Gangster Government

Simon Safetyism says

Posted on April 2, 2022April 3, 2022 by Mike

Ralph Peters slaps it, tells it to just shut the fuck up awready.

The video below moans about the substandard efforts of various car manufacturers to harass people sufficiently to wear seat belts. Note that I did not say their seatbelts. Which I did not say for the same reason I have never said anyone ought to wear their “masks.”

This is not pedantic. It is vitally important.

The use of “their” is very deliberate. It is meant to convey – and to assert – a kind of needful symbiosis. That a seat belt – or a “mask” is almost a part of us and heaven forbid the intimation of disassociation. What is wanted – and intended – is for the person being addressed to immediately feel obligation. And shame, for not wearing “their” seatbelt or “mask.”

But it is just a “mask” – or a seatbelt. An object, nothing more. Unless, of course, you do claim it as yours – in which case, that’s up to you. But the very last thing those who use their – or your – want is for you to make up your own mind and exercise choice, yourself.

Anyhow, it ought to be agreed that everyone has heard – a lot – about wearing seatbelts, asserted to be theirs. Much of it from their cars, which in many cases will not stop reminding – another obnoxiously, insufferably passive-friendly abuse of language – to wear their seatbelt even when it is ridiculously apparent they have purposely decided not to. Anyone willing to endure the repetitive chiming/dinging – often a loud and jarring chiming/dining – for the sake of not wearing the damned things clearly doesn’t need a reminder.

He knows perfectly well that he’s not wearing it – and doesn’t want to.

Civility would leave it at that. Would, in fact, have let it go well before that. But safetyism is relentless. The chiming/dinging must continue for longer, louder. Perhaps forever – or at least for long enough that the victim of this harassment cannot stand it any longer and gives in, by bucking “his” seatbelt.

Also the passengers. All of them. Shotgun, of course – but now also those in back. Safetyism has decreed chiming/dinging for everyone in the vehicle. So even the backseats are no longer safe harbor. The driver is put in the same position the government puts the store owner, who is forced to act as tax collector for the government. Just so, the driver of the cars coming off the line will be forced to become the government’s nag, pestering the people riding in back to wear their seatbelts – in order to save his nerves from the unendurable racket of all that chiming/dinging.

Treating normal, healthy, perfectly competent and capable American adults as if we were empty-eyed, mentally challenged diaper draggers who won’t survive a few more minutes without the protective cocoon of a constant, government-provided overwatch and micro-micro-micro-management of our every smallest twitch or blink is how the Nanny State creates the perception of itself as indispensable, serendipitously seducing the more weak-willed and biddable but nonetheless reasonably intelligent among us into thinking warm, cozy thoughts of how much gosh-darned easier life would be if only our good friends in government would just help us out a little throughout the course of each day! Why, there oughta be a LAW!!

Next thing you know, the very idea of choosing not to “buckle up for safety” the instant you climb in the car, each and every damned time you do, and keeping yourself strapped into place—even if the car is stationary and the transmission is in Park, the parking brake engage, no less—now strikes all too many otherwise normal, otherwise sane people as OUTRAGEOUS! IRRATIONAL! IRRESPONSIBLE! INTOLERABLE! A reflex action so natural they’re no longer even aware of it, so deeply has the conditioning been drilled into their brains, the reckless, selfish misdeed now an actual, honest-to-God crime which is punishable here in NC by a fine totalling over two hudred bucks, all told (as of a few years ago, NC dot Gov now charges transactions made with the State—drivers license, registration and plate, title transfer, and yes, vehicle-related citations and fines. As if the original fees for all those things weren’t ALREADY a de facto tax themselves, Gawdammit!

This new policy, mind, enacted at the same exact time that they also decided to double or even triple all fees on those same “services” they’d started adding tax on.

Assholes.

But even that ain’t the end of this thing, our final stop on the Safety First! Express. Peters knows as well as you or I where the smothercating embrace of Safetyism ends—it doesn’t.

Soon, it will be more. Heck, it already is. But it will be more than we can imagine. There will never be an end to it.

Safetyism pushes itself beyond all previously acknowledged boundaries of civility that – once upon a time – formed a kind of perimeter around the person (and property) of the individual, past which government was not allowed. Better said, beyond which government had no rightful authority.

Today, after 50-plus years of safetyism, there is no boundary beyond the reach of this inhuman doctrine, which forms the basis of what has become an inhuman society, in which no one is free to be let alone, ever – because it might not be “safe.”

And to think, it all began with a seatbelt, all those years ago.

Actually, no, not exactly. It began well before the coordinated nationwide push for seatbelt mandates began, with state laws requiring motorcycle riders to don uncomfortable, unsafe, slapdashedly made, vision-restricting, neck-torquing “safety” helmets sweeping the land back in the ’60s. The seatbelt push, spotty and obscure enough not to notice, really took flight in the late ’70s/early ’80s, originally sparked by FederalGovCo’s arbitrary decree that all US automakers must install airbags by some date certain or other, which I have long since forgotten. The automakers studied the problem and realized that putting those airbags in—a new, quite expensive technology at the time, something of an untried and unknown commodity which American motorists didn’t want or need, a product whose add-on cost every trustworthy industry survey and/or poll flatly said an overwhelming majority of America’s car buyers just flat weren’t willing to pay—would jack up the sticker price of every new American car by between five and six thousand bucks per…this, at a time when the price for a new car wasn’t a whole helluva lot more than the price of the airbag install, something your average Joe Everyman was smart enough to notice and object to vehemently, and 2) new-care sales numbers were way down, thanks to several factors:

Detroit had been caught flat-footed by a huge influx of Jap crap on these shores, a bruising, unforeseen competition caused mainly by the Saudi-contrived fuel “crisis” just a few years prior
Adding fiscal insult to crippling injury, the Jap crappers weren’t subject to the seatbelt mandate at that time, tying another hand behind Detroit’s back when it was already punch-drunk and reeling from its Asian competitor’s fierce onslaught
For another thing: Nobody was much interested in purchasing an American car back then anyway; despite my Jap-crap ribbing earlier, the fact is that those Hondas, Toyotas, and Datsuns of the era were solid, long-lived, dependable cars, if also smaller, lighter, and susceptible to much greater damage in a crash. The Japanese makes all boasted superior build quality, along with quiet, smooth-running engines that ingested their ever-more-expensive and -harder to find go-juice in polite, dainty sips, an unattractive contrast with the mighty, manly V8s Detroit was still cranking out in number at the time. As enjoyable as they were to drive, those engines swilled fuel like a union longshoreman who just clocked out and will be cashing whatever pitiful pittance he has left of his paycheck at whatever dingy dockside bar is closest to the shipper’s warehouse where he works after tonight’s boozy, bare-knuckles blowout chugs his brown likker.
American cars, in even more unflattering contrast with their fleet-footed, wily, and capable Southeast Asian competitors, had declined steeply from the dizzying peak of their ’50s-’60s Golden Age. American cars of the ’70s, frankly, were absolute junk. Expensive to run; shoddy construction; obsolete design and moldy-oldie engineering; overly heavy (hey, we NEEDED those powerful V8s, just to get those damned pigs on down the road at a reasonable pace); sloppy handling and mushy suspension that left you rocking, rolling, and wallowing through the curves instead of aggressively slicing your way in and out of ’em. These are but a small sampling of the gripes people had about the Blue Ovals, Bowties, Byuricks, and P.O.N.T.I.A.C.s (Poor Old Nigger Thinks It’s A Cadillac—heh) of the ’70s. The electrics were primitive and tetchy, the carburetors persnickety and weird, the steering loose as a goose. The cars had become untrustworthy at BEST.

Plus, a disturbing number of the American models were just plain ugly.I mean, who was it whose dubious auto-design creative gifts brought us vinyl roofs, for fuck’s sake? Worse, the Landau roof—utterly pointless; looking like it was conceptualized on one of the worst, most excruciating Hangover Sundays of all time; haphazardly designed; prone to rust underneath the fabric quickly and completely; a meaningless embellishment with absolutely no function or purpose whatsoever beyond doing a piss-poor job of trying to look like something it can never be.
Or how about those massive, waddling grocery-getter station wagons? Y’know, the ones with the cheap, fake-wood paneling in a sloppy, half-assed parody aping the classic Woody wagons from the late ’20s (!!) up into the mid-’50s?
The sudden, explosive expansion of the market for compact, well-built fuel misers mostly unconcerned with traditional American-style must-haves like bucketloads of rubber-shredding horsepower, plush interiors, lots of chrome, and come-hither good looks came as a total shock to the poor American manufacturers, and their sleepy response to the astonishing success of the invaders very nearly killed the American auto industry completely. After all, the market for the kind of car on offer from the Land of the Rising Sun didn’t even exist here until the 70s; before then, you could’ve called it a “niche” market, maybe, if you were the generous type and weren’t above stretching the truth almost to its breaking point. So, that being the case, you can’t fault Detroit entirely for the near-fatal debacle.
On the other hand, Detroit had certainly helped its own downfall along, getting all fat and lazy, lapsing its quality standards so severely that their existence became merely theoretical; certainly, they weren’t being applied, not by anybody. The unions demanded, and got, salaries so extravagant and out of proportion to the job requirements that they ended up reducing the world’s most stable, successful, and market-dominating industries into a tottering, feeble, confused wreck—aimless, incompetent, wholly unable to even identify where the American Dream they had embodied and enabled for so long had gone so terribly wrong, much less how they might make things right again. The collapse and near-death of the American auto industry was so catastrophic, so far-reaching, that it brought the once-proud city of Detroit—once one of the most prosperous, well-run, beautiful, and admired cities in all the world—down with it. Today, the industry has for the most part recovered, albeit not completely; American car makers will never again stand in unchallenged domination at the very pinnacle of the industry as they once so confidently did. The city, on the other hand, suffers under kleptomaniacal, corrupt, and self-serving leaders, black Democrats whose entire focus is on thieving and grafting their way into great wealth, have only worsened the plight of their city and its barbaric citizens. Its middle and upper-middle class population long ago fled the decaying and increasingly unlivable urban shithole en masse for greener, safer, more civilized climes, leaving crumbling ghettos full of feral and uncivilized Negro savages—layabouts, gangbangers, and irredeemable dope fiends left to their self-created squalor and anarchy to gnaw the last rotting bones of once-great Detroit.

But I digress. Anyhoo, the car makers worked out a deal with the goobermint’s crew of shakedown artists and strongarm men: government holds off for a decade or so on those airbags they want so much, provided Detroit could persuade a specified number of states to legislate mandatory seatbelt use as a first step, allowing hard-beset car makers a little breathing space, which they can use to tool up for the blasted bags. Thus, the deal was done. Now as it happens, NC was one of the first testbeds of the Constitutionality of this new, heretofore unthinkable regulatory overreach. Auto company attorneys carefully shepherded the case all the way up to the Supreme Court, where it was speedily approved without much fanfare or controversy. Whereupon everybody just clammed up. The media coverage of the heretofore sharply controversial issue stopped, the op-ed pages went dark and quiet. Nobody seemed to feel like discussing things further. After a period of mysterious silence, everybody moved on to the next big thing.

So the desired useful precedent had been set; the unthinkable had now become Law, landing a knockout blow against freedom, privacy, and self-determinatio—a vicious punch attenuated somewhat by assurances from the self-same snake oil salesmen who drafted it, promoted it, and got it into lawbooks that the thing had been conceived with an ironclad guarantee that violations would only ever be a secondary offense, meaning the cops couldn’t pull you over for a seatbelt infraction alone. They could only write you up for the seatbelt offense after having stopped you for a primary offense. Also, the seatbelt requirement would apply to drivers only, not passengers. It would carry a measly ten dollar fine, assigning no bank-account-draining license points for a violation. Pretty innocuous, right? Such a minor, trifling, harmless thing. Nothing worth getting one’s panties in a wad over. Nothing that should cause concern for those who take the Constitution and their rights seriously. Right?

My, ain’t it funny how things change. In the beginning, almost everybody pretty much ignored the new legislation, motorists and cops alike basically just carrying on as before. Then the insurance companies started to squawk, the hectoring TV commercials, explaining the vitally critically vital importance of wearing your safety harness so’s you won’t die began to run. Then, all of sudden, seatbelt tickets started to be handed out, to the stunned disbelief of the motorists who were issued them. Some overly zealous Joe Friday dreamed up the Click It Or Ticket weekend, three days on which entire police departments would gallumph on out in search of thougtless perps, a clear and present danger to the lives of everyone in the same zip code they presently occupy, hoping to jerk a knot in their asses. The inevitable mission creep emblematic of all government endeavors slowly but steadily advanced, until now every motorvatin’ scofflaw stands a chance of earning himself a hefty 200-dollar reminder that he better by God get with the program, or else. And, just as with every other for-your-own-good government encroachment on the presumed rights of its subjects, the inattentive, too-trusting frog has been thoroughly boiled.

Monsters of Globalism

Posted on April 2, 2022April 2, 2022 by Mike

In an article which surpasses his own established standards for cutting high, wide, and deep, Brandon Smith recounts the history (which goes back farther than you probably thought) and explains the goals of the fiends in human shape who masterminded the Great Reset, the 4th Industrial Revolution, the Sharing Economy, and other dangerous and diabolical plots.

I first heard the phrase “Great Reset” way back in 2014. Christine Lagarde, who was head of the IMF at the time, was suddenly becoming very vocal about global centralization. It was an agenda that was generally only whispered about in the dark corners of institutional white papers and the secretive meetings of banking elites, but now these people were becoming rather loud about it.

Lagarde was doing a Q&A at the World Economic Forum and the notion of the “Reset” was very deliberately brought up; what the project entailed was vague, but the basic root of it was a dramatic shift away from the current economic, social and political models of the world into a globally centralized and integrated system – A “New World Order,” if you will…

It’s important to remember that we had just jumped through the fires of an international credit collapse which started in 2008 and had continued to cause uncertainty in markets for years. The central banks had dumped tens of trillions of dollars worth of stimulus into the system just to keep it on life support. Some of us in the alternative media believed that these actions were not meant to save the economy, only zombify the economy through currency devaluation and inflation. Not long down the road, this zombie creation would turn on us and try to eat us alive, and only the central bankers new exactly when this would occur.

Think of the crash of 2008 as Stage 1 of the Reset agenda; the globalists were getting cocky and were ready to unveil their plans to the public.

Lagarde’s discussion at the WEF was also held around the time that Klaus Schwab was introducing his 4th Industrial Revolution concept, which is a little more forward with what the globalists really want. He talks excitedly of a true “global society” and a world in which people turn to Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a better means of governance. He even suggests that laws would eventually be dictated by AI and that courts would be run by robots.

Of course, he admits that this cannot happen without a period of economic deconstruction in which people and governments will have to choose between sacrifice for the sake of stability or continued pain in the name of holding on to the “old ways.” Look at it this way: The Great Reset is the action or the chaos, and the 4th Industrial Revolution is the intended result or planned “order.” That is to say, it’s a new order created out of engineered chaos.

Yeah, it sounds like bad science fiction, but remember these are the people that enjoy the undivided attention of many of our political leaders and they rub elbows with the central bankers at the Federal Reserve. I’ll say it again: The proponents of the Great Reset and the 4th Industrial Revolution, who want to completely undermine and reconstitute our society and way of life, are close partners with our national leaders and the very bankers that could force such a reset to happen through a deliberate collapse.

The globalists have been trying to rebrand and repackage their New World Order agenda for many years, and the Reset was what they came up with. Rather than being innocuous sounding, the term threatens systemic upheaval and an erasure of the past. When you “reset” something it usually goes back to zero – A blank slate that the engineers can use to rewrite the code and the functions. But what does this really mean?

What do the globalists REALLY WANT? Here are the details, so far as I can prove or support with evidence, of what the “Great Reset” actually is and what programs they hope to enforce.

This is some truly frightening stuff, skillfully broken down by Smith into a comprehensible, streamlined narrative. All of this essay is vital, must-read material, but this next passage I find impossible to resist re-publishing here.

The argument for this kind of society is of course that “climate change” and the frailties of consumer economics demand that we reduce our living standards to near zero and abandon the sacred ideal of property ownership for the sake of the planet.

Set aside the fact that carbon based global warming is a farce. The world’s temperatures have only risen by 1 DEGREE CELSIUS in the span of a century, according to the NOAA. This was data that climate scientists had attempted to hide or gloss over for years, but now it is out there for everyone to see. There is no proof of man made global warming. None.

The globalists have been scheming to use environmentalism as an excuse for centralization since at least 1972, when the Club Of Rome published a treatise titled ‘The Limits To Growth’. Twenty years later they would publish a book titled ‘The First Global Revolution.’ In that document they specifically recommend using global warming as a vehicle:

“In searching for a common enemy against whom we can unite, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like, would fit the bill. In their totality and their interactions these phenomena do constitute a common threat which must be confronted by everyone together. But in designating these dangers as the enemy, we fall into the trap, which we have already warned readers about, namely mistaking symptoms for causes. All these dangers are caused by human intervention in natural processes, and it is only through changed attitudes and behaviour that they can be overcome. The real enemy then is humanity itself.”

The statement comes from Chapter 5 – The Vacuum, which covers their position on the need for global government. The quote is relatively clear; a common enemy must be conjured in order to trick humanity into uniting under a single banner, and the elites see environmental catastrophe, caused by mankind itself, as the best possible motivator.

Brandon proceeds from there to lay bare the ultimate objective of this insidious conspiracy: essentially, a contemporary reboot of feudalism…but worse, if you can believe it. His closing remarks might be the most chilling part of all.

The truth is a rare commodity these days, but nowhere near as rare as it will be if these elitists get what they want. The globalists are far more open about their agenda today than they have ever been before, and I suspect this is because they believe they will be able to rewrite the history of today’s events with impunity after the Reset unfolds. They think they will own the world of information and will be able to edit our cultural memory as they go.

The mainstream media calls all of this “conspiracy theory.” I call it conspiracy reality. It’s hard to deny openly spoken admissions by the globalists themselves, all they can do is try to spin the information as much as possible to keep the public on the fence in terms of what needs to be done, which is a purge of the globalists from our country and perhaps the entire world.

If we do not do this, there will come a time when nothing I say here is remembered and no evidence of the Reset plan will exist. The establishment will have eliminated all notions of it from written history, leaving only a fantasy tale of how the world collapsed and a small organization of “visionary” globalists saved it from oblivion through a new religion of centralization.

Not at all difficult to imagine precisely this scenario coming to pass in the fullness of time, is it? It all seems to me to confirm what I’ve so often, perhaps to the point of tedium, insisted: These wealthy, powerful, and morally stunted manipulators, contra the received wisdom, are NOT “afraid of us” and our however-many-million guns threatening retributive justice from inside of their locked gun safes at all—not even slightly, they ain’t. Ironically enough, their premature contempt for the presumed Serf Class offers us some faint glimmer of hope: as Brandon suggests, their own overconfidence, arrogance, and conceit may prove to be their undoing, gifting us with the key to thwarting their Satanic designs and taking them the fuck down.

I’ll leave off with an apt confession from Smith’s comments section:

“Some believe we are part of a secret cabal working against the best interests of the United States, characterizing my family and me as ‘internationalists’ and of conspiring with others around the world to build a more integrated global political and economic structure—one world, if you will. If that is the charge, I stand guilty, and I am proud of it.” -David Rockefeller, Memoirs, 2003

This struggle before us is one that’s been a long time a-building. It’s time to face the facts squarely, and engage our foe directly, without reservation or reticence. Decent, upstanding people can NOT suffer monsters such as Schwab and his inhuman associates to live among them on this good Earth, to forever go on refining and revising their twisted machinations, testing each new, “improved” version on far better men than they’ll ever be themselves. They make bitter mock of the noble principles of America’s Founding; blasphemously dismissing as an impossibility—a non sequitur, almost—any notion of meaningful human advancement—the eternal struggle to attain a worldly state of grace whose existence the stiff-necked, all-knowing Monsters Of Globalism pompously deny.

To this supercilious, disdainful Master Race of Titans, Colossi, and self-styled Übermenschen, the rest of humanity is and will always remain no more deserving of consideration or serious regard than any other insect—hapless, helpless, and harmless; bat-blind to their benighted, lowly state of existence; blissfully unaware of their own ugly reality; occasionally of some small interest, if only momentarily so; more often, just another insignificant crawly thing inhabiting a larger landscape they aren’t equipped to comprehend, worthy only of being ignored by Superior Beings as they step around, over, or on them.

Be that as it may, such crippling self-obssession in no way means that, while simultaneously being both annoying and alarming—when all is said and done the Globemeisters really don’t pose a mortal threat to their pitiably underevolved fellow men. It ain’t so, provably, their lawless breed having demonstrated otherwise more than once or twice over lo, these many years. None of us should blandly take their long, unbroken record of falling somewhat short of total global domination so far as confirmation of their non-menacing, merely blustery and boisterous inner nature. Don’t wave them off with a casual, “Sure, they can be assholes sometimes, but hey, boys will be boys.” If they haven’t killed off as many of us as they’d like to so far, rest assured it hasn’t been from a lack of effort.

Better to think of them as a sort of cancer—as with any other cancer they must be cut out, before they destroy the body politic utterly. More apt yet, think of them as a parasite—as with any other parasite, they must be removed straightaway, lest they gradually weaken and, eventually, kill the very host they depend on for their repulsive existence. Another shared trait: Globalists and parasites alike contribute nothing whatsoever to either their hosts or to the wider world. The Globalists, in close imitation of their parasite brothers, accrued their incalculable wealth and power not from hard work and ferocious determination, natural business acumen, or any other variety of value offered, but as riders on the aching backs and honest sweat of the working-class mules they aimed all along to victimize, to exsanguinate, to subjugate.

Their wealth confers no Divine Right To Rule upon them, refuting the comforting assumption that yes, it most certainly does—a universal assumption among their ilk spontaneously generated as if by some strange kind of autonomic reflex. Having long since renounced the responsibilities called for under what Chinese rulers of antiquity referred to as the Mandate of Heaven, they instead chose to adopt as their creed the exact opposite of responsibility and noblesse oblige: reckless profligacy; crass, status-seeking rumpswabbery via the obnoxious flaunting of wealth; unrestrained self-indulgence—in short, a drunken orgy of Dionysian sensuality elevated from wastrel sin to legitimate and unobjectionable lifestyle choice.

The Green Deceit

Posted on April 2, 2022April 2, 2022 by Mike

Screwing the energy-policy pooch—and most Americans, too—on purpose, so as to pimp expensive, unreliable Green “solutions”—a ruinous shell game built entirely on a foundation of brazen lies.

Joe Biden Is Doing Everything Possible To Avoid Unleashing American Energy Production
Americans are coping with the highest gas prices ever recorded, compounded by inflation, with the national average reaching $4.33 per gallon earlier this month, according to an AAA tracker. On Thursday, a Federal Reserve analysis recorded inflation at a four-decade high, which followed a survey from Salary Finance out Wednesday reporting 1 in 5 Americans are running out of cash between paychecks.

After 14 months actively suppressing oil and gas production in the name of climate change, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine hampered the Oval Office’s diplomatic menu as the United States enthusiastically forfeited its energy independence. In the run-up to its full-scale invasion, Russia supplied more than 10 percent of the world’s crude but is now throttled by western sanctions against the primary source of revenue for the Kremlin’s war machine. Following the United States’s stint as an energy-independent net exporter of oil under President Donald Trump in 2018, the Energy Information Administration (EIA) forecast the United States will revert to its role as a net importer this year under Biden.

Repeated use of U.S. reserves without a plan to permanently increase U.S. oil and gas production was described by Montana Republican Sen. Steve Daines as a “band-aid on [a] bullet wound.” It showcases an administration dedicated to pulling every lever possible to avoid allowing American producers to ramp up production to meet the nation’s energy needs. According to the EIA, Americans consumed an average of nearly 20 million barrels of oil a day, putting the White House release of 1 million barrels per day into perspective.

Instead of opening American energy projects the administration has shut down such as drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and permits for the Keystone XL Pipeline, Biden has continued to harass the oil and gas industry, and suppress production in the process. Just this week, Bloomberg reported the Biden administration is planning to delay oil leases in the Gulf of Mexico for a third consecutive year, signaling to the industry that the White House has no plans to endorse long-term production to reclaim energy independence.

No, of course not. Why, that would be just AWFUL, a horrible mis-ordering of government priorities. Everyone knows that you just don’t go around promising to “reclaim(ing) energy independence” until the job of bringing a once-mighty nation to its knees, destroying its economy, and breaking its people to your will via impoverishing them and denying their freedom of movement has been completed. Then and only then, once their desperation and misery has reduced them to abject pleas for government to step in and “help,” can you resume your forked-tongue eructations promising “energy independence” for one and all again.

Your cash ain’t nothing but trash

Posted on April 2, 2022April 2, 2022 by Mike

The idea of a cashless society has long been one of the Left’s brass rings, in accordance with the incrementalist strategy which facilitates their Marxist takeover of America that Was—a so-far successful soft coup which is now in its very last stages.

Central bank digital currencies (CBDC’s) have been spoken of in theoretical terms for many years, but they’re now becoming reality. Three nations, including China, have already introduced them on a limited scale, and the USA is actively considering it too. They promise (or should that be “threaten”?) a whole new way of managing our money – or, rather, letting the powers that be manage how much we have and what we do with it.

CBDC is effectively the most sweeping control measure yet considered by a government over its citizens – so much so that they may devolve from ‘citizens’ into ‘subjects’, because their spending (and thus their actions and freedom of expression) might be subject to far stricter control, if a government wishes to exercise it. That’s what China has done with its social credit system. If the “woke” mentality prevails in this country, you can imagine how much power CBDC’s would give to those who want to crush individual rights and freedoms.

The trouble is, the sheer size of modern populations may make something like a CBDC inevitable. Take, for example, the growing pressure to introduce some form of Universal Basic Income allowance. In an era of massive unemployment, with little prospect of enough jobs being created to absorb people back into the workforce, UBI may be unavoidable – although one hopes it would fold into itself all the other allowances, grants, benefits and entitlement programs currently proliferating all over the sociopolitical landscape. If UBI were to incorporate and replace Social Security, welfare payments, and they many other government payments and allowances out there, it would be both easier to fund and produce a greatly streamlined system of state assistance. However, to do so, it would have to be centrally controlled, with measures to limit fraud and ensure prompt distribution of benefits. A CBDC is probably the single most efficient way to do that, and politicians and bureaucrats will emphasize that. (Also, of course, politicians and bureaucrats will consider a CBDC’s potential for social control to be a feature, not a bug. Their minds work that way.)

Well, naturally. An insatiable lust for boundless power and control over others is the central cog in the psychological machinery of such people. It’s what drives them to seek work in government at any level, what gets them out of bed every morning—their raison d’etre, the fundamental motivation for everything they think, say, and do. It’s the heart’s blood of every bully, every thug, every despot. If they didn’t think that way, they’d be something other than what they truly are. And the rest of us would be soooooo much better off for it, too.

JD asks The Big One

Posted on April 1, 2022April 1, 2022 by Mike

This really is the question of our age, ain’t it?

So, who’s running the United States? Is it the same people who are running the world? Probably. And unfortunately that may have been the case from George H. W. Bush all the way through to Barack Obama. There was a blip in their control structure when Donald Trump won, which is why I’m convinced they did everything they could to steal the election from him in 2020.

Below, I made a list of the ten people/groups I believe are most likely to be truly in charge. It’s in no particular order so don’t give more weight to the top or the bottom. To be clear, neither I nor anyone outside of the inner circle of evil knowledge could possibly know for sure who’s really in charge. Whoever we might think it is at any given moment is almost certainly working on behalf of someone or something else. Until we get to the top of the evil food chain with Satan himself, everyone else is just a minion. The people and groups on this list happen to be extremely powerful minions.

There’s an important thing to consider before we get to the list, and that’s to know the difference between the high-level puppets and the actual puppet masters. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are definitely puppets. Missing from the list below are two prominent people and one prominent organization that are puppet masters in their own right, but who are not really at the top of the evil hierarchy even if many believe they are.

Betcha can’t guess who those two mid-level malefactors might be, not right away at least. I think Rucker’s mostly got the right of things here, although I do have to admit to a quibble or two, and it’s some downright scary stuff to contemplate for long. In the end, though, we’ll almost certainly never know for certain. Even if the whole structure and system our true lords and masters conceal themselves behind is brought crashing down, they’ll still be pretty tough to identify, I imagine. But hey, maybe that’s just the cynical old crank in me talking.

Right?

Is it Dictatorship yet?

Posted on April 1, 2022April 1, 2022 by Mike

Wilder, wise feller that he is, says we meet seven out of a possible seven criteria.

And that’s just since December of 2019. It’s interesting just how much Donald Trump, despite not really achieving much of lasting note, upset the system. Trump didn’t restore law and order. Heck, he couldn’t even restore Firefly. But yet, they were willing to take off the mask just to get him out.

The end state is what we’re really interested in – the failure of government, the loss of hope, and the dependence on someone, anyone, to save them. All they have to surrender is control. And, in the United States that doesn’t necessarily mean the same party – in many ways the GOP is just the “for God’s sake, don’t put me in charge, they’ll expect me to do something” wing of the Democratic Party.

The Strong Man himself is certainly out there right now. He might be unknown to us, but he is building, biding his time. It’s almost certainly not AOC, since she’s not anyone’s idea of a problem solver unless your problem is needing a Margarita, no salt. It’s not someone too old like Bernie Sanders who will turn to dust if Sunlight ever hits him – which is why he has coffins in the basement of the multiple mansions he owns.

It’s certainly not the Ad Libber in Chief, since he (like his pants) is in the process of being dumped (you don’t think those releases about Hunter’s laptop are coincidental, do you?). No, someone young, vigorous, yet already sold to The Narrative. Dan Crenshaw (World Economic Forum™ Young Leader®), my eye is on you.

But it doesn’t have to be Dan. Any man who has The Plan, charisma, and reasonable personal hygiene (including regular showers) might become the Strong Man. It won’t be a woman: the masculinity of the “tough” solutions will be a part of the sales pitch, along with the ever so regretful admission that temporary controls are needed to restore the abundance of the past.

So, control is surrendered. Rights are conditional –rights will be honored as long as it is convenient, ignored, or suppressed when not. The budding Kommissars of Australia provided the poster child for the sudden evaporation of rights when inconvenient for government. In a continent where every insect is an inexhaustible vat of poison, every animal has fangs and can disembowel a man with a kick, and the nectar of half the plants does things that would make H.P. Lovecraft shudder, who knew that the most dangerous creatures were…government employees?

I’m thinking we probably coulda guessed before now, based on available evidence. Certainly, there’s no longer any excuse for not being aware of it now.

The two errors that robbed us of our country

Posted on April 1, 2022April 1, 2022 by Mike

Our current Constitutional contretemps has a two-pronged origin. First: the remarkably successful Gramscian infiltration and eventual takeover of American institutions, the schools in particular. Second: the rise of a professional-politician class, what I usually call the ProPols, something the Founders warned us explicitly and specifically about, again and again and again.

The Founding Fathers Would Have Gagged at the Idea of Legislators for Life
The Founding Fathers would have been appalled at the idea of legislators for life. When the Constitution was adopted, “public servant’ was more than a euphemism.

Leaders were expected to serve because it was their patriotic duty. They would leave their farms, shops and offices for a term or two, and then go back home to live among those they’d governed under the laws they had fashioned.

Today, they make a pilgrimage to the Golden Temple on Capitol Hill and stay, and stay, and stay.

I was originally going to excerpt a much bigger chunk of this one, until I realized that the above will be plenty and enough to adequately pique your interest.

Police state empire

Posted on March 31, 2022April 1, 2022 by Mike

So what might possibly be done to rectify this awful, intolerable situation?

Police in this tiny Alabama town suck drivers into legal ‘black hole’
Ramon Perez came to court last month ready to fight the tickets he’d been handed by Brookside police, including one for rolling through a stop sign and another for driving 48 mph in a 40 zone.

He swore he’d seen the cop from a distance and was careful as he braked.

“I saw him and we looked eye to eye,” the Chelsea business owner said. “There’s no way I was going to run that stop sign.”

When he got to court Dec. 2, he saw scores of people just like him lining up to stand before Judge Jim Wooten, complaining of penny-ante “crimes” and harassment by officers. He saw so many people trying to park in the grassy field outside the municipal building that police had to direct traffic.

He figured there was no point.

“I saw the same attitude in every officer and every person,” he said. “That’s why I hesitated to fight it. They were doing the same thing to every person that was there. They own the town.”
Perez, it appears, was right.

Months of research and dozens of interviews by AL.com found that Brookside’s finances are rocket-fueled by tickets and aggressive policing. In a two-year period between 2018 and 2020 Brookside revenues from fines and forfeitures soared more than 640 percent and now make up half the city’s total income.

And the police chief has called for more.

The town of 1,253 just north of Birmingham reported just 55 serious crimes to the state in the entire eight year period between 2011 and 2018 – none of them homicide or rape. But in 2018 it began building a police empire, hiring more and more officers to blanket its six miles of roads and mile-and-a-half jurisdiction on Interstate 22.

By 2020 Brookside made more misdemeanor arrests than it has residents. It went from towing 50 vehicles in 2018 to 789 in 2020 – each carrying fines. That’s a 1,478% increase, with 1.7 tows for every household in town.

The growth has come with trouble to match. Brookside officers have been accused in lawsuits of fabricating charges, using racist language and “making up laws” to stack counts on passersby. Defendants must pay thousands in fines and fees – or pay for costly appeals to state court – and poorer residents or passersby fall into patterns of debt they cannot easily escape.

“Brookside is a poster child for policing for profit,” said Carla Crowder, the director of Alabama Appleseed Center for Law & Justice, a nonprofit devoted to justice and equity. “We are not safer because of it.”

Brookside is a poor town, 70% white, 21% Black, with a small but growing Hispanic population and a median income well below the state average. The town survives on the fringes of Birmingham with tax revenue from the Dollar General, which forms the totality of its commercial district.

In 2018, when the town had one full-time police officer and a few part-timers, it reported no serious crimes to the Alabama Criminal Justice Information Center. Brookside Police did patrol the 1.5-mile stretch of Interstate 22 within their jurisdiction and wrote tickets that brought in $82,467 in fines. That contributed a 14% chunk of the city’s total income, a number that would be considered high in much of America.

Bad as all that inarguably is, don’t let yourself be flummoxed or distracted by it; eventually, you knew we’d come to this:

By 2020 officers in the sleepy town were undergoing SWAT training and dressing in riot gear, even as the city continued with only a volunteer fire department. It parked a riot control vehicle — townspeople call it a tank — outside the municipal complex and community center. Traffic tickets, and criminalizing those who passed through, became the city’s leading industry.

And there we have the most damaging, destructive, and dangerous development to occur in American law enforcement since I can’t remember when: the militarization of the police.

“When you look at their Facebook pages it’s almost like they are bullies. I’ve seen it,” DA Carr said. “I don’t condone it, but you know, I’m not the chief out there.”

Dude—seriously? Almost?!?

And it’s not an idle threat. Arrests on Brookside warrants went from zero to 243 in the span of two years, according to statistics Chief Jones presented to the council.

Jones — again as Mayor Bryan nodded — said the goal of the department is only to help people.

Yeah. Right. Assholes.

“It’s not about making a dollar,” Jones said.

Like hell, you lying Nazi piece of pig shit. Then again, he’s not all wrong here; it’s NOT exclusively about the bucks he’s thieving. It’s also about being able to abuse, oppress, and harrass the Serf Class yeomanry without legal stricture or consequence. Ahh, the intoxicating, heady pleasure of running roughshod over whoever you wish, any time you wish, without possibility of censure or retribution. Until the frabjous day when you choose the wrong person to victimize and get a bullet in your brainpan for your savagery. That would be a far swifter death than you deserve, but at least your unconscionable spree of lawless brutality would be brought to a permanent end.

In December the mayor provided AL.com a budget document, based on previous years’ audits. It did not feature a breakout of the police department.

Asked why that was the case, Bryan responded there had been an error, that the heading for the ‘Municipal Court Fund’ was actually the police department budget. “Sorry for the typo,” the mayor wrote.

That document budgeted $646,620 to the police this year.

The town also provided a set of police stats Jones presented to the Brookside council to push for more resources and authority.

It showed that total arrests – custodial, misdemeanor and felony – rose 1,109% from 2018 to 2020. Brookside police made 4.4 arrests in 2020 for every household.

It showed police in 2020 patrolled 114,438 miles in the 6.3-mile town and issued more than 3,000 citations – a 692% increase from 2018.

“We don’t care about tickets,” Jones said. “We don’t like writing tickets.”

Holy mother of God, the balls on these lying, amoral swine. The story goes on at some length from there, but I had to break away at that point before the throbbing headache it had given me intensified into literally life-threatening status. Cynical as I am, distrustful of authority as I’ve always been, this one still left me slackjawed and wide-eyed with shock, disbelief, and absolute horror. The very idea of outlandish corruption this extreme taking place in an American small town in the year of our Lord 2022 is absolutely staggering. But even after reading as much as I did of it, then sitting back for a few minutes just trying to take it all aboard and reason it out, I still haven’t come up with an answer to my opening question. I don’t know that I ever will.

I can tell y’all one thing, though: if BLM and the Defund Po-Po mob showed up one day and got all up in some Brookside faces, they would have my vociferous and unattenuated support for once. Thuggish cops like these Alabama fiends are going to wind up getting good cops killed right along with the predators. It’s a damnable shame and disgrace; makes me glad all the cops I’ve been either friends or related to have long since retired, which they tell me unanimously they’re extremely happy about.

These fellas—decent, humane, and likeable guys to a man, a pleasure to sit at the bar or grill burgers and dogs in the backyard with—don’t even recognize the job they once treasured anymore. So alien has policing become, so antithetical to the Peace Officer role they once gladly dedicated themselves to, that not a one of them would the slightest interest in having any part of it today.

All through the Trump Presidency, most especially during the Fauxvid lockdowns, from Australia to Canada to Europe to right here in the States, too many cops let their fascist flags fly, eagerly obeying unlawful orders to break up perfectly lawful and orderly protests, often violently; giving violent pAntifa/BLM rioters, looters, and arsonists carte blanche to wreak billions in damage to American cities; clubbing down harmless J6 protesters, then jailing them without charges in solitary confiment for months, blandly making mock of the now-moribund US Constitution and its toothless guarantees of “unalienable rights.” They’re sowing the seeds of their own destruction, siding with those who can’t get enough of that Defund ‘Em stuff against what was once their natural base of support. We’ll see how that works out for ’em in the end.

Via J Kb at GFZ, who sums up nicely: If there ever was a town begging for a fully armed and armored killdozer to set things right, this is it. Got that right, J.

Welcome to Wrist Slap City

Posted on March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 by Mike

Guilty as hell, free as a bird.

FEC Fines Clinton, Dems for Debunked Dossier
The Federal Election Commission fined the Democratic National Committee and the Hillary Clinton campaign more than $100,000 for secretly funding opposition research that falsely accused Donald Trump of colluding with Russia.

The commission fined the treasurers of the DNC and Clinton campaign for “misreporting the purpose of certain disbursements” related to the infamous Steele dossier, according to a ruling released on Wednesday. The DNC and Clinton campaign paid more than $1 million in 2016 to fund the dossier project, but labeled the payments as legal expenses. The commission fined the DNC and Clinton campaign $105,000 and $8,000, respectively.

Disgusting, infuriating, absolutely disgraceful. No wonder We The People’s trust and faith in the fundamental integrity of their federal government is draining away faster with every passing day, like dirty dishwater schlurrrping down a brand-new sink drain. How very sad it is to have to admit that—with each fresh outrage against decency, each successive breach of the explicitly-defined boundaries of its Constitutional remit—only an abject imbecile would swallow a single word these audacious vermin vomit forth.

Spells nothing whatsoever hopeful regarding the admittedly way-slim likelihood of seeing Hunter Biden doing the Leg Iron Shuffle, either. Takes the air right out of this, too.

I’m with Morphius here.

SO, then. A lousy hundred grand pried from a rich bitch’s purse, a piffling sum she’ll never even notice is missing, exacted in “punishment” for a manifestly unlawful and consequential offense which William Barr correctly described this way:

Attorney General William Barr said that the FBI investigation into the Trump campaign in 2016 was “one of the greatest travesties in American history.”

The attorney general told Fox News on April 9 that he is troubled by the findings from the ongoing investigation into the FBI by U.S. Attorney John Durham, who is looking into the origins of the probe as well as what the bureau did after Donald Trump was elected president.

“My own view is that the evidence shows that we’re not dealing with just the mistakes or sloppiness,” Barr told Fox News’s Laura Ingraham. “There was something far more troubling here. We’re going to get to the bottom of it. And if people broke the law and we can establish that with the evidence, they will be prosecuted.”

“What happened to him was one of the greatest travesties in American history—without any basis, they started this investigation of his campaign,” Barr said.

“And even more concerning, actually, is what happened after the campaign. A whole pattern of events while he was president to sabotage the presidency or at least have the effect of sabotaging the presidency.”

What it was, in truth, was a fucking attempted coup—a for-real case of no-nonsense, full-bore sedition,; raw treason in broad daylight, brazen and unembarrassed, before which the J6 “rioters” can but respectfully bow their heads in awe. Hillary Clinton and her cabal, in collusion with co-conspirators at the highest levels of the US government itself, did in fact plot with foreign nationals to topple a duly-elected and sworn President, nullifying the votes of millions of Americans. It’s an all the more heinous crime because it strikes at the very heart of everything America is supposed to represent, undermining if not outright obliterating the very concept of American self-government for all time. Political crimes just don’t come any more serious than that.

Yet still the witless Swamp creatures persist, studiously hacking away at their own credibility, as if the complete loss of the consent of the governed couldn’t ever have any impact on them. Thou fools. Thou purblind, arrogant fools, to imagine that the time can never come when the American people you’ve wronged over and again will rise up to avenge the long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object you inflicted on them.

Yeah, tell me again all about how important it is that we scrupulously maintain a firm faith in the basic integrity, honesty, and moral probity of the US federal government, whydon’tcha. That one’s my favorite.

*spit*

Laying blame where it belongs

Posted on March 31, 2022March 31, 2022 by Mike

What’d I tell you people.

This is not news; this national driver shortage is no shock to businessmen or policymakers. Our driver shortage contributes to empty store shelves, idled assembly lines, retail price inflation, a reduced Gross Domestic Product, and the global supply chain crisis.

This is not just one industry’s problem; it’s everybody’s problem. What is odd, however, is that so many people believe the trucker shortage is caused entirely by not enough people choosing the profession of truck driving as a career. While that is certainly a part of it, it’s not our real problem.

In fact, our truck driver shortage is caused primarily by a series of destructive government policies at every level.

…And these are just (a few of) the reasons we need so many more drivers than we should. We could also look at issues like the double-hit of the federal payroll tax that attacks owner-operators so hard. We could consider the complexities of federal Hours of Service (HoS) regulations that make every log sheet and fleet schedule a math project. We could review the federal fuel efficiency standards that have left common sense behind, chasing after ever-more-expensive, ever-less-worthwhile gains in efficiency, pricing rigs beyond the reach of entrepreneurial individuals, all contributing to the end result: making truck driving less appealing to the next generation of workers.

We could also look at, say, exorbitant license and accreditation fees, permits innumerable, and unnecessarily burdensome and costly “safety” regulations. Back when I was running the road in a big rig, I usually ran from CLT out to a small-town furniture factory in eastern Tennessee, hauling uncut blocks of foam for sofa and chair cushions. At 0-dark-thirty each morning I bobtailed up to Cumulus Fibers in Stateville to pick up a pre-loaded 53′ trailer stuffed with the material, a light load which only weighed in at four or five thousand pounds (max weight for your typical 53 footer is usually between 40 to 45 thousand pounds). I’d then head on out for the remote, decrepit old factory in Nowhere, Tn, spend an hour getting unloaded, and then come back to CF to drop off the trailer at Cumulus. Next morning: lather, rinse, repeat.

The only variation of this routine was that, about twice a week, the DMV lawdoggies at the I-40 weigh station in Statesville would wave me off to the side for yet another “safety” inspection. That would add another hour or so to my daily round, as Smokey crawled around underneath my trailer on a mechanic’s creeper filling out a list of “infractions” that would end up being about five-six pages’ worth.

There’s a reason for this, but I never thought of it as a good reason. What it was, was daylight fucking robbery by the Heat-o Banditos, raising vital revenue for the Almighty State. I swear, those po-lice should have been wearing a bandana across the bottom of their faces, and maybe an eye-mask, just to properly identify themselves.

See, those CF trailers were all ramshackly, rusted-out pieces of shit. Shabby as they were, though, the Cumulus bossheads knew they would easily hold up under the negligible load. Long as I made sure I got the trailer doors well secured—a sometimes tricky job, rasslin’ those wobbly, rusty, crooked-ass things together so that the latch hasp would mate with the cam bar lock well enough to keep the doors from flopping open on those rough mountain backroads—my tired old follow-on rig presented no real hazard to anybody.

Problem was, the Staties and DMV cops knew about the sad, sorry state of those Cumulus trailers same as I did. So a couple days a week, each and every week, I’d be honored as the selectee for a gimlet-eyed going over, after which I’d be presented with a stack of paper more closely resembling a Dostoevsky novel than a mere citation for violating “safety” regulations.

The funny part is, back then the fines were handled differently than now. All I had to do was hand the paperwork over to my boss, who would then mail it off to Cumulus Fibers, who would just pay ’em all off. There was never any thought of fixing the crappy trailers, much less buying new ones. The State got its pound of flesh, Cumulus could keep operating on the cheap, and I could keep my job. The fines were no more than a cost of doing business, that’s all. Nowadays, however, fines for almost anything at all are levied against the shipper and/or recipient involved, as well as the trucking company, as well as the poor old truck driver.

If he’s a company driver, and depending on who he works for, he may or may not get partially reimbursed. Although not usually; the company he works for will almost always, as a matter of policy, require their drivers to inspect their ride before leaving the hub; report any problems via a printed checklist and verbally; and demand a truck that’s up to snuff while the faulty rig gets down-checked for a trip to the shop to be repaired. This, in Cubical Land’s view, leaves Night Crawler, the Road Roller, or Ratchet Jaw ultimately responsible, so he gets to pay for his lax standards of professional conduct his own self. Just never anybody mind that he’s probably been writing up that same burned-out tail light, broken horn, or bald retread for weeks if not months, with all his paper shuffled, passed around, filed, and duly forgotten by the bossheads at Corporate. Trust me, it happens all the time, then and now.

If he’s an owner operator—a righteous entrepreneur working hard to grab himself a piece of the American Dream—well, he’s just screwed, basically.

As anybody who knows anything at all about the nature of government knows, said fines are way, WAY higher now, too.

We do need more truck drivers. Transportation is at the heart of everything in our economy, from food prices to energy, from necessities to the little luxuries that make for a modern, first-world standard of living. It’s government actions and government choices that hamstring the industry, drive up costs and drive down efficiency.

It’s government that makes us need so many more drivers than we should, and dissuades the young from going into it as a career.

We can hardly be blamed if we are reminded of the late President Reagan’s dictum: The nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Smart man, that Gipper was. It should be noted by one and all that the further we’ve strayed from that wise maxim, the worse our situation has become. Which is why today we struggle to get by under the less-than-capable hand of a fraudulently-installed “president” with obvious mental degradation and severe integrity issues—an inarguably untrustworthy mountebank wholly unfit for the position he finally swindled his way into, after decades of scrabbling after it so desperately. Throw ruinous taxation, crippling overregulation, and an indifferent, inflexible, and out of control bureaucracy into the pot, and the rank fetor of one hellacious stew to be finding oneself in suddenly wafts up, strong and unmistakable.

The wheels of justice, grinding slowly

Posted on March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Mike

But surpassing fine.

In October of 2020, a bombshell report detailing possibly incriminating emails (and generally degenerate behavior) from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden dropped. That report, originally published and expanded on by The New York Post, was relentlessly censored by social media companies and maligned as “Russian disinformation” by the mainstream media and the Biden campaign.

That didn’t stop right-leaning media from digging deeper, and the revelations were stunning, including Hunter Biden making $80,000 a month from a Ukrainian oil company and receiving a $2 million “retainer” to sell influence to the Libyan government. His dealings with China were also extensive and at the very least, seemed to cross into the realm of criminal FARA violations. To this day, Hunter Biden has yet to fully divest from his partial stake in a Chinese-controlled venture capital firm.

Still, all of that has been known for a long time, yet the media’s response has been to completely ~~ignore~~ suppress it while the Biden administration has continued to lie about the origins of the emails. That was, until the last few weeks.

Fixed it for ya.

Suddenly, for no reason whatsoever I’m assured, the liberal news industry, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, decided to ~~“confirm”~~ admit all the reporting we already knew was true. Further, the Post’s write-up goes so far as to detail some of Hunter Biden’s corrupt dealings, specifically regarding the Chinese. That’s quite the about-face.

Fixed it for ya again.

We should be asking ourselves why the Times, the Post, etc. just walked through the door with a six-pack and their dancing shoes on. Nothing, and I mean nothing that is harmful to a major Democrat gets printed by accident. There is always an underlying reason why a report gets made at the time it does, especially when we are talking about a story that was previously suppressed.

So what’s going on here?

My guess is that the hidden Power behind the DC throne has decided, for reasons we’ll never know, that it’s just about time to cut the drooling retard Biden’s strings to replace him with another, less laughable marionette as frontman for their ongoing charade. Either that, or Praetorian Media suspects that, their stifling of the Biden laptop story having passed its sell-by date, the whole sordid affair is about to come out whether they will or they nil. So they badly need to find some way, somehow, to hang onto whatever gossamer-thin tatters of credibility they have left by getting out ahead of it. That seems to be where Bonchie is placing his bet:

I think one only has to look at the media’s history to see a pattern when it comes to harmful revelations about Democrat figures. When reports start coming out that simultaneously make major admissions but still attempt to white-wash what’s happening, that’s usually because forces within the government are leaking information in order to get out in front of a story and preset the narrative.

The Times and the Post reported on the Carter Page FISA abuse, but only after it became clear much more was about to come out showing the FBI’s abuse of power. The Times and the Post reported on John Durham indicting Michael Sussmann, but only as a way to suggest the indictment was weak. When the actual indictment dropped, it was far worse than described.

Do you see what I mean? Something big is coming regarding the corruption surrounding Hunter Biden (and possibly his father). That’s why we are getting these reports right now, and that’s why those privy to the FBI investigation into Joe Biden’s son are suddenly leaking like crazy. They want to set the narrative before it becomes apparent just how bad things truly were. That means you can take the Post’s newest report and assume it’s just the tip of the iceberg.

All fine and well, but don’t let’s be counting any chickens as to whether Hunter might actually do time for his serial criminality—much less his senile, corrupt-to-the-marrow dad. All I have to say about THAT is, I’ll believe it when I see it. Also, harrumph.

As counter to my usual cynical suspicion, however, the Bidengate plot is definitely thickening.

On Monday, two Republican members of the United States Senate revealed evidence that Joe Biden’s son Hunter received payments of at least $100,000 from Chinese oligarchs.

As reported by Fox News, Senators Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) took to the floor of the Senate to provide a receipt for a payment of $100,000 from the Chinese energy company CEFC to Wells Fargo Clearing Services, with “further credit” being paid to Hunter Biden’s firm Owasco.

In his speech from the Senate floor, Johnson criticized the mainstream media’s efforts to deliberately cover up Hunter Biden’s numerous scandals.

“Over the course of our investigation into how Hunter Biden used his father’s position and name to enrich himself and his family,” Johnson said on Monday, “the dishonest press published countless stories reporting on the Democrats’ false charge that we were soliciting and disseminating Russian disinformation.”

Mo’ bettah still—but not for Grifter Gropey and his seedy spawn.

On Tuesday, The Federalist reported that two GOP senators, Chuck Grassley of Iowa and Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, released actual receipts of payments Hunter Biden received from foreign oligarchs that indicate “the extent to which President Biden might be — and almost certainly is — compromised.”

“There’s no middle man in this transaction. This is $100,000 from what is effectively an arm of the communist Chinese government direct to Hunter Biden,” Grassley said from the Senate floor on Monday. “To the liberal media and my Democratic colleagues: Is this official bank document Russian disinformation?”

Don’t you get it yet, Chuck? To the sleazy, scummy Left, it’s anything they need it to be, or nothing at all. Whatever advances the agenda another step down the road to Marxist utopia and unchecked, limitless power, that’s all that matters here.

Update! A NY Post deep dive into the corrupt Biden Family’s criminal connections to Chinese espionage agents, from last January.

For those wondering why Joe Biden is soft on China, consider this never-before-reported revelation: The Biden family has done five deals in China totaling some $31 million arranged by individuals with direct ties to Chinese intelligence — some reaching the very top of China’s spy agency.

Indeed, every known deal that the Biden family enjoyed with Beijing was reached courtesy of individuals with spy ties. And Joe Biden personally benefited from his family’s foreign deals.

In 2018, I was the first to report on Hunter Biden’s involvement with a Chinese investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). Hunter even introduced his dad to a company executive in December 2013 when father and son flew to Beijing on Air Force Two.

In October 2019, Hunter Biden’s lawyer George Mesires said Hunter would be resigning from the BHR board, without receiving any return on his investment or shareholder distributions.

What Team Biden failed to address was the fact that Hunter Biden still owned a stake in the investment fund, said to be 10%.

When I first reported on Hunter Biden’s China ties in 2018, Team Biden denied that they existed. Then they absurdly claimed that his stake in the BHR investment fund was only $420,000.

Steven Kaplan, who conducts research on issues in private equity, venture capital, entrepreneurial finance, corporate governance and corporate finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, said a private equity fund with $2 billion under management will typically generate fees over its life of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“It is difficult to imagine, if not incomprehensible, that a 10% stake in those economics is worth only $420K,” Kaplan said via email. “The distinction they appear to be making is they capitalized the management company with $4.2M even if the fund manages $2B. The value of that management company is likely far in excess of $4.2M if they are managing $2B.”

Much, much, MUCH more follows before landing us here:

These deals are disturbing enough, and are exacerbated by the fact that every one of them was made possible by an individual with ties that sometimes went to the highest levels of Chinese intelligence.

But there is also the curious fact that in 2014, Hunter Biden took the unusual step of telling the Secret Service that he did not want protection when he traveled overseas. The request happened shortly after he began securing deals in Beijing.

Money that Hunter Biden received from his overseas deals flowed to other members of the Biden family.

Joe Biden’s brother James  received over $1 million originating from the spy-connected Ye, according to a US Senate investigation.

And Joe Biden benefited, too.

Well, of course he did. Lest we forget, another scrupulously-ignored news item gives the memory a gentle nudge.

Bombshell: Emails show Hunter, Joe Biden shared bank accounts, could drag him into Hunter’s FBI tax probe
WASHINGTON, DC- A blockbuster report by the Daily Mail is reporting that the current occupant of the Oval Office (when he’s not in the fake set across the street) Joe Biden may soon become caught up in the FBI’s probe into Hunter Biden’s finances, according to some experts.

Emails obtained by the Daily Mail gleaned from Hunter Biden’s abandoned laptop show that Joe and Hunter Biden not only shared bank accounts, but also paid each other’s bills. The report also notes that Joe Biden may have in fact contributed to funding Hunter’s 2018 prostitution and drug binge, albeit inadvertently.

The emails, between Hunter and his business partner at Rosemont Seneca, Eric Schwerin revealed the latter was working on Joe Biden’s taxes, showed discussions revealing the Biden’s paid each other’s household bills, fielded requests for a book deal for Joe Biden, then serving as vice president, and also the donation of Biden’s papers from his time as Senator to the University of Delaware.

The emails raised some questions as to why Schwerin was so involved in Joe Biden’s affairs as vice president as opposed to government officials assigned to the vice-president’s office.

The claims made by Hunter of a shared bank account with his father also begs the question if the funds from that joint account were used for Hunter Biden’s May 2018 bender with a prostitute in a Hollywood hotel, the Mail piece reported.

The existence of a federal investigation into his tax affairs was admitted by Hunter Biden himself last December.

Of course all of this also calls into question claims that Joe Biden had made that he had no knowledge of his son Hunter’s business dealings, an important claim because Joe Biden used that as an excuse claiming no quid pro quo in Hunter’s membership on the board of Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian energy company whose CEO was being investigated by a Ukrainian prosecutor.

One expert says that if Joe Biden were not ~~currently president~~ a Democrat he would likely already be on the prosecutor’s radar by now, along with Hunter. So says John Cassara, a former U.S. intelligence officer and treasury special agent, an expert in money laundering investigations.

“Corruption is a predicate offense for money laundering. And besides corruption, it’s the perception of corruption. This kind of thing should not be happening. It undermines full faith in the US government. It undermines trust and our international reputation. It’s an embarrassment.”

As well it should be, to any of us with a shred of integrity and a functional moral compass. Which would most certainly NOT include any of the Biden clan, a family of crooked blood-ticks who have miraculously become filthy rich on a US Senator’s relatively-measly salary (174k, as of last year).

When the Bear slaps, it hurts

Posted on March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Mike

Ignore strategic analysis from sources whose visceral loathing for all things military is so deeply ingrained in their psyches that it simply overwhelms any possibility of rational, objective commentary.

The Russian military operation in Ukraine began with a rather small force of some 150.000+ men against a much larger (including reservist and territorial forces) Ukrainian force of some 400.000. The Russian force used maneuver warfare to fix the larger Ukrainian forces into place. It attacked on a large front and threatened major population concentrations, i.e. cities.

The Russian operations started with the destruction of the Ukrainian command and control network. Over the last four weeks the Ukrainian navy, its airforce, its radars and air defenses and a huge number of its armored vehicles were destroyed. Throughout the last week fuel depots all over the Ukraine were attacked and destroyed over night. Ukraine’s large ammunition depots are gone. Military production and repair facilities have likewise been destroyed. The Ukraine is no longer able to move large numbers of troops between the various fronts. Its army has lost its mobility.

While this was ongoing threats to Kiev, Odessa and other large Ukrainian cities have held significant numbers of Ukrainian troops in place and prevented reinforcements to move to the east. There units from the Donetsk and Luhansk republics attacked the 60,000 strong main force of the Ukrainian army to keep it in place.

This allowed Russian forces from Crimea and from the Russian border in the north to move into positions that will now enable them to envelope the east.

The Russian forces will probably take another four weeks to destroy the Ukrainian units at the Donetsk front. The Russian command will then have to decide which parts of the Ukraine it will want to keep under control. Next to Donetsk and Luhansk the region north of Crimea is a likely candidate. Odessa and Dnipro may also be still on the menu. The regions can be kept as statelets under local control or form a confederation that may well institutionalize a new country.

Anything beyond that depends on the willingness of the U.S. proxy government in Kiev to submit to Russia’s demands. Russia can leave it at that or it can continue to mow the grass until none is left.

Bill is eagerly anticipating the moment when “all the propaganda blows up in the usual faces,” but it won’t add up to anything. Based on observation of their past behavior, there will be neither acknowledgement of error nor any expression of contrition or apology for their self-serving blunder. They’ll just keep right on truckin’ as before, quickly moving on to the next campaign of manipulation and deceit.

At the start of a long, dark road

Posted on March 30, 2022March 30, 2022 by Mike

As I keep saying.

Two Years After Lockdowns, The West’s Troubles Aren’t Ending — They’re Just Beginning
Two years ago this week, the United States shut down. Churches, schools and businesses went dark. Weddings, funerals, and birthdays went silent. City streets stood empty, with an eeriness closer resembling occupied Paris than the bustling hubs they’d been just days before.

Two years later, as the last of the mask mandates for school children falter and crack, it’s tempting to believe our nightmare is finally over. Just as the disease is going to haunt us a long while, however, so too will the effects of how we tried to fight it.

Americans’ relationships with our politicians, bureaucrats, schools, media, police, and churches are fundamentally altered. Indeed, the entire West’s relationships with these major segments of society are forever remade. As we look out on the wreckage of two years of Covid policies, as well as our spiking fuel prices, rocketing inflation, a contested election, a Chinese Olympics, and a land war in Europe, it’s increasingly clear that, far from standing at the end of a dark era, our civilization teeters unsteadily at the very beginning of one.

It’s hard to notice at first. The modern West has become so accustomed to a slow, steady decline — the kind Merle Haggard sang about, and Ronald Reagan ran against — that complaining about it has become cliché; like the angry old man waving his cane.

More than that, it’s very tempting to view the past two years as separate from our other major problems. But just as Black Tuesday began an era marked by the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, the Second World War, and a fundamental reshaping of the American life, so too will the Lockdowns mark the start of a ride we can’t get off.

Even in states that have long since shrugged off the bureaucrats’ Covid demands, trust is broken. The people had believed in March 2020 that if they did their parts, all would soon be well. As President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism…[and] the chief business of the American people is business.”

Neither Americans’ idealism nor our industry were rewarded, however. From March 2020 on, ours was rule not by people, but by bureaucratic diktat.

Our politicians betrayed us: flying abroad, getting haircuts, going maskless, holding parties, and dining out while also closing schools, forbidding gatherings, banning amenities, and demonizing all who resisted — or even questioned — their orders.

Our corporate media betrayed us: propping up liars and fools, tearing down all who spoke against their champions, and spreading fear and hatred of dissent as far and wide as their words would carry.

Our teachers betrayed us: using Covid to gain a grab bag of vacation time, control over parents, wage hikes, and other unrelated perks, all while punishing school children with years of masks, separation — and the educational and developmental retardation those rules cost.

Even our much-vaunted hospital workers betrayed us: keeping dying husbands from their dying wives, grown children from their elderly parents, brothers from their sisters, and babies from their mothers — all to ensure “Covid safety.”

As hard as it seems, much of this might be good. Not that our politicians, media, teachers, and health care are broken — as the most important essay of 2021 laid bare — but that Americans now recognize just how broken they all are.

A most excellent essay, one I can’t recommend to you CF scapegraces highly enough. I don’t really have anything to add myself in the way of commentary; Bedford pretty much said it all, and said it quite damned well, too. Most of it we’ve already covered here anyway, enough so that I’m starting to feel like Chris’s “angry old man waving his cane.” Although I admit that could also possibly be due to my being…well, an angry old man. No cane at the moment—although with the fake leg coming along in the next several days (or so I’ve been told), I’m going to have to get myself one soon.

The keys to compliance

Posted on March 28, 2022March 28, 2022 by Mike

Superstate arm-twisting is the mother of invention.

The Hemi V8 engine may be history – or will soon be that, tragically – but Dodge hasn’t given up on engines just yet.

A new engine – rather than another electric motor – is coming, soon. It’s not a V8 – because V8 engines are too big, all the time, to “qualify” for legality under the anti-engine regulatory regime of the Biden Thing. Which recently “mandated” that all engines must soon approach the 50 MPG mark – else be heavily fined. As well as “comply” with “emissions” regulations that “mandate” essentially zero emissions – at the tailpipe – of the dread gas carbon dioxide. The one that amounts to less than .01 percent of the gasses that compose the Earth’s atmosphere. We are supposed to believe that a fraction of that fraction – “emitted” by gas-burning engines – constitutes an existential threat to the “climate.”

Kind of like the “virus” that was so threatening it didn’t kill 99.8 percent of the population.

The replacement for the Hemi series of V8 engines – in 5.7, 6.2 and 6.4 liter displacements – will be an in-line six of about half that displacement, heavily turbo-boosted to make up for it.

It is the “Hurricane” 3.0 liter engine, which is an entirely different kind of engine. The Hemis were pushrod-actuated, overhead valve engines with just one camshaft operating the works. This simple – and compact – layout, with fewer parts – defines the modern V8 engine, which has been around since the mid-1950s and for good reason.

The design works.

Indeed it does; the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine has been said to be the most successful invention in all of history. Which is what they hate most about it. The ICE has for years stood for freedom, independence, and readily-available mobility for the American hoi polloi. It liberated entire populations, quite literally. No wonder the shitlibs hate it so fanatically. Now, about this new thang.

Is anyone being forced to buy these (V8—M) “hogs”? Are there not less “hoggy” alternatives available for those who want such? If Dodge can sell its “hogs,” does it not imply that people want them? If so what gives the busybodies the right to thwart the transaction?

Since these questions haven’t been raised, the answer is this new in-line six, which does have multiple overhead cams and four valves per cylinder. Plus two turbochargers.

These are the keys not just to horsepower but compliance.

The cams and valves increase airflow. The turbos increase effective displacement. A V8 inhales a certain amount of air; a turbocharged engine is force-fed air. Negative vs. positive pressure. But – in the case of the latter – only when under boost. When not, the engine inhales less air – and burns (and emits) less gas.

And that is the key to compliance, at least on paper. Which is all that matters in these latter days, when car companies are obliged to build cars for the government first and customers second.

Just another aspect of life in this demented nation that the Left has turned upside-down and inside-out. They’re “experts,” see, and so very much better than mere serf-class oafs like you and me. Hats off to Dodge for finding the workaround, I suppose. But as we used to say in the H-D shop: There ain’t no replacement for cubic-inch displacement.

Evil empire

Posted on March 28, 2022March 28, 2022 by Mike

As I keep telling ya: All part of The Plan.

At first it seemed outrageous to think anyone would want famine, starvation, energy shortages, economic depression, and global war, but watching the insane decision making of politicians, trumpeted by the Deep State bootlickers in the media, has convinced me this is chapter 2 in their Great Reset book of horrors.

Once you wrap your head around how vile, evil, and demented those who are pulling the strings behind this Great Reset are, your eyes are open to how far they are willing to go to institute their plan. It appears they will stop at nothing, kill as many people as necessary, create maximum chaos and pain, wreck any civic cohesiveness left, and destroy all moral and legitimate norms of society, in order to increase their control, power and wealth on this earth.

They hold all the cards. They control the governments, corporations, banks, legacy media, social media, entertainment industries, military industrial complex, sickcare Big Pharma complex, and the mental processes of the masses through their mind control/propaganda technology. Their hubris and arrogance have reached peak altitude and exuberance. They believe they are invincible. That will be their fatal weakness.

I know we would like to root for the good guys, but there are no good guys running any country on this earth. Only bad guys, willing to sell their souls, are ever elevated to positions of power. They are selected by oligarchs, not elected by the people. The western propaganda spewing media machine specializes in demonizing those they are paid to demonize (Putin, Trump, non-vaxxers), while glorifying anyone the ruling elite have chosen to use to further their agenda (Zelensky, Fauci, vaxxers).

That’s what grabbed my attention hardest from a piece so very characteristic of TBP: quite long; complex and dense; thoroughly well-researched and supported by hard evidence; covering an extremely broad range of intellectual and philosophical ground; offering a unique and sometimes quite visionary analysis, as well as bold projections of how and where things are likely to wind up. You’ll need to block out a significant chunk of time to read all of this one—I’m nowhere near done with it myself yet—but you really, really should.

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