Not in our stars, Horatio, but in our selves

More and more, it begins to look as if my friend Claire and I might just be one more example validating the “great minds think alike” hypothesis.

It’s true. We’re most free when we can just take our freedom for granted.

But you see the problem there, of course. Our not thinking about freedom leaves control freaks free to pursue our enslavement. Then by the time we’re aware of what they’re doing, it may be too late.

In theory, it’s possible to set up bulwarks that operate more-or-less automatically against government-gone-mad (constitutions, decentralized political structures), but in practice few of them work very well or very long.

Now, living an age of despotism whose manic growth we’re compelled to witness during 24/7 news cycles, we have to be on constant watch, right down to a fight-or-flight biological level. Because even if we’ve chosen the course of maximum freedom we still need to know, and move in response to, what’s coming at us.

HOW we move in response is up to our discretion, and I think most of us realize that political action — other than on the most local levels — is just playing the game Our Glorious Rulers want us to play.

Later this year, barring some more dramatic form of manipulation, we’ll cheer as the R-party broom sweeps the D-party dust out of office. Pundits will pund. Hands will be virally wrung. The End of Democracy will come ’round once more. On the winning side, cheers will be cheered. Promises will be promoted. Freedom will be rung. Swamps will be threatened with draining.

And not a damn thing will change. Except a few cosmetics, which the next power turnover will bring back.

Still, we will watch the coming turnover and want desperately to be happy about it. Because the alternative is…

Plenty more left to take in here, every word of it Gold Medal-winning quality, spanning several categories: Reasoning, Composition, Logical Cohesiveness, and Analysis. What I’ve come to really enjoy over the years Claire and I been reading each other’s work is that at times, each of us seems to be channeling the other’s thoughts. We’re almost always in complete agreement with each others’ conclusions, and then we toddle off to write about the topic of the day in very different styles, rhythms, and phrasing.

This interplay between the friction-free synchronication of our intellectual gearworks, juxtaposed with our operational variances of style and craft just intrigues all hell outta me. I’ve been noticing our odd same thoughts/different words relationship for a goodish while now, and it tickles me good. I consider it both strange and wonderful, as the reformed KGB goon/hot dog cart operator said of America towards the end of Moscow On The Hudson.

Some shrink really oughta write a book about us, I believe. Anyhoo, back to the esteemed Miz’riz Wolfe* for the closer.

The Crazy—and the Crazies—will not win. In the long run, they can’t win because the world operates on realities, and realities always reassert themselves. Kipling knew. Everybody with a grasp of how reality operates knows.

The Crazies can do—and are doing and will do—a whale of a lot of damage in the short run. And the short run could last a painfully long time. They’ll blight a society and perhaps even bring it down. They’ll provoke a backlash that could lead to a Nehemiah Scudder or worse.

Havoc they will create. Suffering they will impose. Confusion they will sew. A million individual tragedies they will have to answer for. Tyranny they are already grimly advancing. But win? No, they will not. Because reality always triumphs in the end. And in that battle the Crazies are by definition on the losing side.

Havoc they’ll create, suffering they will impose? Not if we stop them with all the mail-fisted BANG, ZOOM!™ we can unleash on their empty heads, they won’t. The one and only reason their tyrannical agenda has grimly advanced as far as it has is because Our Side has sat passively back on our soft, flubbery haunches and allowed it to happen without so nuch as a token gesture of pushback from us. That speaks quite poorly of Real Americans, a real-world example which soundly rubbishes all their puffed-up gasbaggery declaring how very, very much they love “Muh freedumbs!!” Sorry, Cletus, but I’m afraid I’m gonna need to see some viable, no-shit proof of your rock-solid commitment to individual liberty before I’ll be willing to swallow any more of that empty, chest-thumping flummery again.

The link Claire helpfully provides in the above excerpt, in case you hadn’t guessed already, is to Rudyard Kipling’s seminal poem The Gods Of The Copybook Headings. The choice to bring up this particular work is only meet and just, seeing as how Gods… is one of Kipling’s many timeless masterpieces that somehow never offers a single hint of the stale aroma that typically wafts off the outdated, the irrelevant, or the no longer applicable. You can love him, you can hate him, but you can’t gainsay his insight, the solid truth behind it, nor his powerful way of expreesing it. Same deal with Claire Wolfe. Any poor soul foolish enough to contradict her does so at his own risk.

*When I was a wee grade-school tyke, there was a black kid in the same class with me who couldn’t pronounce “Mrs” for the life of him, folding, spindling, and mutilating it into the closest approximation he could gargle out: “Miz’riz.” Which, interestingly enough, may not be as goofy and incorrect as it first appears. See, “Mrs” was originally used as a contraction for “Mistress,” and is almost never seen in fully spelled-out form. Actually, there IS no standardized, officially-approved spelling; it was always just plain old “Mrs,” and that’s it

Goin’ down

Robert Spencer asks a pertinent question.

Does the Western Lifestyle Put Societies on the Path to Extinction?

Apparently, yes. Yes, it does.



The rest of the world is noticing the West’s pronoun madness, trans madness, grooming madness, and other evils, and is drawing the obvious conclusions. The deputy commander-in-chief for coordination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, said in a recent interview on Iranian TV that Europeans were losing the sense of their own national identity, and that the Western lifestyle had placed European societies on the path to extinction. He could have said exactly the same thing about the United States of America.

The March 31 exchange on Iran’s Ofogh TV began when an interviewer asked Naghdi: “If I am not mistaken, you expressed an opinion about the French national soccer team. You said that out of the 23 team members, 15 were Africans, and that of the 12 members of their national basketball team, ten were Africans. You inferred that France has no national identity.” It was an interesting question, because if an interviewer had asked it in France or any other country in Europe, or in the U.S., he or she would have been excoriated as a “racist” and likely fired, simply for asking the question. When a topic, any topic, can be more freely discussed on Iranian TV than on American TV, you know there is something wrong.

Naghdi didn’t berate the interviewer for “bigotry.” Instead, he answered: “The West delineates a certain lifestyle for societies, and how we should live. What has this done to the West itself? It has caused negative population growth, which forces them to import population from abroad. European societies will reach a point, within several decades, where you will have to search for a single person of the European race in France or in England, for example.” Well, yes, and not just France or England. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) recently conducted a “micro-census” that found that fully twenty-five percent of the people in the country have a “migrant background.” Given the low birth rates of native Europeans all across the continent, it isn’t hard to see where this is tending. As far back as 2005, the renowned historian Bernard Lewis said that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century, “at the very latest.”

Naghdi continued: “In this situation, there is no more meaning to national identity. According to statistics, if you hold free elections in England in 2060, a Pakistani or an Indian will be the prime minister, and [British] Parliament will be filled with [immigrants] from Iraq, India, and so on. What will be the meaning of national identity there? There will be no such thing as the English people anymore. This will be a different nation and different society.” As if aware of what the Western establishment media would make of such talk, Naghdi added: “Some people might interpret what I say to be racial discrimination, but if you care about the value of preserving a nation’s identity and the continued existence of that nation, [know that] the path [the West] outlined for human society will ultimately be the annihilation of future generations.”

This Eye-ranian dude is one brainy cat, no doubt about it— perceptive, quite canny both historically and politically, and right on the beam. Which is NOT a sentence I ever imagined I’d have occasion write, much less actually mean.

From First World to Third World in a few short months

Remember all those times when I insisted that—contra the folks who figured gun confiscation would be the spark that got the CW v2.0 conflagration started for reals—we wouldn’t see normal people out in the streets, shooting at Official Authority figures, and putting Minas Morgul to the torch until they’d gotten good and hungry—them, and/or their families?

Yeah, well. About all that.

I’m noticing a trend. Not good, very much not so good.  As in very very much a thing of Badness. Jen Pisseye-the-Mouth, old PCircle back? Let me tell you, she’s not bright enough to understand ain’t no one with two brain cells is buying her bullshit anymore.

I mean it’s getting to be an untenable situation. The rest of the World now sees this time as a chance to really pay back ‘Murica for all our Leadershit’s Imperial Meddling. They’ve gone around for the past 70+ years pissing in everyone’s cornflakes, and expected everyone to ask, if not outright beg for more.  

Now? Not so Mucho. The Saudis won’t take our calls, Joe Chink is salivating at the prospect of metaphorically eating our lunch so to speak, and the Indians told us to piss up a rope. Hell, the Pakistanis are in an uproar ‘cos it’s obvious even to Oedipus that we just fucked them over with a mini-color revolution there, which does not make Lil Brown Hindu Brother happy.

We’re in -the- most precarious position I can think of in the history of our small country. No one here seems to grasp it… well, we deplorables and detested dissidents know, and that there is part of the issue…when the wheels come off, the scapegoating is going to be astounding.  

BCE draws his conclusion after doing a little comparison shopping for various food items which showed Bidenflation rates of anywhere from 54 to…ummm…128 percent?!?

SRSLY???

Then things go from bad to much, much worse. In the comments section, several Expat fans point out the sudden shady-looking spate of large food production facilities, grain mills, and such-like burning to the ground, both here and abroad. In Germany, they’re already rationing cooking oil, of all things, a three-liter bottle of which item will now set you back a cool 65 simoleons (60 Euros). Tons more grim reportage over there, enough of it to freeze the marrow of even the sunniest, most carefree Pollyanna. As jimmyPx says:

My wife has always rolled her eyes at my “conspiracy theories” but the price of food has woken her up. When I told her revolutions usually follow food shortages, I said “would you or your sister kill someone to feed our beloved 6 year old nephew and keep him alive”? She sadly agreed and I said so would everyone else for their kids hence why famine = revolutions. Remember the French Revolution and “let them eat cake”? Our elites are just as out of touch as the French nobility was and will be shocked when nooses and pitch forks come out.

S’truth. Yet still they persist. We’re in for some seriously bad times, very soon now. They know this every bit as well as everyone reading this does. Somehow, though, our self-styled “elites” appear to believe that all this suffering and woe will fall on everybody except themselves. Hey, it’s always been that way before, right? So why shouldn’t it still be that way now?

Sorry, not this time around, you bastards. THIS time, you soulless fiends have screwed the pooch so completely that where this whole thing goes is no longer something over which you have any control. THIS time, with all your globalist jiggery-pokery, your arrogant fiddle-fucking around in affairs which are much bigger than you’ll ever be, you’ve gone way too far. THIS time, having inserted all ten of your fat thumbs into the machineworks not just of a small nation or two, but of THE ENTIRE FUCKING WORLD, you’ve brought us all to the very brink of destruction—REAL destruction, literal-not-figurative, destruction of a scale and magnitude impossible to either gauge or comprehend—a scale large enough, powerful enough, to pull all you vain imbeciles right down into the pit with the rest of us.

This will be a first in so many ways. The mighty US of A, for so many years the world’s breadbasket, the place where all the food was grown, will be reduced to a beggar nation itself, its populace no longer the smiling, fresh-faced, carefree suburbanites of 50s magazine advertising.


Better days

Looks pretty good, no? But not to the twisted, envious trolls of the Left, so sick in the head that even as innocuous an image as that will leave them choking nearly to death on the bilious hatred it brings up in their throats. Only killing those happy young Americans off completely could provide Leftists with any relief, removing even the memory that they’d ever existed at all, a standard practice for them. So that’s just what they did. One will have to hearken back a bit further to get an idea of where they intend to leave us now.


Not so good

Niiiice. Why, as their Black Jesus once smarmily sniffed, “You would think they would be thanking me.” I almost look forward to seeing the architects of so much human misery get themselves a long-past-due schooling.

American bygones, American revival

America’s once-robust old stock has been diluted beyond all recognition, what had been a savory and nourishing stew watered down to thin, flavorless pap.

The point is, this USED to be America, where Americans didn’t take lies and false accusations from punks just because they wore a badge. I know there’s cops out there thinking that they’d thump and cuff anyone who tried that sort of thing, but that’s only because they haven’t had to deal with real Americans for a long, long time, if ever. While the cops used to be tougher, so were the Americans with whom they dealt.

The downside of mass immigration since the 1960s, is we’ve imported a lot of compliance-oriented people and watered down the original stock. People from other countries, who lived in lawless nations, who could be killed and dumped by any number of government goons, don’t understand a nation that relies on the rule of law, they only know how to comply and they’ve infected the American population and that’s influenced the American police force.

Real Americans are massively jealous of their freedom and real American cops respect the fact that the citizens have rights. Where that’s gone wrong is largely with the citizens themselves. When I’ve gotten a ticket for seat belts, or some imagined moving violation, I’ve taken the cops to court. Sometimes I win, sometimes I lose, but it’s the fight that matters. It’s the injustice that cannot be shrugged at and passed by. When the cops pull me over, I hand them the registration, proof of insurance and my driver’s license. I don’t talk, unless it’s to argue, but that argument is better done in court than the side of the road.

I understand that a lot of people are going to recall the cops in the 1960s being pretty brutal. Yes, of course, but not with regular citizens, unless they were known trouble-makers. One could be an upstanding member of the community and get something done by fighting back. If you were a known pedophile, they might just find your poor body beside the road, the victim of a hit and run. Today, we tolerate pedophiles in the Oval Office and the Supreme Court and I’m not necessarily talking about Ketanji Brown-Jackson.

I’m not trying to aggrandize myself, or my family, I’m just trying to give personal experiences so the reader will know that I’m not suggesting things to be done, that I wouldn’t or haven’t already done, or witnessed being done. When the cops were right, when I’d done something wrong, generally out of mischief, I owned up to it and took the beating, but when I was innocent, it was a different matter.

What I’m trying to point out is that we ALL used to be that way, everyone I knew. That was America to me, a whole nation of people whose first instinct was to demand freedom, demand justice, take a beating if it gave one the opportunity to tell them to pound sand. When I look at all that went on during the lockdowns, I just don’t understand it. In-N-Out Burger joints never caved, never made their customers wear masks and when California told them they had to ask for vaccination status, they told them to pound sand. That was an American act of hostility toward injustice. I believe a lot of Americans have forgotten what it means to be American, to be hostile toward authority when it’s doing some injustice, cooperative when they’re pursuing justice. Understanding the difference used to be common sense.

Our two nations are not compatible. For those who demonstrate and encourage sexual deviancy in children as young as three years old are not compatible with those who find it firstly criminal, but also offensive, cruel, sadistic and damaging can’t live together. They can’t share the same laws, the same schools, the same government or treasury. They can’t enjoy the same television programs or sports activities. The openness with which this sexual perversion of little more than toddlers takes place is already a national disgrace, but that disgrace belongs to the Americans who’ve forgotten how to be Americans. It’s a lost art. For heaven’s sake, revive it.

Heaven’s sake? No, for ALL of our sakes. Heaven will be the reward for having brought America back into the warm light of righteousness once more, should the struggle to restore our precious liberty end in success.

“A Handgun Against an Army”

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)

How to fix a broken nation

Kevin Downey does a fairly comprehensive yet concise review of events over the last cpl-three years, from which a conclusion is drawn.

Real Americans have had it.

We watched as voters handed Virginia Democrats a pounding in last November’s elections. Long Island, solidly blue at one point, cleaned house and voted for Republicans in four out of four races on the same day Virginia cleaned house. Kenosha, Wisc., home to the riots over the police shooting of Jacob Blake, a black guy who was retrieving a knife from his car after being stopped by cops for sexually assaulting an ex-girlfriend, voted red Tuesday in races from the county executive down to school board seats. Nearby Waukesha and Menomonee Falls followed suit. The writing is on the wall: go woke and real Americans will send you to your room.

The Daily Wire is in combat mode. Not only did they get into the razor business to compete against the wokesters at Harry’s, but they also have their sights set on Disney.

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed an anti-grooming law in Florida. Tennessee is looking to ban obscene materials for all school kids through 12th grade, and Georgia has passed several measures that help parents protect their kids.

Now is the time for conservatives to get LOUD. The battle against Marxism is ON, and it’s going very well for us. Now is the time to step on the gas, NOT the brakes. It’s time for all of us to go to a school board meeting, demand answers, and stop voting for RINOs like Mitt Romney.

That’s all fine and well if it makes you feel better, Kev, and more power to ya; can’t do any harm to try it while we all wait for the shooting to start, I suppose, except insofar as it could distract us from important activities like loading mags, zeroing rifles, and establishing interlocking fields of fire in the front yard. As far gone as we are along the road to ruin at this point, though, I’m afraid your well-intended suggestions will fall well short of being equal to the task before us.

I have to agree that Real Americans have had it. According to the available evidence, more and more of them are becoming more and more fed up with each new outrage, insult, or indecency. The pertinent question is whether enough of us are fed up enough to overcome our natural reluctance to do the fearsome, shattering things which, deep down, we all know will almost certainly have be done. The forecast, long term and short both, is for unpleasant and uncertain conditions, with a strong chance of calamity and ruin afterwards.

Don’t despair quite yet, though; Padraig Martin says there’s a better, easier, less destructive way to go about it.

I get it all the time – “Fight!,” “Hang the traitors!,” and “Real Patriots are ready to shoot!” I get complaints that I am some kind of wimp because I do not embrace a violent assault on the vile US Government. About 50% of those making such posts and comments are Feds. They are trying to ensnare you in a conspiracy trap. About 50% are legitimate, well intentioned individuals of varying levels of mental stability who believe fighting is the only way out of our current mess. Let me clear the record: whereas I do not believe things will fix themselves and a fight may eventually occur, no mater how successful your fight, you need a plan for the post-revolution you seek.

I am not only a student of insurgencies, having done my graduate thesis on how to build successful revolutions using the Iranian model, but I also spent almost 20 years working on the logistics of supporting insurgent operations. I know what is needed. My favorite aspect of insurgencies are the comms necessary to build and guide them. Revolutiomary Propaganda is crucial to support. Thanks to the US Government, I have worked in this field for decades. You – random sincere Gab Patriot – have done nothing for the revolt you seek.

There has NEVER been a successful revolution without a parallel system. Whether it was the United States of 1775, Ireland 1918, Iran 1978, or Romania 1992, you will never succeed without a “Shadow System.” Economically, Torba is right. You need to build a parallel economy. You need a parallel legal structure… parallel education system…parallel monetary structure…you need to develop systems necessary to replace the collapsed state after you win. If you offer no alternative, no one will join your fight. It will die at the Pale.

How do you achieve this? Build.

Read the rest of it, as you already knew I was going to say, then read this astute followup (“A great place to raise a child does not come cheap”—well put, Simon) from the comments section too. WRSA is understating the case by calling it “food for thought.”

Update! Sundance heartily seconds the notion that Real Americans have had it and are fed up, but then scampers waaaay on out into deep left field with it.

Folks, the need for control is a reaction to fear. The people in “fly over” country have joined with the coastal working class. People are furious right now, from the guy that guides hunters, to the truck drivers, hammer swingers, mayors of towns and cities, and even state senators, legislatures and newly awakened citizens who are demanding action against this leftist onslaught.

The political pendulum has never, in the history of humanity, stayed on one side of a swing. The back lash from overreach has always been proportionate to how far off center it went before coming back…and right now we’re staring at a whole hell of a lot of the country (about 80-90% of the land mass, as well as about 70% of the population) that is fed up. DC knows they are in a tenuous place, and they do not want that assembly deciding the only way to fix it is to burn it down and start over. They are doing everything in their power, and beyond, to control and avoid it.

Okay, where to begin.

  • The need for control is a reaction to fear: The need for control CAN BE, and sometimes IS, a reaction to fear. It can also be the product of greed; egotism; feelings of inadequacy or inferiority; or a sadistic craving to have others bow and scrape before them
  • The people in “fly over” country have joined with the coastal working class: Oh, they have? Based on what, exactly? Certainly, none of them has contacted me to inquire about any “joining.” Heck, how sure are we that there even IS a “coastal working class” anymore?
  • …mayors of towns and cities, and even state senators, legislatures: Except the numerous ones who are fully on board with the Uniparty program, if not actively helping to implement the Agenda

I’m more or less okay with the pendulum/backswing analysis, hoary old cliche that it is, and won’t raise a quibble with the “80-90% of the land mass” proposition either. But…”70% of the population”? Dude, SRSLY?!? Even Limbaugh didn’t go that far with his oft-repeated rose-colored mantra that the US is “a conservative-majority nation”—a contention that, as time went on and the country’s death spiral into Leftism deepened and accelerated, required a more desperate and far-flung search for smaller and smaller nuggets of evidence to prop it up. I mean, c’mon: if 70% of us really were fed up with what, after all, is almost entirely the perfectly predictable end result of Democrat/Leftist policy and ideology, no Democrat elected official could safely open his front door to poke his head out for a brief look around without having to take to his heels and fly for his very life from the angry mob in hot pursuit of him.

70%?!? Hell, even the most vain and/or unrealistic Democrat office-seeker could only throw up his hands in abject hopelessness and withdraw under the burden of such a crushing weight of political opinion. If that number was anything like accurate, election theft and fraud would be a thing of the past, as dead as the dodo. Hell, the Democrat Party its own self would be eligible for federal protection as an endangered species, with the odds of it surviving for long being inversely proportional to said 70%.

Sure, it would be nice to think it was real, better yet if it WAS. Alas for us all, it ain’t. It just ain’t. There’s optimism, then there’s over-optimism, then self-deception, then balls-out delusion. Where Sundance might have come across that 70% blue-sky of his I haven’t the merest clue. Wherever it might have been, though, he really ought to take it back there and leave the damned thing.

Unreal

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?

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.

Monsters of Globalism

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.

Laying blame where it belongs

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.

At the start of a long, dark road

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.

Not the Worst that Could Happen

A number of people are in a tizzy about the possibility of Kamala Harris — Heels Up, Kneepads, the Sloppy Seconds in Command, or whatever you want to call her — being declared President if the Joetato dies (naturally or otherwise) or is found to be unfit (which would be nothing more than an acknowledgement of something which has been obvious for over a decade) or even is impeached and removed (unlikely but not completely impossible).

Here I am, messenger of joyous tidings that I always am, to tell you that such an occurrence wouldn’t be all that bad. Bad, yes, but not as bad as all that.

For one thing, it wouldn’t really matter. Do you think that the Drooling Imbecile in Chief is really in charge of anything more significant than choosing what flavor pudding he gets for dessert? The diseased hyena will likewise be a figurehead or she’ll be removed just as easily.

For another, the witch drives people away at a rate matched only by other incompetent, screaming tyrants — Hillary Clinton and Andrew Cuomo come to mind. Any chiefs of staff, agency heads, and anyone else with anything on the ball will turn in their resignations in a hurry, leaving only inept chairwarmers. This would leave the machinery of government in the hands of the bureaucrats, not ideal but better than what we’d see with a handful of energetic, capable, charismatic progressives in charge.

Finally, and most importantly, Harris sliming her way into the oval office would give her the title of First Female President, taking away that prize from any number of mostly progressives, some of whom might have some shred of competence in carrying out their destruction. Even better, Harris would taint the idea of a female President as thoroughly as Obama tainted the holy goal of a black President. It’s even possible that she’d kick off the long-awaited backlash against progressives and their goals.

So: not good, but it could be worse.

Evil empire

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.

Is it treason yet?

Kunstler asks a question whose answer we all already know, or at least ought to.

What Is to Be Done?
The black hole of depravity known as Hunter Biden’s Laptop dilates ever wider as the rickety “Joe Biden” regime chugs towards its event horizon of disgrace and collapse, throwing off the jetsam of our nation’s remnant honor in its toxic vapor trail. The memos and emails on the device could not be clearer: “Joe Biden” and his grifting family sold out their country.

The mentally incompetent husk of a crooked old pol is owned by every foreign interest in his decaying orbit, and owned as well by the foul and perfidious “intel” mafia lodged like a cancerous mass eating away at what used to be known as the American government. Face it: this false “president,” installed by malignant forces allied with his Party of Chaos, is a menace to our nation.

The Russian clean-up of Ukraine has exposed the operational base of the Biden Family’s flagrant crimes. The laptop confirms that Hunter’s Rosemont Seneca front company invested in the chain of bio-weapons labs set up by the CIA and Department of Defense and operated through their front company Metabiota, with tendrils reaching to the Wuhan, China, virology lab that was the most likely point-of-origin for SARS-CoV-2, a.k.a. Covid-19.

Money money money everywhere along the trail for the Biden Family, fees-for-service from the crooked Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, chairman of Burisma, the gas company that provided walking-around money for Hunter’s insatiable drug habit and degenerate sexual adventures…more millions from shady sources in Russia…and then billions more from the board rooms of Chinese companies connected with the intel and military arms of the CCP.

If the American public had known of these entanglements, Joe Biden would certainly not have been the beneficiary of the engineered balloting irregularities that determined the 2020 election.

It’d surely be nice to think so, yeah. But how confident of that can we really be? Granted, the Laptop, Holy Grail of Corruption, was successfully suppressed in a tour de force of collusion, corruption, deceit, and bare-naked treason whose reach extends to practically every institution, organization, bureacracy, and office in the US. Too, though there is simply no way in Hell Biden received the number of votes that were claimed; 2020’s disgraceful “election” was shot through with fraud and criminality, rife with it. This, every honest and Awake™ American already knows.

Even so, we’ve seen no general uprising in consequence; the response, rather, has been flaccid, indifferent, blasé. In light of that, can anybody possibly convince themselves that now, all of a sudden, the revelations of things thinking people already knew about the Biden Cosa Nostre and the Demonrat COMAAPP (Criminal Organization Masquerading As A Political Party, the acronym I”ll be using from here on out) will inspire them to correct the error at last? Sorry, can’t see it myself. As I’ve insisted for a goodish while now, we’re not there quite yet; gonna take a lot more hungry children and jobless parents—salt of the earth Americans, I mean, the people who keep this faltering system staggering blindly on—before anything like that ever happens.

Kuenstler frets and gnaws at his opening question for a few more ‘graphs before closing things out with a forecast I can agree with completely.

“Joe Biden” has knocked the remaining props out from under the country’s assumed standard-of-living. We are on track to go medieval in months, not years: no replacement parts for our machines, no money (or else money that’s worthless), no food, no heat, no light, no getting from Point A to Point B, soon no hope. And if we’re really unlucky, the very land itself and the things we’ve built upon it reduced to cinders and ash.

One thing you must know: we are not entering the wishful robotic anti-utopia of social credit control, QR code management, and World Economic Forum / Klaus Schwab transhumanism. We are veering, rather, off-the-rails into epic historic political disorder, something much more perplexing than the clear-cut crack-up of the 1860s. In this new pandemonium, the best of us will remember what has been best about us: liberty, the rule of law, freedom of speech and the press, the dignity of work, our sense of obligation to a common good, and the decorum of truth-telling. For now, strive to stay sane against all the inducements of the wicked.

Strive to stay sane, yes. And stock up on more ammo, provisions, TP, and all the general neccessaries of living to whatever degree you’re able. Regardless of how and/or why it comes to pass, extremely hard times are a-comin’.

SHTF plan

Herschel posts a video of a bipedal parasite.

I wouldn’t embed this video except that I have actually talked to people like this.  Yes, to someone who told me he was arming himself (and even minimizing ammunition purchases) but planned to take what ammunition he had and steal ammo and food from other people.

I’m not kidding.

That’s certainly bad enough, but individuals like this can be dealt with as and when they crop up. There’s another thieving predator out there, though—a much more fearsome one.

Like him, I’ve also met people who openly talk in such terms. They’ve spent thousands of dollars on their guns, accessories, ammo and the like, but very little on everyday necessities that will be in short supply if (when) trouble comes. They consider themselves well prepared for emergencies, but in reality they’re only prepared to rob those who have prepared well for emergencies.

Bear in mind, too, that this is a very likely official response in an emergency. I’ve seen it time and time again in real life in the Third World, and there’s plenty of history of it in the First World too. In a crisis, the authorities mostly won’t have reserve supplies to feed people, but they’ll be under pressure by a huge number of folks demanding that they “do something!” There’s not much they can do, except take whatever supplies they can find from those who have them, under cover of a proclamation of a state of emergency.  If you check your state’s and town’s laws and statutes, you’ll almost certainly find legal authorization for such proclamations, including the right for theauthorities to take whatever they need from anywhere or anyone to deal with the emergency. It’s standard legal boilerplate, and it’s ubiquitous. (Look at the official seizure of firearms in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina, and how the authorities confiscated whatever they needed from those who had it – including cops looting stores right alongside “regular” looters. Learn from that example. If it happened there, it can happen where you are, too.)

If things go to hell in a handbasket, expect official proclamations forbidding “hoarding”, and demanding that those who have, share with those who have not. When the nice policemen come door to door, demanding to search your property (without a warrant) and confiscate half or more of your supplies to feed those who don’t have them, they won’t take “No” for an answer. They’ll have their orders. They’ll also have their own families that need food; and their bosses (political and/or law enforcement) will have made it clear to them that if they don’t produce the goods from the community, they and their families won’t eat either. If you try to stop them, you’ll be lucky to escape with an arrest and a beating. In a Third World nation, you’ll likely eat a bullet or three if you’re so stupid.

If grasshoppers think that an ant has food, they’ll come a-running. If some of those grasshoppers are well-armed individuals who think they can take what they need from you, as discussed in the video above, you’d best have some means on hand to deter them – or stop them the hard way.

Hey, I’m good with that. In a SHTF situation, my plan is to shoot first, early, and repeatedly, until not one skel is left upright. As one of Herschel’s commenters reminds us: The training period is coming to an end, use the remaining time well. Indeed so.

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