Hard times in the land of plenty

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.

The nihilistic/narcissistic West

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Mike

Can narcissists even BE nihilists, really? Or that a contradiction in terms, an oxymoron? Y’know, like “jumbo shrimp,” “militant pacifist,” or “unbiased opinion”?

The Scales Have Fallen. Now What?
You may have noticed that the enemies of the West no longer need to hide their animosity or their purpose. In the wake of my 2015 book, The Devil’s Pleasure Palace, I was often asked what, exactly, did the Frankfurt School and its spawn in academe and its fellow travelers in the media desire in the wake of the collapse of Western civilization? What would follow the triumph of “Critical Theory”? A new communist paradise? The teleological resolution of their imaginary “arc of history”? The sunny uplands of “fairness,” “equality,” and even “equity”? None of those things, I replied. What they want is…nothing.

To assume that our ideological opponents want something is to play the game on their turf. It’s a mistake we make constantly. We imagine that words mean the same thing when they use them as when we use them. We have accepted their protestations that they “only” want a new, post-revolutionary Brotherhood of Man when they speak glowingly of the future, when instead they’re happy to stop with the destruction of the past two thousand years of history, and call it a job well done. We mistakenly assume that they want the same world that we do, only different, when in fact nihilism is their goal. To put it in contemporary terms, they are Jokers, the kind of men who only want to watch the world burn.

Thanks to a host of recent developments, this finally seems to be sinking through the fog of our post-Greco-Roman Christian reality. Muslim irredentists have butchered thousands of innocents in Israel — and Muslims and their supporters all over the West march in full-throated support. In London, they have defaced public monuments; in Germany they have ignored orders to disperse; in the United States their radicalized supporters in the universities — universities that were deliberately radicalized by the Left in this country, and who now are astonished to find themselves on the receiving end of overt anti-Semitism — show not the slightest signs of shame, but instead exult in their chance to finally be against everything.

As winter approaches, the exhausted bugbear of the Covid hoax isn’t playing as it did during the heyday of the pocket tyrant, Anthony Fauci, as the public realizes that the entire charade was a test run to see just how much Americans would take, how eagerly they were willing to rat out each other out, to be spied on, lied to, panicked by their friends, neighbors, and government. The same mouthpieces at the wholly corrupt CDC and other official organs continue to push their “vaccines,” but this time the public is saying that it’s asparagus, and to hell with it. People are more fearful of dying young and “unexpectedly” after a hot shot of mRNA than they are of the weaponized common cold imported with malice aforethought from China.

The “transgender” movement, too, is losing steam, along with the “diversity” shibboleths. The sexy lingerie manufacturer, Victoria’s Secret, has abandoned its attempt to sell fat women (and feminized men) as objects of sexual desire to straight men, a wholly undesired push for “inclusivity” that has economically come a cropper. Gillette’s sales of razors and blades tanked after an unfortunate experiment with denouncing “toxic” — i.e., real — masculinity, while Bud Light’s beer sales famously cratered after its unfortunate liaison with a transsexual model: The Crying Game of American corporate stupidity. And real women are finally waking up to the fact that men in dresses can cause them serious harm, and that this delusion must be stopped in the fields of competitive women’s sports.

So the choice is stark, the danger clear and present, the time is now: do the men of the West rise once again to stop the barbarians at — and already within — the gates, or do they surrender to the resentful losers of cultural Marxism and their burning desire to set the world aflame and live in the ruins? How do we save the cultural legacy that extended, until recently, from Greece and Rome through the democratic victory of the Second World War?

Exhausted and effeminate (to use Gibbon’s scornful characterization), Rome eventually collapsed, split apart, and was reborn in the West as the nation-states of Europe, whereas in the East it succumbed to luxury, replaced war with bribery and negotiation, and eventually fell to a leaner and hungrier Islam that had only contempt for the effete Byzantines. Which is why Constantinople, founded as a Christian capital, is today called Istanbul.

In 1919, Georg Lukács — one of the founding fathers of the Frankfurt School — wondered aloud: “Who will save us from Western civilization?” Today, we must ask: “Who will save it?”

An excellent question, one which bespeaks unimaginable travail, loss, and human misery no matter what the eventual outcome of any attempt at saving it might end up being, should anyone ever bestir themselves to try at all. The jury is still out on that last one.

FINALLY

Posted on October 28, 2023October 28, 2023 by Mike

At last, Kuenstler has written a column that I can’t quibble with, complain about, or disagree with in even the smallest, most niggling way.

Our nation, under the leadership of “Joe Biden” (…iden…iden…iden…iden…), has deployed our mighty warships in the waters all around and amongst Israel’s adversaries. Hard to see how that couldn’t happen, our sacred duty and all. If called upon, they can probably do a lot of damage — though there is plenty of reason to believe that Iran has enough anti-ship cruise missiles to create a big problem for us. Heck, Iran has enough long range conventional guided missiles to turn Haifa and Tel Aviv into ashtrays. But then, five minutes later, the same would be true for Teheran and Damascus, only they’d be radioactive. And who knows what those swarms of moiling migrants in the US and Euroland might be inspired to do, when it comes to that?

Jihad is in the offing. Too many are itching to set it off. Now they’re just waiting for an excuse, a reason to ignite the fuses. The obvious excuse would be an Israeli military incursion into Gaza. That would git’er done, I’m sure. The Israelis must realize this. Despite prior expectations, though, and even given the thirst for vengeance, they might realize it’s unnecessary. They’ve done enough bombing in Gaza. They could neutralize the command network of Hamas pretty much the same way they got the Black September ringleaders of the Munich Olympics massacre, 1972 — a methodical hunt over years, decades. They don’t have to shout from the rooftops, either. Everyone will know.

There is the fate of the Gaza hostages to consider. It doesn’t look good. Given enough time, of course, they can be shuttled around geographically here, there, and everywhere and concealed for years. They have value. World opinion will turn on the hostage-takers, though you might argue that no longer matters. I rather expect that rescue operations are well-planned and some may be carried out. But, overall, many of these poor pawns are apt to be lost. Tragic is tragic.

If we manage to avoid World War Three, America has its own grave problem to consider, which is comprehensive collapse — of economic activity, the financial scaffold for it, and of civil order in a society under deadly stress. Most of this damage has been induced by our own political leaders. Now that the House of Representatives has been put in order, it’s time for that body to act expeditiously and relieve “Joe Biden” of his responsibilities…and then Ms. Harris…and then Messrs. Garland, Mayorkas, and Wray. Out with them, post haste, and begin the project to save our own country.

Seconded, wholeheartedly—every word of it, to the last detail. Well, except that nothing in the last two sentences—which demonstrate that poor old James is still eager to succumb to the usual unfounded over-optimism about the likelihood of even one item on his devoutly-to-be-wished list coming to pass, desirable as they would doubtless be—has a ghost of a chance of happening. I say again: this is NOT America as we once knew it, not in any way, shape, or form. This is Amerika v2.0, and the sooner we can all get our heads around that dismaying home truth, the sooner something useful might actually be done about it.

A fool for Richard Russo

Posted on October 21, 2023October 21, 2023 by Mike

That would be moi. I’ve been a huge Russo fan ever since I swiped a former Significant Other’s copy of Empire Falls and, after finishing it, proceeded to wolf down the rest of her library of Russo’s amazing work in one great gulp of binge-reading. This rave review of his latest release describes what’s in store for the Russo reader.

In an endnote, Russo says that he kept returning to North Bath because he liked the characters—and there is a lot to like. He kept hearing Sully’s voice in his head, and gradually, he acknowledges, that voice became Paul Newman’s, who so unforgettably portrayed Sully in the film of Nobody’s Fool. But another voice also stuck with him, that of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, who turned a bit part in the film as the officious but hapless officer Douglas Raymer—whom Sully bests in a comic confrontation—into such a definitive portrayal that Russo made Raymer a major character in subsequent North Bath novels. In Somebody’s Fool, Raymer is now the retired chief of the former North Bath police department, called back into service to deal with a dead body and with corruption in the newly consolidated Schuyler Springs force—whose crooked cops have much do with Thomas’s near-death experience. While it’s not uncommon for authors to disdain or disown film adaptions of their work, Russo has said of the 1994 film, “You could examine it frame by frame and you’d learn just about everything you needed to know about adapting a book for film.” It’s not an exaggeration to say that the film helped bring Russo back to North Bath.

Even as Russo publishes Somebody’s Fool, another of his works has made it to the screen—in this case television—in an AMC miniseries adaption of Straight Man. This 1997 novel is Russo’s “university book,” but unlike those that Vidal disdained, Straight Man is a wickedly funny, harshly critical depiction of life in an English Department where ideology shapes professors’ research and writing, academics use petty politics to advance their careers, and the decline of the humanities has created a constant fear of budget cuts. Though the novel itself is 25 years old, it so accurately depicted where the humanities were headed that it doesn’t take much massaging to turn it into 2023 series with the ironic title of Lucky Hank—a reference to the bored, cranky English Department chair, William Henry Devereaux, Jr., who endlessly torments his deserving colleagues. Though quite different from Nobody’s Fool, Lucky Hank has garnered similar acclaim—in part because both sources benefit from Russo’s gift for creating comic characters with serious significance.

Russo supported himself in college by working the kinds of hard jobs at which many of his characters toil. There, he watched his father and his father’s friends use humor to get themselves through jobs, after which he’d join them at some local bar to help laugh away the day’s aches. It’s that kind of storytelling, in Russo’s hands, that makes his blue-collar novels so engaging and palatable, because oftentimes the circumstances of his characters are difficult at best, near-awful at worst. American fiction is better because Russo stuck with characters who he thought he was escaping when he went off to school. The arc of his career reminds me of the words of the narrator of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound, writing about himself in the third person, when he observes that all he wanted as a young student was to leave behind “all the shallow provincials” of his hometown “for the deep emancipating world of Art. As it turned out, he had taken them all with him.”

Russo has done the same, in the process taking many of his lucky readers along for the ride, too.

It’s a ride I very much look forward to taking, and highly recommend to everybody else out there too.

(Via John Tierney)

Update! Just for shits and giggles I had a look in on the IMDb page for the Empire Falls miniseries, which I remember greatly enjoying back in the days when I still watched TV now and then. Somehow, I’d forgotten that it was Paul Newman’s last acting performance. It’s one of the vanishingly rare exceptions to the rule that any film or TV project featuring a long list of A-list actors is guaranteed to suck big green donkey dick.

The best thing about living in San Francisco?

Posted on October 21, 2023October 21, 2023 by Mike

It’s all the interesting, unusual, culturally-diverse people you meet there.

We all know that San Francisco has a terrible, awful, horrible, homeless problem with homeless people sleeping everywhere. One homeless man set up camp across from a Catholic grade school. It would have been a curiosity except for the signs he hung outside of his tent.

“Free fentanyl 4 new users” and “Meth for stolen items.”

Joseph Adam Moore served six years for unlawful sex with a 12-year-old girl and was accused of having sex with a 15-year-old girl just a month after getting out of prison. But his probation deal did not include staying away from schools. So he camped directly across from Stella Maris Academy and began to host parties of stoners — much to the neighborhood’s dismay.

“Some of these people brought barbecues, a beach umbrella, and even a dune buggy that sat on the pavement,” said Nathaniel Weiner, a neighbor. “They’re ‘creating a Burning Man-style party’ in a quiet residential neighborhood where people are just trying to live their lives.’”

Note that I haven’t even used the word “police” in this piece. Apparently, the only law Moore is violating is the one about public camping. The cops are hamstrung by about a thousand rules and regulations regarding the treatment of the homeless; they can’t be forced to go anywhere or do anything; they can’t be forced into a mental health facility; they can’t even be forced to go into a shelter.

Dan Noyes, a reporter for ABC7 in San Francisco, had an enlightening interview with Mr. Moore.

Moore says he’s lived across the school for two years and that his signs offering free drugs are no joke. He told Noyes “he’s just passing on the drugs that other people give him, in exchange for blankets and supplies he provides.”

Moore: “So they bring me trash that they’ve scavenged, things that they think are valuable, or they give me some of the drugs that they have, which I don’t do.”

Noyes: “You’re exposing grade school kids to this? This is not right. You know that?”

Moore: “No, no, it’s shallow.”

Oh, absolutely. Wouldn’t EVER want to be perceived as “shallow,” you know. Or “unevolved,” or lacking in empathy for the “less fortunate” who have been “victimized” by our rapacious “capitalist” system. Why, that would be just awful. After all, a mentally-ill pedophile dope-slinger says so.

So obvious only a “liberal” could fail to understand it

Posted on October 17, 2023October 17, 2023 by Mike

Just another typically brilliant Daniel Greenfield essay.

As highly civilized people, we’ve lost touch with some basic concepts. Like war.

We complain that we never win wars anymore, but that’s because we don’t fight them. Instead, we have limited interventions against insurgents. We try to stabilize failed states. Sometimes we go in, take out a few terrorists, and then go back home. Veterans, whose wounds are very real, sit around wondering what it was all for. So do the families of the men who died fighting in a war that was never a war.

To win a war, you have to fight one.

If your enemy is fighting a war and you’re fighting something less than a war, the enemy will win.

A few rules of thumb, from people who knew a little something about it.

We fight things that are not wars to ‘stabilize’ regions. Wars are not fought for stability, but destruction. To win a war, destroy the enemy. That’s what the United States and its allies did in WWII, raining mass death and destruction on Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan in ways that still make modern liberals cringe.

“The Nazis entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everyone else, and nobody was going to bomb them,” said Arthur Harris, the Royal Air Force chief of Bomber Command, in 1940.

“The harder we push, the more Germans we kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing harder means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that,” General Geroge Patton told the Third Army.

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s obsession with taking the war to Japan led to the Doolittle Raid. One of the bombs from that raid hit a school. “It is quite impossible to bomb a military objective that has civilian residences near it without danger of harming the civilian residences as well. That is a hazard of war,” Doolittle had warned.

That is what war is. It’s why wars should not be fought lightly. But when you fight them, fight to win.

Indeed so. Or, as the rockabilly folks always like to say: Get hot or go home.

The whole megilla

Posted on October 7, 2023 by Mike

Big, LOOOONG excerpt coming up here, from an entirely brilliant article that essentially breaks down into two sections, de facto if not de jure. I’ll put the first part above the fold, then tuck the rest below so as to keep the main-page scrolling here from getting too obnoxious for y’all. Y’know, ‘cause I’m a giver like that, I am. A-HENH!

Against the Black Pill
Despite the leftist takeover of most American institutions, America is still saveable—if the right is willing to fight fire with fire.

It’s pretty easy to be optimistic about America’s prospects if you believe the tales that the conservative movement tells its donors. Or the Trump mythology. Or the Reagan hagiography.

More generally than not, though, those who know what time it is—that is, who realize just how much ground has been gained by the left in the past century and how corrupt the regime has become—tend to despair. As the kids say, they’ve been “blackpilled.” And it’s easy to see why.

What was once justly known as the land of the free and the home of the brave has devolved into an oligarchic, feminizing regime that is hostile to most of the defining elements of traditional American identity. The institutional high ground is controlled by a ruling class that is either sincerely woke and anti-American or that lacks the courage to stand up to the fanatics.

At best, our elites are just greedy—or neoliberal, to use the quaint contemporary term—and thus indifferent to America. At worst, they are woke believers hellbent on further accelerating Third World immigration, turning your kids transgender, and eradicating all dissent. What they almost never are, is unabashedly committed to constitutionalism, any kind of recognizably orthodox Christianity, liberty (on issues not related to drugs or sexuality), manliness, or any other of the features that once defined this republic. The best that can be said on their behalf is that they generally support economic growth and scientific innovation, although both are undermined by the woke erosion of standards and environmentalist neo-Luddism.

If you love America, you can still find a handful of dissident institutions that align with your beliefs (I am lucky enough to work at one)—but both the elite and mainstream institutions loudly signal that they despise your beliefs and your heritage. And they are becoming more and more brazen in wielding their power to punish dissenters and bestow special privileges upon allies.

The rule of law, the foundational pillar of American republicanism, is increasingly giving way to a two-tiered system of justice. The law (along with the media, of course) mostly turns a blind eye to the machinations of the Clintons and the Bidens, to Epstein’s pedophile network, to the millions of illegal immigrants flooding our southern border, to the homeless encampments overtaking our cities, to BLM and Antifa rioters, and to the petty and not-so-petty black criminals whom Soros-funded district attorneys refrain from prosecuting because of “antiracism.” While these allies of the regime do not operate with complete impunity, parts of the law simply do not apply to them.

The law, by contrast, comes down extra hard (and the media obsessively reports) on political dissidents who “trespassed” the Capitol on Jan. 6, citizens who defied the draconian COVID policies of the regime (unless they were protesting racial injustice), and, of course, the leading Republican contender for the presidency, his inner circle, and those who supported him in unapproved ways. Douglass Mackey was recently convicted of conspiring to deprive others of their right to vote because he tweeted unapproved memes. He faces up to 10 years in prison. The average prison sentence of the 70 BLM and Antifa rioters who have so far been found guilty is 27 months. In New York, two former lawyers, Colinford Mattis and Urooj Rahman, were sentenced to a little over a year for setting fire to an empty police car with a Molotov cocktail.

In 1994, Chronicles columnist Sam Francis coined the term “anarcho-tyranny” in the pages of this magazine to describe the now-prevalent double standard, but subsequent events have shown that his definition needs to be expanded. The tyranny—that is, the draconian enforcement of laws—applies not just to “the innocent and the law-abiding” ordinary citizen, but also to the political enemies of the regime. And the anarchy, or the nonenforcement of laws, extends beyond “serious criminals” to politically well-connected individuals and disorderly groups whose causes are blessed by the regime.

Part The First carries on from there, amounting to a pretty comprehensive rundown of all the institutions, bureaucracies, agencies, and media/entertainment edifices now controlled completely by the America Hatin’, Goosesteppin’ Left. Now, for Part the Second, which is all about how this sorry situation might be dealt with effectively.

Continue reading “The whole megilla” →

Bloggers go round in circles

Posted on October 4, 2023October 4, 2023 by Mike

First, JJ gets the train a-rolling with this, about drooling socialist shitwit and felonious Congresscritter Jamaal T’Qwon’ShiTaviousLa’VerlenDe’Etta Bowman:

In any case, what Bowman did was indeed the dictionary definition of what all of the innocent dupes who were caught up in the FBI/DOJ false flag sting operation on January 6th have been accused of – many of whom tried, convicted and sentenced to long stretches in federal prison. And what he did was worse as it could have led to actual physical harm. As opposed to the crime against humanity of walking around with a police escort dressed as Chief Wild Eagle or putting your feet up on Malig-Nancy Pelosi’s desk. The horror. The horror…

In a completely bizarre decision, Dem. Rep. Jamaal Bowman (NY) committed a misdemeanor and potential felony in order to stop the Constitutional function of government. I kid you not…

…We are talking breaking the law here, an act apparently performed with the goal of disrupting Constitutional congressional work. This is a Constitutional crisis because he intended to upend our Constitutional order and to topple our democracy. And stuff. Isn’t that how this works? I think so, according to the Democrats’ own rules, so this felony needs to be pursued and this man held accountable.

He won’t be held accountable, because Democrat. If he actually were held accountable, cities would burn.

Emphasis Bill’s, who responds thusly:

Wait. Is that supposed to be a threat? To me and the constitutionally governed republic I love?

Let it burn. Let them burn. The cities are all nests of America-hating negroes, illegal aliens, organized criminals, white female supremacists, and low self-restraint barbarian savages too stupid, ignorant, and violent to see a problem with burning down their own homes, let alone our society, culture, and politics. Except for a small minority, it’s not really their society in the first place. They didn’t create it, and, in fact, seem barely to know it exists, even as they rampage through the smoking rubble of its destruction.

“Burn, baby, burn!” you threaten?

I say, fine. Let it burn. Since the American body politic seems unable to defeat the cancer eating away at its heart, perhaps stronger, more traditional cures are needed.

Seconded, with all my heart and soul. Every word he just said is true, albeit disheartening as all hell. Regardless of what sane, peaceable folks might prefer, all signs and portents indicate that the time for painful, unpleasant remedies is nigh upon us. Harsh reality will reassert itself, dream castles come crashing down. Fantasies and delusions will blow away like tiny shreds of Kleenex in a stiff wind.

Consider: Normals have been lied to, laughed at, swindled, double-crossed—their guileless trust weaponized against them; their intelligence insulted; their values and beliefs belittled. Their jobs have been outsourced to hostile nations. Their independence and freedom of movement have been slowly but steadily eroded, their businesses gratuitously destroyed, their very lives ruined, all in the name of a fraudulent climate “crisis” and a Plandemic hoax. Their children have been indoctrinated, sexualized, surgically mutilated, and taught to despise their loving parents—all while being somberly cautioned that they must never, ever mention to their parents what Teacher has been doing to them in school, mind.

They pay punitive taxes to a Superstate Leviathan that disburses those funds to feral inner-city “youths” who express their gratitude for such kindly largesse by robbing them, mugging them, hijacking their cars, invading their homes, raping their wives and/or daughters, and remorselessly murdering them for no more reason than that they think it’s “fun.” That same Leviathan-state—bloated yet never sated by a steady diet of extravagantly-usurious taxation, licensing fees, permits, and “service” charges—denounces its Normal benefactors, upon whom its very existence depends, as unevolved, bigoted, (victim of the week)-phobic, and reflexively violent. It vilifies them as an ever-present threat to all things officially deemed Good, Decent, and Acceptable—a threat that must be suppressed, exiled, incarcerated, and/or eliminated without delay.

The money Normals earn much too little of by the sweat of their brow—paid with fiat currency backed by nothing more substantive than hot air and the forked-tongue promises of politicians—has been devalued into virtual worthlessness thanks to systemic fiscal irresponsibility, staggeringly profligate spending, and just plain waste. Meanwhile, expenses for food, rent, fuel, and all consumer goods rocket into the ionosphere even while untold billions are shoveled to a corrupt and intractably mendacious foreign dictator—ostensibly to sustain a pointless proxy war FederalGovCo cannot win, waged against an army its own weakened, numerically dwindling, and poorly trained armed forces cannot defeat, but in reality a quid pro quo payoff to buy the bent dictator’s continued omertà on the topic of the Biden Crime Familia‘s chronic bribe-chasing and influence peddling, a scheme pulled off in quiet collusion with said dictator.

Normals live in a lawless society under an illegitimate occupation government, ceaselessly reviled by an amoral arts-entertainment/education/sports/journalism monolith which cordially loathes them and all that they stand for, cherish, or revere. Their generosity and good will are taken for granted; their faith in institutions and authorities betrayed; their best interests, opinions, and preferences ignored. Their patience, tolerance, and forbearance are assumed to be without limit. Because they’ve never yet risen in righteously-furious revolt to liberate themselves from such cancerous oppression, their oppressors have convinced themselves that they never will.

Yeah, if the “Biden” junta, its lackwit ghetto dupes, and sundry overprivileged, epicene, Wokester pseudo-“elites” really DO want a fight, just let ’em keep all this up. Should they carry on as they have been, I strongly suspect they just might get themselves one before too very much longer—all they wanted of one, plus.

Update! Almost forgot to include the inspiration for my post title, dang it. Ladies and germs, for your dining and dancing pleasure, allow me to present to you the one, the only, the incomparable BUDDY! MIIIILES! *insert wild, uproarious applause HERE*

FYI, that odd-looking, pint-sized keyboard-whatchamadingy Buddy blows his solo into around midway through is called a Clavietta Melodica. Reason I know this is my dad had one of ’em just like the one at this h’yar link. Man, I used to just love playing that little sucker when I was but a wee tot. I ain’t claiming I was actually any good at it, but when I was eight years old, I sure thought I was.

Street justice

Posted on October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 by Mike

When vigilantism is all that’s left, then vigilantism it shall damned well be.

A 26-year-old taxi driver from the Middle East was reported for rape against a 14-year-old girl – and then found hanged in a nature reserve. Now the girl, her boyfriend and three of his brothers are suspected of the very troublesome murder, which according to the prosecutor had the character of “an execution”.

The events began in February this year when the then 15-year-old girl reported that the taxi driver had raped her when she was 14.

On March 26, a taxi was found abandoned, overflowing and with the taximeter in progress on a parking at Hjälstaviken nature reserve in Enköping municipality north of Stockholm.

On April 1, the taxi driver – was found hung in a tree 500 meters from the car.

Aww, what a shame. Bayou Peter says:

That’s what happens when the authorities can’t or won’t act against criminals, particularly unwanted alien intruders (of which Sweden has an outsize proportion among its population). It’s not limited to Sweden by any means. Friends, acquaintances and contacts of mine in law enforcement around these parts, ranging from Oklahoma City to Dallas/Fort Worth and from Amarillo to Texarkana, have all reported “unintended consequences” of crimes, sometimes fatal for the criminals, other times just very, very painful and/or impoverishing. I’d say I’ve heard of at least a couple of dozen occurrences over the past year or two, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When police will no longer respond to a crime because it’s too “minor” for them to bother about, or because they’re too busy elsewhere, or because it’s politically incorrect to make a fuss about certain crimes and/or perpetrators…people will take it upon themselves to act. The authorities don’t like that, and will doubtless threaten dire consequences, but it’s already happening and it’s going to go on happening. After all, if those same authorities ignore the rule of law and the provisions of our constitution by encouraging (and even paying for) massive alien invasion, they shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes committed by those aliens (an increasing proportion of them, I’m told) attract consequences that also ignore the law and the constitution. One good (?) turn deserves another, and all that sort of thing.

BP unequivocally avows that he disapproves of such, but at this late date I can’t honestly say the same myself; far as I’m concerned, the bestial thug got exactly what he had coming to him, no more nor less. The Proper Authorities having consciously abjured their sworn duty to protect their citizenry in favor of political correctness, “diversity,” and multi-culti virtue signalling, I’m not exactly distraught at seeing the prey turn predator.

Ultimately, blame rests squarely on those in positions of trust and authority—both in Sweden, the US, and across most of Western Civ, sadly—who foolishly decided that importing Third World wolves en masse to have at the First World sheep without so much as a token nod towards assimilation and acculturation was a good idea. Left to their own devices, there’s only so much predation ordinary people will put up with, which is only meet and just.

The true immorality here lies neither with those finally forced to take action in their own defense, nor even with the wolves simply doing the things wolves will do. Rather, it rests with those who, having voluntarily taken solemn oaths to secure their nation’s borders and protect those within them, conspire to fling open the gates to the marauding hordes and allow them—hell, encourage them, in fact—to run completely amok. Such circumstances make vigilante reprisal inevitable; it not only will happen, it damned well ought to. Peter sums it up:

It’s very telling that many governments and their agencies are coming down more and more in favor of evil, and against good, in defiance of their citizens. It’s not just about crime – it’s about every aspect of our lives.

Precisely so. Bad as it is, what we have here is more than just defiance of said citizens, and worse as well. It’s active, open betrayal of them. Intolerable conditions will not forever be tolerated—not whilst the most tatterdemalion scrap of honor and self-respect remains among those put-upon souls subjected to them, it won’t. Every society has its breaking point, just as the individuals who created it do. Thus the day must surely dawn when the betrayed will rise up to repay their abusers in full measure, to the last bitter dregs. To expect otherwise is daylight barking madness.

Predator-class blaggards, note ye well. Their Ruling Class enablers: same-same, perhaps even moreso. We see you.

Update! Note, also, this unforgettable scene from The Watchmen.

“All the whores and politicians will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’ And I’ll whisper: NO.”

Mouth, meet Money

Posted on October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 by Mike

Another shitlib gets herself a painful schooling in the stark home-truth that a nation without borders, by definition, cannot be said to be a nation at all.

New York’s Democrat Governor Kathy Hochul ranted about failing immigration policies saying the southern border is ‘too open’ and demanded a limit on how many people can stream over into the US.

During a Sunday appearance on CBS’ ‘Face the Nation,’ Hochul said she feels the country’s border is currently too much of a free-for-all.

‘We want [Congress] to have a limit on who can come across the border,’ said Hochul.

‘People coming from all over the world are finding their way through, simply saying they need asylum, and the majority of them seem to be ending up in the streets of New York, and that is a real problem for New York City,’ she added, echoing what Mayor Eric Adams has been saying for months.

‘It’s in our DNA to welcome immigrants. But there has to be some limits in place.’

How delightfully ironic—that’s precisely what beleaguered border towns have been telling open-borders D卐M☭CRATs like yourself for years and years now, you miserable bint. Compounding the irony is this (bold mine):

‘Congress has to put more controls at the border,’ she said, noting that some lawmakers have called for a reduction in the number of Border Patrol officers stationed down south.

‘Talk about eliminating positions for Border Patrol, well, we actually need to double or quadruple those numbers,’ she said.

Within the last 18-months, more than 110,000 migrants have arrived in New York City.

OOOOOOHHHHH, you poor pitiful Sanctuary State/City pearls! Over a hundred thou, is it? How very awful for you all! May I remind you that a lowball-estimated 20 fucking MILLION immivaders have crossed our (former) borders the last few years, the majority of them blitzing tiny Texas towns who hadn’t smarmily declared themselves to be “Sanctuary” anything.

Officials have been scrambling to house and provide basic accommodations for the massive number, and the attention of the city’s government has been diverted, often at the expense of the legal population of the Big Apple.

“Massive number,” my wrinkled, baggy scrotum. You asked for it, you got it. Now deal.

More at the link, which I didn’t bother reading because of a sudden onset of intense ennui and lack of concern.

Backupdate! Not as bad as all that then, huh Kath?

Sunday, Gov. Hochul delivered a spot-on explanation for New York’s current dilemma — for how it came to be stuffed full of penniless border-hoppers.

The problem, she said, is the border itself: As in, “It’s too open right now.”

Which it obviously is. The consequences — societal, fiscal and cultural — also are obvious, and becoming more so.

But Hochul’s candor — aimed squarely at Washington, and at Joe Biden in particular — clearly has had consequences too.

On Monday, she was warbling a different — far more deferential — tune. To wit:

“With respect to what was said about the border, I have called for a more thoughtful, balanced national immigration — federal — immigration policy.”

Translation: “Oops, I sure stepped in it this time. Please don’t hurt me.”

Ah, but Gov. Flippity-Flop needn’t worry. She’s too compliant to be of concern, especially after re-embracing the orthodoxy — and, in the process, making sure that nobody ever again takes seriously a word she says.

It’s not hard to imagine the blowback Hochul’s impertinence generated; the phone calls doubtless came fast and furious — the message being clear: “Nice incumbency you got there, guv. Be a pity if something happened to it.”

To which Hochul might have replied: “Go to hell. This is my state, and I’m going to do what I can — what I must — to protect it.”

What a glorious, liberating moment that would have been – both for Hochul and for the Empire State itself.

But she said no such thing.

She groveled – and now she, and New York, can expect more of the same: More disrespect, for sure, but also many, many more budget-crushing economic wanderers masquerading as political refugees.

Tough noogies, sez I. You can be sure that, whoever New York’s governor ends up being, he/she/it will be another of their patented cookie-cutter D卐M☭CRAT shitlibs, who will put political intrigue, corruption, and personal privilege over the best interests of the people they misrule, as always. I know there are a fair few saner sorts in the less-citified corners upstate; they’re so lopsidedly outnumbered, one can’t help but feel kinda bad for them, really.

That said, in NY as in Europe “conservative” doesn’t mean anything close to what Real Americans understand by the word. That’s something that should always be borne closely in mind. Even Rudy Giuliani, contra his hardass right-winger image in The City itself, was always a Big Government guy—a lot more liberal than Flyover folks might assume. Mind you, he did a fine job as mayor and prosecutor both, no denying that. Rudy really did save NYC from itself; I lived there then, and watched him do it. What fun it was for a guy like me to behold, too. Take him out of the Five Boroughs and plonk him down in Alabama or Oklahoma or Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, though, and he’s just another “moderate” at best.

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