Hard times in the land of plenty

STILL think you’re voting your way out of this?

Posted on May 22, 2024May 22, 2024 by Mike

Because, y’know, you ain’t.

BREAKING: Somehow, Fulton County Democrats Choose Fani Willis Again

“Somehow,” no less. Note my bold in this next bit, please.

With all the information that has come to light during Fani Willis’ tenure as district attorney in Fulton County, Ga., it would be understandable to think that voters in the county would be ready for a change. Yet somehow, Democrats in Fulton County have overwhelmingly voted to send her to the general election this November.

Willis defeated her challenger, attorney and writer Christian Wise Smith, to the tune of 89.4% to 10.6%. WSB Radio reports that the Associated Press called the race within a half hour of polls closing.

Any questions? There shouldn’t be, I think the above speaks for itself quite loudly enough.

Naturally, emboldened by their clear overwhelming-majority status, under-qualified and over-incompetent persecutor Mr Darius “Sweetdick” Honeycum had the unmitigated gall to show up at his illicit lover’s victory bash, where, according to Ms Easysnizz herself, “we be gone pawty ’n’ git dronk ’n’ sheeitz. Where dat vokka be at ’n’ sheeitz, yo?“

Well consider me shook. At DA Willis’ campaign party in Buckhead and Nathan Wade just walked in. All smiles pic.twitter.com/hc7uKPn5ka

— Tamar Hallerman (@TamarHallerman)

May 21, 2024

The last stra…uhh, word.

Willis was so sure of herself and her ability to avoid accountability that she refused to debate Smith. So Smith appeared at an Atlanta Press Club debate and debated the empty podium behind which Willis was supposed to stand.

Willis will face off against Courtney Kramer, who ran unopposed in the GOP primary, in November. In other news, McAfee, the judge presiding over the Trump case, also won his election handily.

Now go ahead, tell yourself alllll about how “scared of us” these filthy scum are. If THAT doesn’t make you feel better, why, I simply don’t know what might.

*spit*

Update! Found a pic of your typical Fulton County voter celebrating the resounding Willis/Honeycum win.

Fo’ shizzle, mah nizzle!

Updated update! I should probably aver that yes, I know this is the D卐M☭CRAT primary we’re talking about here, not the general “election” itself. Do remember though, that, in Fulton County as in every other major urban area in the country, the D卐M☭CRAT primary is where the real action is; the GOPe primary counts for precisely Jack, and Shit, a total irrelevancy.

Sweden has fallen

Posted on May 13, 2024May 13, 2024 by Mike

Bet Mark Steyn has come to really hate being proved right all the time.

I may not know much, but I know Malmö – although eighteen years ago one of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s many in-house lefties, Jill Singer, accused me of exaggerating the city’s transformation. I offered to fly the late Ms Singer and an ABC crew to Sweden so that she could accompany me on what, by 2006, had already become my annual ritual in Malmö. The eminent presenter declined, being more concerned, fulminating-theocrat-wise, by George W Bush, on the grounds that “a faith-based US President …scares the bejesus out of me”. So, as in previous years, I walked my walk alone:

After that conference with Lars in Copenhagen a couple of years ago, I took the train over the water to Malmö in Sweden. Malmö was one of the first Christian cities in what was then Denmark. It’s now on course to become the first Muslim city in Sweden. I sat and had a coffee in a nice little place in a beautiful medieval square in the heart of town. Aside from a few modernist excrescences, it would not have looked so different in the early days of the Lutheran church. I got lucky, and fell into conversation with a couple of cute Swedish blondes. Fine-looking ladies. I shall miss Scandinavian blondes when they’re extinct. At dusk, and against their advice, I took a 20-minute walk to Rosengård. As you stroll the sidewalk, the gaps between blondes grow longer, and the gaps between young bearded Muslim men grow shorter. And then eventually you’re in the housing projects, and all the young boys kicking a soccer ball around are Muslim, and every single woman is covered – including many who came from “moderate” Muslim countries and did not adopt the headscarf or hijab until they emigrated to Sweden, where it’s compulsory, at least in Rosengård.

Do you remember the rationalization Israel used at the Oslo Accords? “Land for peace”? In Sweden, which is about as far as you can get from Gaza and the West Bank, they’re also trading land for peace, and as in Gaza unlikely to wind up with either. The Jews are already fleeing Malmö: Soon it will be like Tangiers or Baghdad or any other Arab town with a weed-strewn, decaying “old Jewish cemetery” and no one left to tend it. But it’s not just the Jewish graveyard that’s destined to be abandoned, but the Lutheran ones, too.

I would urge anyone to do that twilight walk from downtown Malmö to Rosengård, as the blondes thin and the bearded men multiply. That’s Europe’s future walking toward you.

For around a decade-and-a-half it was a more-or-less scientific experiment. Until the Covid clobbered my jetsetting, each year I would mark the precise point at which the last blonde was glimpsed and the beards took over – and each year that point advanced just a little more towards the centre of Malmö. By 2008 (which is a long time ago now: Greta Thunberg was in kindergarten) the “foreign-born” population of Rosengård was already 86 per cent. Sixty per cent had not completed elementary school.

How’s that working out? Sweden is not to everyone’s tastes, but it was, until recently, a peaceful and well-ordered society. Today, in a wholly transformed land where you can be shot dead in the crossfire at a pub and the courts say child gang-rape does not count as a serious crime, you might think that the ire of ethnic Swedes would be directed other than toward Jews. But in 2016 in Östersund I talked to a young lady whose daughter and her friends had been sexually assaulted in the municipal swimming baths by “migrants”. The staff who witnessed it sized up the cocksure young lads, swimming in the pool (in defiance of regulations) in their urine-stained and malodorous underwear, and declined to attempt their removal.

“There must have been other men there,” I said. “Didn’t they do anything?”

My friend laughed. “Swedish men are manginas,” she said – a portmanteau of “man” and “vagina” with which I was not hitherto familiar.

It is the logic of arithmetic: Follow the science, as Greta’s climate chums say. A keffiyeh is a little light accessorising; the full body bag will come later. So I’ll repeat my observation from almost two decades back: The Swedes are also trading land for peace, and will wind up with neither. A society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for, and thus the last Europeans rush to embrace those who will supplant them.

If preferring Israel and ((((DemPeskyJOOOOOZ!!!))) to yodeling jihadi weirdbeards and any of their hellish Muzzrat theocracies you’d care to name is wrong, then I don’t wanna be right. As the Bible (almost, kinda-sorta, okay, not really) says, by their friends shall ye know them. Any position that places me alongside “people” like tard-baby terror-symp Greta T; sundry campus-protest pussyfarts; Faux Jaux Bribem & the D卐M☭CRATs, and the whole squalid panoply of Jew-haters, Jew-baiters, the Mad Mullahs, Enemedia liars, and historically-illiterate Libtard shitwits who have not the first fucking clue about the Middle East generally, Pisslam, and exactly why and how Western Civ got itself into this sorry pass to begin with…well, thanks, but no thanks. That is NOT anyplace I want to be standing, these are NOT people I want to be associated with in any way, shape, or form.

A suggestion of even slight congruity between my own viewpoints, beliefs, or casual assumptions and their own is grounds for immediate, careful reconsideration on my part, to help me figure out where I might have gone so horribly wrong, and put things right again.

I hope BiBi tells Usurper Jaux in no uncertain terms to go take himself a flying fuck at a rolling donut; goes through the Rafah rat’s nest like shit through a goose—buildings, homes, streets, and tunnels, the whole God-bedamned megilla; and offs every last pus-nutted, goat-buggering Hamas filthbag currently stinking up the joint. Not one brick left standing upon another, Mr Prime Minister, sir, that’s my advice. In the immortal words of Kevin Costner portraying old-school G-man Elliott Ness:

And there you have it, Mr Netanyahu. Damn the naysayers who hate you no matter what, with their squee-squee-squeeing for a phonus-balonus “peace” agreement that would be tantamount to suicide for your proud, undauntable people. Collateral damage, “civilian” casualties, “disproportionate” force? Boo fucking HOO, assholes. PRO TIP for murdering Mooselimb savages now crying their widdle eyes out over “genocide” and other such rot: Don’t start none, won’t be none. The current conflict, initiated by Hamas at the unwise instigation of their Iranian overlords, must now end in one and only one way: total, uncompromising victory for Israel.

Economic State of the Union

Posted on May 11, 2024May 11, 2024 by Mike

Another excellent sum-up from Ms Sarcastica.

Biden Goes Full Biden.

Run-roh. You should never go full Biden. Especially if you, y’know, ARE Biden.

During an interview with CNNLOL last night, when confronted with the facts that just about everything from food to housing cost 20-30% more since he was installed, the nation’s Village Idiot stated that no one has ever “had the run we’ve had in terms of creating jobs and bringing down inflation. It was 9% when I came into office, 9%.”

Yeah he actually said that with a serious look on his face (see video below). Truth is, the inflation rate hit its peak of 9.1% by June, 2022. A full year and a half after his installation. The CPI inflation reading for January 2021, when *46 was sworn in and December 2020, the month before, were both 1.4%. Gee, looks like somebody had a handle on things back then.

But like a well seasoned leftist politician these days, he dodge any blame. “People are right to be concerned about greed from corporations.”

“Greed from corporations?” That may be true of the blood sucking “Big Pharma” who are one of Biden’s biggest campaign contributors for the last 50 years. But that’s fresh coming from the guy who launched inflation by driving up transportation, fuel and labor cost, new stricter mountains of regulations, in turn driving up insurance and operating cost for businesses, all that are passed on to the consumer in order to remain profitable. But this nitwit goes on to talk about overpriced Snickers Bars and “people have a right to be concerned, ordinary people. If you take a look at what people have, they have the money to spend.”

Sounds like something Squinty Joe Scarborough would whisper in Biden’s ear on one of his admitted frequent nighty-night phone calls while the maid hoses down Mika on the veranda.

It does at that. Sounds even more like something a corrupt, blibbering fraud would have whispered in his ear by his puppetmasters, as Dr Bolt-Upright is shooting him up with an armload of crank to prepare him for the interview, I think.

The three R’s

Posted on May 2, 2024May 3, 2024 by Mike

The last of which being the most important in these most perilous times.

The Three Rs: Read the Writing on the wall – and do the ‘Rithmetic. Like I said, it’s not difficult – although it seems to be for some of the willing dupes who brought us the western world’s new reality. Here is (Wokester chowderhead and self-gassing Jew Anthony Housefather—M) the Liberal Member of Parliament for Mount Royal, and Parliamentary Secretary to the President of the Treasury Board in Mr Trudeau’s ministry, attempting to reconcile the scenes on the street with the policies he has supported:

I call on the @mcgillu administration to act. Final exams are coming up and all students need to feel safe on campus.

Good luck with that. As Sheila Gunn Reid points out, Anthony Housefather belongs to a government that was happy to invoke war measures when Canadian truckers arrived in Ottawa and to freeze the bank accounts of any citizen who donated fifty bucks to the cause. The foot-soldiers of the new intifada need fear no such strictures. Mr Housefather chaired the House of Commons committee I testified before just five years ago, and seemed personally a polite and agreeable fellow. But he belongs to the “Official Jews” for whom mass Muslim immigration is less of a threat than those awkward types who point out the obvious consequences of mass Muslim immigration. The “Official Jews” are not confined to Canada: America is awash with them, as is the United Kingdom. And unless, as Kathy Shaidle used to say, they’re “too stupid to be Jewish” what’s happening cannot have come as a surprise.

And thus the seeming paradox of the post-war era – that, as a certain “niche Canadian” has been saying for years, the principal beneficiary of western Holocaust guilt was Islam. The Canadian Islamic Congress and America’s ADL and their European equivalents did not choose merely “to remain silent”: they enthusiastically welcomed it, and did their best to crush those who disagreed. Having made his bed, Mr Housefather is now apparently a little squeamish about lying in it. He is a Jew whose family have been Montrealers for generations. But there will be no Housefathers in the city’s future: that is the logical consequence of Liberal Party “multiculturalism”.

This isn’t about Jews, except insofar as they are presently at the sharp end of a convulsive cultural shift. About six months after 9/11, I took a little trip to Western Europe and the Middle East and, waiting for a friend in Vienna, I noticed that everybody going in and out of the maternity shop across the street appeared to be Muslim. That’s just anecdote, as the bien pensants who dismissed my book as “alarmist” like to say. But two decades on it’s borne out by statistics. Back then, Muslims made up four per cent of Austria’s population; now it’s over eight per cent.

“Eight per cent” doesn’t sound like a lot. But, in western societies of elderly native populations, they skew young, and make up an ever larger percentage of your youth – close to a majority in certain European cities. Jews, on the other hand, are old. So, for those cutesy coeds, young Muslims are all around and young Jews are very thin on the ground. Mr Housefather’s concern for “all students” to “feel safe on campus” isn’t going to be an issue for much longer.

The salient feature of the demonstrations roiling McGill, Columbia and other western campuses is not that the pasty blonde trustiefundies are “pro-Palestinian” but that they’re cool with being culturally Islamic. Oh, to be sure, it’s mostly just keffiyehs and a few other fashion accessories; not yet full body bags and clitoridectomies. But why wouldn’t it have a purchase on them that Mr Housefather’s bleatings about how everyone should feel safe do not? The young want to belong, and what they most want to belong to is the future – and they grasp instinctively where the future’s headed.

They also get that these guys mean it. It is not coincidental that white upscale females are now among the most enthusiastic proponents of Hamas. For two generations, their menfolk have made the mistake of believing all that What Women Want bollocks, and the result is legions of “new males”, metrosexuals, soyboys – or, alternatively, depressive methheads chugging back Bud Light down in the man-cave. Me again: “We have made a world of men that women don’t want and women that men don’t want, and that doesn’t seem likely to end well.”

Oh, it isn’t going to, that much seems completely obvious. In the world Steyn describes, how on Earth could it? Another apposite Steynism: Demography is destiny. We must pray he’s wrong, but in the quiet places deep inside us which we don’t talk about at parties, we know damned well he’s right.

Lots of folks on Our Side frequently warn, in grim, foreboding tones, “War is coming.” Okay, fair enough, so stipulated. But…WHICH war is coming, prithee tell? Would that be the war between Pisslam and Western Civ? The war between Real Americans and the Goosesteppin’ Left? Rural versus urban, Freemen versus authoritarian government, Blacks versus Whites? Red States versus FederalGovCo, deranged “transgender” freaks versus sane Normals? Academia versus Joe Lunchbucket? Republicans versus D卐M☭CRATs, illegal aliens versus citizens, Capitalists versus filthy Commies, builders versus wanton destroyers? Sickly, green-teethed Vegans versus sturdy omnivores in the flush of good health? Gun owners versus gun-grabbers? ((((Dem JooJooJooJOOOOOZ!!!)))) versus pretty much everybody else? Professionals versus tradesmen? NeverTrumpTards versus OnlyTrumpers? Ghettos versus suburbs? Big Labor versus Big Business? Which, which, which, which? Please, somebody help me out here, it’s got me all confusticated and bewildered.

Overlong as it is, frightening as it is, the above list is nevertheless by no means comprehensive. I can see I’m gonna have to get a scorecard to keep up with all this.

The most striking thing of all is how incredibly insightful the incomparable CS Lewis was; he saw this goatfuck coming decades ago, laying out the particulars with such foresight and precision it makes for some seriously hair-raising reading.

A masterful piece of religious prose disguised as satire, C.S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters is a series of messages from senior devil Screwtape to his protégé Wormwood on how best to corrupt mortals. Originally released during World War II, its tight 175 pages provide charming, timeless wisdom.

In an addendum released shortly before the author’s death in 1963 – Screwtape Proposes a Toast – Lewis pivots from dispensing universal wisdom to directly criticizing social trends of his day, trends which have gone from mere whispers on college campuses 60 years ago to become orthodoxy with the power of law today. Reading it today, it feels like the author was more prophet than professor.

In the 15-page essay – full text available here – the devil Screwtape outlines how the term democracy can be warped into destroying excellence, first in the halls of education then to society at large to make sure everyone stays “equal.”

“Democracy is the word with which you must lead them by the nose,” Screwtape tells his fellow devils. “The basic principle of the new education is to be that dunces and idlers must not be made to feel inferior to intelligent and industrious pupils. That would be ‘undemocratic.’”

Screwtape espouses the “significant benefits” of “ungrading” decades before Brown University ever led this race to the bottom, saying:

“At universities, examinations must be framed so that nearly all the students get good marks. Entrance examinations must be framed so that all, or nearly all, citizens can go to universities, whether they have any power (or wish) to profit by higher education or not.”

Easy to see echoes of Screwtape in the demands of progressive demagogues, like when Bernie Sanders insisted that everyone should go to college so we have “the best-educated workforce in the world” – willfully ignoring that an education void of rigor has no value at all. Screwtape all but uses the word “triggered!” to describe children in self-esteem first, outcomes last schools.

“Children who are fit to proceed to a higher class may be artificially kept back, because the others would get a trauma — Beelzebub, what a useful word! — by being left behind.”

Screwtape must be grinning at headlines about public schools eliminating gifted programs, knowing how much this hurts the segment of society most likely to build it up: the middle class.

Downright spooky, no? Effectively, what Lewis has done here is draw a roadmap not of physical terrain but of the future, one much more accurate and minutely detailed than any Google GPS map is, will, or ever could be. Assuming current travel trends and conditions remain unchanged, all indications are that we’re in for a very rough ride—a nightmare trip which will steadily get worse the longer we stick with this godawful road, stubbornly maintaining course in this same deadly direction despite many large, colorfully-printed hazard signs warning of imminent catastrophe just ahead.

Plenty more after the excerpted passages, all of it similarly prescient. I downloaded the Screwtape addendum via the provided link, but haven’t found time to start reading it yet. When I do, you’ll know it; there’ll be tons more post-worthy material therein, I expect.

Yet ANOTHER “Ask a silly question” entry

Posted on April 25, 2024April 25, 2024 by Mike

“Is Biden About To Declare Himself Climate Dictator?” Waitwaitwait, I thought he DID that already.

Democrats have already made it clear that they will stop at nothing – nothing – to prevent Donald Trump from winning in November. So, we aren’t surprised to read reports that President Joe Biden might declare a “climate emergency” this year in hopes that it gooses his reelection odds. Never mind that such a declaration would put the U.S. right on the path to a Venezuela-style future.

Late last week, Bloomberg reported that “White House officials are weighing whether to declare a national climate emergency several months out from the 2024 election.”

Let’s leave aside the entirely fatuous notion that there is anything even remotely constituting a climate “emergency.” What would be the basis for such a declaration? The number of hurricanes, fires, floods? None of these has been trending upward. Death rates from natural disasters are a tiny fraction of what they were 60 years ago, and lower than they were 20 years ago. Food production is way up.

But Biden has already used the “climate crisis” as an excuse to impose a draconian electric vehicle mandate on the country, attack a host of household appliances, pour billions into “clean energy” scams, and more.

As Bloomberg notes, declaring a climate emergency “could enable the president to halt or limit crude exports for at least a year at a time, suspend offshore drilling, and throttle the movement of oil and gas on pipelines, ships, and trains.”

Apparently all that is not enough “newfound authority” for Biden’s minions.

Whatever you think of Robert F. Kennedy Jr., he is one of the few who has been outspoken about the dangers the COVID precedent set.

“We’ve now established a precedent in this country – they suspended the First Amendment: religion; freedom of association when they did the lockdowns,” he told Fox News.

“[They restricted] freedom of speech. They banned jury trials against vaccine companies – that’s [a violation of] the Seventh Amendment. They abolished property rights [which violates the] Fifth Amendment [when] they closed 3.3 million businesses with no due process, no just compensation, although there was no pandemic exception in the United States Constitution.”

Not that I hold any truck with a great many of his views, but hey: when the man’s right, he is damned well right, clear down to the friggin’ bone and with big ol’ bells on.

Declaring a climate emergency would give Biden the ability to control anything that uses energy – which means literally all human activity – in the name of fighting this emergency.

If Biden were to declare a “climate emergency” and if – God forbid – it helps him win reelection, there will be little hope for the future of this nation.

What, you mean there still IS some? I musta missed a meeting, or something.

I repeat: this isn’t about the climate, nor about humanity being good stewards of our natural enviroment, nor about saving Mother Gaia. It’s not about animal/plant/insect species going extinct, nor about reducing pollution, CO₂, and/or industrial emissions. Nor is it about polar ice caps shriveling away before our very eyes. It will assuredly NOT create good jobs, save boucoup money, revitalize the economy, or enrich/empower a living soul aside from the ProPol-class and proven-failure “green energy” concerns they choose to shower FederalGovCo cash upon as the gentle rain—companies, mind, which have no hope of surviving absent government largesse.

No, the Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ bunco is really about the same old-same old: POWER, and CONTROL. Always was, always will be. Period fucking dot.

Update! Tell me the one again about how Biden hasn’t declared himself Climate Dictator, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

President Joe Biden and his administration have taken over 200 actions against the U.S. oil and natural gas industry as energy prices have gone up, according to a new report.

“President Biden and Democrats have a plan for American energy: make it harder to produce and more expensive to purchase,” the Institute for Energy Research states in a new report. “Since Mr. Biden took office, his administration and its allies have taken over 200 actions deliberately designed to make it harder to produce energy here in America.”

The analysis highlights actions Biden took on his first day in office, listing them chronologically through March of this year. The first act was canceling the Keystone XL pipeline, issuing a moratorium on all oil and natural gas leasing activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and revoking Trump administration executive orders that decreased regulations in order to expand domestic production.

Within a week of being in office, Biden issued additional moratoriums on new oil and gas leases on public lands or in offshore waters and imposed new regulations related to permitting and leasing practices, which were tied up in the courts for years. It was not until last month that a federal court upheld the first oil and natural gas lease sale on federal lands. Last December, the Fifth Circuit also ruled that Gulf lease sales must go forward.

Other actions ahead of the midterm elections include threatening to tax the oil and natural gas industry, blaming them for profiteering. Roughly six months before the general election, his administration has proposed $110 billion tax hikes on oil, natural gas and coal. In response, U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyo., led a coalition of 24 senators expressing “grave concern” about his “continued hostility towards American energy production.”

Even if Pedo Peter hasn’t expressly said it in the exact words, he’s definitely talking the talk and walking the walk. Which oughta be plenty enough for anybody, I should think.

SitRep for Amerika v2.0

Posted on April 24, 2024 by Mike

Situation Normal: ALLLL Fucked Up.

The citizens of the United States of America are in deep trouble. Why? I’ll tell you why.

The following are objectively true statements about the United States of America in 2024. These statements are not in any way hyperbolic, and they represent a stark reality that not even the most rabid Fascist Democrat can deny. Here they are:

1. The leader of the nation’s opposition party is currently defending himself in a series of contrived #lawfare criminal and civil suits reminiscent of fascist Hitlerian/Stalinesque show trials of the 20th Century, for the primary purpose of making it extremely difficult for him to be elected as President of the nation.

2. On campuses throughout the nation, Jewish students are being persecuted and attacked in a manner reminiscent of the German Nazi Party’s Kristallnacht of November 9 and 10, 1938.

3. In many states across the nation there are no voting laws enforced that effectively verify that ballots come from qualified citizen voters.

4. Individuals who peacefully protested the matter of #3 have been imprisoned by the federal government in inhumane conditions for literally years without trial.

5. The nation’s Southern Border is wide open to the point where any person who is capable of walking can cross into the nation AND receive free money and support necessary to survive. There is no mechanism to ensure that criminals and terrorists are not taking advantage of such situation.

6. The current President constantly displays symptoms of advanced elder dementia.

7. The current President has repeatedly labeled the opposition party as a “threat to democracy,” often alongside visual imagery similar to that used by Hitler and other fascist leaders of the 20th Century.

8. The nation’s debt equals over 120% of its annual GDP.

9. As a consequence of inflation and interest rates, most middle class citizens of the nation cannot afford to purchase a home.

10. The political party that controls the Presidency and the Senate has actively supported sending tens of billions of dollars to foreign governments who are credibly accused of money laundering funds provided to such party members, while not providing remotely similar assistance to the residents of the State of Hawaii who were burned out of their homes.

11. The nation’s military has equipment readiness rates making it incapable of fighting effectively, while instead focusing on “diversity” initiatives that promote race/gender/sexuality over war fighting skills and competency.

12. The overwhelming majority of the nation’s mass media refuses to report on any of the above matters, and in most cases the people running such mass media have close familial and personal connections to the people directly responsible for the above matters.

These are symptoms of a nation on the verge of disintegration. Moreover, these are qualities consistent with failed fascist regimes of the 20th Century.

What are we going to do about it, Patriots?

Ahh, the eternal question. The eternal answer: I don’t know.

This time out, I decided to just cut to the C&P chase without doing the usual Tweet embed. For that, head on over to the Place de la Renegade.

Montana sitrep

Posted on April 21, 2024April 21, 2024 by Mike

Q: Are things coming to a head, even in Big Sky Country?

A: Yes. Yes, they are.

There’s Gonna be a War in Montana
An analysis of visible propaganda in Bozeman, Big Sky, and Three Forks

In popular culture, protagonists and antagonists battle eternally for Montana’s precious land. Country folk fight off city folk in Yellowstone and the podcast Land Grab: A Podcast About the Place We Call Montana. Long before that Montana (1950) pit sheep farmers against cattle farmers. In Last of the Dogmen (1995) cowboys faced Cheyenne Indians. Of the 14 major film/TV projects scheduled to be shot in Montana, every single one involves some take on the battle for Montana’s soul. And Montana’s soul is in its land.

Land conflicts have led to at least one recent murder, but despite Yellowstone’s depiction of ranchers (our heroes) massacring greedy real estate developers with machine guns, so far Montana hot wars have been relegated to fiction.

My wife, toddler, and I attended a family reunion on a ranch in Tom Miner Basin—one of the most beautifully preserved parts of the state—for a week. Six years ago I attended the same event at the same ranch. There is indeed something special about the land and particularly the sky in Tom Miner Basin. Rural Montana is astonishing. I won’t bore you with more cringey descriptions because that’s all there is to say. Jockeying for Montana’s land provides great stakes for drama because the prize is priceless.

More interesting to me were the parts of Montana I saw by accident. A new coldness grips the relationship between visitors and locals. I first noticed it at the ranch. Six years ago the kitchen helpers were a happy mix. The chef was known for his thoughtful local cuisine, elk with au jus, beef burgers from ranch cattle, loaded baked potatoes, hearty mac and cheese. The servers wore big smiles. The progressive boomers attending the reunion were comfortable with this type of staff, the same hodgepodge they interacted with at home. Much backslapping occurred.

This time, the help had clearly experienced a vibe shift. They were all white, and distant. The food was awful—boiled carrots and reheated pork steaks, the result of some Aramark-type lowest-bidder supply chain. The new staff had been mostly hired on Coolworks, a website for low paid service jobs on ranches, resorts, and other “great places.” They came from the surrounding towns, forgotten about, left behind, bright red Trump country. Young women with sloped posture and heavy eyeshadow, barely 18. Their clothes don’t fit, they looked impoverished, hungry, skittering. The young chef who had once proudly presented his take on local food was gone. The guests no longer chatted with servants. There was separation and silence.

Then my wife tested positive for COVID so we fled to Bozeman. Throughout the subsequent week, I explored Bozeman and Big Sky, ultra-hot destinations (and now homes) for the woke bourgeoisie, and Three Forks, the polar opposite, a totally different world a razor thin distance away. I saw two groups of people, an overclass and an underclass, pressed up against each other, spoiling for a fight, just waiting for the littlest spark to set their fury ablaze.

Over what? The soul of Montana of course. One-of-a-kind land. That’s nothing new. What’s new is the character of the warring factions. They aren’t who you see on TV. On one side you have global interests imputing their values, importing cheaper labor, hollowing out Montana’s attractions and selling them to an international bourgeoisie for maximum profits. On the other you have the new underclass. Not the friendly Christian country folk of times past. And not Cowboy Hat Republican Rancher Dad either. No, these are a new kind of country person. Angry, exasperated, poor, Trump-loving service-workers—the Oxy takers, the meth cookers, the eaters of Chick-Fil-A. This group is acutely aware of just who controls Bozeman and Big Sky, and believe that the same people are coming for their territory. And they’re right.

If you listen, you can hear the two groups screaming at each other in silence, waiting for their very own Gavrilo Princip to spark this thing off.

You can at that, and not just in Montana, either. Then again, when shitlibs are screaming at the top of their lungs exactly what they intend to do to you, it probably behooves you to listen. Because if you don’t think they’ll really do it—not they themselves necessarily, but through their Wokester governments; their Wokester banks and other corporate entities; their Wokester cultural mafia; their monolithic Wokester “education” edifices from pre-K to post-grad; their grim, whey-faced Wokester bureacrats—then you probaby aren’t paying attention anything like closely enough. Divemedic knows:

So if the leaders of the Democrat party calling for your imprisonment and death aren’t real, the people burning and destroying property aren’t real, just what will it take for you to advocate defending yourself? When is it enough to say “no more, I will not be made a target?”

— Divemedic (@DMAreaOcho)

April 20, 2024

Indeed so.

(Via WRSA)

Boeing: What happened?

Posted on April 14, 2024April 14, 2024 by Mike

From a half-century as one of the world’s premier, most respected aircraft manufacturers to…well…

Meme purloined from the awesome Ken Lane. Now to the who, what, how, and why of it.

Suicide Mission
What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

John Barnett had one of those bosses who seemed to spend most of his waking hours scheming to inflict humiliation upon him. He mocked him in weekly meetings whenever he dared contribute a thought, assigned a fellow manager to spy on him and spread rumors that he did not play nicely with others, and disciplined him for things like “using email to communicate” and pushing for flaws he found on planes to be fixed.

“John is very knowledgeable almost to a fault, as it gets in the way at times when issues arise,” the boss wrote in one of his withering performance reviews, downgrading Barnett’s rating from a 40 all the way to a 15 in an assessment that cast the 26-year quality manager, who was known as “Swampy” for his easy Louisiana drawl, as an anal-retentive prick whose pedantry was antagonizing his colleagues. The truth, by contrast, was self-evident to anyone who spent five minutes in his presence: John Barnett, who raced cars in his spare time and seemed “high on life” according to one former colleague, was a “great, fun boss that loved Boeing and was willing to share his knowledge with everyone,” as one of his former quality technicians would later recall.

But Swampy was mired in an institution that was in a perpetual state of unlearning all the lessons it had absorbed over a 90-year ascent to the pinnacle of global manufacturing. Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs. CEO Jim McNerney, who joined Boeing in 2005, had last helmed 3M, where management as he saw it had “overvalued experience and undervalued leadership” before he purged the veterans into early retirement.

“Prince Jim”—as some long-timers used to call him—repeatedly invoked a slur for longtime engineers and skilled machinists in the obligatory vanity “leadership” book he co-wrote. Those who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price were “phenomenally talented assholes,” and he encouraged his deputies to ostracize them into leaving the company. He initially refused to let nearly any of these talented assholes work on the 787 Dreamliner, instead outsourcing the vast majority of the development and engineering design of the brand-new, revolutionary wide-body jet to suppliers, many of which lacked engineering departments. The plan would save money while busting unions, a win-win, he promised investors. Instead, McNerney’s plan burned some $50 billion in excess of its budget and went three and a half years behind schedule.

Swampy belonged to one of the cleanup crews that Boeing detailed to McNerney’s disaster area. The supplier to which Boeing had outsourced part of the 787 fuselage had in turn outsourced the design to an Israeli firm that had botched the job, leaving the supplier strapped for cash in the midst of a global credit crunch. Boeing would have to bail out—and buy out—the private equity firm that controlled the supplier. In 2009, Boeing began recruiting managers from Washington state to move east to the supplier’s non-union plant in Charleston, South Carolina, to train the workforce to properly put together a plane.

That move, also, didn’t work out so well for the now-floundering aerospace company. The story details a toxic mish-mash of Wokesterism, the rise of a know-nothing MBA class, and a creeping, not-my-problem/not-my-fault corporate blame-shifting culture that replaced the former all-American can-do, git-er-done spirit which may well prove fatal to the once-mighty Boeing…and probably should, frankly.

It’s a sign o’ the times in Amerika v2.0, by no means unique but an increasingly commonplace story—and an extremely sad one.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

The Biden Economic MIRACLE!© continues apace

Posted on April 10, 2024April 10, 2024 by Mike

Our ol’ buddy Stephen illustrates how it works with a, err, distasteful anecdote.

BIDENFLATION: Now Is When We Sit in the Dark and Eat the Canned Meats
So how bad are things, really, here in the real world?

Let me tell you another patented VodkaPundit True Story™.

The details are all correct and I haven’t even bothered to change the names because none of us were all that innocent.

Thirty-mumble years ago, I might have made a drunken 2 a.m. munchies run to the Safeway in Arcata, Calif., with my best friend, RJ, and the college girl roommates we were dating. RJ, for reasons best left unexplored, picked up a can of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product — and then dared me to read the label.

I can never resist a dare but, this once, I wish I had because “Partially defatted beef fatty tissue” are words seared into my brain to this day.

No, we did not buy or eat any of Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product. We weren’t that drunk. At 22 and working only part-time, we weren’t even that broke.

But in Presidentish Joe Biden’s America, canned meats are flying off the shelves like rarely before.

While the New York Post didn’t mention Libby’s Potted Meat Food Product by name, the paper did report on Tuesday that “demand for cheap canned meats like Spam and Vienna Sausages is surging,” according to grocery chain execs.

“Spam is a regular item again,” Bronx grocery store owner Miguel Garcia told The Post. “I’m selling them at a discount now because I’m buying more.” He’s even set up showcases at his Foodtown, Keyfood, and Met Foodmarket locations for inexpensive items like Spam, Libby’s Corned Beef, and Chef Boyardee Spaghetti & Meatballs because demand is up 10%.

Garcia said his average sale is now $15, down from $20 at the end of last year because customers are choosing cheaper items.

These are the expectations baked into the shopping habits of everyday Americans after three years of Bidenomics.

And Zee Bugz, too, Steve, don’t forget Zee Deeelishious Bugz!

What a world we’ve let them make for us, eh?

Damn fools about it

Posted on April 10, 2024April 10, 2024 by Mike

As Wellington said after Waterloo: “They came on in the same old way, and we sent them back in the same old way.” Or, as WC Fields said: “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try, again. Then quit. There’s no use in being a damn fool about it.”

S’truth. And yet.

Woke Extremist Minneapolis City Council Demands $30.60/Hour Minimum Wage for Uber and Lyft Drivers; Uber and Lyft Both Announce They Will Abandon Minneapolis
Faced with public anger about driving out the popular ride-share services, the woke extremists of the city council say they may delay when the order goes into effect.

But they’re only doing that to allow other ride-share companies — are there any? — to enter the Minneapolis market.

By the way, I base the headline claim of a $30.60 per hour minimum wage on the city council’s demand that drivers be paid a minimum 51 cents per minute when ferrying passengers.

California recently imposed a $20/hour minimum wage for fast food workers. There’s now a $16/hour minimum wage for all other jobs.

Companies immediately began firing workers and closing down stores.

A pizza chain announced the closure of five stores in California.

Analysts forecast that this law will gift California with increased unemployment for years.

That’s putting it in the best possible light.

And there you have it. As Billy Pilgrim said: “All this happened, more or less.” And so it goes.

If at first they don’t succeed…

Posted on April 7, 2024April 7, 2024 by Mike

If you thought there was any end to shitlib stupidity, that there simply had to be some point at which the perfidious chowderheads would smack their foreheads and mutter to themselves, “DAYUMM, this isn’t working! Could it be that we’re at fault here—that, instead of doubling down again and again on each successive failure, it might be time for us to rethink our basic premises?” PRO TIP: There isn’t, and they won’t.

San Francisco Bill Would Let People Sue Grocery Stores for Closing Too Quickly
A proposed ordinance would empower people to sue supermarkets that close without giving the city six months’ advance notice.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is considering a remarkable policy that would allow people to sue grocery stores that close too quickly.

Earlier this week, Supervisors Dean Preston and Aaron Peskin introduced an ordinance that, if passed, would require grocery stores to provide six months’ written notice to the city before closing down.

Supermarket operators would also have to make “good faith” efforts to ensure the continued availability of groceries at their shuttered location, either through finding a successor store, helping residents form a grocery co-op, or any other plan they might work out by meeting with city and neighborhood residents.

Lest one thinks this is some heavy-handed City Hall intervention, the ordinance makes clear that owners still retain the ultimate power to close their store. It also creates a number of exemptions to the six-month notice requirement. If a store is closing because of a natural disaster or business circumstances that aren’t “reasonably foreseeable,” it doesn’t have to provide the full six months’ notice.

Still, should stores close without providing the proper notice, persons affected by the closure would be entitled to sue the closed store for damages.

Preston has been floating this ordinance since January when a Safeway in the city’s Fillmore neighborhood announced it was closing before city officials intervened to keep it open a little longer. The policy itself is decades old.

In 1984, the board of supervisors passed an identical policy to what Preston and Peskin are proposing now, but it was vetoed by then-Mayor Dianne Feinstein. At the time, Feinstein described the policy as “an unnecessary intrusion of governmental regulatory authority.”

Ahhh, 1984—as in, the title of Orwell’s how-to manual for contemporary “liberals,” now superceded and kinda quaint. How perfectly apropos.

Preston is more comfortable with the intrusion.

Of course he is. Gee, color me shocked—SHOCKED!

“It was a good idea then, and it’s an even better idea now,” he told the San Francisco Chronicle in January.

Obviously so. I mean, any fool can see that it’s been working out so nicely for all concerned up to this point; it’s just that the original scheme didn’t go far enough, that’s all. I blame Trump, myself. Even way back when, the Orange Man was nothing but a garden-variety shitstirrer.

“We need notice, we need transparency, community input, and a transition plan when major neighborhood grocery stores plan to shut their doors.”

Know what you really need? To get government’s meddlesome mitts out of affairs not properly its own, and let private citizens engage in commerce with honest vendors as, when, and how they prefer, in accordance with A) their own free choice, and B) the laws of supply and demand.

Yeah, I know, in SF (symbolic capital of Amerika v2.0) that’s just crazy talk.

“Transparency, community input, and a transition plan.” Anybody besides me wondering just where the owner’s and/or shareholders’ needs might come into play here? Or, for the matter of it, be taken into consideration at all?

Whatever the impact of this proposed policy, it does provide a telling insight into just how much micromanagement San Francisco politicians think their city needs.

HATE SPEECH! HAAATE SPEEEEECH!! QUICK, SOMEONE ARREST THAT MAN AND LOCK HIM UP FOR TREASON, INSURRECTION, THREATENING OUR SACRED DEMOCRACY, SOMETHING!!!

(Via Ed Driscoll)

Who could have POSSIBLY foreseen…?

Posted on April 2, 2024April 2, 2024 by Mike

Mike’s Iron Law #635: If you make the cost of doing business too steep, it will close.

Fast food workers blindsided by sudden closure of Fosters Freeze in Lemoore
LEMOORE, Calif. (FOX26) — Employees at Fosters Freeze in Lemoore are out of a job.

Assistant General Manager Monica Navarro says she was called Monday morning by her boss who was at the restaurant to open, only to find the locks were being changed.

Please do note the insert that immediately follows the above for a strong hint as to why this entirely UNEXPECTED!© tragedy might have come to pass.

[RELATED] New $20 minimum wage for fast food workers in California set to start Monday

Bold in the original, entirely dispositive, and hilarious.

Navarro said she thought it was an April Fools joke.

“I was so caught off guard. We had no type of notice, no type of warning either. I mean the owner had told me happy easter,” she said.

And she wasn’t the only one.

“We had gotten a text in the group chat that we were shutting down, and I completely thought it was an April Fools joke,” said former employee Jason Boado.

After learning it was real, she drove to the restaurant on Hanford Armona Rd, where the owner was handing out final paychecks.

Navarro says the owner, Loren Wright, had previously told her the $20 minimum wage increase for fast food workers was going to be really hard on him.

Navarro says she started working three years ago and worked her way up to assistant GM.

She is a full-time student at Fresno State and was planning to work there until graduation.

She was excited about the wage increase and felt like she was stabbed in the back for not getting any kind of notice.

Bold mine this time, likewise dispositive, and hilarious. From that, one could be forgiven for jumping to the invidious conclusion that Fresno State students might not be all they should in terms of general intelligence and aptitude for deductive reasoning.

In a text from Loren Wright, he stated that he couldn’t survive the mandated wage increases:

I tried to the end to try to figure out a way to make it work. Last thing I ever wanted was to close down,” he said. “By Friday night I knew I was most likely not gonna be able to stay open but I didn’t want to ruin their Easter Sunday. Small businesses can’t survive a 120% plus min wage increase over the last 10 years. We are all more broke than we were 10 years ago its clear raising min wage isn’t helping….I am sad to see my employees off, and sad to see lemoore off. This location has been in business for 35+ years and lemoore has been such a good place. It’s painful to realize that raising min wage and regulating fast foods are putting people put if business but that is the path california leadership has taken. Thank u to my staff for everything and thank u lemoore for all the support over the years.”

“Now they’re getting laid off. They’re losing their jobs,” restaurant owner Angela Marsden told Fox News host Dana Perino. “Gavin Newsom, I hope the United States is watching. I hope he never becomes president. This man is destroying California. I don’t understand why people can’t see that he’s the biggest trickster of all time.”

As if it was only Gruesome Newsome we need to be worried about. Sadly, though, in Amerika v2.0 Newsome is just one little piece of a much bigger puzzle.

Key Bridge: can we rebuild it?

Posted on March 28, 2024March 28, 2024 by Mike

No. No, we cannot.

Here’s the million-dollar question nobody is asking about the Baltimore bridge collapse…
The recent bridge collapse in Baltimore is an absolute nightmare, and our thoughts are with the victims and their families during this incredibly tough time. Beyond the heart-wrenching loss and the basic “whys” everyone’s dealing with, there’s one crucial question not many are asking: Can America rebuild the bridge?

Oh, America could have, probably. Amerika v2.0, though? Not a hope in Hell.

Sure, it might seem odd to wonder about our capability to build a bridge in 2024, but sadly, it’s a valid concern these days. When you consider how our nation is faltering under inept globalist rule, dragged down by dangerous DEI agendas that place “charity” over excellence, and watching the decimation of hardworking middle-class America, the question isn’t just rhetorical—it’s a stark reflection of our abysmal current reality.

Revolver has been calling attention to this decline in American society for quite some time, starting from when Biden first introduced his “infrastructure bill.” Fast forward three years, and here we are: bridges collapsing, roads deteriorating, and let’s not even dive into the chaos unfolding in our skies or the sorry state of our airports. Meanwhile, as China makes serious strides forward, it feels like we’re just spinning our wheels, stuck in neutral. It’s a stark contrast that highlights where our priorities have been misplaced and the need for a serious reevaluation of how we invest in our nation’s future.

The scary part is this: as we’re facing our own decline, other nations are advancing. The recent Baltimore bridge disaster could have been an attack, a result of DEI-related incompetence, or something else entirely. What’s clear, though, is that America is showing signs of wear and tear, and our focus shouldn’t be misplaced on absurd “pet projects” like electric cars or gender transitioning. It’s time to return to the fundamentals: roads, bridges, and airports, and see if we can spark that long-forgotten American “can do” spirit again. God knows we need it badly.

PRO TIP: We won’t. In fact, even if over half the country wasn’t vehemently, violently opposed to the whole “can-do spirit” concept, we still couldn’t. It isn’t a matter of “sparking” anything, but of recovering the skeletal remains from their long-since abandoned, musty crypt and bringing them back to life again. All the advanced tech, government financial largesse, and PC die-versity in the known universe can’t turn the trick.

Back in the mid-90s, when my friend Pfouts and I would go out for our regular Saturday strolls around lower Manhattan, he would sometimes shake his head ruefully and say, “Y’know, if New York had to build the subway system today, it couldn’t do it.” I never questioned him on that; all one had to do was take a quick glance at everything around him and see that Chris’s gloomy assessment was in no wise overly pessimistic or cynical, but in fact perfectly accurate.

Again: this was back in the mid-90s, mind. The situation both in NYC and the rest of the “nation” has certainly not improved any since those days.

All Senile Jaux’s angry yelling to the contrary notwithstanding, the EPA “environmental impact” study alone for any such FSK reconstruction project would take five or ten years and hoover up billions of dollars, and that’s before the first girder or I-beam is purchased and put on indefinite back-order while Baltimore waits for it to be shipped from China. Bottom line?

To ask the question is to answer it.

The abyss peers back

Posted on March 26, 2024March 26, 2024 by Mike

Doctor Samizdat—a good, close friend of mine, actually, which we won’t go into right now, you’ll just have to trust me on that; The Doc is part of a solid ReichWingNaziHitlerDeathBeast blogger & IRL collective which also includes my brother-from-another-mother BCE, among several others—finally carves some time out of his insanely busy work schedule to do a new post over at his Substack hang.

The Precipice
Peering into oblivion, the world on tenterhooks…..

These are strange times indeed. I told another blogger today that I haven’t written for months because, simply, I’ve had no time. That’s not exactly true. I haven’t MADE time. I’ve always held that there are folks a good deal smarter, better-connected and more prescient than me who’ve covered the same ground and that my rabble would be just more white noise.

Maybe so, maybe not. Between turbo cancers (this is a real thing, folks, it just isn’t recognized because of widespread distribution and plausible deniability), chronic fatigue and our inexorably slowly collapsing healthcare system, it’s been difficult to muster the motivation to write. I ask every new cancer patient their Vax status. The responses are predictable; their reactions are gut-wrenching. One recently asked me “did I kill myself?”. I don’t know, maybe. The saga of Kate Middleton comes to mind. Those Godforsaken royals can’t seem to love and cherish a young matriarch-to-be, can they?

The noticing is increasing, the awakening beginning to surge. Trust in government is at an all-time low, as they try to convince Americans the economy is healthy. An increasingly large percentage sees through the bullshit, and those in charge of things simply ignore it. Terrorism strikes Mother Russia, with fingerprints of CIA/MI6 everywhere, EU troops on the ground in Ukraine….not mercenaries, formal deployments. There must be some Evil shit to cover up because to all rational observers that ship has sailed; game over, score one for the Russians.

I always wondered why, after the Berlin Wall fell, we did not reach out and embrace Russia. Both largely white and Christian, yet diverse. I suppose it made too much sense. We had to have an enemy for the neocons, I suppose. So much had already been invested in China (after traitor Nixon opened them up) I believe those in charge felt that pivot was a non-starter. I’ve felt the same way about the Cuba embargo; let our culture infiltrate them. Instead, it appears as if their culture has infiltrated ours, Haitians to follow.

Insightful, perspicacious, well-written: it’s another one you’ll definitely want to read all of, even though it’s altogether too short to suit me.

Squatters rights

Posted on March 21, 2024March 21, 2024 by Mike

“Vigilantes”? Hardly, seems to me.

‘Vigilantes’ try to evict squatters at $1M Queens house after homeowner who confronted them is arrested in tense standoff
A pair of vigilantes allegedly tried to forcefully evict three alleged squatters from a million-dollar Queens home after the homeowner was arrested when she changed the locks and tried to remove them.

Two unidentified men driving a black pickup truck pulled into the driveway of the Flushing home searching for the tenants Tuesday afternoon, according to the Daily Mail.

“We are looking to get this guy out,” one of the men allegedly said, a neighbor told the outlet. “I am here to talk to him. I want to see why he is here.”

Adele Andaloro, 47, was in the process of selling the property when the group shadily took refuge in the home last month.

Andaloro inherited the $1 million property from her parents after they died.

She confronted the trio and changed the locks in hopes they would not be able to re-enter if they left.

However, a male inside the home called the police on Andaloro, who was later arrested.

Neighbors have noticed some concerning activity from the house since the alleged squatters snaked their way into the home.

Residents of tight-knit Queens Street, which many have called home for over 30 years, expressed that they’re ready to do as much as possible to get the alleged intruders out. Some have even floated the idea of starting a petition in hopes that it will help, according to the Daily Mail.

A beloved community member, Andaloro put the two-story home on the market, but that’s when the tenants got in and brazenly replaced the entire front door and locks.

Before her arrest on Feb. 29 — which was captured by ABC’s “Eyewitness News” — Andaloro faced off with the group in a tense standoff.

The police were eventually called and escorted two people off the property.

With at least three apparent residents still inside, cops told Andaloro she had to sort the saga out in housing court because it was considered a “landlord-tenant issue” before she was arrested.

Utterly, utterly pathetic. Unless and until the nabe gets itself some serious vigilantes willing to adopt measures a bit more forceful than “talking” and petitions, Queens Street will just have to live with their new “neighbors” whether they like it or not.

I lived on the top floor of a five-floor walkup on 13th between 1st and 2nd in Manhattan for a year (ask me how much I love stairs!). In one of the two ground-floor-front apartments was a woman who’d lived there rent-free for over ten years; she had sued the landlord over some piffling dispute or other, and they’d been tangled up in court ever since, resulting in her refusal to pay another dime of rent. She fully expected to continue living there without paying rent indefinitely, and is probably there still.

Artist Joe Coleman lived in the apartment directly under mine; I used to run into him all the time in the stairwells or just sitting out on the front stoop, one of my favorite things to do on my days off work, weather permitting. Old Joe was what used to be politely referred to as “a real character,” had lived in the building for years himself. And Lord, the horror stories he used to tell me about that old building!

I’d never thought much about it until Joe commended it to my attention, but in the quieter watches of the night you’d hear this strange sound as of sand sifting down between and behind the walls—which, according to Joe, is exactly what it was. The plaster was crumbling, the joists and interior timbers eroding, the whole mess slooooowly slip-sliding away into the basement all night and day. There were only three months left on our lease when Joe related this to me; me and the gf decided we would NOT be re-upping.

One night, our power went out during a bad thunderstorm. I grabbed my trusty Maglite and hurried downstairs to see if I could find a breaker to reset or a fuse in need of replacing, wherever the damned box turned out to be; I had no idea about that, all I knew for sure was that there wasn’t one in our apartment. On the ground floor I ran into the building super on his way to the basement, a friendly, avuncular sort who I’d come to know a little, and who seemed quite glad to see me…or my flashlight, more like.

He led me through the basement to the main fuse box, where I replaced three blown fuses with new ones he handed me from his pocket. On our way back out, he pointed out two rows, stacked three high, of plywood cubicles along either side of our path: cramped, stuffy holes containing bedding, items of clothing, miscellaneous unidentifiable bric-a-brac. These cubicles were almost hilariously poorly-built and flimsy-looking, as if they’d been designed and constructed by a little kid using the Fisher-Price Jr Carpentry Set Santy Claus had left under the tree last Christmas.

The odor wafting from this subterranean jungle—stale sweat, dirty linens and/or clothes, unwashed bodies, rotting fruit, human piss—was literally eye-watering.

The super explained to me with a conspiratorial grin what I was looking at: here in this dark, dank 13th St basement were the living quarters for about thirty or forty Chinese illegals, who exchanged a measly rent every Monday for the right to coop a few hours a day in these squalid, nightmarish little rats’ nests, spending the other 18 to 20 hours working in garment-district sweatshops; shared-storage waterfront warehouses or outer-borough factories; Chinatown restaurants, or whatever other sketchy employment an illegal alien could scrounge to bring in coolie wages he could kite to his Honorable Family back home.

I had heard of such arrangements before, of course—what New Yorker hasn’t? Same-same could be found under any number of non-luxury buildings all over the Lower East Side, I knew. Trust me, though, it’s one thing to know intellectually that these things, these people, exist; it’s quite another to see it in front of your very eyes, under your very nose. I was neither naif enough to be shocked, nor jaded enough to just shrug it off and forget about it. In fact, I never have.

Rent control, squatters rights, property owners who are paid more by the city to keep their residential buildings vacant than they could hope to make renting them—NYC’s real estate regulations are a jumbled, incomprehensible maze of payola, corruption, and backscratching that neither tenants, property managers, or owners are at all happy with; that artificially keep rents at insanely-inflated levels; that keep dangerously decrepit buildings in desperate need of repair neglected; and that leave entire city neighborhoods unstable, unprofitable, unaffordable, and unsafe.

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