Leftward ho! – Page 13

On principles and motivations

Posted on September 12, 2021September 13, 2021 by Mike

When you know the Who, the What, and the How, all that remains to suss out is the Why. Which, when it’s government under discussion, is never all that tough to do.

The question is on every thinking person’s minds – though the answer varies. What is this all about?

The Push for the Jab?

The most benign explanation is that they – the pharmaceutical cartels that wield shocking influence over the government – are determined to use the government they bought and paid for to get a return on their investment, via enshrining mandatory and universal forced-medicine. People are fools if they believe that this is a one-time thing.

I have been screaming into the wind for decades about the importance of understanding precedents. If they can make you do A then they can make you do A1. So, if it becomes a requirement that you roll up your sleeve for this Jab, you will be required to roll up your sleeve for future Jabs – and perhaps much more than just Jabs.

Which is exactly what I was screaming into the void about right from the “two weeks to flatten the curve” phase of the even-now-escalating Fauxvid scam: You do not, MUST NOT EVER willingly lay Principle on the altar of Safety, no matter what cause, what purported emergency, is put forth as justification. Period, full stop, end of story. Historically speaking, the purpose of an altar is sacrifice. Allow yourself to be gulled into forgetting that—even once, even momentarily—and whatever dear, imperiled thing placed thereupon will almost certainly be lost to you, for all time.

And, well, here we all are.

If, after all, the precedent is established that you must submit to a medical procedure because you might otherwise get sick and might otherwise get others sick, then other medical procedures will be similarly required – and justified on he same basis. If the precedent is accepted, there is no way to argue against such an expansion – the principle of the thing having been conceded.

It is like the income tax, or the property tax on your home or any other tax. If the principle is accepted that you “owe” the government a penny because the government decrees you “owe” it a penny, what is to prevent it from decreeing you “owe” it a dollar? If the precedent is allowed to stand that the government can just take your penny, there is no principled objection to it taking more.

There may well be more to it than just money – and the control it will enable over the lives of every American who is compelled to work in order to earn his daily bread. We certainly know it is not about our “health,” a fatuity that would be funny were it not for the tens of thousands of deaths and serious, life-altering Adverse Events (as these are styled) that are undeniably associated with the Jab. It is ridiculous – it is evil – to demand that people who are perfectly healthy and whose health is in little, if any, serious jeopardy from a sickness that does not kill 99.8-something percent of the healthy population take the risk of being Jabbed.

Imagine the government ordering people to buy and drive a car that has racked up a body count even 1 percent of the total reported to VAERS – the Vaccine Adverse Reporting System. Well, take that back. The government has effectively ordered people to buy and drive electric cars – which present a known and inherent risk of fire, due to the nature of high-capacity electric car batteries and the known fire risk associated with “fast” charging them. The government has also turned a blind eye to the known risk of defective air bags, which it recalled but which it also refused to allow to be disabled until they could be replaced.

The reason for that being the precedent that would be set, if it did allow it. The government cannot admit error anymore than Dracula can sunbathe. It would be to concede non-omniscience. That it does not always know best. That its decisions sometimes result in…adverse effects.

Let’s just make it another of Mike’s Iron Laws: Place not your trust in government. For it is not reason; it is not eloquence; it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant, and a fearful master; never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action.

I don’t give a damn whether Washington said those last lines or not, they’re still true, and ought always to be kept foremost in mind.

Lessons learned

Posted on September 11, 2021September 11, 2021 by Mike

All of them harsh, ugly, unsettling ones.

Some days back a friend asked me what we have learned twenty years after 9/11. I sent these answers:

1) That our enemies have taken our measure, and we never took theirs. Bin Laden’s strategic predictions vis a vis Afghanistan and the United States have been vindicated: 9/11 was for the other side a massive, generational strategic success.

2) That the entire American governing apparatus is incapable of real strategic thought.

3) That the federal government of the United States is much more inventive, determined, and relentless in curbing its own citizenry than it is in curbing those who would slaughter that citizenry.

4) That the federal government of the United States will allow foreign-power interests — specifically Saudi and Pakistani — to override and eclipse the just interests of the American citizenry.

5) The preceding item exists, of course, because we are ruled by an elite with much stronger social ties to other elites than to the people of our republic.

6) That our generational response to 9/11 guarantees that 9/11 will happen again and again.

This twentieth anniversary is even more depressing and cruel than they usually are. We didn’t suffer as a lot of Americans did that day — my wife made it out of Lower Manhattan alive, for one thing — but because we are Americans, we suffered. Our leadership class was utterly incompetent to the moment, and remained so for the succeeding generation. Today we have inflicted upon us the twin bookends of blundering who mark the two-decade span. In Pennsylvania, President George W. Bush speaks: the man who cared more for Saudis than Americans while the fires still burned, who abandoned the hunt for the immediate perpetrator mere weeks after the massacre, and who cynically leveraged the moment to pursue his own disastrous projects. In Manhattan, President Joe Biden speaks: the lone figure of significance who opposed the raid to get Osama Bin Laden, and the man who presided over the shameful humiliation of defeat in Afghanistan.
A healthy and virtuous republican citizenry would shun them, and erase their names from the record.

Some questions arise. Now that we’ve decided it’s fine for Al Qaeda and the Taliban to have a country of their own again, can we at least abolish the TSA? Now that we’ve given Al Qaeda and the Taliban a stupendous cache of arms and ammunition, can we eliminate all federal gun-control law? Now that we’ve decided we have a community of interest with the Taliban — including its Al Qaeda elements — can we release everyone jailed on account of January 6th?

Hey, just asking. It hardly seems unreasonable for Americans to ask Washington, D.C., for treatment as generous as Washington, D.C., accords the terrorist movements who slaughtered thousands of us in our own streets.

Not gonna happen, which, as his bitter sarcasm indicates, the author well knows already. Things having worked out so swimmingly for our oppressors, with authoritarian tyranny so comfortably settled in and secure on American shoulders, it’s obvious our masters learned a few useful lessons themselves. Out of all of them, the rewards gained from the mutually-reinforcing virtues of patience and single-mindedness would have to be near the top of the list.

Getting schooled updated! More damning and damaging are the lessons we DIDN’T learn.

America has not learned the lessons of 9/11. The lessons were lost as they were being learned.

Foreign pressure on political leaders in Washington, intellectual laziness or dishonesty in the intelligence community, and political correctness-turned-wokeness made it so.

American society repeated those unlearned lessons as the global pandemic spread from China.

The unlearned lesson goes like this: Trust your instincts about who was responsible for crimes perpetrated against you. Ask tough questions to find out who was behind them, and ruthlessly hold those top enablers accountable. Suspect those who deny the obvious and who discourage honest inquiry. Resist those who abuse their authority and erode constitutional rights in a misguided quest for “security” and “safety.” If you see something, say something loudly and ceaselessly.

In both man-made cataclysms, powerful foreign interests imposed extraordinary pressure to prevent the American public from demanding that the obvious funders and state sponsors be held accountable.

This is not a partisan issue.

The George W. Bush Administration actively discouraged its political allies at home from asking questions about the then-Saudi regime’s state and family-sponsorship of jihadist movements. It refused to entertain questions about involvement of the jihadist regime of Qatar.

For certain, al-Qaeda did not represent the beliefs of many of the world’s Muslims and Islamic clerics and scholars.

Oh? Name three. Go ahead, I’ll wait.

But it absolutely reflected the beliefs of elements of the Saudi regime of the time, and the entire Qatar regime then as now, to say nothing of the international Muslim Brotherhood that they funded.

In a goodwill bid toward Muslim people everywhere, Bush gave his “religion of peace” speech at the Islamic Center in Washington, D.C. All well and good. And all proper wartime public diplomacy.

And all a lie, every damned word of it. It was the opening class in Unlearned Lessons 101, a course of instruciton for which the syllabus might easily read: Never go to war against an enemy you’re forbidden to call by his rightful name.

So here we are, 20 years after the jihadist terrorist attacks that redefined our country, triggered a global techno-security system with endless mission creep, handing over our Afghanistan sacrifices to the Taliban and Xi Jinping.

We failed to learn the lessons necessary for victory. And as we don our toylike masks and fight one another over whether or not to take experimental vaccines, and enter everybody into an ever-growing global database, we fail yet again to understand those who attacked us all.

Even though, in our inner consciences, we understand very well.

Well, some of us anyway. As prep for our final exams, we will discover how many of us do, and whether that number will be high enough for a passing grade.

To Sefton

Posted on September 7, 2021September 7, 2021 by Mike

So my very first blog-stop every day, after I’ve painfully hauled my creaky, clanky old carcass out of bed, grabbed a cuppa Joe, and lit the first smoke of the day, is always JJ Sefton’s reliably-excellent Morning Report over at the ol’ AoSHQ. As y’all no doubt know, last Thursday I did a post (“Time to wise up, dont’cha think?“) gingerly (well, for me) taking Sefton to task for this passage in that day’s edition of the MR:

Emphasis mine, because with all due respect to the author, RUFKM? We’re going to play by rules which the other side not only never does but now never needs to because the game, the stadium and the entire league has been wiped out?! Please. Let’s stop pretending. The thugs and terrorist goons of Antifa and BLM are already assaulting us in the streets while the crooked cops, DAs and judges are throwing us into political prisons just for daring to show up in public. But, that said, I think it’s crucial to still show up and vote, not so much being confident that Dao-Min Yen can’t steal the election, but that in the likely event that that happens it will just underscore the fact that America is no more and that we are being held hostage, in many ways just like the hundreds or thousands of Americans left behind in Afghanistan.

I registered my (frankly niggling) disagreement with JJ here with as much caution and reserve as I could muster—neither of those things being what anybody would call my long suit, since I never have had a whole hell of a lot of ’em to begin with—and did so with great reluctance and trepidation. I’ve been a tremendous fan of Sefton’s skillful, astute blogging since before he even came on board at the ol’ Ace Place. JJ is a damned fine writer, and in my opinion has made a valuable contribution at AoSHQ since taking up the post there. The last thing in the world I’d ever want to do would be to antagonize him, slight or insult him, or hurt him personally in any way. As I said in the post: he’s one of Our Guys, and a highly admirable and valuable one at that, one of the most indispensible players on Team Liberty’s first-string squad of heartbreakers and lifetakers.

With that mind, I published the Thursday post with no slight trepidation, although in truth I also didn’t really think it too likely that JJ would ever even see the damned thing. For one thing, there’s never yet been a link to CF from the HQ to my knowledge; honestly, I have no idea if Ace or any of the cobs over there even look in on this site at all. Which, y’know, that’s perfectly okay, I got no gripe with ’em for it. Although I rely a good bit on the HQ as a blog-fodder source, I’ve had no more than a brief and perfectly cordial email exchange or two with Ace over the years, and no such correspondence with any of the cobs. Which, too, is perfectly okay. They do their thing, I do mine. I like their work, I respect them, I check their site more than once a day. We have a great many beliefs and opinions in common, but not all of them. That’s as it should be, too. Anyone who finds himself in one hundred percent, across-the-board agreement with someone else is probably crazy as a shithouse rat, a certified headcase.

The folks over there have made AoSHQ a genuine blogosphere juggernaut, one of the biggest of the Bigs, by dint of a lot of what Heinlein called “skull sweat,” dedication, and effort. Having been on this beat myself for twenty years now almost to the very day, I know full well how much work it is, what it requires of the person doing it. Trust me, this blogging gig takes a lot more out of a fella than most who haven’t tried it probably realize— it’s way more time- and labor-intensive, more just plain exhausting, than you might think. The people at AoSHQ didn’t rise to their current lofty position by either coincidence or dumb luck, I assure you.

So in light of all of the above, imagine my surprise to see this earlier today:

Good morning, kids. Tuesday and it’s back to work and school after the long Labor Day weekend. Or at least it would be if we were living in normal times. But this is the “new normal” where we are through a glass and darkly. I don’t usually respond to criticism but in this instance I feel it will help make my point about the state of play and what it means for all of us. Mike over at Cold Fury was a bit irked with my observations on elections in a post-2020 world:

I do hate to look as if I’m jumping all over JJ here; I have tremendous respect for him, and always enjoy his posts. Thankfully, after the above-noted momentary swerve into the “Vote HARDERER!TM” ditch, he righted himself and got back on track again with those closing ‘graphs. But I declare, if I see one more of Our Guys (and Sefton surely is that) so much as bring up American “elections” again as if they still mattered as anything other than pure theater, I may just start rending my garments, tearing out what hair I have left, and swallowing my tongue over it.

It’s a fair point, because I too have on more than one occasion called out pundits, respected and otherwise, who write the most perceptive essays on where we’re at yet shit all over them in the end with exhortations to organize and/or “Vote HARDERER.” In my own defense I will chalk it up to not adequately articulating and organizing my thoughts insofar as my perception of things, so with that let me see if I can get it right. As I said, through a glass and darkly. It’s some sort of alternate reality where everything appears to function as before but it’s all wrong. Terribly wrong. For me that happened 20 years ago this week. Shock, numbness, and denial. After that comes acceptance and G-d help me if I ever feel that because I’ll have to stick my head in an oven. Assuming we haven’t banned natural gas by then.

A perfect response, in my opinion, adroitly and handsomely done. JJ goes on from there to make another point I’ve been meaning to get around to myself, but haven’t yet found time or opportunity for it:

Some people, and absolutely justifiably so, are calling for the impeachment and removal from office of Joe Biden.

The Afghanistan disaster has surely taken out what little fetid wind was left in the sails of Nancy Pelosi’s Trump-hate, January 6 committee. Instead of a Monrovian “era of good feelings,” America is having and executing a time of increasing unease over bad policy failings in every important field, ostensibly presided over by an opinionated but incoherent man approaching the last extremity of cognition adequate to hold such a great office. It cannot go on like this and it won’t.

Joe Biden is not up to the job. Barring a miracle (and they do occur sometimes), he will not go on for three-and-a-half years. The powers that be in the Democratic Party appear already to be trying to shuffle the vice president out of the deck and bring in someone who might be able to hold the commanding heights of American government through what is building up to be a broad consensus for radical changes of personnel and policy.

Aside from his blind worship of FDR which has rendered more than a few otherwise cogent essays unreadable, I really like and respect Conrad Black. But here too, the “miracle” he’s relying on is not Biden lasting until 2024, but of a leopard changing its spots. Joe Biden is merely the proverbial deck chair on the Titanic. The entire Democrat Party, and sad to say most of the GOP, are at best incompetent grifters and at worst anti-American ideologues. Even if you got rid of both parties we’re still left with the Leviathan bureaucracy – including our military – that is 100% Marxist/socialist and a seriously corrupted judiciary which is just as bad. And that’s just government. The same rot has infected our schools, private sector and even our houses of worship. I am in total agreement that some sort of miracle is required at this point. But replacing Biden and even Harris along with him, is not it.

Black, like so many people, is still under the illusion that America functions under regular order, with the rules, conventions and norms associated with them respected and followed. Canadian or not, the fact that he and so many others cannot or will not see that the USA as of last January 6th has been overthrown is troubling to say the least. Troubling but understandable. It’s human nature to not want to face that horrible, undeniable truth. Maybe that’s why I dithered or sent mixed signals about voting.

Ironically enough, I’m smack in the middle of work on a post saying almost exactly the same thing. Mine will undoubtedly be a lot wordier than his, with wild stream-of-consciousness digressions, overlooked typos, and miscellaneous other grammatical, syntatical, conceptual, and structural atrocities scattered throughout. Hey, you get what you pay for, people. Now, to the thrilling conclusion:

But there’s no denying that the enemy is doing all it can to consolidate power, control elections, flood the country with foreigners (now including unvetted Afghanis in the thousands), and continue to use a phony health “crisis” as a means to eviscerate whatever shred of the Constitution still existing. Did I mention sick a feral law enforcement and intelligence apparatus on anyone who dares object, soon to be aided and abetted by a military that can’t fight the PLA or the Taliban but has its weapons trained on the climate and “insurrectionists” but mostly average G-d fearing Americans.

So, what do we do? If you vote, they’ll steal it or otherwise create some other pretext to cancel the elections to avoid being ousted, Dao-Min Yen notwithstanding. If we don’t vote, they win automatically and declare a mandate (which is what they do win, lose or draw anyway). Do we take to the streets peacefully? That risks being arrested for insurrection. Do we do nothing? I wish I knew what to tell you. We are out of time. Either there is a mass movement of civil disobedience where people really do have to risk everything here and now or else it’s over over here. And there for 500 years as the Pox ChiCom-ica replaces the Pax Americana.

I’ve never felt so helpless, useless and hopeless in my entire life. I’m just sick and tired. Maybe I just need to eat something.

Fret not, my friend. The way things are going, NOT feeling the way you do would be something to worry about. Your reaction, though certainly discomfiting and unpleasant, is the only sane, appropriate option for any American whose moral compass and integrity remain intact and functional. The problem here ain’t with you. It’s with them—with what they’ve done, and continue to get away with doing. It’s a bona fide litany of outrage and evil so excessive, so brazen, so mind-bendingly perverse that it might make even Lucifer himself blanche and recoil in disgust. As a decent and honorable man yourself, if you weren’t positively choking from despair, gloom, and incandescent rage over the whole sordid mess, it would be an indication that there’s something seriously, seriously wrong with you.

A new “ism”

Posted on September 4, 2021September 4, 2021 by Mike

Same as the old “ism.”

The Goal of Covidism is Communism
Most of us have heard the phrase: “The goal of socialism is communism”. Perhaps, at its core, the statement is a reference to creeping incrementalism, or, stated another way: Give Marxism an inch and it takes a mile.

Just like Covidism: it was given an inch and it took a mile. In only eighteen months America advanced, incrementally, from Flatten the Curve® and lockdowns to mandatory vaccinations: All because of a virus that mostly endangers the elderly and those with serious health concerns.

Don’t be surprised if another false flag were to occur the next few days – or around September 11, 2021, the twentieth anniversary of 911.

Believe it or not, such an event would further the cause of Covidism. Yes, Covidism.

At the start of the “pandemic”, on April Fool’s Day 2020, I posted an article entitled “In the New Age of Deception, Coronavirus has Hastened the Old Collectivism” whereupon the following observations were made:

The COVID-19 outbreak has proven to be a perfect coup de grace on America, and in ways we’re only beginning to realize. It has caused We the People to turn on each other under the guise of caring for one another.Or, Essentialism, twisted from the words of collectivist revolutionary Karl Marx (1814 – 1883): From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.

Indeed, Covidism is the New Marxism as the natural rights of Americans have been subsumed by The Collective. Covidism has also decimated the American middle class and small businesses while the billionaire oligarchy, and multinational corporations, have further consolidated power and centralized supply chains around the globe.

Politically, under Covidism, a quiet revolution occurred on November 3, 2020 when a handful of Democrat Party-controlled precincts in a few swing states, altered the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. It marked the beginning of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset”. Since then, Covid vaccine mandates have been implemented throughout the U.S. government, military, and Covid-subsidized health systems – as “private” corporations have forced jabs for jobs policies upon employees.

The social architects behind Covid are, in fact, the central party planners of Covidism. Correspondingly, modern transnational corporations have become de facto collectivist entities fused together by big government, financial corruption, and globalism.

Big Government, statism, fascism, Big Business, corporatism, or corrupt and coercive centralization by any other name: when staring down ostracism, harassment, potential unemployment, homelessness, starvation, incarceration, and, ultimately, death…what’s the difference?

Not much that I can see. But ain’t that always the way with these Leftards: the name is always changing, but it remains the same old game.

Dead things

Posted on September 1, 2021September 1, 2021 by Mike

Steyn on going with the flow.

G K Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man “about the direction in which the world is going. People were so certain about the direction that they differed only about the pace”. But America’s politics barely musters that profound a conflict: AOC wants radical judges to overturn the remnants of the constitutional order; Lindsey Graham votes to confirm them all anyway. It’s not an argument about the pace, only one’s publicly stated enthusiasm for it.

As to their certainty about “the direction” we’re headed, Chesterton remarks a paragraph or two later:

A dead thing can go with the stream, but only a living thing can go against it.

There are a lot of “dead things” going with the stream. The United States military is utterly dead, at least in terms of being a force of influence in the world for anyone other than German supermarket managers dependent on the local base’s patronage. Thoroughly Modern Milley goes with the flow because he’s all ribbons and no chest. Pentagon press releases read like Teen Beat in the Seventies. Last Wednesday, as the chaos at the gates of Hamid Karzai International was beamed around the world, the United States Army stayed on message:

V Corps Hosts ‘Don’t Date A Jerk’ Workshop

FORT KNOX, Kentucky — V Corps Soldiers took the opportunity to enrich their personal lives during the chaplain-led single Soldiers Strong Bonds retreat in Mason, Ohio, Aug. 20-23.

The retreat, themed “How to Avoid Falling in Love with a Jerk,” taught Soldiers relationship enhancement with a focus on the importance of picking a future partner that leads to a healthy, sustainable relationship.

The United States has picked the Taliban as its “future partner”. Are you really going to take relationship lessons from Milley & Co?

The following day, as near two hundred poor souls were blown to smithereens, the Pentagon’s irredeemably oblivious wankers were Tweeting up a storm about “Women’s Equality Day”, even as the women they abandoned are being fitted for their Sharia body-bags.

I saw on Twitter some veterans objecting to Tucker Carlson’s ongoing mockery of a military that boasts of new flight suits for pregnant fighter pilots: Yeah, right, they scoffed at Tucker, let us know when you’ve been through boot camp. The only point of boot camp is to assist in the winning of wars. If you can’t win a war, boot camp is bollocks: it does not fulfill its purpose. How can you be so tone-deaf, so self-unaware that you don’t realize that it’s not just some Faux News blowhard but near the entirety of the planet that’s laughing at you? You’ve just given the guys who pulled off 9/11 a victory bonus of 22,174 humvees to ride around in, and you’re so bloody out of it you want to talk about boot camp? Every veteran should be joining that poor shmuck who got fired the other day and demanding mass resignations at the Pentagon. And, if you’re not, carry on with the boot-camp braggadocio for the next seven decades of unwon wars, and see what things are like by then. The US military needs to be much smaller, leaner, meaner, and way savvier about the world.

I find most of the US news coverage of what’s happening somewhat narrow: on the right, it’s all about leaving no American behind; on the left, it’s about leaving none of the 4.7 million (at the time of writing) Afghan interpreters behind. Everywhere else, it’s about a world leaving America behind.

But so what? Most Americans have little appetite for the tedious chores of global hegemon; they’re already shrugging off Afghanistan for the exciting victories closer to home: Harvard’s new “chaplain” is an atheist; DC’s most elite private schools have decided that “physics classes will include discussions of social justice such as kneeling during the national anthem”; in California, high-schoolers now place their hands on their hearts before the LGBTQWERTY flag and teacher Kristin Pitzen declares, “I pledge allegiance to the queers.” There is nothing progressive or edgy or groovy about these weary provocations: American education is merely another dead thing, inert and decayed and drifting with the stream. The contempt in which it is held by Xi and Macron alike is entirely deserved.

Out there, in towns you’ve never heard of, among people you’ve never heard of, there is still life in America, but to survive they will have to give up reflex veneration for institutions that despise them. The urgent objective is to throw off this awful diseased albatross of a self-enriching know-nothing Sino-suck-up elite whose chosen frontman’s decrepitude was designed to teach voters that electoral politics is entirely irrelevant as a mechanism of change. Any meaningful course correction will not come from McConnell and McCarthy: You have to shift the direction, and the dead thing of Conservatism Inc will drift along with the flow.

To the rest of the planet, the last fortnight has made the legendary “moderate” a too perfect embodiment of the superpower as rotting cadaver. Oh, but the corpse knows who his enemies are: After British cabinet ministers were quoted in the Washington press as calling Biden “senile” and “doolally”, the Telegraph reports that Joe is bent on revenge.

Yeah, sure, whatever…

The world is moving on.

Our sole consolation is that all our precious, mollycoddled white-shitlibs here at home, Mr and MX Karen and Ken Pissypants, are really not going to enjoy where it’s going.

Totalitarianism is NOW

Posted on August 31, 2021August 31, 2021 by Mike

It’s no longer coming; it’s here.

I say that’s the direction we’re going because everybody seems to have a slightly different definition of what totalitarianism encompasses and very few people would say that we are actually living in a totalitarian society right now.

After all, this is “the land of the free.” This is “the freest country on earth.” Totalitarian? Hey, we fought those guys — and we won!

But the truth is we are actually living in a totalitarian society right now. And we’d better recognize that so we can deal with reality.

Is it as fully developed as Nazi Germany, Stalin’s Soviet Union, or North Korea’s socialist paradise? Of course not. But do you have to wait for the day-long bread lines or the boxcars full of doomed Deplorables to recognize the nature of a thing? Most people probably will wait — until it’s too late. But Western society — led by the Five Eyes countries of the U.S., Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand, and trailed faithfully by most of Europe — has already gone totalitarian with dizzying speed.

Totalitarianism is not “down the road.” It’s not merely in politicians’ dreams. It’s not merely something one administration wants that can be undone by v*ting in a different bunch of liars, thieves, con artists, and slave-masters. It’s not merely a temporary condition that will be lifted once the current crisis (whichever current crisis is being used as the excuse) has abated. It’s here. It’s the new nature of our society and the everyday practice of our ruling class.

Tons and tons more I could excerpt, but I’ll just say it’s the esteemed, estimable, and in fact gifted Claire Wolf’s latest two-part opus, so I trust you’ll all click on over to read the whole thing. There is one more thing I just have to excerpt, however. Claire helpfully provides a quite copious list of what she defines as “bullet points for totalitarianism,” by way of laying out the warning signs. She opens with these, then continues on from there:

Strong central rule by a single interconnected cadre or class

An elite corps of managerial “experts” attemping to shape society

Extensive surveillance networks, both directly run by government and consisting of volunteers eager to report on neighbors, family members, co-workers, and strangers

An obsession with keeping the elite’s own secrets while taking away everyone else’s privacy

Sweeping away of legal, social, religious, and political traditions

Iron control over the economy; government either owns the major means of production is in clubby collaboration with those who do

Control over the means of communication; constant barrage of propaganda

Censorship of any dissenting views, even when such views are based on facts

Increasing misery for the people it claims to represent

Police using arbitrary violence and terror as a control tactic

The law is whatever those in charge say it is

Tragically laughable elections (if any) with unashamedly absurd outcomes

All dissent is branded evil and harshly punished

Sound familiar? Because anyone of even modest intellectual means would have to find these confirmations of our current status absolutely marrow-freezing, seems to me.

I swear, I’m flattered and honored damned near speechless at this humble l’il websty’s inclusion on her blogroll page. No idea how that might’ve happened, but my grateful thanks to you for it, Claire.

First admission, more to come

Posted on August 28, 2021August 29, 2021 by Mike

Screw it all, I’m just gonna say it: I told ya so. Right from the start, I did.

AUSTRALIA- NSW Gladys Berejiklian announces there is no return to normal life.

Even if there are no COVID cases and 80% of the population are vaccinated, social distancing and restrictions will remain for good.

Total state control. Always#COVID19 #covidnsw #NoVaccinePassports pic.twitter.com/ZoHSNCiVAR

— Bernie's Tweets (@BernieSpofforth) August 23, 2021

Your move, Aussies. The whole world’s watching.

Coming soon, to an Occupied nation very near you.

(Via surakblog)

The truth gets loose

Posted on August 19, 2021August 19, 2021 by Mike

Look, over there! A SQUIRREL!

25,687,041 Total population of Australia as of 30th June, 2020

COVID & VACCINE STATS AS OF AUGUST 18th FROM GOVERNMENT SOURCES:
40,774 total Covid cases 970 total Covid deaths
10,195,842 individuals with at least one dose of vaccine.
ADVERSE REACTION REPORTING AS OF AUGUST 4th

28,487 Astrazeneca Adverse Reactions 254 Astrazeneca Deaths 16,816 Comirnaty Adverse Reactions 166 Comirnaty Deaths

Vox unpacks it:

The first thing that leaps out is 420 reported vaccine deaths compared to 970 total Covid deaths. Even if we leave out the assumption that adverse reactions are under-reported, assume that all of the Covid deaths are actually OF Covid rather than WITH Covid and are of the unvaccinated, and ignore the natural mutation of the virus to more contagious, less lethal variants, the relative risk factors make it clear that it is riskier for the average Australian to become a vaccine recipient than to remain unvaccinated.

Chance of unvaccinated individual contracting and dying of Covid = one in 26,481

Chance of vaccinated individual dying of an adverse vaccine reaction = one in 24,275

So, even in the most favorable possible case for the vaccines, the average individual’s risk of death is essentially the same. And once you begin factoring in comorbidities, age, the decreased lethality of the Delta variant, the number of vaccinated deaths, the possibility that the patient died of something else while Covid-positive, and the mounting evidence that the ADE scenario is in effect, it is clear that the vaccines pose a greater threat to human life than does the virus.

There’s more, of course. These days, when isn’t there?

Question asked, question answered

Posted on August 13, 2021August 14, 2021 by Mike

Because you’re a bunch of goddamned liars, that’s why.

Why Don’t They Believe Us?
You’re struggling to understand where all this vaccine hesitancy comes from. Let me help you.

Imagine you’re a normal person. The year is 2016. Rightly or wrongly, you believe most of what you see in the media. You believe polls are broadly reflective of public opinion. You believe doctors and scientists are trustworthy and independent. You’re a decent, reasonable person who follows the rules and trusts the authorities.

You are proud to be doing your part. Thanks to you and millions of your fellow citizens, the first wave of the pandemic overwhelms certain hot spots, but it does not devastate the health care system at a national level. While thousands sadly die, you’ve helped to protect those around you.

Imagine your confusion as the same people who spent three months telling you not only that masks don’t work, but that there are several reasons you shouldn’t wear or purchase them, suddenly introduce mask mandates. We’re “following the science,” they tell you. This seems to make little sense, but a pandemic is no time for questions. And who knows, maybe our understanding of the science evolved?

As you cautiously go to the supermarket, you notice that masks have made people less likely to socially distance. You remember reading somewhere that bicycle helmets work similarly: They give the wearer more confidence, and the result is often more accidents and injuries, not fewer. “Silly people,” you say to yourself. “If only they would follow the experts.”

You turn on your TV and learn that shoppers at your local supermarket aren’t the only ones who have been ignoring the rules. Nancy Pelosi arranged for a salon, shutdown by government decree, to open privately for her—then publicly blamed the business owner for violating the lockdown. California Gov. Gavin Newsom is seen eating dinner at one of the most expensive restaurants in America with a large group of unmasked people indoors. In the U.K., Neil Ferguson, the epidemiologist whose projections were used as the basis for lockdowns, appears to have broken his own rules to get some action with his married lover. Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s chief adviser, Dominic Cummings, drove halfway across the country to ensure he had a better place to isolate. The journalists who berate him for this are later found to have attended an unmasked, indoor birthday party in breach of the rules. The lockdowns continue.

The same people who told you Brexit would never happen, that Trump would never win, that when he did win it was because of Russian collusion but also because of racism, that you must follow lockdowns while they don’t, that masks don’t work, that masks do work, that social justice protests during pandemic lockdowns are a form of “health intervention,” that ransacking African American communities in the name of fighting racism is a “mostly peaceful” form of protest, that poor and underserved children locked out of shuttered schools are “still learning,” that Jussie Smollett was a victim of a hate crime, that men are toxic, that there is an infinite number of genders, that COVID couldn’t have come from a lab until maybe it did, that closing borders is racist until maybe it isn’t, that you shouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine, that you must take the vaccine developed during the Trump administration, that Andrew Cuomo is a great leader, that Andrew Cuomo is a granny killer, that the number of COVID deaths is one thing and then another … are the same people telling you now that the vaccine is safe, that you must take it, and that if you don’t, you will be a second-class citizen.

Understand vaccine hesitancy now?

If you ask me, terms like “vaccine hesitancy,” along with our shiny new group-epithets “the vaccine-reluctant” and “vaccine-resistant” are some pretty weak tea. As a totally committed “Vaccine” Refusenik™ my own self, I am proudly, openly, and irreversibly Vaccine Hostile. Unfortunately for the increasingly restive Vaxx Nazis out there, people like me aren’t anywhere near as cowardly, pliable, and just plain stupid as they desperately need us to be, and that’s bound to mean big trouble for ’em before all’s said and done. Which calls for an embed of one of the absolute greatest soliloquys from one of the absolute greatest movies of all time:

Serenity has never been more relevant, or more apropos. Chock of full of rich, buttery goodness as it surely is, it’s truly mind-boggling that the creator of both film and TeeWee series (Firefly, for those poor deprived souls who have been dwelling off-planet for the past couple decades) is in fact a Mark-1, Mod-0 libtard. It Does. Not. Compute. Not for me, it don’t.

More inspirational quotes:

“People don’t like to be meddled with. We tell them what to do, what to think, don’t run, don’t walk. We’re in their homes and in their heads and we haven’t the right. We’re meddlesome.”
HUNTER ANSLEY WRYN – Young River

“Can I make a suggestion that doesn’t involve violence, or is this the wrong crowd for that?”
(during a fight)
NATHAN FILLION – Mal

“- The Operative: I believe in something greater than myself. A better world. A world without sin.
– Mal: So me and mine gotta lay down and die… so you can live in your better world?”
CHIWETEL EJIOFOR – The Operative
NATHAN FILLION – Mal

The Operative: Do you know what your sin is, Mal?
Mal: Ah, hell, I’m a fan of all seven. But right now, I’m gonna have to go with wrath.

Inara Serra: You came to the Training House looking for a fight.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: I came looking for you!
Inara Serra: The war’s over, Mal.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: You tellin’ me that cause you think I don’t know?
Inara Serra: I’ve just seen so many sides of you, I wanna make sure I know who I’m dealing with.
Capt. Malcolm Reynolds: I start fightin’ a war, I guarantee you’ll see somethin’ new. 

To close things out, a few memorable stand-alones from Captain Malcolm Reynolds.

“My days of not taking you seriously are certainly comin’ to a middle.”

“My estimation is that…every man ever got a statue made of him was one kind of a son of a bitch or another.”

Someone ever tries to kill you, you try to kill ’em right back.”

“That sounds like the Alliance. Unite all the planets under one rule so that everybody can be interfered with or ignored equally.”

“Point of interest? Offering to shoot us don’t work so well as an incentive as you might imagine.”

“Half of writing history is hiding the truth.”

Yep, we are all Captain Mal now. Or we’d damned well better learn to be, at least. I don’t mean slow, either.

Lines in the sand

Posted on July 30, 2021July 30, 2021 by Mike

Ramping up the real, the bad, and the scary.

OK
My sourcing is… shall we say… unwilling to say anything that could be ‘identifiable’…The how, where, when, who… all of it is out the window. Can’t say which country I worked with them in. They (and yeah, I’ma use the They/Them/Theirs pronouns in hopes to keep things on the down-low.) They however have already heard rumblings about the ‘vaxport.’ That’s what it’s going to be called theoretically. They have an upcoming vaykay from Ye Olde Jobbage, and were told to make sure the papers were in order before doing any travel. Reason is, the ‘vaxport’ is going to be needed for any travel in, around and through the majority of the Western World. Papers for the fam needed to be gotten and maintained as well. As in “get them (das Papiere) now, as we cannot help you later.”

Essentially, we’re going to see a quick move to “Full Soviet Control” vis-a-vis borders, movement and the ability to travel. The current rumblings of the Delta Bullshit variant? They said this ain’t shit as to what’s coming. According to them, (They’s bosses) there’s a massive spike coming, just in time for the horror-days, and yeah…that’s the term they used “Horror-days” instead of ‘holidays’ when they were supposed to be travelling around and oot and aboot. They (my peep) think it’s because the ‘nominal-normal spike of pneumonia and cold related flus’ are ALL going to be tagged onto the COVID Hump.

Just like they did last year.
‘Cept this time, they’re (not my folk) but “they” for the powers-that-be ain’t gonna play.
They like the power they were granted
They love the control factor
They intend on keeping that control no matter the cost

We, on the other hand?
We Be Fucked

Not if we fuck them first…and harder. Failing that, well—yeah, fucked is probably putting it quite mildly. In any event, Grond crawls on.

The illegitimate president Biden has accepted the role of chief propagandist for mass mandated vaccination. He said today (July 29) that all federal employees and contractors will have to show proof of vaccination or wear masks, use social distancing, and have regular testing.

A number of state governors are also mandating vaccination of state employees, and corporations are requiring it of their employees and some are requiring prospective employees to be vaccinated prior to their job interview.

Danny Meyer, the founder and chairman of Shake Shack just announced that both employees and customers must be vaccinated. No proof of vaccination, no service.

To understand how utterly stupid all are from Danny Meyer to Joe Biden, consider that these tyrannical and strictly illegal mandates are being blamed on the “delta variant” against which health authorities admit the vaccine is ineffectual. What then is the point of the vaccination?

We know from the adverse vaccine effects databases that the US, UK, and EU alone have 3,000,000 adverse vaccine cases and tens of thousands of deaths. Clearly, the vaccine carries high risk. We also know from reports from the UK, Israel and elsewhere that it is the countries with the highest percentage of their populations vaccinated that are having the highest rate of new cases, and the cases are vaccinated people.

There is now abundant evidence that the mRNA injections are creating identical symptoms to those created by the Covid virus—life-treating blood-clotting for example. It is an act of murder to mandate a vaccine that is known to kill people.

To ask the question again, what is the purpose of the vaccination? Is the purpose the “grave harm to female fertility”? Is the purpose the large percentage of the vaccinated population that some experts expect will die from the vaccine’s toxicity? Is the purpose Big Pharma’s profits? Is the purpose to breach the law that requires informed consent for any intervention in one’s body so that authorities can mandate that we be microchipped?

Something is going on that we are not being told.

Sho ’nuff is at that. The worst part is, that ain’t even the worst part. No, the WORST part is, even if they DID deign to tell us anything, it would only be a damned lie anyhow.

Fly Fall from the friendly skies!

Posted on July 21, 2021 by Mike

Man, I sure am getting a lot of mileage lately from that old ad slogan, ain’t I?

It seems like a really bad idea, yet it’s one United Airlines reportedly just bought into – probably for many millions of dollars (the actual sum hasn’t been disclosed). It will “invest” in the development – italics to emphasize the nonexistence at present – of the ES-19, an electric aircraft that exists on the drawing board only. This hypothetical aircraft is being developed by a Swedish company with the cloying name, Heart Aerospace – which summons images of kumba-ya’ing around the campfire in a collective hug.

But will it fly?

Not with me in it, it won’t. Not ever, not one single time.

It is claimed that the ES-19 will have a range of about 250 miles – which is just barely enough to make the short hop from DC Dulles to a regional airport such as Roanoke, in SW Virginia. With very little margin to spare. What happens if the plane needs to circle, as because of traffic or weather?

Maybe it would be a good idea to equip this one with parachutes rather than flotation devices.

People who know airplanes raise other pertinent questions, such as the drain on the electric airplane’s batteries during taxiing from the terminal to the runway, which as anyone who flies commercially knows sometimes takes half an hour or more. All the while, the heat or AC must be running, in addition to the lights and all the plane’s electrical systems. Does the advertised 250 mile range factor these considerations in?

The FAA nominally requires redundancies and margins-of-error for commercial aircraft especially. It is why, for instance, commercial aircraft that fly over the ocean must be able to remain in the air if one or more engines cut out.

What if the batteries cut out?

Which – it bears repeating – it is more likely to because an electric airplane will necessarily be heavier than a jet-powered airplane because of the massive weight of the batteries that will be necessary to drive electric props sufficiently powerful to get it in the air. But the weight of all those batteries will necessarily reduce the amount of time it can remain in the air.

If it smells of unicorn farts, your nose is working.

Astute commenter Baxter raises a glaringly obvious potential-failure-point issue that leaves one totally mystified as to what the everlasting fuck the Supergenii™ skull-sweating over this fever-dream could possibly be thinking—besides MUH GAIA!!!, that is.

Other things to think about: Batteries suck when it gets cold. Forget an electric car in the winter when it’s 20 degrees F. Planes need to fly high where there is less air friction. Think about a plane (summer or winter, doesn’t matter) at 35,000 feet where it’s 65 degrees below zero F. Plane batteries will obviously need to be heated. Where does that heat come from? The batteries, limiting range even more so.

Obviously, as with the Goobermint-decreed transition from ICE cars to useless, unreliable, and unsafe coal-powered ones, the hidden agenda here is to eventually eliminate flying altogether. Except for the Kommissars, natch. They’ll still carry on as before, just without having to sully themselves with any unpleasant physical proximity to us beastly, smelly serfs in the airport cocktail lounge anymore. The vlasti won’t be replacing their in-flight steak or burger with the new bug-beef they’re foisting off on us proles either, you betcher.

Breaking down the breakdown

Posted on July 20, 2021 by Mike

As I’ve said in a different but very much related context: a process, not an event.

How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse
Maintaining the illusion of confidence, permanence and stability serves the interests of those benefiting from the bubbles and those who prefer the safety of the herd, even as the herd thunders toward the precipice.

The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

One such node is the delivery of gasoline and fuels. It’s such an efficient and reliable system that 99.9% of us take it for granted: there will always be plenty of gasoline at every station, the tanks of jet fuel will always be topped off, and so on.

The 0.1% know that this system, once disrupted, would knock over dominoes all through the economy.

Hyper-efficiency and hyper-globalization has reduced the number of producers of essentials to the point that disruptions cannot be overcome with redundant sources. We see this everywhere in the global economy: a handful of plants and companies (sometimes a single source of essential components) process or manufacture essential components in much larger systems.

This is how you end up with thousands of newly manufactured vehicles parked in lots awaiting one critical part that is in short supply.

We’ve seen this movie before; we already know how it ends, or we should. Yet somehow, a great many of us seem unable—or unwilling, perhaps—to learn.

Sink, sank, sunk

Posted on July 16, 2021July 16, 2021 by Mike

Tell me the one about “the most powerful military in the WORLD” again, Daddy. That one’s my favorite.

The other day, WRSA linked to a recent great read by Cdr Salamander, who’s probably known to Pentagon brassholes as Cdr. Cassandra, on just exactly how f**ked up the US Navy has gotten.

Before you head over to RTWT (which you should do), hydrate.

Because you’re either going to cry a river, or be vinegar-pissing mad, either of which is going to take a full tank.

He ain’t just whistling Dixie about that, either; the post opens with a jawdropping pic featuring what looks to me like a rusted-all-to-fuck-and-gone superstructure/bridge from a USN destroyer or perhaps heavy cruiser, just before the breakers turn the poor neglected thing into razor blades…and a CIWS* mount with its gun-muzzles rusted also! I swear to you, I can think of five or six former sailors and Marines in my personal circle of family and close friends who would jump at the chance to come out of retirement and deal out some old-school NCO justice to everyone responsible for such a shameful dereliction of duty.

TL;DR:

The Navy sucks ass right now, because going back to 2009 (perspicacious readers may note a specific change of administration that correlates with that timespan), all flag- and general-rank promotions were run through a filter of pre-woke communist civilian and military zampolits. Only ass-kissing toadies need apply. The current can’t-sail-can’t-shoot-can’t fly-can’t-fight genderfluid diversity Navy is how that plan worked out.

GIGO.

In short, when the only admirals the Squids promote are ass-kissing back-stabbing four-star fuck-ups, the entire Navy takes it in the neck. And. It. HAS.

You can’t even blame this on the blue-haired transgender enlisted, because the fault was letting them up the gangplank in the first place; everything else is just gravity working, plus time, and salt water. Both literal, and metaphorical.

There’s a simple cure, in about three parts. Sadly, Cdr Salmander’s once-wonderful comments seem to have gone away (we can guess why), so we offer our cure here.

Follows, Aesop’s simple three-step solution for unfucking the Navy—all of which identify and address the underlying issues correctly, would almost certainly work a treat, and which therefore have absolutely zero chance of being implemented. In sum:

Do that, and you’ll have the ass-kicking world-beating US Navy last seen about 1990, if not 1945, by Christmas.

Re-enlistment will hit 100%, and we’ll have the fleet we paid for. And certain countries thinking they’re the New Big Dog will be in for a rude awakening.

Do it not, and we may as well de-fund the Navy, and to save further time and effort, just send everyone in the U.S. free copies of Rosetta Stone Mandarin and Cantonese.

Some may think I’m too harsh on the sister service. On the contrary, a functional Navy is vital for US interests. Speaking as a former Marine, for naval gunfire support and amphibious transport, just for openers. Let alone the basic missions of carrier force projection, maintaining freedom of the seas by the surface fleet, and control of the shipping lanes and nuclear deterrence by the Silent Service.

We currently – and going back a decade and more – have a Navy full of Squids and Shitbirds. Starting at the E-ring in the Pentagon. Those at the bottom of the totem pole are that way precisely because of those at the top, whether by active sabotage, foolish encouragement, spineless apathy, or malign neglect and dereliction of duty. Period. Complicity should become a hanging-from-the-yardarm offense.

We need, and deserve, a Navy of sailors. History teaches harsh lessons to nations who fail to provide for their own defense, and we’re dangerously close to the shoals of learning that lesson, in a Pearl Harbor sort of way. Hoping it doesn’t happen is not a good plan.

Rather more drastic measures, just shy of actual guillotines, are needed. In haste.

Oh, I dunno now, let’s not be too hasty about ruling things out here. Myself, I’m very interested in your guillotine idea, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Like I said, good, practical ideas all, with less than the proverbial snowballs chance of ever seeing the light of day in the Navy as currently constituted. What we have here is an endless Swamp circle-jerk: the necessary reform and rejuvenation of the Navy will require that its misbegotten, politicized, and self-serving higher-officer class be reformed first. That, in turn, can’t happen unless and until the civilian “leadership” is also reformed, top to bottom. And that means removing and replacing the sleazy, corrupt DC ProPol class which is ultimately responsible for the decline and decrepitude of not only the US military but the whole damned country…which reform, thanks to their accumulation of near-limitless power, can now be accomplished in but a single, radical, and distasteful way.

Link to CDR Salamander’s post, which you should also read, here, and to the report itself here.

*Close-In Weapons System, an either missile- or gun-based perimeter defense system in use on just about all of the larger USN ship classes to defend against enemy missile and/or aircraft attack. The one in Aesop’s pic looks to be the Phalanx, which is built around the venerable, trusty old Vulcan B61 20mm autocannon—a tried-and-true workhorse of a Gatling gun that was originally developed for the USAF in 1959, mounted in a multiplicity of aircraft ranging from the F4 Phantom, to the F111 Aardvark, to the F16 and -18, to the stupidly-abandoned F22 Raptor

With rust in the fucking barrels. Lord help us all.

Great Recession redux

Posted on July 11, 2021July 11, 2021 by Mike

Arthur Sido says it ain’t gonna reset itself, y’know.

Something I return to again and again is that most of our fellow Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, view politics in a deeply skewed manner. Most garden variety liberals think that Big Business is bad and we need more government to restrain it. Most NormieCons think Big Government is bad and we need more free markets to prosper. What neither side gets is that Big Business and Big Government are the same damn thing. Big Government loves Big Business because Big Business enriches politicians. Big Business loves Big Government because the dot gov types help Big Business to be more profitable. The last thing Big Business wants are free markets. They want state controlled markets that give them advantages in return for political donations. At Executive Board meetings for the National Housing Conference, non-profit types and corporate shills sit side by side and figure out ways to loot the American tax payer.

We are told that initiatives like using Freddie and Fannie to “help” low income Americans is a matter of “justice” and “equity”. The article twice mentions the “the racial wealth gap” as if giving blacks mortgages they can’t or won’t repay will make them wealthier. How exactly does it increase wealth to have blacks and mestizos getting mortgages that they end up defaulting on, thus making their poor credit even worse? Encouraging them to be responsible with credit? That would help. This won’t do anything to help them and in most respects will make things worse.

What it will do is vastly improve the profit of the major banks and mortgage lenders who will make shitty loans and then dump them onto Freddie and Fannie, and ultimately the American tax payer. In return, these banks and businesses will shower contributions on the politicians who made this windfall possible. As I pointed out before in Everyone Else Should Pay For My Poor Decision Making!, the top leaders in both parties tend to have a lot of campaign cash coming from the financial services sector. If you think that banks and investment firms are giving Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell alike millions in campaign contributions without a firm understanding that no matter which party is in power, the banks are protected, then you are kidding yourself.

You can see the end result of this from where we stand today. It doesn’t take a crystal ball, just a modicum of awareness. Lots and lots of crappy mortgages being issued to people who can’t handle them. Many or most of those will go into default and the tax-payers will be on the hook, which will be wrapped up into more make-believe money. Of course since “low-income” is often code for “not White”, there will be Congressional hearings and legislation to bail out these good folk who got in over their heads through no fault of their own. More money will flow to help keep them in their homes, magical bullshit money printed up out of thin air.

With a finite supply of homes and skyrocketing lumber prices making new home construction very expensive, we will have a bunch of new buyers in the marketplace looking to purchase homes. This increases demand and that will in turn cause prices to rise even faster. Next will come pressure to intervene in the home construction business to encourage faster construction. We already saw that in the quote from the article: “…expanding investment that supports the construction of multifamily rental properties”. “Investment” in this case is a fancy way of saying “tax breaks and government subsidies to build apartments and housing”. Groups like the National Association Of Home Builders will certainly support making “investments” as well as making it easier for people to get mortgages. That is where the real power moves are happening. Biden eating ice cream or empty blustering from politicians on C-SPAN? That is meaningless. Where things are really getting done are behind the scenes with regulators, congressional committee staff and lobbyists jockeying for position at the Fed Gov trough, all trying to stick their snouts in the sweet, sweet magical money flow.

Getting screwed in the deal? Us. Housing prices skyrocketing, inflation spiking. Housing is a huge part of the economy. Not everyone has an iPhone but just about everyone has to have a place to live.

This is all part of the plan. To enact the Great Reset, things have to be a widespread dumpster fire. People living in a decent society aren’t going to live in the pod. What better way to throw a society into chaos than to mess with the housing market that impacts everyone? Not to mention inflation being another tool for the Powers That Be to accelerate the Great Reset, there will be more on that later.

While sane people look at this move, which not only seeks to replicate the disaster of the Great Recession but to double down, and wonder what the hell they are thinking, it is critical to understand that torpedoing the economy is not an unforeseen effect, it is the whole point.

Annnnd bingo. In fact, that’s true of so many things happening to and around us these days it’s hard to keep track of them all. But if you still think these nefarious shitweasels aren’t working a Plan here, you need to think again.

The whole enchilada

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Ace links to an absolutely brilliant theory-of-everything thread, which I ran through ThreadReader so you don’t have to. CAUTION: excessively lengthy excerpt follows, for which I make no apology because there was just no way around it.

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them (from) getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

Believe it or not, there’s still a lot I left out, of which you should read the all. If anybody has done a better job of pulling together all, and I do mean ALL, of the events of the last five years than this, I’ve yet to run across it. Bravo, MartyrMade, and a humble tip of the ol’ chapeau to you for this most excellent work. In the end, it all boils down to Ace’s closer:

It’s time to start talking seriously about the crisis of illegitimacy in the former America republic, and what exactly the subjects of the Ruling Class — not the citizens, we’re not that, we’re subjects, and we will pretend no longer — will do about it.

Actually, it’s way PAST time. We’ve been doing precisely that here at CF for quite a while now.

Update! JD Rucker picks up on this masterpiece, correctly identifying it as a must-read.

Must-Read Twitter Thread: Here’s Why We KNOW the 2020 Election Was Stolen
Twitter is general(ly) a cesspool of bad ideas argued by people with even worse takes on those ideas. The days of being entertained by Twitter disappeared when Donald Trump and tens of thousands of conservative Twitter accounts were banned in January. Occasionally, a gem still pops up.

This is one of them. Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. Normally I post the thread in its original form, but this one is 36-Tweets long. There’s also a good chance it will be deleted because it makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it.

Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.

Indeed we won’t, nor should we be. At this late date, anyone gullible enough to place the tiniest iota of trust in anything coming from the maw of FederalGovCo is too damned stupid to figure out how to tie their own shoes. Even if they have Velcro straps instead of laces on ’em.

Updated update! I already knew that Rucker is the proprietor of the NOQReport portal blog, which I’ve had in my bookmarks since, like, forever. What I didn’t realize until just now was that I hadn’t installed NOQR in the Portal category in Ye Olde Blogrolle yet. Oversight duly addressed, with a big fat mea culpa and most humble apologies to JD.

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