Hard times in the land of plenty

GIVE TIL IT HURTS!

SO, how’s that 15-20 buck an hour minimum wage working out for ya, anyway?

Posted on February 6, 2024 by Mike

NOT. TOO. GOOD.

McDonald’s CEO promises ‘affordability’ amid backlash over $18 Big Mac combos, $6 hash browns
McDonald’s CEO admitted the burger giant’s sales have taken a hit as jacked-up menu prices have turned off core customers — and signaled the chain plans to focus on “affordability” this year.

The Chicago-based fast-food behemoth — which has lately taken heat over a Big Mac combo meal priced at nearly $18 — said its global same-store sales in the latest quarter had grown just 3.4%, falling short of the 4.7% growth Wall Street had expected.

The lackluster quarter — which the company also blamed on conflict in the Middle East that has slammed franchisees overseas — sent McDonald’s shares on the New York Stock Exchange tumbling nearly 4%, to $285.97, at Monday’s close.

“I think what you’re going to see as you head into 2024 is probably more attention to what I would describe as affordability,” McDonald’s chief executive Chris Kempczinski said on a Monday earnings call with analysts.

In particular, low income customers making less than $45,000 per year have largely stopped ordering from McDonald’s. Pummeled by inflation, they’re eating at home more frequently as grocery prices come down, Kempczinski admitted.

Last week, a McDonald’s outpost in Connecticut got slammed over its “outrageous pricing” after a customer was charged $7.29 for an Egg McMuffin — and nearly $5.69 for a side of hash browns.

Over the summer, a franchisee in nearby Darien, Conn., was called out for charging $17.59 for Big Mac combo meal. That location also sold a Quarter Pounder with Cheese and Bacon meal that came with fries and a soda for $19, according to viral posts.

Experts have also warned that fast food prices could climb even higher as minimum wage hikes are implemented across the country. California’s $20-an-hour minimum wage for fast food workers goes into effect in April.

McDonald’s and Chipotle both announced that they would be hiking the prices of menu items at Golden State locations beginning this year.

Because of COURSE they will. Why wouldn’t they—actually, how could they NOT, if they want to continue to exist and turn even a piddling profit? In the era of Bidenflation and a worthless paper dollar, the idiot protesters demanding fifteen bucks an hour are going to protest themselves right out of a job and onto the unemployment rolls before it’s all said and done, which serves them right if you ask me. May they all have joy of their foolish choice.

Publick notice

Posted on February 6, 2024February 6, 2024 by Mike

Still working on getting MarsEdit up and running properly again, after an extended e-mail exchange last night with a very nice and helpful Red Sweater (purveyors of MarsEdit, among other software offerings) tech-dude who put me onto some excellent ideas from the crash-log data I sent him that I would never have thought of myself, crash logs being no more than so much gobbledegook to me.

Hell, I usually don’t even read the things, really; being on a Mac, I haven’t had a great deal of exposure to ’em over the years. Not at least since the rise of rock-steady and reliable OSX from the smoldering embers of the old pre-Intel PPC chip and OS 9, alternatively known to legions of frustrated, embittered Mac users as “OS Crash.” Which derogatory nickname, believe you me, was well-earned.

Last night/this morning around 1:30 in the AM, Tech Dude sent this:

In the crash log that came through separately, it seems like MarsEdit is having trouble gaining access to the data folder in your home folder. If you haven’t already tried this, the first thing I would try is restart your Mac and hope that “resets” something. Also, is there any chance your disk is very full? That can sometimes cause problems with accessing data reliably.

Daniel

Hrm. After several bootless reboots (heh—sorry) yielded no joy, I checked and saw that my HD was slightly past 2/3rds full, so today I’ve been beavering away at consolidating files and reorganizing folders, transferring everything I can to Flash drive sticks and deleting the originals from the machine, and such-like geekish finger-bangery.

Next up, I’m going to trash the MarsEdit data folders mentioned in the above email; inexplicably, there are four (4) of the danged things, HUGE folders (several hundred megs apiece), each of which seems to be an exact replication of the other three. Then, I’ll uninstall MarsEdit and do a fresh re-install of a brand-spanking new copy I downloaded late last night—the idea being that on first launch, the new install should create a brand-new data folder for itself, and VIOLA! problem solved, hopefully.

I’m leaving the ME Preference Pane in place and as is, since it includes the unlock key-code (or should, if it’s set up like other 3rd-party PPs I’ve had occasion to deal with over lo, these many years) I obtained back when Barry’s generous donation financed the purchase of a gin-yoo-wine Oaf-Ficial MarsEdit software license. ME is by far the best WP blog editor for Mac I know of out there; the idea of losing it, particular after having set up a cpl-three dozen custom macros and handy-dandy keyboard shortcuts, just sickens me.

Hell, I keep trying to use those shortcuts and macros with this infernal native WP editor, hitting them two or three times before I realize that dammit, my comfy accustomed writing routine just don’t work up in here. It’s infuriating, that’s what.

Another “food desert” mirage

Posted on January 29, 2024 by Mike

So first, this happened.

In-N-Out has never closed a location, until now. It cites crime as the problem
New York CNN—In-N-Out is permanently closing one of its restaurants for the first time ever, announcing that its Oakland location will soon shutter because of rampant crime in the California city.

The burger chain said in a statement that “despite taking repeated steps to create safer conditions, our customers and associates are regularly victimized by car break-ins, property damage, theft, and armed robberies.”

The location, which has been open for nearly two decades, will close on March 24. It’s the city’s only In-N-Out and is near the airport.

Crime has indeed substantially increased in Oakland: Burglaries were up 23% and motor vehicle thefts were up 44% in 2023 compared to a year prior, according to Oakland Police Department data obtained by CNN affiliate KGO-TV.

In-N-Out said in a statement that while “several” of its locations have relocated in its 75-year history, the Oakland closure is the first restaurant it has closed.

“We feel the frequency and severity of the crimes being encountered by our customers and associates leave us no alternative,” said Chief Operating Officer Denny Warnick, in the statement.

Notably, Warnick said its Oakland location was “busy and profitable,” but it can’t ask its customers or employees to “visit or work in an unsafe environment.” Affected employees, which amount to about 100, will transfer to a nearby restaurant in San Francisco or receive severance.

Then, the reliably-brilliant and hilarious Hodge Twins decided to have way too much fun with it, as is their wont.

Heh. Excellent rip, fellas.

I stand with Texas!

Posted on January 20, 2024 by Mike

Tactical Hermit spells it all out for us, simply and concisely.

As per usual with liberal communist propaganda drivel, note how the article seeks to appeal to the humanitarian/emotional side:

DHS officials said Saturday that a woman and two children drowned in the Rio Grande after Border Patrol agents “were physically barred by Texas officials from entering the area” under orders from Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.

While all the while ignoring the cold hard facts that the Federal Government is helping to subsidize an outright invasion of 7 Million plus ILLEGAL ALIENS.

Let’s not forget that word ILLEGAL.

EVERYTHING that is transpiring on the Southern Border is UNLAWFUL and in Direct Opposition to the both the U.S. and Texas Constitution.

“Because the facts and law side with Texas, the State will continue utilizing its constitutional authority to defend her territory, and I will continue defending those lawful efforts in court,” Paxton wrote.

The sovereign Republic of Texas has a Constitutional Right to Protect it’s Citizens from FOREIGN Invasion when the Federal Govt. is aiding and abetting the enemy.

Eagle Pass may become our Fort Sumter very soon.

Prepare Accordingly.

Please note that the entire DHS story about the three illegal-alien would-be border jumpers who drowned was, as you would expect from the evil Leviathan-state, a damned lie: none of it, not one single aspect of it, really went down the way FederalGovCo says it did.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre stuck to the narrative — not the facts — the Biden administration parroted after three migrants drowned last Friday while attempting to cross the Rio Grande.

After the tragedy, the Biden administration rushed to blame Texas for the incident. Homeland Security, for example, accused Texas National Guard soldiers of having “physically barred” Border Patrol agents from responding to migrants in distress. The White House, on the other hand, suggested the migrants could have been saved had Texas soldiers not “blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance.”

But the Justice Department admitted in a filing to the Supreme Court on Monday that the migrants — two children and an adult woman — had already drowned when Mexican officials alerted Border Patrol agents of the tragic deaths. In fact, they had been dead for at least one hour.

On Wednesday, Fox News correspondent Jacqui Heinrich confronted Jean-Pierre over the White House’s dishonest narrative. She asked, “Will the administration amend its separate statement that implied that Texas officials were responsible for the deaths of those three migrants when, in fact, they had nothing to do with it?”

“They had already been dead for an hour by the time Mexico told anyone in the U.S. about it, and the administration admitted as much in their court filing,” Heinrich noted. “But the statement from the White House implies that Texas was responsible, and a number of outlets were forced to issue corrections and editor’s notes because of that White House statement.”

The falsehood exposed, Jean-Pierre responded by urging Heinrich to be “sensitive” because of the “devastating situation.” But then she refused to acknowledge the truth after repeatedly stumbling over her thoughts.

Ahhh, the usual fallback of the hack goobermint spokesweasel when caught in a blatant fabrication: “sensitivity.”

The Fox News reporter then read Jean-Pierre the White House statement — which said that “Texas officials blocked U.S. Border Patrol from attempting to provide emergency assistance” — but the press secretary simply restated her earlier point.

“There were other migrants in the water as well,” she said.

“Then why wasn’t that included in the statement?” Heinrich shot back.

Easy-peasy lemon squeezy: because they some lyin’ mothafuckas, yo. If ANYBODY is directly “responsible” for the drownings, apart from the criminal aliens themselves, it would be the senile, staggering stumblebum who threw open the former Border In Name Only and encouraged the flood of illegals to cross it in the first goddamned place…and we all already know who that is, thenksveddymuch.

America’s toxic business culture

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Mike

I’ve been muttering about where things were headed since the late 80s, when getting an MBA and starting out in middle-management replaced rising through the ranks from the factory floor to eventually land in the executive suite as the primary model for success. And now, well…here we all are, staring at the pluperfect example of that lamentable development: Boeing.

Boeing was once a well-run engineering company that became very profitable from its well-engineered products. It is now a poorly-run manufacturing company being managed in the manner taught in elite MBA programs, placing an emphasis above all else on cost control and expense reduction.

It is also a company whose current version of its workhorse product, the 737 Max, continues to have catastrophic in-flight failures.

Part of the 737 Max fleet has been grounded, again, this time after a door plug came off the fuselage of an Alaska Airlines airplane while in flight. Back in 2018 and 2019, there were two fatal 737 Max crashes, both apparently related to poorly designed and programmed flight stabilizer systems.

There is so much more that needs to be said about the toxicity of the “slash and cut your way to increased profit” culture that is learned at business schools, but I’ll briefly summarize that putting the “Chief Cost Cutter” at the helm of a corporation is just as ridiculous as putting the Accounts Payable Manager or Facilities Manager in charge of all operations. They’re all important roles, but you would not have the entire company focus almost exclusively on just one of those facets. Yet too many modern executives have a monomaniacal obsession with cutting costs and expenses, which causes neglect of innovation, quality, safety, and new product development, if not outright hostility toward those critical areas. It also causes a loss of important talent whose legacy knowledge has a value that can’t be quantified on a financial statement.

Throckmorton goes on to cite, at length, a seminal Atlantic piece which appeared in the wake of the 2019 crash, to wind up thusly:

If I can make a quick side note, the only people more destructive in corporate C-suites than Ivy League business school graduates are General Electric alums. They tend to bring a cult-like fanaticism for the idiotic business fads that ultimately destroyed GE, never understanding that the success of GE in the 1990s was despite those awful gimmicks, not because of them, and that the subsequent destruction of GE as a successful company in the 21st century was largely because of all the gimmicks that came to define GE’s culture.

Right now, there is much well-deserved mockery of Boeing and Alaska Airlines for how their focus on DEI and LGBTQ has distracted them from manufacturing and operating airplanes that don’t fall apart mid-flight. I have no doubt that if Alaska Airlines spent more time inspecting its airplanes rather than decorating them in rainbow colors and putting on drag shows, this latest incident would not have happened.

But neither would it have happened if Boeing was still a company run by engineers, rather than being a company run by MBAs who will gladly sacrifice quality and safety to temporarily goose the bottom line.

Quelle surprise, that a communist-run nation should lose touch so completely with its capitalist roots.

After the Day Of When, what?

Posted on December 30, 2023December 31, 2023 by Mike

Shitstorm a-brewing, full steam ahead!

How Many Load-Bearing Walls Have to Come Down Before America Collapses?
Imagine a big, beautiful house, but it has a maniacal group of squatters living in it. They take sledgehammers to load-bearing walls, carelessly tinker with the wiring, and make no real effort to fix things.

If the roof gets a leak, they let it go. If there’s a crack in the foundation, they’re more likely to hit it with a sledgehammer for fun than to repair it. If they’re going out of town when there’s going to be a cold snap, they leave the water running and don’t worry about whether the pipes freeze or not. Maybe a couple of them will board up a broken window or slap some duct tape on things when they’re sober and bored, but there’s no organized plan to hold everything together.

What do you think that house is going to look like a few years down the road? Better question, what do you think our country is going to look like a few years down the road?

Granted, it takes longer for a country to break down than a house, but it does all the same. In fact, if you’re middle-aged or older, you could probably reel off half a dozen ways the house we have today is vastly inferior to the one we had just a few decades ago.

This is not a coincidence. It’s not bad luck. It’s a consequence of the fact that we’ve done a lot of damage to our home, and we’re no longer even going through the motions of trying to keep it in good repair. We still have a roof over our heads for the moment, but we are certainly no longer on track to have a home we’re going to want to leave to our kids.

In John’s piece he cites an earlier one by Insty, wherein we find this:

What makes me sad now is the ongoing game of Civilizational Jenga that our ruling class is playing. One by one, they’re withdrawing the supports of civil society, in a process that will inevitably lead to a collapse. They’re taking what was a very robust society, and consuming all the safety margins, bit by bit.

What really makes me sad is that while some of the people involved – let’s call them “the morons” for convenience’s sake – are doing this out of shortsightedness, cupidity, or sheer partisan bloodthirstiness, I’m increasingly convinced that there’s a contingent at the top that knows exactly what it’s doing, and is fine with it.

When considering any political tactic, after all, one question is what happens if it doesn’t work. But sometimes an equally important question is, what happens if it does?

Say the various Democratic flacks, special prosecutors, and state attorneys general somehow manage to eliminate Trump. What happens?

Half the country – maybe more – will conclude that the whole system is rigged, that the establishment doesn’t follow the rules, and that it will gang up on anyone it sees is a threat. They will conclude, in short, that the government, and indeed the entire system, is illegitimate.

And they will be right. And the politicians of even a generation ago recognized that as enormously dangerous.

Oh, it’s sad all right, but that ain’t all it is. Not by a long yard, it ain’t. Need more specifics before you can take alarums warning of impending national catastrophe seriously? Ragin’ Dave offers a few.

It’s going to get worse, before it gets worse
Someone points out that we’re already in a recession, even if nobody wants to admit it.

Let’s take a look at three key areas.

If honest numbers were being used, they would show that GDP growth has been negative for almost the entire time that Joe Biden has been in the White House. That would indicate that we are at least experiencing a recession.

And if honest numbers were being used, they would show that the unemployment rate in this country is sitting at about 25 percent right now.

Needless to say, that is absolutely horrible. And if the rate of inflation was still calculated the way that it was back in 1980, it would still be in double digit territory even though it has come down a bit. The official numbers that the government gives us are designed to make us feel good about things. But at this point things are so bad that the charade is falling apart.

Food costs are up. Energy costs are up. Housing costs are through the damn roof. If I didn’t already own property up where I live I’d be screwed because I couldn’t afford to purchase it today, and I made far more in my last year of military service than I did when I purchased the property back in the early 2000’s.

And the people with their hands on the levers of power are either in denial about everything, or they’re just flat out lying to you and shoving as much lucre into their bank accounts as they can before it all comes apart. You know it, I know it.

Just on housing costs alone I don’t see how we come out of this without some sort of massive collapse. When the average family cannot afford a home, there’s no incentive to keep pushing forward.

From where I sit it looks to no longer be a matter of if, but of when. Although it probably won’t matter all that much to us once when arrives, for the nonce the question Glenn suggests remains a stimulating topic for consideration: is all this disaster, loss, and grief being brought down on American heads because our so-called leaders are incompetent and/or stupid? Or is this being done intentionally, with malice aforethought?

Y’all already know which side I come down on there, no need for me to belabor the point; many years of close examination of all the available evidence leaves me confident enough in my conclusion that, for once, I won’t proffer the obligatory “but I could be wrong” disclaimer this time. Whatever the case may be, though, it’s clear that we’re fast approaching the point where stopping them in their tracks by any means necessary—ANY means—will become not just a desirable, wise option but an absolute imperative, a matter of survival, quite literally.

In the bleak midwinter

Posted on December 30, 2023December 31, 2023 by Mike

Kunstler brings the DOOOOOOM in his year-end review/2024 preview combo, and It. Is. EPIC.

Do You Dare Even Look? — Forecast 2024
Historians of the future, flash-frying peccary testicles and mesquite pods over their campfires, will wonder at how the archetypal Shining City on a Hill of America’s storied yesteryear got transformed into the roach motel that our country has become on the threshold of 2024 CE. Will they be as stupidly bewildered as, in our time, the faculty at Harvard, the editors of The New York Times, or the directorate of the CDC? Or will they figure out the score by then?

Which is: the nauseating state-of-the-nation is being driven by a cohort of our own fellow citizens lost in an evil crypto-religious salvation rapture that veils their own self-disgust, moral failure, peevish discontents, petty hatreds, willful profanations, compulsive lying, sexual depravity, fraudulence, venality, cupidity, and all-around want of boundaries. They are wrecking the country on-purpose, led by their chosen figurehead avatar, “Joe Biden,” and the horses of many different colors he rode in on.

The people running things, yanking the levers of power, managing the malign weapon they have made of government (and the law, and schooling, and medicine, etc.), have got to be turned out, and hard. Not a few should find themselves in the courts and, with proper and fair adjudication, be conducted to prison, perhaps even to the special room there where the lives of the wicked are ceremonially concluded.

You may legitimately ask: Does America deserve what it’s getting? Well, you know the old maxim about hard times make strong men…strong men bring good times…good times make weak men…Our national quandary is certainly a case of that, plus the manifestation of well-known terrestrial cycles (e.g., Fourth Turnings), plus the workings of emergence as the dynamics involved in all this sort themselves out…topped off by the “secret sauce” of Globalist wickedness, with the aim of severe population reduction and the asset stripping of Western Civ for the benefit of the that moneygrubbing Globalist transhuman technocrat rat-pack.

My natural inclination, you know, is a kind of allergy to paranoid schemes, but one does survey the scene with wonder at how superbly coordinated the fuckery has been — much of the world locking down simultaneously for the Covid-19 op…the global mass vaxx campaign…the fiscal lunacy and accompanying central bank shenanigans…the broad-based censorship operations…the capture of the news media…and the war-mongering.

So, the country is in the toilet and it is our job in 2024 to make sure it doesn’t get flushed all the way down the pipe. That’s all the throat-clearing you will hear before we get to the meat of this broadside: predictions for the year ahead.

And with that, we’re off on a railway ride to Doomsville for an unflinching look at where and how the impending trainwreck might occur. A couple more bits ‘n’ pieces of dis ‘n’ dat before I tell you to go read all of it.

The Energy Picture
In short, a fateful new game of musical chairs with oil is underway and Europe can’t seem to find a seat to park its sad old rump in. American shale oil production has been an amazing parlor trick that is now coming to an end as it swerves into decline in 2024. Additionally, the ideologue maniacs under “Joe Biden” have drained the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, which is supposed to tide us through great national emergencies and war. And the same idiots have shut down pipelines, designated public lands off-limits for oil drilling, and burdened our country with similar unrealistic “Green New Deal” alt energy schemes like the policies pounding Euroland down a neo-medieval rat-hole.

Oil still matters, a lot. It drives every aspect of our so-called advanced economy. We’ve been pretending it’s possible to shift easily away from oil to alt. energy and that fantasy is now dissipating. Nuclear is both capital intensive and dependent on social stability, and the global debt bubble will disorder capital flows while it stimulates social chaos. Nuclear power plants also take years to site, permit, finance, and build, apart from the NIMBY opposition they provoke. We’re about out of time and capital for a new nuclear program.

2024 is the year that Americans who are still capable of paying attention realize we’re steaming into true post-modernity — not the skull-fogging inanities of the art world, but rather the end of the precious comforts and conveniences of daily life: abundant food, central heating, hot water, lights and appliances on-command, happy motoring (and the suburban matrix it built), yellow school bus fleets, airplane travel, theme parks, blue-light-special shopping, and everything else.

It’s not all going to fall apart at once — though an electromagnetic pulse attack could do it — and we’ve already been witnessing the slow decay of many supply lines and services that we Americans formerly took for granted, like, getting a certain car part you needed, or a doctor’s appointment in under two months, or an airplane flight that isn’t some kind of existential trauma. But in 2024, we’ll see noticeable failures of systems for providing the things we’re used to getting, which is being aggravated greatly by the flat-out incompetence of people employed at everything, anywhere. Surely, you’ve noticed.

How the hell could any but either the most insulated (ie, Mordor on the Potomac orcs) or oblivious (ie, any random shitlib Karen or Ken you run across in your daily round) NOT have noticed? Onwards.

Civil Strife and the Election
Doesn’t it look like the Democratic Party wants to start Civil War Two? They may get their wish. It appears that they will stop at nothing to keep voters from re-electing their nemesis, Donald Trump. In the process, they’ve managed to turn Mr. Trump into the biggest underdog in US history. The court cases in New York, Washington, Atlanta, and Florida could not be more obviously fake confections, insults to every custom and order of Anglo-American law. I doubt the cases will survive their chains of review, and it is looking like special counsel Jack Smith may not even survive his appointment (being in breach of the rules — he was not confirmed by the Senate…whoopsie).

WashPo op-ed scribbler Robert Kagan, husband of State Department warmonger Victoria Nuland, has suggested that some extra-legal removal method may be needed to solve the Trump problem if the idiotic indictment barrage falls short. Everybody who read his piece thought: Oh, they’re actually proposing to whack him. That would set things off nicely.

You’d suppose the Party of Chaos might loose its Antifa / BLM mobs, and other shock troops onto the streets well before November on some George Floyd type pretext in order to invoke a “national emergency,” giving “JB” & Co. license to declare martial law and perhaps postpone the election. Everybody will see through the play. Try it and see what happens.

But, if the election actually happens and Mr. Trump wins, I’d expect the Dems to unleash holy hell on the country post election day just for the sheer sadistic pleasure of watching whatever is left of America burn down. This time, proponents of the 2nd Amendment may not stand idly by, especially with the big city police forces decimated. There will be ten-thousand Kyle Rittenhouses out there defending the streets from the ragtag and bobtail of diseased imbeciles in their black bloc uniforms cringing behind their sissy umbrellas.

As I’ve said more than once, the “election” will indeed happen. Why on earth wouldn’t it? They’d do themselves way more harm by cancelling or postponing it than they would just going ahead and keeping the scam going as is. The whole sorry charade is working out quite nicely for them, as well it might be after all the years of work getting the fraud engine dialed in and tuned to run smoothly. Throwing all that away would achieve but two things, neither of which the Power would find desirable:

It would pull the rug out from under the VOTE HARDERER Republicrat© politicians, pundits, and citizenry who still so fervently Want To Believe, all of whom make up such an important part of Team Status Quo
It would once and for all blow the lid off the quaint, ever-more-feeble delusion that We The People still have any say whatsoever in how we are governed ruled, and by whom; despite all their best efforts, there are still hundreds of millions of guns in private hands out there, so God only knows where that ugly relevation might possibly lead

If we know anything about The Enemy by now, it’s that he is cunning, amoral, and above all patient. A long-term plan he conceived, implemented, and nurtured for nigh on a century is now VERY close to full and final fruition, and they’re all of a sudden going to lose patience now? Sorry, I just can’t see it. Anyways, as I said above: go check out the rest. It makes for some pretty grim reading, but is all the more accurate for that.

Oh yeah, about my post title: as my fellow Christmas music aficionados will know, it’s the title of a lovely Song O’ Teh Season which reminded me that I yet have two more videos to put up for y’all—one I only recently discovered, the other a fantastic rendition of an old favorite—which I will get to anon.

Update! In the “Civil Strife and the Election” category: Mark Steyn sees the writing on the wall, mentions the unmentionable.

The lone hyperpower is not quite a one-party state, but it is a one-party Deep State. In 2016, while everyone was shrieking about foreign interference in US elections, there was sustained domestic interference in US elections – courtesy of the FBI, Crossfire Hurricane and all the rest. But, in those bygone days, it was still necessary to do it sotto voce – offshoring most of the dodgier bits to friendly Five Eyes guys, such as the Australian High Commissioner in London.

Unfortunately for Peter Strzok et al, they underestimated the scale of the challenge. So they were obliged to spend the next four years subverting the so-called head of the executive branch – again, mostly on the sly.

But they’re doing it openly now. They’re using anything to hand – civil suits, criminal prosecution, executive authority, whatever it takes. It’s ever more brazen. In the preferred cliché of the age, last time round it was the quiet part, now it’s out loud.

We are a little over ten months to what’s still quaintly called “Election Day”. Does this seem like the behavior of people who, come Tuesday night in November, will be willing to lose a democratic vote?

In my bestseller After America, I quoted the late Pat Caddell’s observation that it is not a good thing to tell the people that there are no peaceful means of effecting meaningful course correction – not in a land where half the people are disinclined to go along with open borders, Chinese domination, grade-school transitioning and all the rest. If voting doesn’t change anything, you are setting up pre-revolutionary conditions – assuming for the purposes of argument that, in the panopticon state of 24/7 high-tech surveillance, our rulers haven’t already priced that in, and figured it’s no longer possible.

Nevertheless: In Colorado and Maine, in Georgia and New York, the permanent state is telling you that, in the interests of “saving democracy”, there isn’t going to be any “peaceful transfer of power”. The talk-radio guys with the butch bumper music and the easy-listening opinions could at least stop trying to pass this off as “politics”.

I repeat: why WOULD they cancel or postpone the 24 “election”? In dystopian tyrannies such as Amerika v2.0—(mis)ruled by ruthless, reckless, amoral swine hidden behind stone walls, concrete barriers, electrified fences, and armed security squads—even when The Power loses, it still wins anyhow. As the hoary old stage aphorism has it, the show must go on…and it will. Until one day, all of a sudden-like, it doesn’t.

Walk gently on Mother Earth

Posted on December 17, 2023December 17, 2023 by Mike

CHRIST, what a muttonhead.

Should I Stop Flying? It’s a Difficult Decision to Make.

Yes. Yes, you absolutely should, immediately. Every minute you dither makes Mother Gaia cry, you know.

Four years ago, during a Zoom work meeting, a colleague who lives in London told me she’d decided to quit flying on airplanes. She simply couldn’t stomach the cost to the climate. Due to her decision, she said calmly, she would probably never visit the U.S. again. My heart skipped a beat.

Her choice seemed so extreme. She shared it with me casually in the context of conversation, without a trace of judgment or moralizing. Still, I felt shocked and inexplicably a little defensive—but also intrigued. At the time, I traveled by air as often as ten times a year for my work as a journalist and to see family members strewn about the country. I couldn’t imagine my life without flying.

But my colleague’s comment lodged in my mind as a beautiful and challenging seed. Over the next few years, it cracked through the concrete of what had been, until then, a completely unexamined belief in my inviolable entitlement to flying. When the pandemic arrived, grounding travelers and shrinking international air travel by 60 percent in 2020, I began to see that significantly reducing air travel—or even giving it up altogether—was absolutely possible.

Rare individuals have chosen not to fly for ethical reasons for decades, but in the years leading up to the pandemic, the smattering of outliers coalesced into a movement. It took root most quickly and deeply in Sweden, which in 2017 became the first country in the world to establish a legally binding carbon-neutrality target—a year before Greta Thunberg began protesting in front of its parliament. In Swedish, the movement became known as flygskam, which translates to “flight shame,” a term commonly attributed to Swedish singer Staffan Lingberg, who gave up flying in 2017.

The number of people pledging to stop flying grew so much that Swedish air travel declined 5 percent between 2018 and 2019, and the movement strengthened in other parts of Europe as well. In the U.S., the flight-free movement, in the form of groups like Flight Free USA and No Fly Climate Sci, has been slower to spread but is growing. This year, Flight Free USA, for example, is on track to see the largest number of pledges to stop or minimize flying at 436. By comparison, tens of thousands have pledged in Europe over the past four years.

Well, an admiring pat on the head for all those Neo-Luddite lackwits, then. But y’all should by no means stop there. Ditch your cars, your houses, your modern appliances, any clothing you didn’t sew with your own two pwecious widdle hands. Throw out your computer, your tablet, and your sail foam, all of which are made of plastic derived from *gasp!!!* fossil fuels. No more mass transit, either, most of which consists of either gas or diesel-engined buses or electric trains and/or subways which rely on a mostly coal-burning power grid.

Squatting in your dark, freezing-cold cave to cook over an open fire? Perish FORBID! When I think of the miasma of planet-killing pollutants spewed into our fragile atmosphere by such unnecessary indulgences, I can but weep. Small-scale agriculture? Non: cow farts, plus plants have feewings too, you know. Composting? Nein: that is just soooo 2010; you should be scooping, bagging, and eating your own poo like more enlightened pyrsynz are doing. Travel/commuting by horseback? Nyet, nyet, NYET: animal cruelty, you heartless, soulless monster, amongst a whole slew of other objections.

Criminy, but these navel-gazing, sanctimonious handwringers really make my hair hurt sometimes.

Blackpilled

Posted on December 10, 2023December 10, 2023 by Mike

Truth hurts.

How many of you feel this way? I never served, but I can tell you that I would gladly give up my own if it meant my children would be safe from all enemies. pic.twitter.com/0iyazAPmUN

— Sassafrass84 (@Sassafrass_84)

December 10, 2023

And you’ll almost certainly have to, alas.

Via Dave Renegade, who opens with a painful question.

Questions questions update! Unrelated, but since it was also found via Dave I’ll append it to this post anyways.

An open letter to Elon Musk.

Mr. Musk,

I see that you have reinstated Alex Jones to X. I also saw that you believe only people who are guilty of an egregious act should be permanently banned. You stated that you did not think Mr. Jones’ banishment was warranted but you put his fate in the hands of the people to decide. I have two questions:

Why use a poll? If you did not think his permanent ban was warranted, why did you not just reinstate him?

If you did think his ban was warranted, would you have reinstated him if the majority of people who voted in the poll said to?

Although I was permanently banned from Twitter for one statement, I wonder how many other people have been banned? Can you run a query and post on X how many people are permanently banned on X? Can you also run a second query to show how many were permanently banned after you bought X? My account was banned after you bought X. I did file an appeal but never heard back. I submitted a request to see the status of my appeal which resulted in the complete elimination of my account.

I was wondering who is still making decisions regarding permanent bans and why there is no concerted effort to review accounts that have been banned. We see the reversal of some high profile account bans but what about the rest? Reinstating people based on polls may be good optics but banning people with no recourse to appeal is not free speech.

Good questions all, I must say; perhaps Elon, busy as he no doubt is, will make time to answer them. Might be tough in purely practical terms—running the database queries alone would have to be both difficult and resource-intensive, not to even mention the man-hours burned by putting X employees to work coding them and tallying the results—and chances are Musk will never even know Dave asked, given that there must be who knows how many shitlib Twatter stay-behinds still in place who’ll make damned sure of it.

That said, Dave’s closing statement is beyond debate. And when you get right down to the nut-cutting, restoring free speech at X was the main reason Musk gave for buying the shitlib-infested, censorship-happy Twatter platform in the first place. Elon’s Twitter/X project has been an extended, frustrating exercise in putting his money where his mouth is, which he’s done a commendable job of so far. We’ll see soon enough where this latest wrinkle goes, I reckon.

PC über alles

Posted on December 9, 2023 by Mike

Oh, this is bound to end well.

The country currently is in the throes of an epidemic of mass insanity and irrationality. The manifestations of the disorder are too numerous to cite, but the explosion of the DEI plague being pushed by the government, many businesses, and the intellectual pigmies in most of the media, must be included in any list of the most egregious. As currently advocated and practiced by our leftist “elites,”1 it is incompatible with rationality, common sense, and morality, among other things, and, as the Wall Street Journal, not to mention the Supreme Court, have pointed out, the U.S. Constitution.

There is a brand of this particular wokeness that is relatively unknown to the general public, but that is particularly irrational and dangerous. It is the Federal Aviation Administration’s relatively young DEI mandates. These Biden/Buttigieg DEI commands now apply to the employment of FAA air traffic controllers in an insidious way, a way that threatens the safety of our skies and of anyone who flies.

The FAA has eagerly embraced the extreme DEI strategies that are now oh-so-popular in “progressive” leftist and socialist circles. On its webpage, the FAA clearly sets out how it will discriminate against the wicked white males. As this article will show below, it does so by seeking to employ people who are clearly less qualified than the general applicant pool. Less qualified, that is, unless you believe that the average applicant suffers from, for example, a “severe intellectual disability.”

The FAA makes clear the tribes that it includes in the Diversity Nation: It touts that it specifically “targets” for “special emphasis,” in both recruiting and hiring, people with disabilities in “hearing, vision, missing extremities, partial paralysis, complete paralysis, epilepsy, severe intellectual disability, psychiatric disability and dwarfism.”

Wait. It gets worse. Such disabled applicants get even more special treatment because they are eligible for preferential hiring. The FAA calls this “On-the-Spot hiring.” That is exactly what it sounds like – the FAA admits that it is a “non-competitive hiring method.” They are eligible for this non-competitive hiring even if their intellectual or psychiatric disability is “severe.”

The FAA does not attempt to hide its present and future discrimination. It pronounces, “Diversity is integral to achieving FAA’s mission of ensuring safe and efficient travel across our nation and beyond.”

It is no such thing. In truth, forced “diversity” conflicts with said mission, directly and flatly contradicts it, impedes it, ensures that it can only result in total, abject failure.

And its justification?

“The mission of the FAA involves securing the skies of a diverse nation. It only makes sense that the workforce responsible for that mission reflects the nation that it serves.”

But nowhere does the FAA explain how hiring ATCs with, for example, “severe intellectual or psychiatric disabilities” will enhance its mission of securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers and others.

No, it most certainly does NOT make any sense at ALL. “Reflects the nation it serves”? What muttonheaded folderol. ATCs, among many others employed in similarly essential and demanding fields, must be no less than EXCEPTIONAL—orders of magnitude above the normal run, and just never you mind about what the goobermint falsely insists “the nation it serves” wants or needs. The ATC’s job requires extraordinary intelligence; intensive training and re-training; constant focus and close attention to detail; unflagging ability to remain cool, calm, and collected under extreme pressure; tireless physical endurance; adequate flexibility and mental agility to cope with sudden unanticipated problems; and/or distraction due to severe fatigue and unrelenting, constant stress, both of which are integral, baked-in-the-cake aspects of the job.

In October’s Halloween post I mentioned my friend David’s dad, Charles Black, who served several terms as mayor of Mount Holly. As it happens, Mr Black was an ATC at the old Charlotte-Douglas Airport for twenty-some-odd years until he retired and eventually decided to run for mayor. He patiently but cheerfully regaled us bothersome neighborhood young ‘uns who were curious enough to ask with tales of his worthy occupation again and again, interleavened with stories of his experiences from late 1944 through to the end of the war flying B-17s in the ETO.

The thing I most remember Charlie Black emphasizing in those conversations what amounted to an ironclad law of Air Traffic Control, a risk that just came along with the job: should the ATC ever fail to live up to those rigorous standards during a control-tower shift—even once, even momentarily—people would die. In job lots, usually. MANY people. Period. Fucking. DOT.

So yeah, let’s just do away with niggling irrelevancies such as being qualified, competent, and physically, mentally, and emotionally equipped to handle this supremely demanding job, so’s we don’t harm anybody’s self-esteem. Instead, let’s place many tens of thousands of lives every single day entirely into the hands of:

Droolcases
65-IQ mouthbreathers
Retards
The deranged and/or pathologically unbalanced
Illiterates
The blind, deaf, halt, and/or lame
Miscellaneous other subnormals

I assume irredeemable drunks, heroin/meth/PCP spike-jockeys, welfare layabouts, habitual felons, and the stubbornly-recidivist homeless are also included on the FAA’s most-desired-hires list, although I didn’t bother to verify it. All in the name of making the Differently Abled© feel better about themselves. Which, mind you, has NOTHING WHATSOEVER to do with “securing the skies, preventing catastrophes, and safeguarding the lives of pilots, passengers et al.” Thus do “liberal” imbeciles grant themselves another opportunity for smug self-congratulation celebrating their manifestly-superior empathy, righteousness, compassion, and pragmatic-problem-solver skills, and straight to hell with those uncaring troglodytes stuck with living in Earthly reality.

One can only sit back, stunned, and marvel at the absurd impracticality, the fathomless arrogance-in-ignorance, the illimitable self-regard of these gormless morons. Sit back and marvel, that is, while we wait for the big jetliners to start colliding and dropping onto houses, highways, and urban areas, creating fiery maelstroms of needless carnage and destruction nationwide as the resultant body-count soars to previously unimaginable heights. As bright ideas go, prioritizing political correctness in blinkered contravention of observable real-world strictures to such an insane extent as they’ve done here has to set an all-time record for the Reality-Based Community of some kind or other.

Free investment counseling: The canny market speculator will invest every free penny he can, immediately, in graveyard acreage, casket and headstone manufacturers, funeral homes, and related mortuary services. Once the changes in FAA hiring policy take effect it’s a can’t-lose investment strategy, sure to yield tremendous returns for brokers, their clients, and day-traders who are astute enough to boldly seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

Yeah, great plan there, shitlibs. I’m confident giving complex, intellectually-challenging, technically-advanced positions to random feebs who can’t possibly do them will work out just fine for all involved parties, whether on the ground or high above it. Not that I was likely to anyway at this late date, but this preposterous, dangerous move puts the (dunce) cap on it once and for all: much as I’ve always enjoyed flying, I would rather gargle diarrhea than ever board a commercial aircraft again. In my future travels, if any, I’ll either walk, hitch-hike, or just spit on my ass and slide.

The difference

Posted on December 5, 2023December 5, 2023 by Mike

All boldface mine, indicative of the real bottom line here, the Big Question that every Western society must soon ask itself—and answer—else surrender to eternal subjugation as another conquered part of the Dar al Pisslam.

The anxiety among Jews is perhaps most pronounced in Great Britain, where 500,000 Jews are outnumbered 10-1 by five million Muslims. Close to half of British Jews now say they are thinking of emigrating, so great has their sense of insecurity become.

What do British people think? Would they be glad to see so many British Jews leave the country, where they have for many centuries been loyal, productive, and creative citizens, driven out by Muslim migrants who have been neither loyal, nor productive, nor creative citizens of the land where they batten on government benefits of every kind, regarded as a kind of proleptic “jizyah,” and openly declare their hope and expectation, through demographic conquest, to turn the U.K. into part of Dar al-Islam, where Islam everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule, everywhere? Is that the future the British feel helpless to prevent, or will they come to their senses in time, and do the following: first, put a stop to any further Muslim immigration; second, deport all migrants who are in the country illegally; third, deport all Muslims convicted of crimes after they have served their sentences; fourth, halt all welfare benefits to migrants during the first five years of their presence in the U.K.?

FIFY with that closing strikethrough, which is most apposite of all. Sefton dots the last “i” and crosses the last “t” for us.

France imported God knows how many million Arabs and Muslims from North Africa and elsewhere and the result was not millions of new French citizens, but the transformation of whole swathes of the country into beachheads of Dark Age barbarism. True, the French government and people did essentially nothing to even try and assimilate these people, but it was a lost cause from the get go. They were invited in and behaved as outsiders and, as per the tenets of Islam, the first wave of Islamic conquerers.

As the article states, 500,000 Jews still live in England but there are upwards of 5 million Muslims. The most popular baby name in England is Mohammed, and that alarming cultural warning sign first happened like five or 10 years ago. Aside from the West adopting the most radical solutions, including the mass stripping of citizenship and deportations, the trend is irreversible. It also presupposes political leadership and a mass movement of the citizenry to adopt measures that go against Western tradition and by recognizing in the first place that Islam is completely incompatible and anathema to the past 2,000 of civilizational development and progress. That too is a non-starter.

The other huge and bitter irony is that places like Germany opened their borders to mass migrants because of guilt over what they did to the Jews between 1933 and 1945. Yet look who they let in to assuage their guilt over the Holocaust: dark age throwbacks mostly from Turkey and elsewhere in the Muslim world. Perfect.

So that leaves it up to the citizenry to take matters into their own hands as they had done in Ireland in the wake of last week’s stabbing spree in Dublin. Problem is that Western governments in the main are firmly against their own people.

And as we all know, with a wide open non-existent border and joke of an immigration system over here, what’s happening in Europe will be and in fact is happening here. We are being transformed into Yugoslavia right before our very eyes.

Yugoslavia? We should be so lucky, JJ. Yemen or Ethiopia, more like.

Hotting up

Posted on December 1, 2023December 1, 2023 by Mike

The War On Christmas has gone international, and escalated considerably.

Oh, and speaking of Christmas:

German Police Arrest Islamist Teens Planning Attack on Christmas Market, Synagogue

I remember, seven years ago, writing about two young women I’d met, from opposite ends of Germany, who told me they’d decided not to sing with their caroling groups at Christmas markets any more because, as one put it, “Christmas is now a target”. And I also recall how many friends on the so-called “right” suggested I was exaggerating the threat. This was the headline on Ed West’s Spectator column the following year:

Christmas markets without armed police are now a thing of the past

And so the first sign of the holidays in Europe, and indeed in New York, is watching the Christmas bollards get installed in preparation for the season of goodwill to all men – if you can afford all those security barriers. From longtime reader Robert Strauss six years ago:

Mark,

There’s something so disheartening and depressing about the closing of the Lyons Christmas market due to the cost of security concerns that it makes a person just plain tired. Christmas markets are such wonderful traditions: fun and kitsch (in the most wonderful way) and beautiful and singularly atmospheric. I love walking through them. It’s where a kid’s face lights up and a grandparent can escape back into kid-like memories.

And now it’s going away. I can’t help but think of the hashtag-“not-going-to-let-it-affect-our-daily-lives” mantra coming from the likes of Obama, Sadiq Khan, Theresa, and soda-tax enthusiast Jim Kenney. Hey, the gift-packaged barriers really look nice and Christmasy, don’t they? Nothing abnormal there, people. Just pretend there still is a Christmas market when you look at the cute, packaged barriers and enjoy the carols in your earbuds.

What a sad, heartbreaking crock.

Bob S.

As I received the above, came news of the 2017 vehicular jihad in a thoroughly bollardized Melbourne. That last one I wrote about, but you can’t write about them all – because you’d go mad writing the same column over and over while the western world’s political class sticks its fingers in its ears and says, “Nya-nya, can’t hear you!” No amount of death or destruction will persuade them to address the issue. And so once open, shared traditions become throttled by bollards and security. And in meekly agreeing to surrender our future we lose our past, too.

How could it be otherwise? The war being half-heartedly waged against yodeling Pisslamic jihadis isn’t some small-scale “police action” or yet another far-removed brushfire conflict which effete Westerners can laconically forget about or ignore as a minor annoyance that doesn’t really affect them all that much—most especially not when we’ve permitted our so-called “leaders” to dump several divisions’ worth of enemy soldiers into our very laps, either via studiously looking the other way as they waltz across our nonexistent southern border or just importing them directly, resettling them en masse under the threadbare cover of “refugee” status.

No, this one is for all the marbles, I’m afraid, with the highest imaginable stakes for every last one of us. It’s an existential war, quite literally, and the losing side in that sort of war loses absolutely everything.

Humpty Dumpty nation

Posted on November 28, 2023November 28, 2023 by Mike

First thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence,” wrote F. Scott Fitzgerald, “is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.” As dumb statements from America’s most overrated writer go, this one is not quite on a par with “there are no second acts in American lives,” but it’s right up there. Indeed, it might better said that the ability to hold two contradictory ideas in one’s head and thinking you retain the ability to function is the test of a ninth-rate intelligence, and in fact explains many of the problems that currently plague this third act of American life. Here are three:

Follows, an examination of Fucking D卐M☭CRAT Roostervelt’s tottering, inherently unsustainable Social Security system, even now crumbling in slow-motion before our very eyes as its bureau-weasel administrators scramble desperately to find some workable means of shoring it up (read: draconian tax hikes). Next up, the item that provided the primary impetus for this post.

Lawyers and politicians: a classic racket.
Now that I’m back on Twitter/X (@theAmanuensis), I ventured this observation yesterday:

No one with a law degree should be eligible to stand for public office, ever. Having the same people who benefit from the legal system be in charge of it is the very definition of conflict of interest.

We like to boast that we are “a government of laws, not men,” but that’s only partially true. We are a government of laws written, voted on, and interpreted by lawyers for their own benefit. This is why, no matter whom we vote for, nothing ever gets done, no house ever gets cleaned, no swamp ever gets drained, no “reform” is ever worth the paper the lawyers print it on. To do otherwise would upset the racket known as the Government/Lawyer complex.

Lawyers have become a secular priest class, the guys who claim expertise in the workings of our legal system and who while running for office promise to “fix” it. But they only fix they know is the one that’s already in. Banning lawyers from ever running for office would have several salutatory effects, among them returning the government to the non-Ivy League law school graduates who make up the vast majority of real Americans, as well as de-“professionalizing” politics, eliminating its legalistic jargon, and, eventually, attaining a Supreme Court entirely devoid of lawyers. A government of laws, run by non-lawyers with common sense, would be more like what the Founders envisioned.

I like it, I like it a lot. Of course, being more in line with what the Founders envisioned makes such reform less likely, not more, that it will ever actually come to pass. Walsh’s grim closer:

As Humpty Dumpty tells Alice in Through the Looking-Glass, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.”

“The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master— that’s all.”

Like the big egg, however, we’ve fallen and now have lost our ability to function. And all the king’s horses and all the king’s men can’t put us back together again.

Ahh, but should we even want it put together again? Or should we instead consider a radical change of course, in the direction urged on us by those selfsame Founders? I know not what course others may take…

Excellent advice

Posted on November 22, 2023 by Mike

Buy a gun.

Things are starting to look like they’re going to get dire, and you should probably get a firearm for self-defense.

The reason you should get one probably isn’t going to surprise a lot of my readers. In fact, this isn’t necessarily directed at you scrolling through this article (unless you don’t own a firearm, in which case, sell your cloak and buy one) but the people you might know who are either on the fence or don’t think something nasty isn’t coming their way.

Something is coming this country’s way, and if our recent history has taught us anything, it’s going to get bloody in the streets.

The thing coming is the 2024 election. While all elections have a “this is the most important election in our lifetime” feel hanging over it, this election is particularly tense. That tension is only going to grow from here, and you’re going to see it get worse by leaps and bounds after the Republicans nominate their candidate to run against President Joe Biden.

No matter who gets the nomination, you’re going to see the left flip out and begin ramping up riots, protests, and violence, likely because the media will stir the fears and anxieties of those who still believe them. If the pattern holds, then the media will focus on a cause of some sort that will foment hatred and division that puts Republicans at the center of the blame.

It’s not conservatives the nation needs to worry about getting violent. The violence will come from the left as sure as day turns to night, and you need to be ready when it does, especially if Trump gets close to or obtains the office of the Presidency. Should that happen, the reaction from the left will be fiery both figuratively and very literally.

Violence will be cheered on by Democrat politicians, a fearmongering media, and leftist advocacy organizations of every variety. In their self-induced fear and panic, they will begin destroying and assaulting, attempting takeovers of city blocks, and punishing anyone they believe to be guilty of paving the way for Trump’s return.

You need to be able to defend yourself if you happen to find yourself in an area where the backlash happens.

Forewarned is forearmed; an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure; better to have and not need than to need and not have, all that jazz. I omitted several paragraphs of speculation on Trump’s chances in next fall’s “election” entertainment production, and what might transpire should he win—win again, that is, since he already did so in 2020, then was removed from office via the J6 coup d’état so as to allow the Shadow State to install its choice of marionette, allowing the (shit)show to go on.

My opinion on Trump’s Quixotic quest for the presidency remains unchanged—which, rather than prattle on at length yet again about it, can be sententiously summed up with a reworking of Gen William R Sherman’s famous riposte: If nominated, he will not be allowed to run; if elected, he will not be allowed to govern. In any event, getting another gun is never a bad thing. It’s an easy-peasy, no-brainer move no 2A person is likely to regret making, each and every time.

A refreshing change of pace

Posted on November 21, 2023 by Mike

The Monday Kunstler marks a milestone of sorts.

In normal times we anticipate the splendid gluttony of the American Thanksgiving, the fellowship of family and friends, with gratitude and remembrance of overcoming ordeals past. This year, though, we are a bit preoccupied with ordeals to come, and that nip in the November air conjures rumors of approaching hardship and cruelties we have no idea how we might overcome. These are not normal times.

What was normal, anyway? The second half of the twentieth century in Western Civ, the cornucopia of post-war America, paychecks that covered the house, the car, assured square meals, and quite a bit left over for Disneyworld, a place at the lake with a speedboat, and four seats at the ballpark. Normal was keeping a lid on discontent in foreign lands and containing our wicked obverse enemy, the Soviet communists. Normal was mom and dad together under one roof, expecting strangers to behave decently, order outside the home. Normal was thinking all that would last forever.

I idealize a bit. But many of you will recognize at least some of that being present in your lives for a while, at least. And you might agree that it all started breaking badly in the new century, clearly marked by the attacks of nine-eleven. What followed that wondrous enormity was the amazing and nauseating transfiguration of our country into the opposite of the old normal: broad financial desperation, broken families, strangers bent on homicide and mayhem, official tyranny of all kinds, immersive lying, failed institutions, foolish wars, nothing and no one to believe in, and the creeping suspicion that mysterious evil forces are running it all.

Somehow, we have managed to become our old enemy, the Soviets. The sprawling bureaucracy I call the blob has a blank check to control everything we do, to usurp our individual economic decisions, intrude on our very bodies, snatch us from our homes or lock us up in them, and force us to shut-up about all that. Unlike the Soviets, though, our blob is unable to suppress vile civil misbehavior, murder, rape, looting, car-jacking, robbery at the bottom and fraud, bribery, money laundering, insider trading, cyber-Ponzis, and racketeering, at the top. The law is a new wilderness of iniquity. Show me the man and I’ll find a crime to pin on him, Stalin’s KGB chief liked to say. Merrick Garland seems to like that method, too.

The oddest feature of this upheaval is that the revolutionary youth in the streets and on the campuses are on the side of tyranny — as long as they are allowed to do some of the tyrannizing. The mobs and the blob officials mutually reinforce each other. The governor of Oregon, Kate Brown, did everything possible to protect Antifa while they destroyed the city of Portland. Mayor Muriel Bowser had Washington DC’s streets painted boldly to celebrate Black Lives Matter, after they torched the church across the street from the White House, occupied by the wicked Trump. Lately, the Ivy Leaguers stupidly shout for intifada and the allahu akbar of beheading — the innate sadism of Wokery on display for all to see. These mobs got tacit official permission to do their mob thing — except for the crowd that FBI blob agents turned into a mob on January 6, 2021. Permission denied! Instead, the people who “paraded” in the US Capitol got systematically hunted down by Christopher Wray. Can those luckless souls now serving years-long jail sentences possibly feel thankful for being born in the USA?

Read the rest and rejoice, for this time out Jim omits any mention of VOTING HARDERER AT THEM!!!© in the closing ‘graphs, and It. Is. Good.

Category: Hard times in the land of plenty

SO, how’s that 15-20 buck an hour minimum wage working out for ya, anyway?

Publick notice

Another “food desert” mirage

I stand with Texas!

America’s toxic business culture

After the Day Of When, what?

In the bleak midwinter

Walk gently on Mother Earth

Blackpilled

PC über alles

The difference

Hotting up

Humpty Dumpty nation

Excellent advice

A refreshing change of pace

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