Category: Hmmm…

Star Trek TOS, a “liberal” show?

Posted on      by     

Shet yo’ mouth.

Shatner Suggests That Moderns Feel Threatened by Capt. Kirk
I’m an actor, not an activist! That’s a line that a lot of modern entertainment gurus apparently need to hear. According to actor William Shatner, Paramount will not be bringing back his iconic character of Captain Kirk and will continue to sideline Kirk because people “feel threatened” by the heroic starship officer.

A strong male leader who defies the odds — and sometimes the rules — to be the main hero? That’s almost as offensive as misgendering a hulking dude in a dress! Some of us might be okay with Captain Kirk not being resurrected again from the standpoint that Shatner played the role best, but it does seem mystifying that so many recent Star Trek ads or graphics excluded Kirk. Fans might love all the supporting characters of the original cast, and all the newer characters that came after, but Captain Kirk was essential in making Star Trek the hugely popular franchise it is.

There were definitely undertones of progressivism and liberalism in the original Star Trek show, and I’d guess Shatner is no conservative. But it does make sense that the masculine, weapon-wielding Kirk, definitely in command of his ship and appealing to lovers of the classic American hero (as a white male, no less!), should have been beloved in his heyday but suppressed by modern wokies. 

The esteemed George MF Washington begs to differ with that “liberal Trek” business.

So first, let’s be clear about what the original Star Trek series, Gene Roddenberry’s first creation, actually was…it was a smart, muscular and unapologetic defense of the power of Western Civilization to change the world (universe) for the better…and it was a series which celebrated courage and risk taking as among the most important of all human virtues.

If any of that sounds like something that would send Conservatives fleeing for their lives like vampires before a runaway garlic truck with a busted brake line, well then you’re probably a BLM activist…or at the very least you are admitting that you’re entirely ignorant of the things that modern Conservatives actually believe.

The problem, in my experience, is that most Progressives have not actually seen much of the original series (TOS), and have only a very rudimentary understanding of the show’s ethos. To the extent they are familiar with TOS at all, it is often through modern media “criticism” of the show which focuses on what mainstream critics, which is to say Leftists, have concluded…that the show’s politics were proudly and unapologetically Progressive.

The problem is that this conclusion just ain’t true it’s a misunderstanding often based on a single episode… “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, which has become the most famous episode of Star Trek precisely because it is about race…our modern culture’s most fraught, most talked about, most obsesssed-over issue.

“Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” (S3; EP15): In this most broadly well-known episode of TOS, Kirk and his crew stumble on two aliens, one of whom is a criminal being pursued across interstellar space by the other. These two men’s faces are split down the middle, one side is black, the other white. The intractable problem, these aliens explain to a befuddled Captain Kirk, is that while the right side of one man’s face is white, the other man’s face is white on the left side.

Other than that, they are identical in every way…the only thing that differentiates these two men is…the color of their skin.

But that is not the full story of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield.”

In the end, “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” is not an argument for modern Progressive obsessions like CRT, Race-based preferences, Diversity and Equity programs, reparations or any other form of racial remuneration… the episode makes a much larger, and oppositional point. It makes the case that our obsession with race is unworthy of an intelligent advanced species, that it is terminally corrosive to any pluralist society and that, in the end, this unhealthy obsession will doom us all… just as, in the episode’s final twist, it dooms Bele and Lokai’s entire planet.

“Listen to me…you both must end up dead…if you don’t stop hating…” Kirk implores them both as the two men careen towards an entirely avoidable tragedy…

I do not know a single American Conservative, white black or other, who would object to that message.

And while “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield” dealt specifically with the issue of race, the original Star Trek series tackled a broad range of political hot button issues week-in-and-week-out, beyond just race, over the course of its three seasons…

GMFW goes on to examine several TOS episodes in like fashion, with accompanying video clips including Kirk’s brilliant “Risk is our business” soliloquy, before coming to the beating, bleeding heart of the whole thing.

Look, I could go on and on, citing episode after episode which mirror aspects of our current political moment and which advocate for a modern Conservative (or at the very least a classically Liberal) point of view, but in the end that’s not even really the point, because STAR TREK: TOS has the ultimate trump card hidden in its deck…one singular thing that stands as an unimpeachable argument against the idea that Star Trek represents a modern Progressive ideal that has no appeal whatsoever to the average American conservative.

And that thing is the show’s main character…the iconic and incomparable Captain James T. Kirk himself.

Captain Kirk is everything that the broader Progressive dominated culture has been teling us for years that we are supposed to hate. He is the very definition of what is now called “toxic masculinity” by our Progressive “betters.”

Kirk is a total stud…he’s handsome, he’s unabashedly heterosexual, he has absolutely no confusion about his gender identity and he doesn’t hesitate to take his shirt off.

In his career, as in his life, Kirk is an aggressive Alpha Male… and while he certainly has the guts and skill to fight his way out of just about any situation, he’s also smart, charismatic and clever enough to talk his way out of trouble whenever he recognizes that his is the weakest hand at the table.

Star Trek, and in particular its iconic lead character, celebrated those things about Human nature from which Progressives, and our participation trophy culture in general, tend to recoil like slugs from salt…courage, risk taking, steadfastness, self-sacrifice and confidence in one’s culture and principles. One need only to have survived the COVID pandemic and its concomitant lockdowns and mandates to understand that Progressives no longer admire these things, that indeed they often seek to use their political advantage to suppress or even eliminate them altogether.

The courage to face risk has become something of a lost art here in America of the early 2020’s, to our country’s great detriment. It is our culture’s multi-decade project to decouple risk from reward that has softened the population to the extent that the COVID lockdowns were greeted, not with the rage, indignation and resistance they deserved, but with a quiet un-American acquiesence…almost as if large majorities of the population were eager for Government to remove risk from their lives, regardless of whatever rewards might be thrown overboard right along with it.

But once upon a time, Star Trek and Captain Kirk stood athwart this corrosive “safety first” instinct for risk aversion at all costs and tried to remind us of an America where risk was a necessary part of achieving the things we wanted most in our lives…love, adventure, career success, victory…all those things that make life worth living.

And that is a Conservative impulse to its core.

Much as I’ve always adored both TOS and TNG, I’ve never really thought of it this way before. But now that he mentions it, the man makes one hell of an excellent point, I think.

3
3

So, how’s that forced EV-conversion thing working out for ya, Mr “pResident”?

Posted on      by     

NOT. TOO. GOOD.

Hertz is selling 20,000 electric vehicles to buy gasoline cars instead
Hertz, which has made a big push into electric vehicles in recent years, has decided it’s time to cut back. The company will sell off a third of its electric fleet, totaling roughly 20,000 vehicles, and use the money they bring to purchase more gasoline powered vehicles.

Electric vehicles have been hurting Hertz’s financials, executives have said, because, despite costing less to maintain, they have higher damage-repair costs and, also, higher depreciation.

“[C]ollision and damage repairs on an EV can often run about twice that associated with a comparable combustion engine vehicle,” Hertz CEO Stephen Scherr said in a recent analyst call.

And EV price declines in the new car market have pushed down the resale value of Hertz’s used EV rental cars.

“The MSRP declines in EVs over the course of 2023, driven primarily by Tesla, have driven the fair market value of our EVs lower as compared to last year, such that a salvage creates a larger loss and, therefore, greater burden,” Scherr said.

Simply put, people are generally willing to pay a certain amount less for a used car than for a new one. As the price of new car goes down, that also pushes down what people are willing to pay to buy a used one.

Hertz expects to take a loss of about $245 million due to depreciation on the EVs, an average of about $12,250, per vehicle the company said in an SEC filing.

If you don’t already know it by now, you certainly should: Mike’s Iron Law #187: There’s always a workaround, and true Americans will always be able to find it. Flipping the big honking middle-digit salute at FederalGovCo like this counts as one of the very best examples I can think of.

On the other hand, though, watch now as the goobermint takes over the rent-a-car industry entire in retaliation. Who can say, maybe such a dick-move was the whole idea from the very beginning?

“Fossil” fuels?

Posted on      by     

Ummm…well…see, now, uhh…okay, it’s like this…

Titan Has More Oil Than Earth
Saturn’s smoggy moon Titan has hundreds of times more natural gas and other liquid hydrocarbons than all the known oil and natural gas reserves on Earth, scientists said today.

The hydrocarbons rain from the sky on the miserable moon, collecting in vast deposits that form lakes and dunes. This much was known. But now the stuff has been quantified using observations from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft.

“Titan is just covered in carbon-bearing material — it’s a giant factory of organic chemicals,” said Ralph Lorenz, a Cassini radar team member from the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. “This vast carbon inventory is an important window into the geology and climate history of Titan.”

At minus 179 degrees Celsius (minus 290 degrees Fahrenheit), Titan would be an awful place to live. Instead of water, liquid hydrocarbons in the form of methane and ethane are present on the moon’s surface, and tholins probably make up its dunes. The term “tholins” was coined by Carl Sagan in 1979 to describe the complex organic molecules at the heart of prebiotic chemistry.

SO then: might this mean that there were once Thunder Lizards in space? Or might it mean instead that modern theories purporting to explain the origin and formulation of “fossil fuels” are totally bassackwards and wrong? Of those two possible eventualities—1) complex carbon-based life forms not just extant but flourishing on icy, barren rocks throughout our solar system ages ago (but long gone now), or B) simple human error—which scenario seems more likely to be accurate?

What made me think of it was running across mention in several places of Tucker’s latest ep (one of which was here), wherein the topic is discussed. I read about this a while back, may have even brought it up before here, dunno. But Tucker’s riffage on it got me to Luxxle-searching a bit, which led me to the above short article, from 2008. And, well, here we all are. Fascinating subject either way, I think.

2
1

Masks are slipping all over the place

Posted on      by     

Most. Transparent. Facade. EVAR.

Biden in dark over defense chief’s cancer for month
President Joe Biden was kept in the dark over his defense secretary’s cancer diagnosis and subsequent hospitalizations for about a month, the White House admitted Tuesday, as details of Lloyd Austin’s deeply unusual disappearance raised questions about leadership of the world’s top military.

The 70-year-old’s failure to disclose his hospitalization has prompted an extraordinary row in Washington and could be embarrassing for Biden, who faces multiple foreign crises in his reelection campaign year, including in Israel and Ukraine.

As defense secretary, career soldier Austin is personally overseeing military deployments to try and contain fallout from the Israel-Hamas war, which has sparked violence against American forces in Iraq and Syria as well as attacks on international shipping in the Red Sea.

After days of refusal to issue details, the Pentagon came out Tuesday with its first full account of Austin’s health issues, but the new transparency came too late for a clearly upset White House.

According to two of his doctors from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Austin’s prostate cancer was detected as a result of routine screening in early December.

He underwent minor surgery to treat it on December 22, returning home the following day, the doctors said, referring to a procedure the Pentagon had previously been describing as “elective.”

However, Austin was readmitted to the same hospital on January 1 due to complications “including nausea with severe abdominal, hip, and leg pain,” they said.

“Initial evaluation revealed a urinary tract infection,” while medical personnel found “abdominal fluid collections impairing the function of his small intestines” after Austin was moved to intensive care on January 2.

White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby made clear that Austin had not followed procedures.

“It is not optimal for a situation like this to go as long as it did without the commander-in-chief knowing about it or the national security adviser knowing about it, or frankly other leaders at the Department of Defense,” Kirby said during a briefing at the White House.

“It’s not the way this is supposed to happen…It’s not good. We want to make sure that it doesn’t happen again.”

Kirby insisted that Biden retains “complete confidence” in Austin and was looking forward to having him back at the Pentagon.

Yeah, tell me the one again about how ANY of these boobs—Bribem, Austin, Kirby, the whole clown-car load of ‘em—is actually in charge of anything whatsoever, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

I need to establish a new category for this sort of thing, I’m thinking. “Deep State maskirovka” is pretty good, but doesn’t hit the mark quite as squarely as I’d like. Not sure what the name for it oughta be, but I’ll come up with something.

Update! So far I’ve got it narrowed down to six possibilities:

  • Frontmen, figureheads, and marionettes
  • The Great And Powerful OZ!
  • The Not-Ruling Class
  • Shadow-State kabuki
  • Signifying nothing
  • All the Washington world’s a stage

Preferences or suggestions of your own, anyone?

Updated update! Ace sees through it…almost.

White House Orders Cabinet Heads to Inform the “President” If They Cannot Perform Their Duties
—Disinformation Expert Ace

Let me save everyone the time: None of them is capable of performing their duties. Pete Buttigieg fucked off to play mommy for months and months and then have a secret vacay in Portugal and no one even noticed he was gone.

A “president” who even has to give this “order” (or strong recommendation) is obviously not really the president.

Annnnd bingo. In the next line, Ace says it’s “Obama’s staffers” who are in charge, but as much as it may seem so at times, I remain extremely skeptical. As far back as 2008, I maintained that the Boy Who Would Be King was nothing but a ventriloquist’s dummy himself; the man with his hand up Charlie McCarthy’s butt making his lips move was who really brought the act to life.

In fact, though, it isn’t even the Edgar Bergens who are of supreme interest here. The Grey Men skulking in the wings who don’t have faces; don’t have names; never do interviews or appear on the Sunday shows; and who don’t ever stand for “election” are the ones who must be sought out and uncovered. Otherwise, we’re still just playing the same old game, tilting at the same old (replaceable) windmills, dancing to their tune as always.

It’s a daunting task to be sure, but until the backstage string-pullers are at last brought out into the bright lights at center stage, willing or not, there can be no real hope of bringing the final curtain down to close the long-running Amerika v2.0 Show once and for all.

And even that arduous quest, should it be successfully accomplished, will be just the first step. Makes you respect the Founders more than ever, don’t it?

Update to the updated update! Gee, ya THINK?

Via WRSA.

1
1

Anarcho-tyranny perfectionists

Posted on      by     

SO. They figure out how to eliminate Trump from either running or winning next year, thereby at last getting him “out of the way” so they can come after us, in accordance with his canny prediction. Then what happens?

This is what they will do:

Nothing.

At least, nothing we are not seeing already, just perfected.

You have likely heard the phrase “anarcho-tyranny,” originally coined by Sam Francis thirty years ago. He put it best when he described it as:

Essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

Just today on the left’s new favorite holiday, Washington, D.C. attorney Matthew Graves announced the scope of the DOJ’s persecution of people present on January 6th will expand to everybody who was at the Capitol but did not enter (provided here by ALX on TwitterX), right as the FBI arrested three other participants.

If you browse Twitter/X, you will see Democrats shamelessly crowing about how scary that day was and how we need to protect “our democracy,” and people swallow it up. Others gleefully say Ashli Babbitt deserved to be killed (even stealing the meme about George Floyd) and that it was a shame she was the only one.

Who needs a salaried, uniformed, professional secret police when random people ginned up on regime rhetoric demonizing political opposition will do it for free, as this attitude suggests? Might I remind you that just the other day a campaign speech and ad both called Trump supporters extremists, if not enemies of the country?

We have already seen a casualty of this rhetoric when Cayler Ellingson was murdered in 2022 by Shannon Brandt, who said Ellingson was a “Republican extremist.” Brandt has only been given five years.

“But wait, what about the schemes of the World Economic Forum to make us live in pods, eat bugs, and own nothing?” you may ask. That goal could very well be on the table, but the stated objective to enslave us by 2030 might just be a means of provoking outrage. If people object too loudly? Just keep on saying they are conspiracy theorists.

In essence, the good thing about anarcho-tyranny for power-mad psychopaths is that you need to do very little on your own part to oppress the populace. But patience is required because, by its own logic, dissidents cannot be purged, just whittled away.

And rest assured, the Power can expect plenty of assistance from the willing victims of their own self-enslavement: ie, all the Karens, Kens, and sundry other shitlibs who favor “freedom FROM choice” over “freedom OF choice.” Factor in, too, the vigorous cooperation of the born-snitch types who infest every suburban neighborhood, trendy urban enclave, and modern condo community. These Nosy Nellies enjoy a frisson of near-orgasmic bliss at the prospect of diming-out all who A) flatly refuse to mask up; B) decline to get Vaxxed as ordered; C) are possessed of the outrageous temerity to live free no matter what.

In every society independent, liberty-minded people have always been a tiny minority, and always will be; the toil, hazard, and strong sense of personal accountability required by true freedom hold no attraction for the vast majority of stupefied Sheeple, a condition which has been exacerbated by many decades of government-school indoctrination and mass-media exhortation. Shamed by their own pathetic desire to cower under the warm, cozy security blanket of conformism and compliance, they can only resent their betters, and will do all they can to thwart them, hinder them, and see them punished. Last week I posted a meme that’s well worth remembering:

 

Ahh, but once the anarcho-tyrannists DO overtly, aggressively “come after us,” surely we can rely on the military to step into the breach, refuse illegal orders, and fulfill their oath to the Constitution, right?

RIIIGHT?!? USAF vet Mike McDaniel sure thinks so.

Forget it. They’re going to kill their families, neighbors, pastors and friends? The people they’ve grown up with and live with? What they are going to do is walk away with as many weapons, as much ammo and other gear as they can carry and haul in the trucks they’re going to take with them. A few higher-ranking, idiot true-believers might try to stop them, might even try to use deadly force. Heh.

To be sure, there will be some social justice warriors that will turn traitor out of a misplaced sense of duty, or just because they want to be on what they think will be the winning side. But even now, most people in our military love America and Americans. They’re the people buying the guns, living the American military ethic of duty, honor and country. They like Red Dawn and The Patriot. They’re not going to kill fellow Americans. They know who America’s enemies are.

Who are the few that will? They’re the people who shrink from killing our actual enemies, people who haven’t won a war in decades, people who can’t bring themselves to kill the demons that would gladly murder every American. They surely get excited, however, about strafing Des Moines, or nuking South Dakota. Suzie Soccer Mom and traditional Catholics are so much easier to beat than actual armies.

Most of our military—probably enough—will either just walk away, or will fight for liberty, taking as much materiel with them, and sabotaging the rest, as they can. Many will try to go neutral, but won’t be able to maintain that for long.

I pray that he’s right, but I fear that he’s wrong, persisting in a pleasant delusion countered by a plethora of recent evidence indicating otherwise. Commenter Chuck Lowe makes an airtight case.

We already know exactly what will take place. It has already happened. When Americans wanted redress in the streets, BLM-Antifa were given “room to destroy” & allowed to burn 2 Billion dollars to the ground, assault and murder cops-people and Kamala Harris went on TV to get everyone to help make bail for them to get out of jail.

When we went to the capital, to protest the FBI/Deep State irregularities and corruption associated with the election, we were shot dead, imprisoned, marginalized, economically destroyed and placed on watch lists.

Even the incarceration or suspicious death of Trump, or a Black Swan event, will not get the majority of people off of their couches and into the street.

‘Fraid so, yep. Bottom line: there is NOBODY coming to save us, to set things right, to correct the nation’s course and restore America That Was—not the cops, not the military, not the Congress, not the courts—NOBODY. Painful though it is to admit it, liberty-minded folks are well and truly on their own. For whatever cold comfort it offers, t’was ever thus.

It was so in 1776, it remains so in 2024 and, human nature being what it is, it probably always will be. Liberty has many false friends who gushingly extol its virtues, when it suits their immediate purpose. Those who truly, sincerely love it—who are dedicated enough to foreswear a life of convenience and ease to pursue and sustain it at any cost—will never number much more than a handful, relatively speaking.

Doesn’t matter, don’t care. Samuel Adams expressed the sentiment better than anybody:

If ye love wealth better than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest of freedom, go home from us in peace. We ask not your counsels or arms. Crouch down and lick the hands which feed you. May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.

Amen, brother. Calls for yet another rerun of Jack Nicholson’s classic soliloquy in response to Dennis Hopper’s nonplussed bewilderment, I believe.

What a great fuckin’ movie. Well, right up to the part where the rednecks brutally beat George to death while he’s sleeping; I always have to turn it off before that scene, it’s just too much to endure.

2
1

Feisty, fearless, forthright

Posted on      by     

Don’t know much at all about him, not giving three whoops in Hell about the farcical 2024 Presidential “election” contest, but I gotta say: every time I read another attempted GOTCHA! story quoting the guy he leaves me nodding along in complete agreement.

In a fiery exchange last month, CNN anchorwoman Abby Phillip told GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy that there was “no evidence” to support his claim that federal agents abetted protesters at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Ramaswamy shot back that the FBI conspicuously has never denied that law enforcement agents were on duty in the crowd. He argued that federal officials have repeatedly “lied” to the American people about not only that investigation but one that has gotten much less attention: the alleged failed plot to kidnap and kill Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan in 2020.

“It was entrapment,” Ramaswamy said. “FBI agents putting them up to a kidnapping plot that we were told was true but wasn’t.”

His zeroing in on the Michigan case highlighted an uncharacteristic development in contemporary politics, where progressives vigorously defend law enforcement power while conservatives view it with deep suspicion. Further, Ramaswamy’s linking of Jan. 6 and the Whitmer plot resonated with many on the right who want similarities between the two episodes exposed to the general public, especially the FBI’s reliance on informants and other paid operatives.

Our Gal Jules then dons the wet-suit, snorkel mask, and fins for a deep dive into the Superstate Stasi’s phonus-balonus Whitler “kidnapping” piss-puddle in her usual impeccably-thorough fashion.

As for Ramaswamy, although I gravely doubt his ability to A) get “elected,” and B) get anything useful accomplished even if he did, still, his heart sure seems to be in the right place at least, and God bless him for it. He’s not afraid to speak bluntly about topics the rest of the Vichy GOPe field shies away from like startled mustangs; better, he seems to be constitutionally incapable of taking a second’s worth of shit from slime-encrusted “journalist” bubbleheads, understanding as he obviously does that they’re going to mangle and/or manipulate whatever he says to promote the Press-Gaggle Panic O’ The Week© anyway.

Best of all, Vivek unblenchingly expounds on things you really don’t hear mentioned by anyone else, on either side—GOOD things, IMPORTANT things that not so long ago were universally-accepted American first principles that have become so objectionable nowadays they get any unevolved naif who so much as moots them for discussion—in any tone other than either horrified disapproval or snickering, supercilious disdain at the absurd ideas these subnormal provincials are willing to swallow—hysterically denounced as a “dangerous” “radical” “extremist” seeking to overthrow Our Sacred Democracy in favor of a dystopian-nightmare dictatorship.

Following his ritual denunciation, our witless knuckledragger will be Doxxed, Cancelled, ruined personally, socially, and financially, exiled from Polite Society, busted down to the lowly rank of Permanent Pariah—effectively, a sentence of life without possibility of either parole or pardon summarily handed down not just to him but his family along with him.

As if it wasn’t a dictatorship already, the contemptible cretins. But since FederalGovCo is a dictatorship conceived, installed, and run entirely by them, well hey, it’s okay, I guess. There are two distinct flavors of dictatorship, apparently. Given how fond shitlibs are of endlessly reminding one and all that they’re the Good People and all who dare to cherish divergent opinions assuredly are not, the dichotomy of dictatorship is as follows: Theirs=GOOD. Ours=BAD. According to them, this is a vitally crucially vital distinction to make.

Is it any wonder, then, that young Vivek hasn’t the slightest chance of becoming President in Amerika v2.0?

1

“Significant problem”

Posted on      by     

Gee, ya THINK?!?

Ex-CIA analyst says intel agencies to be politically active again in 2024 election: ‘Significant problem’
A Georgetown University professor who spent 12 years as a CIA intelligence analyst is warning that diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts and the overall politicization of the intelligence community have become a “significant” problem and that he is confident those agencies will attempt to interfere with the 2024 election similar to their efforts in 2020.

“My guess is that the the proverbial deep state within the intelligence community will reemerge because presumably a Republican candidate will again be seen as a threat to the internal policies that many intelligence people like,” Dr. John Gentry, author of the new book, “Neutering the CIA: Why US Intelligence Versus Trump Has Long-Term Consequences,” told Fox News Digital. 

Within days of the bombshell New York Post story that detailed the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in the lead-up to the 2020 election, 51 former intelligence officials signed onto a letter in an attempt to discredit the laptop, saying it “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” 

The CIA approved the publication of the infamous Hunter Biden laptop letter, according to documents obtained by Fox News Digital in 2023.

Gentry told Fox News Digital that downplaying the Hunter Biden laptop was “clearly political” and that a highly placed source told him “in no uncertain terms” that it was done “explicitly” with the “intent to help the Biden campaign.”

He said there have already been signs in recent weeks that current or former intelligence agency members will be active in 2024.

“I long have thought we are likely to again see former intelligence officers be politically active against Trump or whomever the Republican presidential candidate is next year, and I expect leaking to resume,” Gentry said. “The activities of ‘formers’ have resumed already, a bit before I expected.”

Further details, unsurprising as they are, at the link. It’s a real dog-bites-man story, and such stories will continue to be so unless/until something is done not just about our fake ’n’ ghey “elections” process, but about our rogue Deep State intelligence apparatus as well—at which point it will be a man-bites-dog deal for sure.

1

Words mean things

Posted on      by     

Except, of course, when they don’t.

Political science professor Gay — who stepped down amid a tempest of allegations that she did not do enough to combat antisemitism and academic plagiarism Tuesday — will return to a position on the Cambridge, Mass., school’s faculty.

Bold mine, and indicative of some truly prime bullshit: 1) they are NOT “allegations,” and 2) it isn’t that she “didn’t do enough” to combat anything—she did plenty. Among other disgraceful things she is known for a fact to have done: she DID commit plagiarism, and she DID express her ((((JooJooJooJOOOOO!!!)))) hate clearly, unequivocally, even pridefully.

This, mind, while the selfsame dicks-with-ears puff out their sunken chests to indignantly declare the madman Trump ineligible to run for President because he’s a known “insurrectionist” and treasonous revolutionary—proving for all time that they really are incapable of shame, because otherwise they’d all be blushing so hard they’d stroke out and die of it.

The above rampant horsepuckey is but one of many abuses of the Mother Tongue we see perpetrated in the mass media every single day; in fact, I doubt it was even the most egregious example from that particular day. Fred Reed offers a primer for those who aspire to do better, a category which would not include any “mainstream” Jurassic Media “journalists.”

English, What’s Left of It, & Its Management
Recently I took part in a discussion of writing and how to do it on Counter-Currents. This being a topic of some importance to me, I decided to throw together a few thoughts in a form more coherent that I could do in a podcast. A danger in doing this is that readers will joyfully point out instances in which I have failed to follow my own suggestions. To these sins I confess in advance. Anyway:

This is not a golden age of writing. For one thing, few today have the grasp of English grammar that long ago we had learned by the fifth grade, or any idea why it might be important. Nor, I suspect, have many read much in the best authors in English, and so have not acquired an ingrained feel for what is good and what isn’t. I may be wrong. I hope so.

For another, good writing is elitist, and must be. Elitism means a preference for the better to the worse. In an intellectual climate resembling that of an urban bus station, in which the lower cultural orders seek to drag standards to the bottom, few will prefer good writing to bad, or know the difference.

Further, when people are in constant communication via telephones, garbling and semi-literacy are less important than they were when poor communication demanded clarity. In the following we will pretend that it is 1955 and that I am speaking to young people who want to write well.

To begin, my advice to the aspiring writer is to forget “creativity.” Writing is first a craft, involving rules and principles and things to which the student should learn to pay attention. Later, perhaps, writing is an art. You have to learn the notes before playing a concerto. Accepting this is important.

Also important, crucial I would say, is the habit of paying attention to language itself, not just its content. By this I mean the structure of sentences, choice of words, turn of phrase. If you read a piece and think it good, read it again and ask why it is good. If an analytical piece, is the analysis clear and compelling? The phrasing fresh and devoid of cliché? The vocabulary extensive and correct in use?

To again use a comparison to music, the listener doesn’t have to know music theory, but the musician does.

Lots, lots more good stuff to follow, including several rules I gleefully traduce on a habitual basis myself, just ’cause I think it’s funny. Even if you’re not a professional writer, you may find it interesting. NYPost link via JJ, Fred link via WRSA. Thanks, fellas!

Update! Also via JJ, Bill Ackerman digs deeper into the Gay brouhaha.

I first became concerned about @Harvard when 34 Harvard student organizations, early on the morning of October 8th before Israel had taken any military actions in Gaza, came out publicly in support of Hamas, a globally recognized terrorist organization, holding Israel ‘solely responsible’ for Hamas’ barbaric and heinous acts.

How could this be? I wondered.

When I saw President Gay’s initial statement about the massacre, it provided more context (!) for the student groups’ statement of support for terrorism. The protests began as pro-Palestine and then became anti-Israel. Shortly, thereafter, antisemitism exploded on campus as protesters who violated Harvard’s own codes of conduct were emboldened by the lack of enforcement of Harvard’s rules, and kept testing the limits on how aggressive, intimidating, and disruptive they could be to Jewish and Israeli students, and the student body at large. Sadly, antisemitism remains a simmering source of hate even at our best universities among a subset of students.

A few weeks later, I went up to campus to see things with my own eyes, and listen and learn from students and faculty. I met with 15 or so members of the faculty and a few hundred students in small and large settings, and a clearer picture began to emerge.

I ultimately concluded that antisemitism was not the core of the problem, it was simply a troubling warning sign – it was the “canary in the coal mine” – despite how destructive it was in impacting student life and learning on campus.  

I came to learn that the root cause of antisemitism at Harvard was an ideology that had been promulgated on campus, an oppressor/oppressed framework, that provided the intellectual bulwark behind the protests, helping to generate anti-Israel and anti-Jewish hate speech and harassment.

Then I did more research. The more I learned, the more concerned I became, and the more ignorant I realized I had been about DEI, a powerful movement that has not only pervaded Harvard, but the educational system at large. I came to understand that Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion was not what I had naively thought these words meant.

I have always believed that diversity is an important feature of a successful organization, but by diversity I mean diversity in its broadest form: diversity of viewpoints, politics, ethnicity, race, age, religion, experience, socioeconomic background, sexual identity, gender, one’s upbringing, and more. 

What I learned, however, was that DEI was not about diversity in its purest form, but rather DEI was a political advocacy movement on behalf of certain groups that are deemed oppressed under DEI’s own methodology.

OHHH yeah, you’ll want to read all of this one. It’s choice stuff, covering a heckuva lot of bases well beyond the Gay business, and I haven’t finished it yet myself.

1
2

Just say no

Posted on      by     

Buck Throckmorton has rapidly become the go-to guy for EV news, debunkings, and unpleasant realities, and there’s a very good reason for that. To wit:

Welcome to 2024! Since New Year’s Day one year ago, the “electric vehicle transition” has gone from being a foregone conclusion to being a rolling failure. Auto manufacturers who bought into the hype are looking at a catastrophic financial miscalculation, and typical car drivers have gone from being curious (at best) to being generally negative about purchasing EVs. I believe that the conservative media’s pushback against EVs has had a considerable impact.

In other words, 2023 was a very good year – a year in which we turned opinion against electric vehicles. The people who want a boutique, status-symbol EV can continue to buy Teslas. (But can we please kill off the taxpayer subsidies for Tesla?) For all the rest, let 2024 be the year when legacy automakers throw in the towel on the eco-communist EV experiment.

For today, let’s do our periodic update on the EV Follies…

“Ford cutting 2024 F-150 Lightning production plans by half, suppliers told; The news comes amid an industrywide pullback in EV investment due to slower-than-expected sales growth.” [Automotive News – 12/11/2023]

Ford Motor Co. is dialing back planned output of the electric F-150 Lightning pickup by half next year because of “changing market demand,” a steep pullback of a high-profile nameplate the automaker spent most of this year working to build in larger numbers.

Although I’ve enjoyed writing about how emphatically consumers have rejected Ford’s flagship EV, in fairness I should point out that the Ford F150 Conflagration Lightning is a spectacularly awful vehicle. Aside from its tendency to burst into flames, it performs poorly at towing, hauling for distance, and operating in the cold – the basic functionalities that are expected of a pickup truck.

The buried lede in this story isn’t that Ford is cutting weekly production of its electric pickup from 3,200 units per week to 1,600 units per week, rather it’s that Ford’s executives still think there is a market that will absorb 1,600 of these abominations per week.

*****

It’s not just Ford that can’t sell its EVs. Half of Buick dealers would rather surrender their franchises than have to sell General Motors’ atrocious EV offerings.

“GM buys out nearly half of its Buick dealers across the country, who opt to not sell EVs” [Detroit Free Press – 12/20/2023]

GM’s awful executives, with little understanding of automobiles or their customers’ preferences, think they can simply dictate what consumers should buy. GM dealers, who actually understand automobiles and what their customers want, know better.

General Motors said nearly half its Buick dealers took buyouts this year rather than invest in selling and servicing electric vehicles as the automaker’s brands transition to all electric by 2030.

That means GM will end 2023 with about 1,000 Buick stores nationwide, down 47% from where it started the year.

*****

General Motors is rolling out an electric version of its popular Chevrolet Blazer sport utility. Well, it’s trying to, but not very successfully.

“2024 Chevy Blazer EV sales are already halted over software issues” [Elektrek – 12/26/2023]

Dozens of potential customers will have to keep waiting.

Ah well, I guess it’s nice to know it will impinge on mere dozens of the poor, pitiful fools; could be worse, could be hundreds. Nice also to see a few major manufacturers finally pushing back against being force-fed this fascistic, auto industry-killing program of FederalGovCo’s devising, instead of just lying back and taking it without demur as they have been up till now. Lots, lots more disincentives to buy into the goobermint’s credulity-straining propaganda push for these abominable, exorbitantly overpriced boat-anchors over at the Ace Place.

2
1

In the bleak midwinter

Posted on      by     

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1

Haley gets one right

Posted on      by     

Even though the Hallelujah Chorus of VOTE HARDERER!!! Republicrats© is giving her hell for it, she ain’t wrong for once.

I’ve never run for office, but I can imagine that for a politician in the South — especially a conservative — questions about race relations and history sound like “gotcha” questions. That may have been what was on Nikki Haley’s mind at a town hall event in New Hampshire earlier this week when an attendee asked her a historical question.

A voter asked Haley, “What was the cause of the United States Civil War?” Granted, it’s an odd question, but Haley could have answered it quickly and moved on. Instead, she gave the strangest answer imaginable.

“Well, don’t come with an easy question,” she began with a quip. “I mean, I think the cause of the Civil War was basically how government was going to run, the freedoms, and what people could and couldn’t do.”

She then turned the tables on the man who asked the question and asked him what he thought caused the Civil War. That part of the exchange wasn’t audible on the video of the town hall, but it opened the door for Haley to dig her hole of bizarre answers a little deeper.

“I mean, I think it always comes down to the role of government and what the rights of the people are,” she continued. “And we — I will always stand by the fact that I think government was intended to secure the rights and freedoms of the people. It was never meant to be all things to all people.”

“Bizarre”…and perfectly correct, too. The “offense” Haley is being pilloried for, of course, is not making the obligatory genuflection towards the written-by-the-winners revisionist history which holds that the “cause” of Civil War I was blood-simple, that the North invaded and punitively subjugated the South over the “peculiar institution” of slavery.

Just one leeeetle problem with that belief: know who else didn’t think the War of Northern Aggression was all about slavery? Massa Abraham Lincoln, that’s who. Among other things, he said this:

My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause.

Note also that the “Great Emancipator,” with his fabled Proclamation in 1863, freed not a single slave in any state wherein he actually had the power to do so; the Emancipation Proclamation was a purely political document whose two-fold purpose was to maintain the shaky entente back home between the radical contingent of so-called “fire eater” abolitionists and the moderates, as well as to gain military advantage for the Yankee invader over the Southern foe.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free all slaves in the U.S., contrary to a common misconception; it applied in the ten states that were still in rebellion on January 1, 1863, but it did not cover the nearly 500,000 slaves in the slaveholding border states (Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, and Delaware) or in parts of Virginia and Louisiana that were no longer in rebellion. Those slaves were freed by later separate state and federal actions.

The state of Tennessee had already mostly returned to Union control, under a recognized Union government, so it was not named and was exempted. Virginia was named, but exemptions were specified for the 48 counties then in the process of forming the new state of West Virginia, and seven additional counties and two cities in the Union-controlled Tidewater region of Virginia. Also specifically exempted were New Orleans and 13 named parishes of Louisiana, which were mostly under federal control at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation. These exemptions left unemancipated an additional 300,000 slaves.

The Emancipation Proclamation has been ridiculed, notably by Richard Hofstadter, who wrote that it “had all the moral grandeur of a bill of lading” and “declared free all slaves…precisely where its effect could not reach”. Disagreeing with Hofstadter, William W. Freehling wrote that Lincoln’s asserting his power as Commander-in-Chief to issue the proclamation “reads not like an entrepreneur’s bill for past services but like a warrior’s brandishing of a new weapon”.

Lincoln first discussed the proclamation with his cabinet in July 1862. He drafted his “preliminary proclamation” and read it to Secretary of State William Seward, and Secretary of Navy Gideon Welles, on July 13. Seward and Welles were at first speechless, then Seward referred to possible anarchy throughout the South and resulting foreign intervention; Welles apparently said nothing. On July 22, Lincoln presented it to his entire cabinet as something he had determined to do and he asked their opinion on wording. Although Secretary of War Edwin Stanton supported it, Seward advised Lincoln to issue the proclamation after a major Union victory, or else it would appear as if the Union was giving “its last shriek of retreat”. Walter Stahr, however, writes, “There are contemporary sources, however, that suggest others were involved in the decision to delay”, and Stahr quotes them.

In September 1862, the Battle of Antietam gave Lincoln the victory he needed to issue the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. In the battle, though the Union suffered heavier losses than the Confederates and General McClellan allowed the escape of Robert E. Lee’s retreating troops, Union forces turned back a Confederate invasion of Maryland, eliminating more than a quarter of Lee’s army in the process.

On September 22, 1862, five days after Antietam, and while residing at the Soldier’s Home, Lincoln called his cabinet into session and issued the Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation. According to Civil War historian James M. McPherson, Lincoln told cabinet members, “I made a solemn vow before God, that if General Lee was driven back from Pennsylvania, I would crown the result by the declaration of freedom to the slaves.” Lincoln had first shown an early draft of the proclamation to Vice President Hannibal Hamlin, an ardent abolitionist, who was more often kept in the dark on presidential decisions. The final proclamation was issued on January 1, 1863. Although implicitly granted authority by Congress, Lincoln used his powers as Commander-in-Chief of the Army and Navy to issue the proclamation “as a necessary war measure.” Therefore, it was not the equivalent of a statute enacted by Congress or a constitutional amendment, because Lincoln or a subsequent president could revoke it. One week after issuing the final Proclamation, Lincoln wrote to Major General John McClernand: “After the commencement of hostilities I struggled nearly a year and a half to get along without touching the ‘institution’; and when finally I conditionally determined to touch it, I gave a hundred days fair notice of my purpose, to all the States and people, within which time they could have turned it wholly aside, by simply again becoming good citizens of the United States. They chose to disregard it, and I made the peremptory proclamation on what appeared to me to be a military necessity. And being made, it must stand”. Lincoln continued, however, that the states included in the proclamation could “adopt systems of apprenticeship for the colored people, conforming substantially to the most approved plans of gradual emancipation; and…they may be nearly as well off, in this respect, as if the present trouble had not occurred”. He concluded by asking McClernand not to “make this letter public”.

Initially, the Emancipation Proclamation effectively freed only a small percentage of the slaves, namely those who were behind Union lines in areas not exempted. Most slaves were still behind Confederate lines or in exempted Union-occupied areas. Secretary of State William H. Seward commented, “We show our sympathy with slavery by emancipating slaves where we cannot reach them and holding them in bondage where we can set them free.” Had any slave state ended its secession attempt before January 1, 1863, it could have kept slavery, at least temporarily.

And there you have it. Nota bene:

  • Quite a few Northerners still owned slaves for some years after the war was over
  • Northern general US Grant was as ambivalent about slavery as his boss Lincoln, at least initially:

    To his father he wrote, “My inclination is to whip the rebellion into submission, preserving all Constitutional rights. If it cannot be whipped any other way than through a war against slavery, let it come to that legitimately. If it is necessary that slavery should fall that the Republic may continue its existence, let slavery go.”

    More on all that here

  • Legend has it that Grant’s wife retained ownership of her personal valet for several years after the end of the war; when asked about this apparent contradiction, Grant is said to have dismissed his interlocuter with a laconic “Because good help is so hard to find nowadays”
  • At the end of the war, certain Northern states and/or cities barred Nee-grows from so much as setting foot within their boundaries, decrees often enforced via violence

And so it goes. As is usually the case, the first American Civil War is not reducible to simple, easily summed-up causes and effects; it just doesn’t work that way, however much we flawed hoomons might wish otherwise. History is rich and complex, with many strange twists and turns serving to make the topic all the more interesting for those of us who study it intently.

Loathe though I ordinarily am to sing the woman’s praises, sincerest kudos to Nikki Haley for truly getting the historical nuance here, and refusing to yield to pressure from the stupes and dupes who don’t to dumb it down for them.

2
1

An “open air prison”

Posted on      by     

It’s not that the Paleosimians in Gaza are angry about being “mistreated” by the Israelis; they’re angry that Israel—and ((((JooJooJooJOOOOOOOZ!!!)))) generally—exists at all.


Yep, pre-Oct 7 Gaza sure looked like Hell on earth for those poor suffering Paleosimians, didn’t it? After being treated as inhumanely as that—forced by the Israelis (who, by the way, control absolutely everything and everyone in the entire world) to live in such extreme squalor and deprivation as seen above—no WONDER they’re so implacably pissed off. What rational, reasonable human being yearning only to breathe free and be left alone to live their lives in peace WOULDN’T be?

But hey, you know ((((DemPeskyJOOOOOZ!!!))) and their never-ending propaganda trickery. The above footage was probably shot in Milan or Nice or Martinique, and the IDF just P-shopped in the Arabic-language signage on the storefronts and whatnot to fool everybody. JOOJOOJOOJOOOOOOOO!!! Plus, they all have big noses, wear funny hats, are greedy as hell, and sound like a throat-cancer victim trying to hock up the world’s worst phlegm-ball when they talk in that fucked-up Yid language of theirs, the rat-bastards. Right, Jew-haters?

And those JOOOOOO women, they’re just the WORST, right? Compare, contrast:

Yep, looks like a no-brainer to me all right. Then again, I’ve obviously been deceived by the International JOOOOO Conspiracy©, so never mind, I guess.

3
1
1

An Establishment of Religion

Posted on      by     

Now that the Constitution has been well and truly cast onto the junkheap, Amerika v2.0 definitely has one, and you damned well better like it. Y’know, or ELSE.

We Actually Do Have an Established Religion, and That’s Not Good

“Not good,” is it? *checks contacts on phone, checks again, checks again* Say, anybody out there got the FBI on speed-dial, perchance? I have a hot tip on a ÜberUltraMegaMAGA domestic terrorist I need to tell ’em about.

America has no established religion, which is undeniably true and a peculiar stroke of genius of the Founding Fathers in preventing the hegemony of one religious system over the others. Yet even without an established religion, the United States has always stood for certain values, notably for its own republican form of government. And today, we have an entirely different kind of established religion, which, while unofficial, is most definitely established.

President Woodrow Wilson was among the first to see this as practically a religious crusade of its own. In April 1917, as he called for a declaration of war against Germany that got the U.S. into World War I, Wilson sounded much like a Christian missionary without the Christianity: “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty.”

A century after the Wilson administration, the U.S. is exporting not democracy, but the Left’s ideology. Our established religion in the United States as we approach the second quarter of the twenty-first century is Leftism’s contemporary sexual obsession and confusion, contempt for masculinity, erasure of femininity, obsession with racism real and imagined (mostly the latter), and all the rest. Today LGBT pride flags are proudly (of course) displayed at U.S. embassies around the world, there are openly “gender fluid” and transgender government officials, and officials at the highest levels, including the president of the United States himself, heap fulsome praise upon Leftist societal and sexual fads.

The Biden regime was establishing a religion for his people in exactly the same way that the Roman Emperor Theodosius was when he made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire in the year 380: as Empire of God: How the Byzantines Saved Civilization details, he was rewarding the orthodox and punishing the heretical and their institutions in ways that would make the heresy less appealing and put it on the road to extinction.

Biden’s leftism isn’t generally recognized as a religion, but it very much is one, as can be seen all over, for instance in the transgender pronoun fantasies and hunt for heretics who dare to “misgender” a particular fantasist, and the fervor with which supporters of abortion vowed to fight against all restrictions to the practice after Roe v. Wade was overturned. But since this secular ideology is not understood to be a religion, it is not seen as an established creed in violation of the First Amendment, as it would be in a sane polity. If it were, then the solution to it would also be found in the First Amendment, in the prohibition of such an establishment, and provisions such as school lunch money being withheld from schools that refused to indulge insane gender faddism would be seen as establishing a religion and accordingly ended.

America today, however, is a long way from being a sane polity.

Said a mouthful there, Robert. Even though America’s Greatest President, Calvin Coolidge, labored mightily to undo them, with fair success, so many of the ills which still plague us today can be traced directly back to America’s Most Evil President, the thoroughly loathsome Woodrow Wilson (the rest of the major ones are on FDR). All of which presents us with a kinda-sorta chicken-or-egg conundrum: did Progressivism drive the polity insane? Or did a not-sane polity drive America That Was into the arms of Progressivism? Either way, t’ain’t funny, McGee.

2
2

It’s a wonderful movie

Posted on      by     

I’ve written more than once here about what I consider to be hands-down the greatest Christmas flick of them all, and probably ran this clip from it at some point also.

Jimmy Stewart, of course, has long been hailed as one of the finest actors ever, and rightly so. As it happens, though, that scene may well not have been one hundred-percent acting.

The movie was Capra’s idea, and he knew from the start that he wanted Stewart to play the iconic role of George Bailey. But Stewart, an Army Air Corps squadron commander who was grounded by PTSD after 20 combat missions over Europe in a B-24, wanted to do a comedy.

Stewart told reporters when he returned to Hollywood that the world had seen enough death and misery, and when Capra approached him with the story of a family man nearly driven to suicide, he balked and left the meeting.

But Stewart, who at the time was sharing an apartment with fellow veteran Henry Fonda, wasn’t getting any other offers. He eventually agreed to take the role.

After learning the history behind the film, I watched it again with new eyes — and I saw Stewart battling his personal demons in every scene.

I saw his heart and his head at war as he chose the woman he loved over his lifelong desire to leave Bedford Falls.

Army veteran Alex Plitsas told the Daily Caller that it was only after returning from Iraq that he truly understood Stewart’s performance in “It’s a Wonderful Life.”

“I was able to understand the movie and [Stewart’s] performance in particular much better after coming home from Iraq. It’s as much of a war film as ‘Die Hard’ is a Christmas movie,” Plitsas said, adding, “Jimmy Stewart’s performance in ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ during the throes of Post Traumatic Stress (PTS) is recognizable to many veterans. PTS was referred to as “shell shock” back then and wasn’t really spoken about nor was there good treatment available. Stewart appeared to use acting as therapy to get through it, and it’s visible in his performance.”

The above article first appeared back in 2020; I seem to recall doing a post on it then, but didn’t bother checking to confirm. It’s well worth a rerun anyhoo, methinks.

2
2

Yes, Virginia, there IS a Santa Claus

Posted on      by     

NOTE: Earlier yesterday the blog started behaving strangely, so I dashed off an email to my old friends at Hosting Matters to inquire what the Sam Hill might be going on. In the course of so doing, I veered off on another of my Standard Issue, Mark 1-Mod 0 digressions which, on reflection and with some revising, I decided might be worth bringing out front here as a post. YMMV on that, as always. Be aware that what follows may offend hardcore fundamentalist Christians; this one’s about Santa Claus, not the birth of our Lord and Savior. I think Christmas is plenty big enough to easily accomodate both Jesus and Santa without undue stress or strain. It isn’t a competition, or at least it needn’t be. But again, YMMV.

Still can’t believe my ex told our daughter there was no Santa Claus at a very early age, because, and I quote, “I’m not gonna lie to her.” My recently-deceased mother in law did the same with my late wife Christiana, saying she didn’t want her child growing up all resentful and unable to ever trust her mom again from the trauma of having been “lied to” about Santa as a little kid.

I never understood the killjoy thinking which underpins that notion, and hope I never will. These are both extraordinarily intelligent people we’re talking about here, one of whom can casually converse in Ancient Greek, the other of whom was fluent in seven (7) languages. So one would think they’d be capable of grasping a distinction as simple and obvious as this one is.

I mean, there are lies and then there are lies, right? The Santa myth is hardly a “lie,” not in any meaningful sense. It’s a wholesome fable passed on from parents to children not for purposes of harm or malicious deception, but to broaden a sense of imagination and wonder, of there being marvelous possibilities in this wide world which we pitiful humans can neither see nor comprehend.

Well, that, plus it’s a heck of a lot of good, clean fun for everyone involved, be they old, young, or young at heart.

I Believed© as a child myself, and will readily attest that, after I’d figured it all out on my own, far from losing trust in them or feeling betrayed, I actually felt deeply grateful to my mom and dad for making the effort to bring me the magic of the North Pole’s First Citizen every Christmas, for at least the short while it lasted. In fact, even after I’d outgrown my own childhood faith I nonetheless went on insisting to my little brother that Santa was real for a few more years, just to keep that beautiful magic alive in him. Lord knows every innocent child will have to face the cold, hard realities of life quite soon enough, thanks.

To this day, some of my happiest, most cherished memories are of my brother and me dashing off to bed no later than 6 or 7 on Christmas Eve during those precious Santa years, to the barely-suppressed amusement of the grown-up contingent. The two of us would lie there sleepless half the night, now and again whispering urgently to each other: “What was that? Did you hear a noise? Was that reindeer hooves on the roof? Were those sleighbells jingling? Is Santa coming, is he (gasp) HERE?” Now and then one of us would stealthily rise, press his face to the bedroom window, and expectantly peer through the frosted panes for some hint as to what was happening out there. Finally, as the hands of the clock crawled towards midnight, we’d drop off to sleep, those visions of sugar-plums dancing in our heads.

No Santa, eh? That necessarily means:

  • No meticulously-composed letters addressed to him at his North Pole toy-manufactory, with the attached Christmas list
  • No lying on the sitting-room rug poring over the Sears Wish Book, scrawling down item after item from the catalog’s delightfully lavish toy section to include on said list
  • No sitting on Santa’s knee at Woolworth’s, telling him what you most hoped he’d bring for you this year
  • No intellectual discussions with the other neighborhood kids on all the imponderables: whether reindeer really can fly; how was Santa going to fit all those toys onto the sleigh; how could he manage to visit every Good child across the entire planet in a single night, etc etc
  • No anxiously X-ing out each December day on the wall calendar before going to bed, waiting on tenterhooks for the Big Day to at long last dawn

Ahh, but is that all, you ask? Sadly, no; not by a long yard, it ain’t. If those were the only things lost by it, perhaps ruining your kids’ Christmas via murdering their belief in Santa—forever depriving them of those happy childhood memories before they even get to experience the making of them—might be at least arguably comprehensible, if still not entirely forgiveable. The preceding list is nowhere near complete, there’s still lots more losses to be tacked on. To wit:

No setting out the traditional plate of oven-baked cookies and a tall glass of cold milk for good St Nick’s refreshment just before turning in for the night, to find the cookies eaten and the milk-glass empty in the morning—this discovery taken as proof beyond debate of his existence.

No jolting wide-awake at 4AM Christmas morn and sloooowly tiptoeing down the hall to the living room to find out what was under the tree, stifling your happy giggles to the best of your ability every step of the way so’s you didn’t wake up Mom and Dad. Should you unintentionally interrupt their hard-earned slumber despite your most earnest effort not to, your exhausted parents—plumb tuckered from the long night’s labor of retrieving all the presents cached in the attic, inside locked closets, the trunk of the family car, and/or other Secure Undisclosed Locations, next arranging them under the tree according to intended recipient (mine on the right side, Jeff’s on the left in our house)—would gruffly order you back to bed to await what they considered to be “a decent hour.”

THEY consider. Not you. And count on it: you will NOT agree with their views on the matter.

The splendidly trimmed tree, for just this one supreme night of nights, would have been left plugged in (by “Santa,” natch) and twinkling through the hours of darkness, gayly greeting the family upon each one’s arrival in the living room. The multicolored C7 bulbs would shine all through Christmas Day, their soft glow seeming no less bright or in any sense diminished by the daytime sun streaming through the parted curtains.

No establishing the line of demarcation between My Side and Your Side of the tree, before finally just giving up and deciding to share each other’s Santa Claus bounty without rancor or recrimination. No Christmas stockings a-bulge with candy canes, fresh fruit, and incidental stocking-stuffers such as Matchbox cars, kazoos, or harmonicas, either. After all, if there ain’t no Santa Claus then who’s gonna stuff ’em?

No ANY of those fine and wonderful things. The wrapped, labelled boxes that had been sitting under the tree for weeks, the pile steadily growing as the gift-wrapping chores neared completion? They could wait. Who really cares anyway? Those damned boxes always turned out to contain new school clothes or notebooks or pencils or some other equally dull and useless object. No, the unwrapped Santa Claus presents left atop and around the gift-wrapped rectangles were Priority One for us.

And my God, our house didn’t even HAVE a chimney, either—presenting another impenetrable Christmas-morning conundrum for us bewildered kids to ponder and discuss. Had Santa broken in, picked the lock, forced his way in someotherhow like a cat-burglar without anyone detecting the agreeable incursion? Had my dad slipped him a key on the sly after we’d clambered down off Santa’s lap to tear around the store like wild Injuns, whooping, laughing, crashing full-tilt-boogie into the legs of tsk-tsk-ing shoppers in our mad celebration of another Christmas mission well accomplished?

Who really knew? Perhaps, perhaps not. In any event, the doors were all closed and locked, as were the windows. Nothing seemed to be amiss, nothing at all, yet Santa had contrived to enter our small-town sanctum sanctorum nonetheless. Phillip Marlow himself would find it tough sledding indeed to unravel such a tangled skein of mystery, as would the Continental Op, the redoubtable Sam Spade, and Nick and Nora Charles. The overrated Frog Hercule Poirot? Gedouddahere, you make me laugh.

My poor kid was pre-emptively robbed of the anticipation, wonderment, and enduring pleasure the Santa Claus myth creates in the memory of every child not so thoughtlessly denied them. Daddy’s opinion on the topic at hand was neither solicited nor welcome. Kinda sucks, if you ask me. In fact, it seems downright cruel to cheat a young ‘un in such a fashion, solely for the gratification of one’s own sanctimony, ego, and cynical self-regard.

“Honesty”? “Truth”? “Not gonna lie”? Yeh, yeh, yeh; pull the other one, it has a bell on it.

But hey, maybe that’s just me, I do admit. That admission made, though, in my view answering what we might call the Santa Question© in the peremptory, knee-jerk negative amounts to projecting an insipid, half-baked ethical imperative onto an issue possessed of no ethical involvement whatsoever, the injection of a fallacious assumption of ill intent (or, at best, unsophisticated, outdated habits of mind, however well-meaning they may be) into a stillborn “debate” when no such intent actually exists. All this nonsense, mind, predicated on a wholly hypothetical claim of psycho-emotional damage—a spurious claim for which there is not the thinnest, flimsiest shred of documentary evidence to support it.

They’re making mountains out of molehills, and I say it’s the bunk. The opening ‘graphs of the NY Sun’s timeless editorial response to young Virginia O’Hanlon’s 1897 (!!!) letter express the sentiment quite well, I think.

VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.

Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

There, put THAT in your little pipe and smoke it, whydon’tcha. If you haven’t read the whole story before—which I find incredible, frankly—there’ll never be a better time than now to rectify that sad lapse in your edumacation.

No Santa Claus? Forbid it, Almighty God! There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

1

CF Archives

Categories

Comments policy

NOTE: In order to comment, you must be registered and approved as a CF user. Since so many user-registrations are attempted by spam-bots for their own nefarious purposes, YOUR REGISTRATION MAY BE ERRONEOUSLY DENIED.

If you are in fact a legit hooman bean desirous of registering yourself a CF user name so as to be able to comment only to find yourself caught up as collateral damage in one of my irregularly (un)scheduled sweeps for hinky registration attempts, please shoot me a kite at the email addy over in the right sidebar and let me know so’s I can get ya fixed up manually.

ALSO NOTE: You MUST use a valid, legit email address in order to successfully register, the new anti-spam software I installed last night requires it. My thanks to Barry for all his help sorting this mess out last night.

Comments appear entirely at the whim of the guy who pays the bills for this site and may be deleted, ridiculed, maliciously edited for purposes of mockery, or otherwise pissed over as he in his capricious fancy sees fit. The CF comments section is pretty free-form and rough and tumble; tolerance level for rowdiness and misbehavior is fairly high here, but is NOT without limit.

Management is under no obligation whatever to allow the comments section to be taken over and ruined by trolls, Leftists, and/or other oxygen thieves, and will take any measures deemed necessary to prevent such. Conduct yourself with the merest modicum of decorum, courtesy, and respect and you'll be fine. Pick pointless squabbles with other commenters, fling provocative personal insults, issue threats, or annoy the host (me) and...you won't.

Should you find yourself sanctioned after running afoul of the CF comments policy as stated and feel you have been wronged, please download and complete the Butthurt Report form below in quadruplicate; retain one copy for your personal records and send the others to the email address posted in the right sidebar.

Please refrain from whining, sniveling, and/or bursting into tears and waving your chubby fists around in frustrated rage, lest you suffer an aneurysm or stroke unnecessarily. Your completed form will be reviewed and your complaint addressed whenever management feels like getting around to it. Thank you.

CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

Subscribe to CF!

Support options

Shameless begging

If you enjoy the site, please consider donating:

Correspondence

Email addy: mike-at-this-url dot etc

All e-mails assumed to be legitimate fodder for publication, scorn, ridicule, or other public mockery unless specified as private by the sender

Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

Fuck you

Kill one for mommy today! Click to embiggen

Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
—Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
—Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
—John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
—Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
—Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
—Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
—David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
—John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
—Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
—Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
—Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
—NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
—Bill Whittle

Best of the best

Finest hosting service

Image swiped from The Last Refuge

2016 Fabulous 50 Blog Awards

RSS feed

RSS - entries - Entries
RSS - entries - Comments

Boycott the New York Times -- Read the Real News at Larwyn's Linx

Copyright © 2026