half since the Terrible Event That Was Worse Than 9/11 and Pearl Harbor, there are more Jan. 6 prosecutions all the time, thanks to “citizen sleuths” who are ratting out protestors who were at the Capitol on the fateful day.

There are so many snitches that the system is being overwhelmed. NBC News reported Wednesday that “aided by citizen sleuths who keep identifying Jan. 6 rioters, the Justice Department is finding that it has more cases than lawyers to prosecute them.” Accordingly, “the Justice Department is asking Congress for additional funds to prosecute those cases — a list that keeps growing.” It’s growing because “multiple online sleuths in a network of ‘Sedition Hunters’ working’ to find Jan. 6 participants have told NBC News that they’ve successfully identified to the FBI hundreds of additional Jan. 6 rioters — including dozens who are pictured on the FBI’s Capitol Violence website.” And the feds, of course, are only too eager to act upon the information these rats feed them.

One snitch said nobly that he had plenty more work to do: “There are hundreds still to go,” he said, “speaking anonymously to avoid retaliation from supporters of the rioters.” Yeah, you know, he doesn’t want trouble from those dangerous traitors who were going to overthrow the government led by a few grandmothers and a guy with Viking horns. But however ridiculous it is, the narrative must be perpetuated, and so the “sleuth” remains anonymous.

There isn’t enough blue language in the Milky Way galaxy to express how completely this sewage-slurping shitweasel disgusts me—him, and all others like him. Sad to say, such vermin have plagued their betters since Lucy first stood erect, and probably always will. Still, I hope some stouter soul, possessed of a more finely-tuned sense of propriety and acceptable behavior, soon does mankind a solid by putting a bullet through this execrable coward’s head from a long ways off, bursting it like an overripe melon dropped from a 25th-floor window onto a city sidewalk in a July heatwave, thankfully erasing a malign influence from the gene pool forever.

Rats are close relations with their like-minded kindred, the Karens and Kens of recent notoriety. But the family tree of these loathsome arthropods is actually a lot older and deeper-rooted than their kissing-cousins relationship might suggest, to the shame of all humanity.

This “citizen sleuth” is a hallmark of totalitarian regimes. In the Soviet Union, anyone could be an ear for the state: your friends, your neighbors, even your own children. The rewards were great for those who turned in “enemies of the state,” and amid the omnipresence of the totalitarian state apparatus, no one was safe. In Communist East Germany, 2.5% of the population acted as informants for the Stasi, the brutal and repressive Ministry for State Security, and some estimate that one in every three people gave information to the Stasi at some point.

In September 1932, a thirteen-year-old boy, Pavlik Morozov, was found murdered in a Siberian forest; it turned out that he had denounced his father to the secret police, and authorities claimed that his own relatives had killed him. He was hailed as a hero of the Soviet Union. Before Pavlik was killed, he appeared at the trial of his father, Trofim Morozov, who called out to his son in the courtroom: “It’s me, your father!” Pavlik told the judge: “Yes; he used to be my father, but I no longer consider him my father. I am not acting as a son, but as a Pioneer,” that is, a member of the Soviet youth brigade.

Watch for the “citizen sleuths” to become heroes of the new woke order the Left is trying to build if they succeed. Maybe we’ll see statues of some of these slouching Internet nerds replacing the statues of Washington and Jefferson that Antifa and its allies have pulled down. Every civilization, even the most degenerate one, has its heroes.

Any civilization that makes heroes of its squealers, its cowards, and its rumpswabs and ass-lickers is indeed a degenerate one, and will collapse a lot sooner than later. As is only meet and just; its lapse into extremities of blasphemy, debauchery, and obssessive self-indulgence might provide some highful useful instruction to succeeding civilizations, should they be wise enough to pay attention to the lesson they offer.

Winning ways

Posted on April 7, 2022April 7, 2022 by Mike

The great Ron DeSantis stays on the offensive.

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced on Wednesday that he would send the illegal immigrants dumped by Biden’s administration in Florida to Biden’s home state of Delaware.

Governor DeSantis vowed to transfer the illegal immigrants to sanctuary states like Delaware, saying they now have the funding for rerouting.

It can be recalled that DeSantis introduced a proposal last December to add $8 million to the state’s budget in order to send those illegals out of the Sunshine State and into Democrat areas such as Marthas Vineyard and Biden’s home state of Delaware.

“If businesses or contractors are dumping people who are illegal into Florida from Southern Texas, you know, we’re going to go after their ability to do business in Florida,” Gov. DeSantis said Wednesday after he signed the No Patient Left Alone Act into law in Naples, Florida.

“If Biden is dumping people, which he has dumped people, they fly them in at 2 in the morning. They haven’t done it lately, but they did it many months ago. We now have money where we can reroute them to sanctuary states like Delaware. And we’re going to do that, to make sure we’re keeping people safe here.” DeSantis asserted.

On the same day, Texas Governor Greg Abbott also announced he would begin to use up to 900 charter buses or “as many as needed” to send illegal immigrants to Washington, D.C., as part of his strategy for the overwhelming influx of illegal immigrants.

“We are sending them to the United States Capitol, where the Biden administration will be able to more immediately address the needs of the people that they are allowing to come across our border,” Gov. Abbott continued.

Be sure to dump some of ’em onto the White House lawn, too, so’s ALL the architects of the forced repopulation of the US can fully enjoy the fruits of their efforts. More like this, please, just as fast as it can be done. Keep THEM on the ropes, their hands effectively tied as they wonder and worry where the next blow might be coming from. In the wise words of the Wizard of the Saddle: Get ’em skeered and keep the skeer on ’em.

Evil Empire redux

Posted on April 6, 2022April 6, 2022 by Mike

Jack Maxey, the first person to receive a copy of the Hunter Biden latop’s hard drive from Giuliani, has been the center of some extremely shady goings-on of late.

According to Maxey, despite articles written about potential financial crimes associated with documents in the laptop, which he states are the most minimal of the unlawful evidence contained within it, there is no official record in the justice department of the FBI handling of the laptop, because the intent of the U.S. government was to hide the material.

Support for Maxey’s claim of the U.S. government taking action to cover up the laptop material, is found in the example of him uploading specific searchable database files of the material into drop boxes in international file saving sites. However, as shared by the Daily Mail, “after about an hour, the links were taken down.”

(Daily Mail) […] Maxey said he believes the US government was hunting down files from the laptop posted online and flagged them to the companies.

‘There were five drop boxes: two in the United States, one in New Zealand, two in the UK. All the same drop boxes in which they tell us child pornography is shared around the globe without any consequence because they can’t look at it.

‘These are all Five Eyes countries, English speaking countries in an intelligence sharing agreement. And they were all ripped down.

‘So this means that our intelligence services, who still have not even acknowledged that they have Hunter Biden’s laptop, were obviously diligently doing cache searches across the internet to find out if any of this stuff was being released.

In addition to the Five Eyes intelligence scrubbing files from internet databases, Maxey claims he gave the material to the United States Senate, yet they did nothing with it. Maxey claims he gave the same material to several news outlets, yet they also did nothing with it.

It was not until Maxey went to Switzerland, and involved authorities who would not participate in a global effort to hide corruption, that U.S. media and U.S. law enforcement began to admit the material was credible, factual and damaging to the Biden family.

In essence, if Maxey had not used the resources in Switzerland, the information from the laptop would still be kept away from discovery. Ironically, Maxey went to Switzerland in part because that was the location of the only drop box not removed, and in part because he was told his life was in danger if he remained in the United States.

I would hope that last would be taken as read by now, by anybody who’s been even halfway paying attention the last several years. Thankfully, Maxey himself seems to be awake to the mortal peril he’s in, and is actively taking measures to protect himself against the threat posed to him by his own goddamned government.

Unreal

Posted on April 6, 2022April 6, 2022 by Mike

This is fine.

Now, some booming economy deniers, Russian bots or anti-vaxxers will doubtless point to all the “evidence” that the US economy is not booming.

They’ll probably point out that inflation is at a 40 year high, and likely to keep on rising.

That the current price of gas is the highest ever in US history.

That the US is expected to enter a recession by the end of the year.

Several more cheery items full of optimism, hope, and positive waves follow before we get to the root of most, if not all, of or problems.

…that’s enough sarcasm for now. It’s time to circle back to reality, because that is what’s missing here.

Reality.

People cannot afford gas or heat or food or rent. The price of everything is increasing even as wages lag behind inflation. Everywhere you shop you buy less and spend more.

If all of that can be translated into “booming”, then “the economy” itself becomes a nonsense concept so abstract and removed from real-life experience that it is either entirely fictional or completely irrelevant.

We just lived through a fake pandemic. We know we have rigged elections. “The economy” is apparently meaningless.

How much of what we see and hear in the mass media has any grounding in reality at all? We know it’s not 100%, and it could easily be as little as none.

Whatever the unreality quotient is, I think it’s safe to say that it’s one HELL of a lot closer to the latter figure than the first one. And that’s just for Establishment Media; the Left is well into the negative numbers by now, actively sucking the very fabric of reality into its own nothingness like a black hole.

Though it’s gonna be a tough thing to do, I’ll lay off the excerpting here. Dark as it is, this one is absolutely a Do. Not. MISS. Hie thyselves thither and partake of it, gang, for it is damned good. Bottom line:

It’s not accidental, it’s not a by-product of “the system”, it’s not the inevitable fallout of capitalism – it is directed, deliberate and malign. They are trying to make you poor, they said so.

They want you to suffer. They want you to be cold and hungry and not to mind, or even know.

They want you sitting in your rented one-room flat, shivering under fifty layers of rented clothes, sipping your rented cup of GMO-cabbage water, and nodding in approval because the rented television says the economy is doing well.

They want you to “reject the evidence of your ears and eyes”, because making people believe a lie – especially an obvious, irrational, impossible lie – is the purest form of power and the ultimate form of control.

Annnnd bingo. Nothing to add from here.

(Via Bayou Pete)

Are you are as impressed as I am?

Posted on April 6, 2022April 6, 2022 by Mike

No, not in the least.

800-Volt EV Charging: The Other Palliative for Range Anxiety
Taking 18 minutes to charge to 80 percent makes top-up pit stops suddenly more palatable

Not to anybody who remembers that the last time he gassed up his current ICE vehicle it didn’t take him even five minutes, it ain’t…and that was filling his tank completely, not stopping at 80% and then calling it a “top-up.” Not to even mention that said ICE vehicle cost him around thirty-forty grand to buy, considerably less than the hefty 56k-and-up tariff the little Green Weenie windup toys bring along for the ride.

“Range anxiety” has been a headline concern for electric vehicles. Some automakers keep trying to soothe it with ever-larger and heavier battery packs, so that consumers can go farther between charges.

The problem is that lithium-ion cells remain expensive, heavy, and in critically short supply around the world. And battery bulk alone, especially in monstrously powerful trucks, can be a short route to a relatively inefficient and prohibitively expensive EV.

The Hyundai Ioniq5 and Kia EV6 that I recently tested—a pair of wildly impressive, high-design EVs—take a different approach to solving range anxiety: an 800-volt battery architecture that delivers some of the fastest charging in the EV game, and unheard of at these price levels. These handsome crossover SUVs might not be able to cruise for 7 hours on the highway, like the 500-mile-range Lucid Air. But their ability to charge to 80 percent capacity in as little as 18 minutes shows how EVs might circumvent the problem of battery overkill and still be fully viable as interstate cruisers.

The Hyundai, especially, left fellow drivers doing double takes and whipping out phone cameras.

But not their checkbooks, one may have noticed. So far at least, the only proven way to move EVs off the showroom floor and into peoples’ garages is for goobermint to mitigate the heart-stopping sticker shock with a nice subsidy package—or, to put it more honestly, a bribe for swallowing the multitudinous downsides of these Loser Cruisers, at the government’s (taxpayer’s) expense. (HINT TO LIBTARDS: Having to resort to bribery to sell a products is NOT an indication of said product’s popularity with consumers. Quite the opposite, actually.) We won’t even go into the many other disincentives that add up to make EVs a very hard sell indeed. Like, say, the very real and serious risk that your shiny new EV strugglebuggy might explode and/or spontaneously burst into flames, taking down your house along with it.

TITLE BACKSTORY: Back in the middle/late 70s I had an interaction—an abbreviated one, for reasons which ought to soon be apparent—with the manager/salesman of one of CLT’s perennially cellar-dwelling music stores, the name of which I don’t remember. I had wandered in there out of sheer desperation in search of a pack of whatever semi-obscure guitar strings I was enamored of back then, kidding myself that I’d be more likely to find off-brand strings in an off-brand store—a hopeful hypothesis which the science would invalidate posthaste.

Music Store Dude’s idea about my quest for cheap but effective guitar strings did NOT concur with my own, oh no no. According to his professional Music Store Dude expertise, what I really wanted was a brand new, all-chipboard-no-tube, cheaply made, sounds like the worst cheap-beer-and-Indian-food morning-after diarrhea-dook you ever took smelled like, Peavey guitar amplifier. Having one of those crimes against rock and roll all plugged in and ready to befoul the air long before my entry into the shop had made the little bell hung over the door go “ding,” MSD leapt into Sell! Sell! Sell! mode, turned the offensive thing on, and began idly strumming the guitar he had been holding in his lap. After each chord, the guitar’s melodious tone curdled into a gnarly, muddy mess courtesy of that sorry-ass Peavey. Then Music Store Dude would beatifically roll his eyes Heavenward as he repeated the corny mantra that had clearly been drummed into him in the Salesmanship 101 course he had flunked out of in community college: Are you as impressed as I am? Are you as impressed as I am? ARE YOU AS IMPRESSED AS I AM?

There was but one answer to be made to this increasingly aggressive query, to which I immediately resorted in self-defense: I muttered, semi-sotto voce, something along the lines of Sorry, gotta go, I think I hear my friends at Reliable Music shouting for me. Which is where I kicked up my heels and hurried off to without further delay, and bought the stupid pack of strings that had so nearly brought a strange doom crashing down upon my head—Death by Shitty Guitar Tone. I should’ve just gone to Reliable in the first place. I don’t know why I hadn’t, but it was a mistake I would never make again. In every city I played in, I kept strictly to the music stores I was familiar with when I needed one, shunning all the weird-looking, down-at-heels ones as if they had leprosy.

Yeah, yeah, I know: Skynyrd used and endorsed Peavey amps, as did pretty much every other ’70s Southern rock hit factory you could name.

And so what? I’ve always been pretty sure the second part of “used and endorsed” explains the first adequately enough: those Southern rockers played ’em not so much because they liked ’em, but because they were being paid to look as if they did. Myself, I hated the damned shitburgers back then, and I still do now. But hey, if Peavey handed me a big enough wad of cash, I’d try my best to pretend I liked the useless boat anchors too.

Obligatory disclaimer/confession: I DID play a Peavey Bandit for a couple-three months in the earliest days of the BPs; it belonged to one of the guys I had originally conceptualized the band with, an old-school purist who just could not abide the Marshall JMP half-stack (ie, the King of Rock, long may he reign—one of the very best amps ever produced, by anybody) that was helping me work through my rage issues back then. I make no apology for my brief lapse into the Shame of the Peavey; after all, none of us is without his own skeletons in the closet, right?

The moral of the story? Never let yourself be taken in by a hustler (the gooberment) trying to pressure or swindle (or legislate) you into settling for an inferior solid-state counterfeit (EV) of the tube-driven (ICE) real deal. You’ll be throwing away your money (your money) in the end, it won’t work out as promised (your house will burn down), and the only one who will end up happy with the whole deal will be the salesman (goobermint).

Oh, one more point to be made: If your product is good enough you won’t even have to sell it, it will sell itself. In contrast to the Peavey band-endorsement hustle, do note that Jim Marshall kept strictly to his principle of not paying for artist endorsements, the lone exception—until 1991 and the release of Marshall’s JCM Slash signature-model amp—being Jimi Hendrix.

According to an old book I have chronicling the amazing history of James Marshall’s world-beating amps (Marshall, amusingly and ironically enough, was actually a drummer his own self, and had enjoyed some local fame playing jazz in London nightspots), their names partially explains the Hendrix exception. Jimi was introduced to Marshall at the small London music store and amp-repair shop James owned and ran—and where his iconic amps had originally been created, at the request of Pete Townsend, probably the most famous of several other shop hangarounds that would later become rock stars themselves—and was blown away by the coincidence of their names—James Marshall Hendrix, guitar god, and James NMI Marshall, immortal guitar-amp legend. The two became close friends, Jimi switched to Marshalls for good, and the rest is rock and roll history.

Some good stuff from the previously-linked article, for any gear-geeks that might be reading:

You’d think that a guitarist of Slash’s stature would have a warehouse full of amplifiers at his disposal. As it turns out, though, the Guns N’ Roses guitarist only has a handful of trusty heads, which were discontinued in 1989, and they’re all just about ready to be retired. “I’ve been using the same Marshall Jubilee heads at every gig and session since I got them in 1987,” says Slash. “A bunch of those got badly damaged at the riot we had in St. Louis in 1991. After that, I was really nervous about my amplifier situation because I knew that if anything happened to the Jubilees I had left, I would be totally screwed.”

It was in the aftermath of the riot (which was prompted by an abbreviated GNR set) that Slash and Marshall began discussions that would ultimately result in the limited-production JCM Slash. And while Marshall amps have been associated with many of rock’s legendary guitarists, this is the company’s first endorsement deal-not to mention its first signature model.

“I’m totally honored that Marshall is doing this,” says Slash. “I’m the first person ever to get a free amp from them-except for Jimi Hendrix. And from what I understand, the amps he had were just on loan.”

The new amplifier is an exact replica of the Silver Jubilee 2555. However, unlike the Jubilee, the JCM Slash boasts the guitarist’s “smoking snake” logo and comes complete with a pimpin’ snakeskin cover.

The all-tube, 100-watt head boasts a quartet of Russian EL34’s in its power section and a trio of ECC83’s driving its two-channel preamp. There’s also a handy, front-panel-mounted half-power switch that allows you to drop the amp down to a more manageable 50-watt triode mode perfect for smaller venues. Slash admits that even he runs his amps on half-power much of the time. “If you have a singer who’s sensitive to loud backlines like Axl is, having a half-power switch is a godsend. It’s the only I way I can get the power tubes to work as hard as I need them to.”

I got chills here. Honestly, reading stuff like this makes me miss playing more than just about anything else, it really does. Nothing sweeter or more satisfying than the spine-tingling yowl of a Model 1987 50-watt Plexi reissue firing a pair of Celestion G12T-75s, the rig I happily ran for many years. Never have I owned a setup I liked better than this one, and I’ve owned ’em all. I never liked GNR, but I do like Slash just fine. He’s an excellent player, and I envy him his guitar/amp setup.

Update! If you can’t bribe ’em, try extorting ’em.

Pete “Just Buy A Tesla” ~~Buttigieg~~ Buttplug (FIFY—M) Says To Get Used To Price Hikes Until We Have Energy Independence Based On Clean Energy
Just another reminder that the higher gas prices you are suffering under are intentional.

Ever since the Obama Administration, the left has made it their goal to make gas so unaffordable that the American people will dump the convenient and plentiful fossil fuels the entire global economy is based upon for “clean” energy sources.

Here’s Mayor Pete telling Americans that the beatings will continue until morale improves:

Here’s the thing to remember, even if all the oil we use in the USA were made in the USA, the price of it is still subject to powers and dynamics outside of the USA.

Which means, until we achieve a form of energy independence that is based on clean energy created here at home, American citizens will still be vulnerable to wild price hikes like we’re seeing right now.

Gay Mayor Pete and the Biden crew will never admit that gas prices were low under Trump and that it was because of his energy policy.

But now that Biden has made it impossible to drill in the US, then all of a sudden all the drilling in the world won’t help the United States. It’s a global market.

Forget the four years under Donald Trump, those never happened.

There’s nothing that can be done, except buying electric cars, building more windmills and solar panels, and keeping the serfs at home forever.

Never mind that Biden’s Energy Secretary even says that they are using the Ukraine crisis and rising oil prices to transition America off gas.

It’s all intentional. It’s meant to cause pain.

Yep, t’is. There must be some way we could return the favor and cause them some right back, don’tcha think? Gee, I wonder what it might be…

OBEY update! When bribery and extortion have failed, you might then try a little judicious legislation removing the serfs’ ability to choose for themselves.

Last week, the current Democrat Governor of Washington state, Jay Inslee, signed a bill into law that aims to ban the sale of most non-electric vehicles in the state by 2030.

This legislation follows the lead of other deep-blue states like California and New York that recently announced bans on gas-powered vehicles in a move to end sales of these vehicles no later by 2035.
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The Post Millennial reported that Inslee signed the “Move Ahead Washington” package into law stipulating that all publicly owned and privately owned “passenger and light duty vehicles 2030 model or later that are sold, purchased, or registered in the state” must be electric.

This legislation comes with a $16.9 billion price tag and will receive funds generated by taxes on gasoline.

Ummm, I believe I see a tiny little problem with this Supergenius!™ idea.

Inslee claimed that the package would help “combat climate change,” but the state of Washington will be reliant upon its residents and visitors continuing to fill their cars with gasoline in order to fund reach this green goal.

So here we are then, where every socialist tyranny eventually winds up: using the wealth only capitalism can create to fund their adolescent fantasies, feeding off the very host that sustains them until they’ve killed it.

The Evil Empire(s)

Posted on April 5, 2022April 5, 2022 by Mike

Reagan correctly identified the essential character of the Soviet Union when he famously called it “the Evil Empire” back in ’83—in Florida, no less, which would later go on to be the final redoubt of American liberty. Hysterical screaming was of course the Left’s reaction, which has reacted the exact same way ever since whenever any non-Leftist so much as takes a breath or clears his throat. Wonder what The Gipper would have to say about Amerika v2.0, then?

On March 8, China echoed Russia’s claims that the Pentagon has been funding bioweapons labs in Ukraine.

The US called the claims absurd on March 9th. The US press secretary took to Twitter to call the claims made by Russia “preposterous” and made the claim that it was a disinformation operation by both China and Russia.

In a statement, Ned Price, spokesperson for the Department of State, accused Russia of “inventing false pretexts in an attempt to justify its own horrific actions in Ukraine” and said Washington was “in full compliance with its obligations under the Chemical Weapons Convention and Biological Weapons Convention, and it does not develop or possess such weapons anywhere.”

John Kirby, Pentagon spokesperson, called the Russian accusations “absurd,” “laughable,” and a “bunch of malarkey.” “There’s nothing to it. It’s classic Russian propaganda,” he told reporters.

Then on March 10, the US government admitted that there were biological research laboratories, but stated that the labs were not secret and were not being used to research weapons.

Anybody who’s been paying attention since, oh, about 1963 or -4 already knows where this story is headed. They’d be right about that, too. Which observation demands that I inaugurate a new category, long overdue: Some things never change.

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