Free markets, free enterprise? No thanks, we’re Amerikans

An amusing story that illustrates perfectly how very far from anything resembling small-business-oriented laissez-faire capitalism we’ve come.

How to Murder a Popular Restaurant Chain With This 1 Weird Trick
Following the unexpected closure of dozens of locations last week, Red Lobster completely expectedly filed for bankruptcy protection this week — and how the seafood chain ended up in Chapter 11 restructuring is a fascinating story of bad decisions, spastic leadership, and shortsighted greed. It’s that last element that really tells the tale.

Reb Lobster “temporarily closed” 87 restaurants last week, but as USA Today reported, some of them have “their kitchen equipment up for auction on an online restaurant liquidator.” Temporary, eh?

CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn wrote Monday that the chain’s “misguided endless shrimp promotion drove it into bankruptcy.” If you missed the news — I knew about it but my efforts at getting back into shape couldn’t afford it — last summer, Red Lobster made their $20 all-you-can-eat shrimp special a permanent menu item.

“The plan, as far as I can tell,” Luke Winkie wrote for Slate, “was for guests to fill up on just enough shellfish to preserve Red Lobster’s profit margin. It backfired spectacularly: The restaurant’s clientele scarfed down enough shrimp to accumulate an $11 million operating loss in the fourth quarter of 2023.” But that $11 million loss was only a small fraction of the company’s overall $72 million loss last year.

There’s so much more to the story than a money-losing menu item.

Business analyst Trung Phan posted to X that “the interesting part” behind the all-you-can-eat shrimp “is that one of the chain’s owners is Thai seafood firm Thai Union… and it may have used Endless shrimp to dump its own shrimp supply through the 578 restaurants in North America.” Restaurant Business Online reported that bankruptcy court documents question “whether the control Thai Union exerted over the supply chain process drove up costs for the chain, worsening its financial condition.” Quality control was reportedly an issue, too.

“Quality”? At Red Lopster?!? The McDonalds of seafood restaurants, first-choice favorite of Neegrows nationwide and hardly anyone else?

Now you’ve heard everything, right?

Wrong.

There’s still more.

And of course there is, Stephen wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. Thankfully, down South we’ve always been blessed with enough old-school “fish camps” that no sensible person had to even think about resorting to dumps like Red Lopster *shudder* for their seafood needs anyway, so no great loss.

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BREAKING: B’rer Rabbitt to be thrown into briar patch!!!

Shocking, horrifying, awful news. Whatever are we going to do without these two Great American Patriots?

JUST IN: Stormy Daniels’ porn star husband says couple will ‘vacate the country’ if Trump found not guilty
“I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country.”

In an interview with CNN’s Erin Burnett, Barrett Blade, spouse of adult film star Stormy Daniels, revealed on Tuesday that they are seriously considering relocating abroad if former President Donald Trump is found not guilty in his ongoing Manhattan criminal trial.

Not to worry, sleazebag: a jury made up entirely of Trump-hating NYC shitlibs, instructed by the most slippery-slimery crook of a presiding judge ever to befoul the bench? Yeah, the chances Trump won’t be found guilty on all counts, plus several more charges made up on the spot by court kangaroos, hover somewhere between None whatsoever and Please, please, stop, yer killin’ me ovah heah!

Blade expressed concerns about the intense scrutiny and negativity directed at his wife.

“If Trump is found not guilty, I think there’s a — I mean, either way, I don’t think he gets better for her. I think if it’s not guilty, we got to decide what to do. Good chance we’ll probably vacate this country. If he is found guilty, she’s still got to deal with all the hate that feel like she’s the reason that he’s guilty from all of his followers. So I don’t see it as a when situation either way. I know that we would like to get on with our lives. I know that she wants to move past this. We want, we just want to do what I guess we would say normal people get to do and some aspects, but I don’t know if that ever will be, you know,” Blade said.

I have only two (2) responses I can make to this bullshit whinging:

And:

Of course, like all those crybaby H-wood types who have solemnly sworn to flee the country after each and every Repugnicunt victory since George W Bush got them soiling their Underoos back in 2000, but who never bother to follow through, these two oxygen thieves aren’t going to actually leave either—which I consider to be extremely unfortunate, quite frankly.

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Incentives, disincentives, and suicidal folly

No more self-gassing-Jew histrionics, no more land-for-peace swaps, no more “cease-fire” blackmail mandated by treacherous FederalGovCo baglappers.

What incentives does Israel have to cease counter-Hamas operations?

Nations, like individuals, historically (not always) operate off a series of incentives.

Net positive = do it

Net negative = avoid it

An easy concept to understand but not simple in practice.

There is no shortage in calls for Israel to implement a ceasefire with Hamas, despite the fact that the current conflict is a direct result of the October 7 Hamas attack where over 1100 Israelis were killed, many of them civilians.

To date Israel has resisted these calls, including those from the U.S., for an operational stand down.

But why?

As a student and practitioner of war I find myself asking, what incentives does Israel have to bow to international pressure?

This is NOT a political commentary, merely a thought experiment on incentives vs. disincentives.

Below are three reasons why Israel has no incentive to stop short of total victory:

Like the man says, he has three, although the last one is enough, t’will suffice.

3. Lastly, with Hamas stating that they will repeat the October 7th attacks as many times as necessary why would Israel stop short of their total destruction?

Ghazi Hamad, a member of Hamas’ political bureau said, “We must teach Israel a lesson, and we will do it twice and three times. The Al-Aqsa Deluge (the name Hamas gave its Oct 7 onslaught) is just the first time, and there will be a second, a third, a fourth.…”

Pretty unambiguous.

I’d say so, yeah. Then again, the Paleosimian swine have been perfectly unambiguous since at least the days of s’faccim Yassuh “Nawssuh” Yassuh Arafat pleading piteously for a “two-state solution” for the news cameras, then rejecting every proposal on the QT, if not even farther back than that. Your implacable enemies, in both the ME and the West, are no longer bothering to even try to hide their “kill all the Jews!” program behind the phonus-balonus mask of rationality, accomodation, and honest good faith. It’s all up-front and in the open now, their genocidal fanaticism laid out naked and unashamed—pridefully, even—for all to see.

So again: ignore the anguished wails of Jewphobic historical illiterates who are gonna hate you no matter what and just git ‘er done, Bibi—whatever it takes, no restraint, no pulled punches, no mercy. Maybe you could look into covering Gaza with one of those big-ass tents used to fumigate suburban houses and annihilate every last one of those cock-a-roaches.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

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Another one they aren’t making any more of these days

That would be gifted actor, horseman, Marine veteran, Hollywood stuntman, ranch hand, jazz singer, blacksmith, and world-champion poker player Wilford Brimley.

Anthony Wilford Brimley (September 27, 1934 – August 1, 2020) was an American actor. After serving in the U.S. Marine Corps and working odd jobs in the 1950s, Brimley started working as an extra and stuntman in Western films in the late 1960s. He became an established character actor in the 1970s and 1980s in films such as The China Syndrome (1979), The Thing (1982), Tender Mercies (1983), The Natural (1984), and Cocoon (1985). Brimley was known for playing characters at times much older than his age. He was the long-term face of American television advertisements for the Quaker Oats Company. He also promoted diabetes education and appeared in related television commercials for Liberty Medical, a role for which he became an Internet meme.

Brimley joined the Marines in 1953 and served in the Aleutian Islands for three years. He also worked as a bodyguard for businessman Howard Hughes as well as a ranch hand, wrangler, and blacksmith. He then began shoeing horses for film and television. At the behest of his close friend and fellow actor Robert Duvall, he began acting in the 1960s as a riding extra and stunt man in westerns. In 1979, he told the Los Angeles Times that the most he ever earned in a year as an actor was $20,000. He had no formal training as an actor, and his first experience in acting in front of a live audience was in a theater group at the Los Angeles Actors’ Theater.

His first credited feature film performance was in The China Syndrome (1979) as Ted Spindler, a friend and coworker of plant shift supervisor Jack Godell (portrayed by Jack Lemmon). That same year, he appeared in the Robert Redford/Jane Fonda feature film “The Electric Horseman” cast as simply “The Farmer” while assisting Redford and Fonda’s characters evade troopers while transporting the horse in a cattle hauler. Later, Brimley made a brief but pivotal appearance in Absence of Malice (1981) as the curmudgeonly, outspoken Assistant Attorney General James A. Wells. In the movie The Thing (1982) he played the role of Blair, a biologist among a group of men at an American research station in Antarctica who encounter a dangerous alien that can perfectly imitate other organisms.

Brimley’s close friend Robert Duvall (who also appeared in The Natural) was instrumental in securing for him the role of Harry in Tender Mercies (1983). Duvall, who had not been getting along with director Bruce Beresford, wanted “somebody down here that’s on my side, somebody that I can relate to.” Beresford felt Brimley was too old for the part but eventually agreed to the casting. Brimley, like Duvall, clashed with the director; during one instance when Beresford tried to advise Brimley on how Harry would behave, Duvall recalled Brimley responding: “Now look, let me tell you something, I’m Harry. Harry’s not over there, Harry’s not over here. Until you fire me or get another actor, I’m Harry, and whatever I do is fine ’cause I’m Harry.”

It was Brimley’s showstopper star-turn as AAG James J Wells (not James A Wells, as Wiki erroneously has it above) in Absence of Malice that sent me down the Wilford Brimley rabbit hole today, after re-watching Brimley’s riveting performance on YewToob. Interesting thing about the apparent James J/James A flub: Brimley’s character may very well have been James A in the script (don’t know, didn’t check), judging from what appears to be his momentary hesitation when giving his name as James J in the AoM final cut:

Note ye well that Mr Brimley, a relatively unknown bit-player-cum-character actor at the time, just walked in, sat down, riffled some papers, opened his mouth, and proceeded to steal the entire film from screen titans Paul Newman and Sally Field, without so much as breaking a sweat. By God, that there is what you call acting, bub. Ahh, but how very typical of Wilford Brimley: Kurt Russell, Robert Duvall, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon—running scenes with all of these fine actors and many more, he refused to be intimidated or overawed, nonchalantly holding his own with all those marquee names, making it look not just easy, but effortless.

More rich, buttery Brimley goodness from AoM:

One more time:

Over the years I must’ve seen Absence of Malice about, oh, I dunno, forty or fifty times—enough that I’ve long since had every word of Brimley’s dazzling five minutes or so of screentime towards the end down by heart, anyway—and still ain’t no way tired of the flick. If you’ve never seen the movie, I urge you with all my heart not to let another sun go down before you rectify that gap in your cinematic education. They ain’t making movies like Absence of Malice anymore, nor actors like Wilford Brimley, nor sturdy, versatile, by-God American men like him, for that matter.

Anybody else thinking, as I just was, that the AAG Wells character, in fact pretty much all the G-men in the above climactic scenes, represents another long-gone American totem: the competent, reasonable, and trustworthy public servant? Not to mention Sally Fields’ newspaper reporter, who, although she lost her way temporarily and compromised her professional ethics in pursuit of a red-hot scoop, nonetheless proves herself to be basically decent in the end, deeply regretful for betraying her integrity and resolved that she will NOT let it happen again.

As Wells says of the DA ensnared in Michael Gallagher’s clever trap: “Yeah, he’s a nice guy, he just forgot about the rules.” When the dust has settled, the wayward but basically well-meaning are chastened, the corrupt and malifecent made to face serious consequences, and AAG Wells has somebody’s ass in his briefcase, as promised.

Today, though, is there anyone left among us so naive, so unworldly, that he seriously expects such unflagging virtuousness from his “public servants,” even in a fictional movie? Yep, the past is a different country all right.

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Quote of the day week month year decade century millenium

The left has the ability to understand reason and the law about as well as my spoon understands the difference between mint chocolate chip and rocky road.

“Presenting them with facts and evidence on gun control is met with remarks about penis size. Talking about case law is like banging your head against a wall. Talking simply won’t work with them.

Which is EXACTLY why we need to stop even bothering to pretend to try; it wastes your time, and annoys the pig. The one, the only language they understand is violence, of the “swift and blinding” variety. So be it, then. Govern yourselves—or, y’know, not—accordingly.

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Constitutional course of instruction

Roth Renegade discovers one of Porretto’s favorites, the uncompromising champion of human liberty Lysander Spooner.

The Constitution has no inherent authority or obligation. It has no authority or obligation at all, unless as a contract between man and man. And it does not so much as even purport to be a contract between persons now existing. It purports, at most, to be only a contract between persons living eighty years ago. And it can be supposed to have been a contract then only between persons who had already come to years of discretion, so as to be competent to make reasonable and obligatory contracts. Furthermore, we know, historically, that only a small portion even of the people then existing were consulted on the subject, or asked, or permitted to express either their consent or dissent in any formal manner. Those persons, if any, who did give their consent formally, are all dead now. Most of them have been dead forty, fifty, sixty, or seventy years. And the Constitution, so far as it was their contract, died with them. They had no natural power or right to make it obligatory upon their children. It is not only plainly impossible, in the nature of things, that they could bind their posterity, but they did not even attempt to bind them. That is to say, the instrument does not purport to be an agreement between any body but “the people” then existing; nor does it, either expressly or impliedly, assert any right, power, or disposition, on their part, to bind any body but themselves.

It cannot be said that the Constitution formed “the people of the United States,” for all time, into a corporation. It does not speak of “the people” as a corporation, but as individuals. A corporation does not describe itself as “we,” nor as “people,” nor as “ourselves.” Nor does a corporation, in legal language, have any “posterity.” It supposes itself to have, and speaks of itself as having, perpetual existence, as a single individuality.

Moreover, no body of men, existing at any one time, have the power to create a perpetual corporation. A corporation can become practically perpetual only by the voluntary accession of new members, as the old ones die off. But for this voluntary accession of new members, the corporation necessarily dies with the death of those who originally composed it.

Legally speaking, therefore, there is, in the Constitution, nothing that professes or attempts to bind the “posterity” of those who establish it.

S’truth, strange though it may sound to contemporary ears; no less august a personage than Thomas Jefferson himself implicitly affirmed this thesis years before, with these stirring words:

God forbid we should ever be 20 years without such a rebellion.

The people can not be all, and always, well informed. The part which is wrong will be discontented in proportion to the importance of the facts they misconceive. If they remain quiet under such misconceptions it is a lethargy, the forerunner of death to the public liberty. We have had 13 states independant 11 years. There has been one rebellion. That comes to one rebellion in a century and a half for each state.

What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the spirit of resistance? Let them take arms.

Bold mine, and a hearty amen to that.

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Orange Man BAAAAAD

That consarned Trump, what a repulsive sicko pervert he is.

Stormy Details of Past Affairs: When a President Watched As His Aide Had Sex With a Girl
Most of what follows aren’t rumors. It’s not a Stormy Daniels, “she said- he said” allegation. There are multiple witness accounts. The president had quite a sexual appetite, beginning with his loss of virginity at 17 to a Harlem prostitute. After he was elected president, he arranged for a tryst with a 19-year-old White House intern. It lasted a year – perhaps because the teenage intern aged out. There were other interns and at least one famous movie star.

The president watched, and a Secret Service agent observed as the president’s Special Assistant was “banging a girl on the edge of (the) pool” just feet away. One would think that the media would spend days, if not weeks reporting those details if they could verify that Trump was that president.

S’awright, we all know he did it. That, and much, much worse, even. Why, the putrid demon-fiend said “grab ’em by the pussy,” for Christ’s sweet sake!

But he wasn’t. That president was the mythical King of Camelot, the icon of the Democrat Party, and an equal to Lincoln in stature. John Fitzgerald Kennedy was that adulterous cad of a chief executive.

John Kennedy couldn’t keep his pants zipped and reportedly looked at his watch while he gave his sexual attention to extra-marital partners. From start to finish — 15 minutes was all the time they got. Then, out the door. It wasn’t a secret. His wife knew. The Secret Service knew. Reporters knew. J. Edgar Hoover knew and threatened to use Kennedy’s trysts as political blackmail. But JFK was the golden calf.

Ahh, the exalted, golden days of holy Camelot, when D卐M☭CRATs and their pet Enemedia poodles ruled the DC roost with benevolence and skill, and none dared question or defy their absolute right to do whatever they pleased. Enlightened, evolved, compassionate, “mostly peaceful,” sensitive: t’was a better age, a better America, and a better President, that’s for sure.

A washed-up porn pin cushion and her story about blacking out and not remembering what happened should never have seen the light of day or the inside of a courtroom. Her new claims that it wasn’t “about the money” and her insistence that she was an apparent unwilling victim are equal parts garbage, legally irrelevant, and clearly intended to prejudice the 12-person jury. The scandalous testimony Judge Merchan allowed has been, without doubt, utterly irrelevant to the case at bar. Merchan is sheep-dogging a kangaroo court, a political show trial that the KGB’s Lavrenty Beria would be proud of.

I got your attention by leading with a false suggestion. Misdirection. That’s what the prosecution is doing in Manhattan. Trump wasn’t “banging” interns. And this trial isn’t about Daniels or her claims. It’s [supposed to be] about business documents. But the prosecution got what it wanted. A false suggestion that Trump may have raped Daniels. 

Orange Man bad.

The Manhattan trial and the blatant misconduct of the trial judge have made it crystal clear for Americans. This isn’t about what Trump did or didn’t do. It’s about getting Trump.

Well, I mean, DUH. The only question remaining now is how much more of this arrant horseshit Real Americans will put up with before they finally get up off the couch, raise up on their hind legs, and strike back at their antagonizers.

The greatest irony of all is that Bad Back Jack’s radical-supply-sider tax cuts were more draconian than either Reagan’s or Bush’s cruel, heartless, ruinous ones in percentage terms, yet elderly shitlibs nevertheless drench their Depends to this very day in rapturous memory of the self-serving, womanizing, election-buying rich-boy heel that was taken from them far too soon. Go figger. Worked a treat at stimulating a stalled economy too, in all three instances. Then again, tax cuts almost always do, regardless of who implements them—almost as if there might be some sort of symbiotic, mutually-reinforcing relationship between them (for more on that curious, inexplicable conundrum, please see this post).

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Kristi, we hardly knew ye!

It’s a damnable shame, I had such high hopes for her up till now. Alas, no longer, although I suppose there’s still barely a ghost of a glimmer of a slim snowball’s shadow of an outside chance that she’s just the latest victim of yet another shitlib con/hit job, career-destroying words put into her mouth by shady malefactors while she wasn’t paying close enough attention. I certainly wouldn’t bet money I couldn’t afford to lose on it, but it’s just possible. Just. Maybe. I guess.

“Everybody wants to be a bodybuilder, but nobody wants to lift no heavy-ass weights.” – Ronnie Coleman

Writing an interesting and engaging article often requires a significant amount of time and energy.

Writing an entire book, especially one that is insightful and captivating, is truly an incredible accomplishment, because it requires SO MUCH WORK AND TIME to complete the mission.

In the political publishing industry, however, the top “authors” have gamed the system entirely. The entire genre is a fraudulent mess of epic proportions.

I’m only 34, but I’ve been in the media and publishing space for quite some time, having written for pretty much every major right of center publication you could think of. I have no idea how long this massive grift has been occurring, but I can assure you it’s been going on for decades.

One such high profile example of political ghostwriting dates back to 1956, with Profiles In Courage, the 1956 volume that helped to establish the intellectual and political bonafides of John F. Kennedy.

Now, there has been a noticeable distinction between how “insiders” and “outsiders” have interpreted the flaming dumpster fire that is the publicity tour related to South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem’s upcoming book. The general public seems confused about the idea that Noem seemingly didn’t know about so many things that were in *her own book*.

From stories of psychopathically mass-shooting her animals to concocted tales of talking tough to Kim Jong Un, Noem’s answers for her claimed antics, and the repeated falsehoods claimed under her namesake, have gone from bad to worse.

It’s a given that many of us in the space already wrote off the idea Noem would write any of her own book. But she has taken the laziness of politician “publishing” to new heights. She apparently didn’t proofread any of her book either, despite narrating the audiobook. Given the historic botch job, I’m glad that the public is starting to ask more questions about this incredibly sketchy operation.

The Kristi Noem saga has exposed an open secret about the political publishing industry: a tiny percentage of “authors” in the space write their own books. And those real authors are often smothered by fake authors with a machine in place to promote their fake autobiographies, which take time and opportunity away from those who have put in the work.

For politicians, I would estimate that maybe 1 percent write their own books. Some spend occasional time with their ghostwriter in order to best express their personality and ideas. Others, like Noem, just mail it in entirely, and have the ghostwriter rely upon public material from speeches and appearances.

Yeah, well, it’s kinda hard to decide which of the two likely scenarios is worse: that she neither wrote NOR read the thing and is therefore blissfully unaware of the kind of bizarre, godawful stories related therein, or *shudder* that she IS aware of them, because they’re, y’know, TRUE and ACCURATE, and she sees nothing wrong with the material, is perfectly comfortable with it, and frankly just can’t understand what all the uproar is about.

I admit I didn’t know a whole heck of a lot about Da Guv before all this, but what little I did know I liked; excepting a few decisions on which she arguably screwed the pooch, her heart during her tenure as Governor has seemed for the most part to be in the right place, Constitutionally-speaking. After getting off on exactly the wrong foot initially, her flat refusal later to exercise dictatorial power over her constituents during the FauxVid psyop/trial run, further fleshed out by some admirably thoughtful, high-minded, and rare-as-hen’s-teeth perorations explicating the specific limits on what she was and was not empowered to do as the Governor of a sovereign State under the US Constitution, I found extremely appealing.

Tough; capable; feisty; determined; far and away the most breathtakingly attractive politician (in the strictly physical sense, which I know I’m not allowed to either notice or mention right out loud, but hey, fuck all y’all) in America today, male or female—Kristi Noem seemed to have the Right Stuff, veritable bucketloads of it. By every indication well on the way to solid renown, respect, and success as a national political figure, all she really had to do was simply not fuck up. Sadly, after this needless, self-inflicted kill shot, I preminisce no return to the salad days for poor Mrs Noem. Stick a fork in her, she is well and truly done. If the woman is as reckless, clueless, weird, and just plain D-M-U-B dumb as this spectacular crash ’n’ burn suggests, could be we dodged a bullet with her. Which makes the Great Noem Flameout of ’24 an occasion not for sadness over what might have been, but for a heavy sigh of relief for being spared in the nick of time.

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Shitlibs announce impending assassination attempt in Argentina

De facto, if not quite de jure.

Milei Is Absolutely Killing It in Argentina
President Javier Milei entered office like Jack Nicholson breaking his way into the bathroom in “The Shining” — with an axe. Armed with emergency powers granted by the Argentine Congress, he balanced the country’s out-of-control budget in one month, fired government workers by the thousands, eliminated more than 200,000 “corrupt” social welfare programs, and even cozied up to NATO.

“There’s a lot more chainsaw” to come, Milei promised in March, and I momentarily almost became gay.

The usual fearmongers mongered the usual fears.

A few weeks ago, the New York Times ran an opinion piece — complete with a demonic-looking, high-contrast black-and-white photo of Milei — by Argentine author Uki Goñi. According to him, Milei is the “product of a long South American history in which authoritarianism has been the norm and democracy the exception.” Of course, Goñi also called Milei “a far-right libertarian,” and if you can square “authoritarian” with “libertarian,” then cut back on the day-drinking.

Victor Swezey warned in December that “victims of Argentina’s dictatorship see [a] step backward in Milei’s presidency.”

And the Columbia Journalism Review’s Jon Allsop got his panties particularly twisted over concerns about Milei’s “particular hostility toward public media,” and the private media, too. But when a conservative or libertarian shows any level of hostility toward the media, he’s merely returning the favor.

So who is right? Milei and his axe or his critics with their axes to grind?

Let’s look at the numbers.

By all means, let’s:

  • Inflation down from 300% to 11%;
  • The first quarterly budget surplus since 2008;
  • Interest rates cut three times in three weeks;
  • The Argentine peso is now the world’s best performing currency

Among other fine and notable things. No wonder shitlibs worldwide are gonna have to have him murdered—he’s singlehandedly proving every last item in the Leftard catchism assbackwards and wrong, they can’t afford to have this sort of thing continue right out in front of God and everybody. To wit:

“It may also get better over the months ahead,” the UK Telegraph’s Matthew Lynn wrote last week. “With stabilising prices, and a rising currency, investment should start flowing again into a country rich in natural resources and hyper-competitive on wages costs.”

“If so, Argentina would be defying a global economic establishment addicted to bigger government, more regulation, and rising deficits.”

Indeed.

“The risk of a default of Argentina has decreased by 38.4% since Javier Milei took office in December,” news aggregator Visegrád 24 posted to Twitter/X on Tuesday. “The Credit Default Swap (CDS), which acts as a kind of insurance against debt default, stood at 4,280 points when Milei was inaugurated. Now, it has fallen to 2,634 points.”

It’s early into Milei’s term and his reforms have barely had time to take hold. There will be pain ahead because decades of bad policies don’t work themselves out in weeks or months. But shrinking government, tamping inflation, and stabilizing the currency, make for a solid foundation for future prosperity.

Free markets work. Who’d a thunk it?

See what I mean? Not there are NO clouds on the immediate horizon, to wit:

There has not as yet been anything like an authoritarian crackdown on dissent. No journalists have heard that midnight knock on the door, and no communists have been treated to free helicopter rides.

BIIIIG mistake there, Mr President, sir. If there’s any single thing that could be counted as sowing the seeds of your own destruction, suffering a Commie to live would have to be it. Please do note that, for Milei, I added no asterisks or sneer quotes around “President.” No need for ‘em, ‘nuff said.

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Put-up job

Waitwaitwait, you mean to tell me that the whole thing was all just a DO(I)J swindle all along?!? That Meinherr Garland’s DO(I)J really, truly is as marrow-deep corrupt and partisan-politicized as some of us have been insisting for years? Why, I can’t believe it. I WON’T believe it.

The DOJ’s Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid
New disclosures in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s espionage case against Donald Trump reveal the FBI tampered with evidence to create the infamous photo–and DOJ has lied about it for nearly two years.

It is the picture that launched a thousand pearl-clutching articles.

A few weeks after the armed FBI raid of Mar-a-Lago in August 2022, the Department of Justice released a stunning photograph depicting alleged contraband seized from Donald Trump’s Palm Beach estate that day; the image showed colored sheets representing scary classification levels attached to files purportedly discovered in Trump’s private office.

Included as a government exhibit to oppose Trump’s lawsuit requesting a special master to vet the 13,000 items taken from his residence, the crime scene pic immediately went viral—just as Attorney General Merrick Garland, who authorized the unprecedented raid, intended. 

At the time, even regime-friendly mouthpieces questioned the need and optics of the raid; the photo helped juice the DOJ’s justification for the storming of Trump’s castle.

“[The] question of whether Trump had classified material with him at his Mar-a-Lago resort has captured the public’s attention. The photo published by the government appears to answer that question quite affirmatively,” Washington Post resident fact checker Philip Bump wrote on August 31, 2022.

Yeah, well, y’know, the Washington Post. That would of course be the longtime regime house organ Washington Post, after all. Fake News doesn’t come any more Fake Newsier than them. Onwards.

Some of Bump’s colleagues were more hyperbolic. An ex-CIA officer told ABC News the cover sheets indicated the highest level of secrecy, which in the wrong hands could have resulted in murder. “People’s lives are truly at stake. Without being melodramatic, anything that helps an adversary identify a human source means life and death,” intelligence expert Douglas London melodramatically warned in reaction to the photo.

The New York Times insisted the photo was consistent with how the FBI handles criminal investigations. “[It] is standard practice for the F.B.I. to take evidentiary pictures of materials recovered in a search to ensure that items are properly cataloged and accounted for. Files or documents are not tossed around randomly, even though they might appear that way; they are usually splayed out so they can be separately identified by their markings,” reporters Glenn Thrush and Adam Goldman wrote on August 31, 2022.

Except…that is not what happened.

And it most certainly wasn’t, as the article goes on from there to detail. Highest possible kudos for the indespensible Julie Kelly for yet another marvelous real-journalistic coup de main. The woman is like a fucking machine.

11
4

The grind

Analysis: perfectly, inarguably, one hundred percent TRUE.

Brainwashing campus activists starts long before college
Americans shocked at the aggressive protests on our most elite campuses often imagine these kids have become brainwashed while away at school.

That indoctrination certainly does take place. Yet the process for most starts far earlier, often in the K-12 years — or even before.

What we’re seeing on our campuses is the culmination of many years of leftist activists pushing kids to the forefront to spread their propaganda.

And it’s not remotely just board books like “A is for Activist” that introduce toddlers to the idea of protest before they even set foot in school.

Teachers push their agenda; whether climate change, gun control or the war in Gaza, they’re focused far less on teaching children how to think than what to think.

The goal is to turn kids into activists, and the sooner the better.

After all, children can be valuable for shutting down debate.

Their youth implies innocence and seems to confer moral authority: How could anyone argue with an innocent child?

Ah yes, but one of these things (youthful innocence) is NOT like the other (moral authority). There is simply no equivalency there, in fact very little relation between the two at all, if any. Quite the opposite, I’d say: if one is present, the other in fact CANNOT be, by definition. It’s by way of being a categorical error—of the sub-type known amongst logicians as an informal fallacy*—a mistake which has unfortunately become commonplace thanks in part to the peculiarly American worship of youth and vigor at the expense of the peculiarly Oriental respect for the wisdom of age and experience.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: there is simply no fixing this without first unfucking the government schools. All our troubles and woe begin there; that rat-bastard Gramsci was truly a fucking diabolical genius, damn his eyes. My own kid has attended those institutions of indoctrination from Grade One, something I’m allowed no say in whatever. Thankfully, my daughter’s native intelligence and/or comprehension are off-the-charts extraordinary; her teachers so far have all been great, rewarding her smarts and eagerness to learn by going well out of their way to nurture and encourage those qualities every chance they get. Even so, I’ve been diligent right along in cautioning her that even the best of them doesn’t know everydamnedthing, and that she must therefore never assume that Teacher is always right, nor take every word she/he says as the Gospel truth.

This is not a young ‘un who has to be dragged kicking and screaming to do her homework, especially if it’s reading. I’ve told her repeatedly to think of her mind not as a sponge, passively soaking up everything thrown at it without discrimination or reflection, but rather as a sieve, sifting the totality to separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak. Instilling and maintaining a healthy skepticism both inside the classroom and out, without lapsing into cynicism, generalized distrust, and despair is a tightrope all attentive parents must walk. So far it’s worked out well, for which felicitous result I consider myself very lucky indeed.

*I took quite a few classes as a college student in logic, philosophy, and rhetoric, for no reason other than that I found the subjects intriguing, so much so that I still have a cpl-three of my logic textbooks to this very day and have had cause to re-consult them plenty of times over lo, these many years; in fact, my poor old Logic 101 text is every bit as battered and dog-eared as any of my cherished military sci-fi paperbacks—its spine broken in several places, its binding loose and flappy, its fabric covers frayed, its yellowed pages liberally spattered with food, beverage, and greasy-fingerprint stains. Like a beat-up old La-Z-Boy recliner, she’s ugly as homemade sin now, but I do love her so anyway

2
1

Point well taken

Remember yesterday, when I hit my estimable and esteemed colleague (blogleague? blogalleague? oh, phooey) JJ Sefton with a little good-natured ribbing regarding the dearth of human beings in political office nowadays, which I consider to be more or less an oxymoron along the lines of “jumbo shrimp” or “military intelligence”? Well, in the comments he pithily reminds me:

Whether Biden is a human, a subhuman, a vegetable, or some combination is certainly debatable. “Obtain” and “legitimately elected” are not one in the same. 😉

Heh. Good ‘un, JJ. No argument against from moi, I did overlook those most salient facts. Sloppy of me, I know, but what the hell, anything for a laugh, right?

5
1

The case for Trump

Diplomad makes it, short and sweet.

I am voting for Trump, as I did twice before, for the simple reason that Trump understands America and its people in a way that no other president or candidate has in my lifetime. 

He understands the corruption in the media, judicial system, and bureaucracy, and is suffering personal harm because of it. He understands that we cannot continue to hollow out our industrial base, and hope to remain a world power and a source of creativity and prosperity. We have to make things, such as cars, medicines, and the other billion widgets that come out of a genuinely industrial country, not just buy them from China and Vietnam. He understands that our once world-beating colleges and universities are now steaming heaps of woke ideological garbage, producing millions of self-entitled, credentialed morons, who want you to pay for their “education,” and couldn’t change a tire if their lives depended on it. He understands what insane environmental policies and the open border mean to our independence, safety, national culture and cohesiveness. 

I hear a lot of blather about how crude and divisive Trump is; that’s nonsense. Obama, Clinton, and Biden not only attack Trump but attack his supporters: “Cling to guns and rifles,” “Deplorables,” “Cultists and insurrectionists,” “White supremacists,” etc. Trump doesn’t do that. 

He asks us all, regardless of race or religion, to make America great again, in other words to live up to our lofty aspirations.

That’s about the size of it, yeah. Nothing we didn’t already know, natch, and not that I think he has a hope in hell of being allowed to win anyway. But it can never hurt to run through it again just the same.

3
1

Tide seems to be doing…that thing tides do

You gotta love it.


And then there’s this:


And this:


In the words of this Great American, albeit in a different context: “It’s turning now.”


Easy-peasy prediction: Look for these objectively pro-terrorist, Sorosturfed protests to do a fast fade from the daily news cycle in 5…4…3…2…

The three R’s

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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