Leftward ho! – Page 8

No redress, no recourse

Posted on March 14, 2023March 14, 2023 by Mike

In Amerika v2.0, we are well past the point of no return. Which leaves us with only the one question left to be answered.

In the movie The Untouchables, written by David Mamet and directed by Brian De Palma, a streetwise Irish cop named Malone tries to educate a starry-eyed fed named Eliot Ness in the ways of Chicago justice when up against an implacable, deadly opponent like Al Capone. The scene has become justly famous for this line: ““He pulls a knife, you pull a gun. He sends one of yours to the hospital, you send one of his to the morgue. THAT’S the Chicago way! And that’s how you get Capone.”

But for our purposes here, what even more important is the exchange between Sean Connery and Kevin Costner that immediately precedes it:

Ness: I want to get Capone! I don’t know how to get him.

Malone: [talking privately in a church] You said you wanted to know how to get Capone. Do you really wanna get him? You see what I’m saying, what are you prepared to do?

Ness: Everything within the law.

Malone: And *then* what are you prepared to do? If you open the ball on these people Mr. Ness you must be prepared to go all the way. Because they won’t give up the fight, until one of you is dead.

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? In a battle between good and evil, with the law having gone over to the side of evil—as it had in the gangland Chicago of the 1920s and ’30s—what are the good guys prepared to do? With the country-as-founded now being shot out from underneath us on a near-daily basis, how do concerned citizens fight back?

Read this—”Preventing a Disrupted Presidential Election and Transition” from something called the Electoral Integrity Project and weep…

“Integrity,” heh. It is to laugh. And also, weep. “Electoral Integrity” is the very LAST thing these shitweasels really want, or for the matter of it would ever even tolerate.

Some of their thoughts:

The concept of “election night,” is no longer accurate and indeed is dangerous. We face a period of contestation stretching from the first day a ballot is cast in mid-September until January 20. The winner may not, and we assess likely will not, be known on “election night” as officials count mail-in ballots. This period of uncertainty provides opportunities for an unscrupulous candidate to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the process and to set up an unprecedented assault on the outcome. Campaigns, parties, the press and the public must be educated to adjust expectations starting immediately.

A determined campaign has opportunity to contest the election into January 2021. We anticipate lawsuits, divergent media narratives, attempts to stop the counting of ballots, and protests drawing people from both sides. President Trump, the incumbent, will very likely use the executive branch to aid his campaign strategy, including through the Department of Justice. We assess that there is a chance the president will attempt to convince legislatures and/or governors to take actions – including illegal actions – to defy the popular vote.

“Dangerous” it is for sure. One instant solution is to restore Election Night to its one-day, one-vote place in the proper scheme of things. And note for the record that “an unscrupulous candidate” describes Mrs. Clinton’s churlish and criminal response to her loss in 2016 far better than it does Trump’s. As for defying the popular vote, so what? That vote means nothing until the Left finally passes its National Popular Vote Interstate Compact and thus eliminates the Electoral College by unconstitutional means.

Some of their solutions:

Plan for a contested election. If there is a crisis, events will unfold quickly, and sleep-deprived leaders will be asked to make consequential decisions quickly. Thinking through options now will help to ensure better decisions. Approach this as a political battle, not just a legal battle. In the event of electoral contestation, sustained political mobilization will likely be crucial for ensuring transition integrity. Dedicated staff and resources need to be in place at least through the end of January.

Address the two biggest threats head on: lies about “voter fraud” and escalating violence. Voting fraud is virtually non-existent, but Trump lies about it to create a narrative designed to politically mobilize his base and to create the basis for contesting the results should he lose. The potential for violent conflict is high, particularly since Trump encourages his supporters to take up arms.

Except that politically mobilized Trump supporters didn’t take up arms on Jan. 6, and as for “violence,” the patsy protesters had nothing on the Antifa and Black Lives Matters thugs during the Summer of Floyd of blessed but rapidly fading memory, his work on earth here now done.

And that, as it turned out, was perhaps their biggest mistake. As did Trump himself, they badly underestimated not only the fanatical zeal of their Swamp-dwelling adversaries, but also just how deeply, thoroughly rotten the whole system itself had by then become. It turned out to be their undoing, and who really even knows how many of them are even now languishing in the Amerikan Gulag as a result of that incalculably-costly “misunderestimation.”

Yet most of us continue to believe in America; like the movie version of Eliot Ness, we’ve sworn to do “everything within the law” to try and right the ship of state before, like all previous democracies, it sinks beneath the waves of historical reality. As I often say about the imported “critical theory” Left, they never stop, they never sleep, they never quit. They won’t give up the fight until one of us is dead.

So then what are you prepared to do?

Not near enough, apparently. Or not yet, at any rate. But we shall see about all that soon enough, I reckon.

2

The rain in Spain falls mainly on the insane

Posted on March 12, 2023March 12, 2023 by Mike

By George, I think he’s got it.

Why is the trans movement so focused on children? Why do they want drag queens, commonly associated with sexualized performances, to read books to toddlers? Why do they want kids to go to highly sexualized drag performances? Why are public schools allowing trans ideology to be taught in classrooms instead of academics? Why are schools secretly taking kids to such performances without parental knowledge or consent? Why is trans ideology being planted in kids entertainment? Why are parents being lied to about gender fluidity as if it is backed by science when it’s not? Why are children being groomed for gender reassignment drugs and surgeries? Why are states allowing children to get gender reassignment surgery without parental knowledge? What the hell is going on?

Many would point out the obvious conclusion that the trans movement has a child fetish. Stephen King is himself a rabid leftist who wrote a disturbing child orgy scene into his IT novel. It’s clearly one of the motivators, but I think that trans activism is a little more complex than simply an excuse for pedophilia.

A decade ago this kind of behavior would have been treated as suspect if not repugnant altogether. If adults with gender dysphoria (a rare mental illness) want to act out a personal fetish on their own time then that is their prerogative. However, this is about exposing innocent bystanders with no critical thinking skills to that same mental illness and that same fetish; a captive audience. This is about parents and teachers convincing children to act against their biology so they can use the child as a virtue signal prop. This is what narcissists and psychopaths do, except that it is being sanctioned politically in many states and from within the federal government.

Why? Because it is useful for gaining power. Imagine for a moment that you are a monster, the most disturbed creature you can think of. All you do is thirst for control and the anguish of your enemies and this thirst can never be fully satiated. How would you go about asserting your dominance over the population?

You would have to weaken the citizenry first. You would have to divide them, and what better way to divide them than to drive a wedge between them and their own children. Make the kids a target, bring them to your side or use them as leverage to make parents submit.

You would have to undermine the foundations of the society, eliminate the lessons of history and pervert the pillars that maintain stability. You would have to convince people that vanity and “PRIDE” are virtues rather than failings. You would have to convince people that all behaviors no matter how destructive must be treated as acceptable and that all discrimination no matter how sensible is wrong. And, when all heritage and all principles are erased you are then free to feast, for evil is now good and good is now evil and there is no one left to stop you.

All in perfect accordance with the strategic prescriptions explicitly laid out by Marx, Gramsci, and Alinski. Coincidence, you ask? Yeah, pull the other one. It has a bell on it.

The trans movement is a vehicle for the absorbing of the youngest generation into a political cult. It is part of a much larger agenda to undermine not just the basic tenets of western culture but to undermine the basic structures of moral compass and conscience. Some trans activists may be unaware of the part they are playing; they might even believe that the targeting of children is about exposing them to new ideas of “acceptance.”

That said, I think many of them do have a clear understanding of their actions and many of them are well aware of the consequences of their efforts, and they take great joy in the destruction they sow.

Several supporting links in the first paragraph of the excerpt, not transcribed here because of a surfeit of pure-tee slackness. It’s Brandon Smith, so naturally you’re going to want to read all of it.

1

All against all

Posted on March 6, 2023March 6, 2023 by Mike

JJ Sefton’s reliably dead-on Morning Report is rife today with examples confirming the grim success of the Left’s divide & conquer strategery.

Report: Austin Police Officers Quit in Droves, Texas City ‘Hostile Place’ for Conservatives

The leftist-run city of Austin, Texas, is facing a police officer shortage with current and former officers citing hostility toward law enforcement and conservatives as the driving force, the New York Post reported on Friday.

Multiple sources told the Post the city allegedly has more than 300 vacancies and officers are quitting “because they feel disrespected,” according to the report. The Austin Police Association said 77 more officers are expected to retire before the end of March. Lt. Brian Moon, who retired last month after 23 years of service, said Austin has become like Portland, Seattle, and San Francisco “where if you’re at all conservative or in law enforcement, it’s become a hostile place.”

The staffing shortage is leading to later response times and 911 calls are being redirected to the non-emergency number “because there aren’t enough cops to solve the crimes,” according to the report. Senior Police Officer Justin Berry told the publication that the department has taken detectives off of cases to act as patrol officers.

“If you come home and find your home burglarized, calls like that are now going to 311,” said police union president Thomas Villarreal. “You’re not getting a police response to many property crimes if it’s not a violent crime that is currently ongoing.”

The report notes that “entire areas of the city are left unpatrolled” at times if a large incident occurs.

“We’ve pretty much conceded that we’re not going to show up anymore on certain calls,” Moody said. “Eventually it’s going to get to the point where it’s so bad, everyone’s going to realize that something has to be done.”

Rest assured it will be, but you ain’t gonna like it much. It’s commonly known as vigilantism. Even though they’d greatly prefer not to have to resort to it, when things get bad enough and enough people realize they’re entirely on their own and have been forced to live in a lawless society, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of it than civilized, First World nations are accustomed to. At some point, it becomes too much to expect that Normals will just passively sit back and allow themselves and their families to be preyed upon indefinitely, just because that’s what shitlibs want them to do.

Moar D&C:

Critical Race Theory Teaches Kids To Hate Each Other, And The Proof Is On The Playground
Critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children. This is most obvious on the playground.

In mid-February 2023, administrators at an elementary school in Springfield, Ohio, called the police to intervene in a racially charged incident on the playground. According to the police report, a group of black students forced several white students to say “black lives matter” against their will.

Around the same time in Orlando, Florida, a teacher at Howard Middle School created and posted to his personal social media account a demeaning skit using students from his classroom. In it, white students bowed to their black classmates, feeding them snacks and fanning them. The teacher, now on administrative leave, captioned the video: “Black History Month. The shortest month of the Year.” Critical race theory is permeating public education across the country and aggravating racial hostilities, even among elementary school children.

When people with authority, such as schoolteachers and administrators, tell children that one group is the oppressor and the other is oppressed, children tend to listen. These critical race theory lessons are fostering anger and aggression instead of empathy among children.

Teachers and administrators need to stick to the “three Rs” of education. Social and racial politics must be under the jurisdiction of families, not public education.

And when they refuse to, as most of them will, what then? My personal preference is for pitchforks, torches, tar, and feathers, but then I freely admit I’m an “extremist” like that.

The cold, ugly facts about EVs

Posted on March 2, 2023 by Mike

You had me at hello.

It’s Time To Admit It: EVs Are EVIL

We’ve had enough of the left’s guilt-tripping anyone who drives a gasoline-powered car. If anyone should be ashamed, it is those who are smugly plugging in their cars each night.

They are the ones responsible for raping the planet, poisoning entire communities, enriching genocidal tyrants, and creating a massive hazmat problem while doing nothing to stop “climate change.”

Does that sound harsh?

Here’s one recent bit of evidence. A Bloomberg investigation found that the aluminum Ford is using to build its “eco-friendly” EV pickup comes from Brazil.

“There, in the heart of the Amazon, rust-colored bauxite is being clawed from a mine that has long faced allegations of pollution and land appropriation,” it found. A class action lawsuit against the mining company accuses it of polluting the water, causing cancer, hair loss, neurological dysfunction, birth defects, and increased mortality.

While all cars use aluminum to cut pounds, EVs use far more to offset the enormous weight of the batteries themselves.

“For consumers seeking to lower their carbon footprints, the environmental and social costs of electric vehicles may be greater than they realize,” Bloomberg says.

No kidding.

Here’s the dirty, rotten truth about EVs.

Follows, a deft and copious skewering of the dirty, rotten pieces of junk, winding up thusly:

It’s time to end this hypocrisy.

It’s time to admit that EVs are being wildly oversold.

It’s time for EV owners and manufacturers to answer for the environmental and human rights crimes they are bankrolling in the name of “climate change.”

It’s time for those of us who drive gasoline-powered cars to take pride in the fact that our vehicles are safe, efficient, reliable, and don’t require ritual human sacrifices to build.

Amen to all that, with great big bells on. As I said: you had me at hello.

1

Democracy, yes?

Posted on March 1, 2023 by Mike

“Democracy,” NO.

The Façade of Democracy
Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies.
It appears that the definition of “democracy” is rather fluid. In fact, it doesn’t really mean democracy at all. Rather, it is an authoritarian and undemocratic term used by self-interested politicians to defend and promote their own desired outcomes. Last time I checked, violent coup d’état wasn’t emblematic of “democracy.”

The Democratic Party and even many RINOs assign the same undemocratic meaning to their use of the term “democracy” in the United States.

The United States supported the 2014 coup d’état in Ukraine, which has been called a “Revolution of Dignity.” But American protesters on January 6, 2021, who were overwhelmingly peaceful—the only murder was committed by a Capitol police officer, who shot an unarmed female protestor named Ashli Babbitt—were called “insurrectionists.”

In contrast, cries of voter fraud in the Ukrainian elections of 2004 were met with serious concern by the U.S government. The mass protests were encouraged and supported and the overturning of the Ukrainian election results heralded as a win for “democracy.”

Cries of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election were summarily denounced and dismissed. The United States rushed to declare the 2004 election results in Ukraine illegitimate. The United States rushed to declare the U.S. presidential election in 2020 the most free and fair in our history.

Is America even a democracy?

Of course not; it was never supposed to be, as everyone here will know full well. The Founders, hallowed be their names, hated and feared democracy as nothing more than “mob rule,” and as time has proven beyond all debate, they were perfectly correct to shun it as they did. It amounts to yet another confirmation of their unimpeachable wisdom, which we have ignored to our own profound detriment.

Just as Democrats had no regard for our own election results in 2016, they had no regard for the election results in Ukraine, when they successfully ousted Yanukovych.

The lifeblood of a democracy is free speech and the general diffusion of knowledge, which ensures the voter is informed. Yet the Democratic Party and the FBI colluded with social media companies to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop scandal during the 2020 election and falsely dismissed it as “Russian disinformation.” Was this democratic?

The Democrats continue to pursue their witch hunt against former President Trump in hopes of ultimately preventing him from running for re-election. This effort too is justified with claims of “defending” or “protecting” democracy.

Democracy is a façade in America and when the term is thrown around by Democrats its new meaning is tyranny.

Democracy today means nothing more than fulfillment of the Left’s agenda and their consolidation of power. Neither Ukraine nor America are democracies. Democracy is tantamount to destruction and both Ukraine and America are being destroyed. Democracy is under attack; in the name of protecting democracy, of course.

If Democrats succeed in protecting democracy in America, we won’t have any democracy at all.

Well, DUH. For tyrants such as they, that’s a feature, not a bug. For us as well, really, just not in quite the same way or for the same reasons.

2

1

Woke kills

Posted on February 25, 2023February 25, 2023 by Mike

Wait, you mean to tell me “diversity” might NOT be a strength after all?

A recent epidemic of airline near-misses deserves both attention and reflection.

In mid-December, a San Francisco-bound United Airlines Boeing 777-200 airliner, just a little over a minute after taking off from Maui, Hawaii, suddenly dived. It lost more than half its altitude and came within 800 feet of crashing into the Pacific Ocean before pulling up.

About a month later, an American Airlines jet crossed the runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport just as a Delta Air Lines plane was accelerating for takeoff. The two aircraft nearly collided.

Then in February, a FedEx cargo jet at the Austin, Texas, airport missed crashing into a Southwest Airlines airliner by a mere 100 feet.

The same month, an American Airlines Airbus A321 was being towed out of the gate at Los Angeles International Airport and smashed into a bus carrying passengers between terminals, injuring five.

These near and actual accidents come amid a general landscape of aviation chaos.

Gee, wonder if this story has anything at all to do with it—or rather, might be emblematic of the REAL issue here.

Tucker Carlson tells the sad tale of one Conrad Jules Aska from back in 2019. Conrad is a pilot of color as you can see…

Born in Antigua he was quite the pilot….

….except for the whole “grossly unqualified and unsuited to be a pilot” thing.

“The first officer in this accident deliberately concealed his history of performance deficiencies, which limited Atlas Air’s ability to fully evaluate his aptitude and competency as a pilot,” said NTSB Chairman Robert Sumwalt.

The report said Aska’s “tendency to respond impulsively and inappropriately when faced with an unexpected event during training scenarios at multiple employers suggest an inability to remain calm during stressful situations.

Acted impulsively you say? Of course his family tried to sue…

They claimed maintenance and poor pilot training was to blame although even at this point the NTSB realized it was pilot incompetence and error. Of course had Conrad Aska being fired for incompetence, his family likely still would have sued because of racial discrimination.

As I said in yesterday’s post, America Has Too Many Qualified Doctors And Pilots!, if you have an incompetent toll booth attendant, perhaps you get back incorrect change but an incompetent pilot? Your plane goes into the ground.

Yep. VDH sums it all up:

Many of the major airlines have established racial and gender quotas for government pilot training programs. United Airlines has set quotas to ensure half of its trainees will be minorities or women. Since 2013, the FAA has been lowering standards for air traffic control qualifications to achieve de facto race and gender quotas.

In sum, our government is playing with our lives as it prefers diversity, equity and inclusion over ensuring the best-qualified employees are hired on the basis of racially and gender-blind competitive tests and experience.

Again: Yep. In Amerika v2.0, it’s Wokeism über alles; Leftard dogma trumps all other considerations, every time, no matter what. Thus, the FederalGovCo megalith doesn’t give a toss about how many of their hapless subjects they have to kill off in order to establish that Politically Correct is, so to speak, the only way to fly.

The results are in: masks and lockdowns are the BUNK

Posted on February 24, 2023February 24, 2023 by Mike

Don Surber’s title really says it all.

Masks worked. They just didn’t stop covid
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens pointed out what was obvious three years ago: masks don’t stop viruses. Nothing short of a hazmat suit does. Viruses make their rounds every few years, eventually deteriorating into a strand of the common cold. They are deadly at first. Indeed, this manmade concoction has killed 1.12 million Americans.

But that is less than 1% of the population; in fact it is 1/3rd of 1% of the population.

And even that “1.12 million Americans” number is the bunk as well, grossly inflated to include as it does deaths by gunshot wound, traffic accident, cancer, flu, random misadventure, and anything else the lying liars of FederalGovCo could misattribute to FauxVid and hope gullible panic-ninnies would gulp down whole.

I was sanguine about the virus. The masks and social distancing were medical theater just as TSA is security theater. Both make the public feel safer, and as an added bonus they give the Karens on the left a reason to feel morally superior to those of us who realize it is all for show.

At the height of the mask hysteria, Kyle D. Killian wrote in Psychology Today, “This week, on social media, I reposted a photo of a white woman carrying a sign that reads ‘I’d Rather Bury My Family From COVID Than See Them Enslaved to the Fear of It.’ Why? I was curious about others’ thoughts on it.”

He wrote, “Highly educated intellectuals—people literally paid to type and talk—must resist the urge to make fun of this person or to lecture down to them about virology, science, etc. What is key, crucial in fact, is not dismissing or mocking this person, but interpreting the signage as an indicator of a fear-based response.

“In this case, masking requirements have been equated in this person’s mind to a fundamental loss of freedom or liberty.”

ANALYSIS: True. Because that is EXACTLY what they were, and ALL that they were. The real problem for Killian and his ilk is that a small handful of us still give a damn about that, rather than being not just willing but eager to surrender essential liberty in exchange for a false sense of security and safety, like the vast majority of gutless pussies here in the Land of the Skeer’d and the Home of the Slave.

…”Fear has clouded this person’s thinking; instead of seeing social distancing and masks as a way of caring for others, putting the Golden Rule into action, or acknowledging that some folks feel just fine but are actually asymptomatic carriers of coronavirus, she sees them as a threat.”

Fuck you and your ersatz Golden Rule all to death, pusnuts. Quite the contrary, in truth: fear has clouded panic-ninny thinking, to the extent that it has made THEM a threat—a credible and serious one, which is going to have be dealt with mercilessly because better men and women than your kind will ever be have permitted you to get away with this creeping paternalistic incrementalism for far too long.

Which brings me to Mister Stephens, who occasionally is an isle of sanity in that Sea of Craziness that calls itself the New York Times. He has taken shots at the Pandemic Panic amid the screeching of the baboons who run that zoo.

On April 24, 2020, barely a month into the two weeks to flatten the curve, he wrote, “America Shouldn’t Have to Play by New York Rules. A national lockdown is bad medicine and worse politics.”

He was half-right on the second line. It was bad medicine, but it was excellent politics for the opponents of Making America Great Again who wanted to get rid of President Trump. Stephens’s heart was in the right place in 2020.

He wrote, “I write this from New York, so it’s an argument against my personal interest. But I don’t see why people living in a Nashville suburb should not be allowed to return to their jobs because people like me choose to live, travel and work in urban sardine cans.”

Okay, then. I’m in no wise a huge fan of Bret Stephens myself, but I do have to admit that last bit was damned well-reasoned and -expressed.

The lesson learned is never trust Washington. The American people can be fooled — but only once. It is time to live the words of General Stark, who fought for the freedoms we have. There are worse things than covid. One is masks. Another is suffering the self-righteousness of the ignoramuses who pushed masks.

Annnnd whoot, there it is. As some of us said from the very beginning of this shameful, endless fiasco, the primary issue was never about masks, (anti-)social distancing, or even public health in general. It was about liberty, no more nor less. And once you’ve traded that priceless jewel away for a mess of “safety” pottage, there’s one and only one way you’ll ever get it back again. However many of their despicable progeny have long since either forgotten, willfully abandoned, or outright rejected that fundamental truth, our Founding Fathers knew it well enough, and some few of us still do today.

So be it, then.

5

2

THIS is Africa

Posted on February 24, 2023 by Mike

And, as African expat Kim DuToit always says: Africa wins again.

Sometime in the late 70s or early 80s, I had the opportunity to work in Senegal for several months. My very first experience in-country was that the rental vehicle wouldn’t start. While the friendly and talkative mechanic repaired the jeep, he inquired if this was my first trip to Africa. “No,” I replied. “Ahhh!” he said, “then I don’t have to explain the meaning of ‘TIA’ to you.”

But I’d never heard that term or what it meant. When I asked, he explained, saying, “This is Africa; nothing works!” Indeed, in my travels, it was much the same in Latin America and other places I have lived, worked, or visited back in the day. When I returned to the U.S. it was a joy to drop a quarter into a payphone and hear a dial tone, or find that the nearest toilet always had toilet paper at hand.

But, in 2023, in Biden’s America, the acronym takes on a whole new meaning. Last week my wife’s car wouldn’t start, and after several return visits to the dealership, the problem remained undiagnosed. The service tech apologized and said, “it’s TIA.” I asked him what that meant, and he said, “This is America; no one knows how to fix things anymore.” Talk about a reflective moment.

Yep. And as I always say: that’s neither accident, nor coincidence, nor happenstance. It’s part of a plan.

3

Stand down, serfs!

Posted on February 13, 2023February 13, 2023 by Mike

Nobody is coming for your guns gas stoves. Except when they are, that is.

Oregon’s Eugene Council Bans Natural Gas Hookups in New Residences

City says it aims to be free of fossil fuels despite strong public opposition

Wasn’t someone saying something about “for the Greater Good” just a moment ago? Why yes, I believe someone was at that.

After more than two years of debate, the Eugene City Council voted on Feb. 6 to ban natural gas hookups in new residential construction, becoming the first city in Oregon to prohibit new homes from using gas furnaces, water heaters, or appliances.

During a closed meeting, the council first decided to deny a request by opponents to put the issue on the May ballot. According to DHM Research, 70 percent of those surveyed oppose the ban.

The council then voted 5-3 in favor, citing concerns about climate change, and public health, and saying the ban would reduce carbon emissions, and eliminate the air quality hazards of gas stoves.

And thus is it established, beyond all further argument or discussion, that government of the people, by the people, and for the people has indeed perished from the Earth.

It did not die of natural causes, mind; it was murdered, by people who have names and addresses. That ought to be borne in mind, not just by the people of Eugene, but by every last man Jack of us who still like to think of themselves as Americans.

Update! When it comes to the larger issue here, the song remains the same: it’s the Leftism, stupid.

The Power-Mad Utopians

America needs a broad popular front to stop the revolution from above that is transforming the country

What happens in politics when one major party, or a major faction in both parties, commits itself to doomed utopian projects of social and economic engineering and seeks to capture and use government to impose its vision from above? In such cases ordinary political consensus and compromise become irrelevant. What is needed, in such cases, is the broadest possible coalition to defeat the mad and impossible schemes of these utopians.

Which coalition must stand resolved to do violence on behalf of themselves and their stolen liberty—not to merely die for freedom, but to kill for it. Y’know, exactly as our Founding Fathers were, hallowed be their names.

As Buck Throckmorton notes, the above-linked article is a long ‘un. And, as I will note, it suffers from the by-now-obligatory insistence on a purely political solution to problems caused by politics—a misguided, impossible dream truly Quixotic in its gross proportions. Those things stipulated, it’s still worth a look anyhoo.

The Great Debunkening

Posted on February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Mike

Looks like the science is finally settled.

I’m pro-science. That’s why I’m anti-mask

The landmark Cochrane study shows that the mask skeptics were right

I believe in the scientific method: make an observation. Ask a question. Form a hypothesis. Test the hypothesis. Listen to the answer. Insisting on the answer before pursuing this methodological approach is not science, it is propaganda.

And “masks work” was never more than propaganda — rooted in mechanical plausibility, not actual science — furthered by public health officials, left-leaning government leaders, the press and the party faithful starting in 2020 and continuing to the present day.

The left is holding fast to the idea that masks do work, despite all the evidence to the contrary. In fact, as of February 6, mask mandates have been reinstated at four elementary schools in Marin County, California.

Will there be redemption for those who had the audacity to challenge authoritarian public health bureaucrats? No, it seems. Will there be a change in policy now that the science is clear? Again, no, it seems.

Will there be a doubling down, with the self-proclaimed pro-“science” crowd continuing to insist masking works despite the scientific evidence showing us that they don’t? Yes. It appears so.

What seems clear is that the enthusiastic, religious devotion to the dogma — “masks work” — signified adherence to a set of beliefs: I mask therefore I am good. I mask my children therefore I am loyal to the Democratic Party and public health diktats. I mask therefore I care. I am a loyal follower of “the Science.” My faith is unwavering.

Those who claim to be on the side of “the Science” will continue to push unscientific policies in order to prove that they were right all along. This is the sunk cost fallacy writ large. Don’t admit mistakes. Ignore the actual science in favor of “the Science.” And continue to punish those who challenge. As well as those most vulnerable who simply aren’t in a position to challenge at all.

“Science” has apparently been rebranded by the left. It is now a slogan — a tagline — shouted at heretics to signify one’s moral superiority and loyalty to the party. What we have now is “science” that ignores the scientific method, which means “the science” is a cult. And a dangerous one at that.

Yes, it most certainly is. That is neither coincidence nor happenstance.

The larger issue here is that Leftists, having by now promoted their misbegotten ideology on up to de facto religious-cult status, while also being constitutionally incapable of leaving anything under the sun imaginable alone and untampered with, must therefore pretzel actual science into “The Science” in order to bring it into compliance with their contradictory catechism.

They’d adamantly deny there’s any religious-cult aspect to their beliefs, natch, particularly as it applies to the Church of the Eternal Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ denomination. But the truth couldn’t be more obvious to any reasonable, thoughtful person.

Which is not to suggest that science and religion are incompatible, mind. It’s just that they’re two very different things, that’s all—distinct modes of thought whose focus is on two separate realms, which we might think of as the practical and the ethereal. Religion is definitionally a matter of faith, and matters of faith are NOT amenable to empirical proof. That built-in contradiction in terms is just another of the myriad reasons why, intellectually speaking, shitlibs can’t help but trip over their own dicks fifty times before lunch every day.

Intellectually speaking.

The aforementioned Cochrane study is here, and says this:

One of the largest and most comprehensive studies on the effectiveness of masks found they do almost nothing to reduce the spread of respiratory viruses.

The study reviewed 78 randomized control trials—experiments that have long been considered “the gold standard” for medicine—which assessed the effectiveness of face masks against flu, COVID-19, and similar illnesses. It found that wearing masks “probably makes little or no difference” for the general public, no matter what kind of mask is used. Even N95 masks, considered the most effective at filtering airborne particles, showed no clear benefit for health care workers.

The study was published on January 30 by the Cochrane Library, a world-renowned medical database that is famous for its high-quality evidence reviews. It comes as a battering ram to the recommendations of the U.S. public health establishment, which urged children as young as two to wear masks throughout the pandemic.

“This amounts to the scientific nail in the coffin for mask mandates,” said Kristen Walsh, a clinical professor of pediatrics in Morristown, New Jersey. “I just can’t wrap my mind around the fact that some schools are still actively forcing children to wear masks, much less children who need to see faces to learn.”

You shouldn’t try; it makes sense only when you recognize that the Scamdemic entire wasn’t really about health or safety, but about the twin pillars of authoritarian tyranny: power and control.

(Via Ed)

4

Free speech: dead as the dodo

Posted on February 11, 2023 by Mike

The incomparable John Hayward’s latest.

A generation after the supposed triumph of classical liberalism at the “end of history,” free speech exists nowhere on Earth as a matter of principle. Every single tech mogul’s commitment to free speech evaporates when powerful authoritarians demand censorship.

Authoritarian foreign regimes know they only need to threaten blockage of Western social media services to make their management comply with censorship demands. Some push back harder than others, but in the end, they all cave. They can’t afford to lose access to growing markets.

Tech moguls rationalize to themselves that they can still do some good in oppressive countries by complying with some censorship demands – it’s better than being silenced completely. Any way you rationalize it, it’s a power calculation that limits the speech of the powerless.

Domestically, we’ve seen government officials using economic leverage and ideological affinity to limit speech in collusion with their Little Partners in the private sector. The ruling left-wing Party has operatives in tech companies that did much of the dirty work.

The power calculations have shifted a little lately, especially after Musk bought Twitter, but they’re still power calculations, not adamant defenses of free speech as a matter of principle. The variables changed, but the equations remain.

A troubling percentage of the free world’s population evidently believes censorship IS free speech – as though speech were a limited resource that must be allocated by the State with an eye toward “justice” and “equity.” Only by silencing some can others be truly free to speak.

“Hate speech is not free speech!” is a pure power calculation: those with power will decide what constitutes “hate speech.” They invariably rule that disagreement with their ideology and political demands is “hateful” and must be silenced.

How utterly convenient for them.

In America That Was, the very place where such forgetfulness was never supposed to happen, we somehow lost sight of the fact that “offensive” speech is the very embodiment of free speech—that once we’ve allowed TPTB to stifle speech they deem “offensive,” the hourglass has been turned over, the countdown to the inevitable loss of yet another Constitutionally-enumerated right has begun. Thus:

Speech is vital to political organization – in the Internet era, they are nearly synonymous. Twitter mobs have a direct pipeline to real political power via lazy, biased legacy media – provided they agree with the ruling Party. That pipeline is tightly shut against dissidents.

“Disinformation” is also a crude political calculation, not a high-minded and principled commitment to protect the population against fraud. We see examples every single day of disinformation that is tolerated, and boosted, when it comes from members of the ruling Party.

As with hate speech, the powerful decide what constitutes actionable “disinformation,” and they cannot resist the temptation of heavily tilting those scales against dissenters and speakers of forbidden truth. Party apparatchiks are never banned or reprimanded for disinformation.

The “end of history” was actually the triumph of authoritarianism, not classical liberalism – political scientists and commentators were just too giddy over the fall of the Soviet Union to see it. Individual rights, beginning with free speech, have steadily eroded since then.

It’s Doc Zero; reading it all isn’t mandatory, but you’re going to want to nonetheless.

1

A path is being cleared

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Mike

For…well, now, let’s see, whom?

The Democrat Long Knives Come Out for Kamala Harris; Democrats Tell Their Newsletter The New York Times That They Have to Ditch Harris To Have Any Chance of Winning in 2024

My italics at the end, to underscore where I must beg to differ with Ace’s take. The D卐M☭CRATs know perfectly well who has and does not have “any chance of winning” in 2024, or any other year going forward. This bit from the NYT’s article I thought was amusing.

Now that Biden has insinuated that he intends to run again, the NYT reported many Democrats worry that Harris’ name on the ticket as his running mate will deter voters. Their worries came after a FiveThirtyEight poll showed Harris’ approval rating at 39%.

“I can’t think of one thing she’s done except stay out of the way and stand beside him at certain ceremonies,” Morgan told the NYT.

Umm, s’cuse me for saying so and all, but that’s pretty much the Veep’s entire job description: travel the world to attend state funerals, otherwise just stand around quietly in the background waiting for somebody to assassinate your boss. It’s why “Cactus Jack” Garner, the VP for FDR’s first two terms as POTUS, famously noted that the job was “not worth a bucket of warm piss.” In fact, the one occasion in recent memory that a Veep was called upon to actually do something important was in January 2021, when “Deep State Mike” Pence declined to do his duty and went ahead and certified the results of a manifestly fraudulent election, despite a veritable ziggurat of credible evidence refuting its legitimacy.

It was truly a day that will live in infamy, to quote somebody other.

But yeah, it does indeed appear that a path is being cleared for somebody, sure enough. The only question is who that somebody might be, and it’s a real head-scratcher.

Okay, okay, I admit: no, it is NOT.

The party certainly doesn’t have a deep bench of candidates. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s miserable performance shows he’s incapable of running the country. Socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) would be 83 years old on his Inauguration Day. Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) likely lacks the charisma to gain national support.

These are desperate times indeed for Democrats when California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Warren are the best the party has to offer.

But there’s another candidate who just might save the day. As abhorrent as the thought may be, former first lady Michelle Obama’s name is increasingly being bandied about as a potential nominee.

As we know, Big Mike repeatedly expressed her disdain for being First “Lady” while her “husband” Bathhouse Barry served his two terms as the Left’s designated weapon of mass destruction in Mordor On The Potomac, which personal disgruntlement would seem to militate against her campaigning for a White House encore. But Toni Williams knows the score on that.

Michelle Obama may say she doesn’t want to be President, but if her country needs her, she will swallow the bile she feels for this country and step up to be our First Authentically Black and Female President. Who could resist. Joel Gilbert definitely thinks she is running and copying Barack (you know the drill) Obama’s formula. She introduced Joe Biden at the 2020 Democrat Convention, she has a book, and she has a voter registration group.

Who could blame Michelle? She would go down in history. She would be the Mother of the Rebirth of Our Country Without Original Sin. You can hear it now, can’t you? She will finish the “fundamental transformation” of our country begun under her husband. Joe can’t do it. Eight years of Michelle Obama will do the job. Our country will be finished.

And my dear friends, I don’t think we will get a choice. If our Lizard Overlords choose Michelle, she will be the Chosen One. The scowling America Hater will be the next President of the United States. She will be installed just as creepy Joe was installed. The Deep State is like a Marvel Cinematic Universe Villain. It cannot be destroyed. Trump tried and look what they are still doing to him. You may think Donald Trump is too damaged to run again. When the Lizard Overlords run Michelle, Donald (Obi-Wan Kenobi) Trump will be our only hope. File this away under predictions and then thank me when I am right. May the force be with you.

Donal Trump isn’t too damaged to run again, but he IS too damaged to win, even if he could find a way to circumvent the D卐M☭CRATs’ now solidly-secured lock on national “elections.” Toni may have gotten that part wrong, but she’s right on the money when she says We The People don’t get to have any say about who the next President will be. Not this time, not the next time, nor any other time.

Yes, there’s something we can do about that, but it will be neither easy, nor pleasant, nor guaranteed to turn out the way we’d like it to. One way or another, though, rest assured that the Deep State not only can but WILL be destroyed. As history tells us, it’s not a matter of if, but of when.

(Victory Girls link via Sarah Hoyt)

Peace through strength

Posted on February 6, 2023February 6, 2023 by Mike

Or chaos through senility.

It is worth remembering that during Donald Trump’s first term as president (note that I say “first term”), America and indeed the world was a more pacific place. Russia did not invade Ukraine. Iran was bottled up. The Abraham Accords brought peace to the Middle East. Amazing.

How did he do it? By taking a page from Ronald Reagan’s playbook. Next to “Make America Great Again” (and perhaps laments about “fake news”) the phrase that one heard most often from the Trump campaign and, then, the Trump Administration was “peace through strength.” It was born of Trump’s understanding that weakness is provocative and destabilizing while recognized strength encourages peace and social order.

Biden has depleted our Strategic Petroleum Reserve, shuttered the Keystone Pipeline, and put the kibosh on fracking. He has gone a long way towards transforming the United States military into a gender fluid sensitivity camp while also undermining the U.S. economy by incontinent spending and by pursuing other inflationary policies. Biden and his puppet masters tried to stymie Trump by turning his catchphrase “MAGA” into a negative epithet (and if “MAGA” is bad, how much worse is “Ultra MAGA”?). As Julie Kelly remarked, “if the balloon was an unarmed female veteran, the government would have shot it by now.”

But it didn’t work. So-called MAGA policies really did “make America great again”—richer, more secure, more confident and patriotic.

Which is precisely why they so desperately, fanatically hated it. And him, and us.

3

So how is Biden’s War On Russia working out so far?

Posted on February 3, 2023 by Mike

Not too good.

The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

As for the “which will fall first” question, with America now entirely in the inept hands of its own homegrown Marxists and their pretend “opposition,” well, the answer ought to be obvious. Russia already went through that cataclysmic teachable moment once; soon, it will be our turn.

And yes, Kunstler’s reversion to his by now Standard-Form surfeit of unfounded optimism concerning “investigations” and such tripe in the final ‘graph remains in full rose-tinted effect. Y’know, just in case any of you were wondering about that.

1

A future so bright

Posted on January 31, 2023January 31, 2023 by Mike

We have to be dragged into it against our will, kicking and screaming.

Road Trips in Our Long-Term EVs Have Been…Interesting

Broken chargers, full charging stations, single-digit temperatures, and optimistic range estimates have tested our patience.

While winter has seen many travelers stranded at airport check-in counters this year, MotorTrend editors have been braving the open road in our expanding fleet of long-term electric cars, trucks, and SUVs. During road-trips, MT’s Slack channels often become a de facto logbook of our exploits, capturing the headaches and small victories of long-distance EV driving in real time. Here’s a lightly edited look at how our drivers have fared in the 2022 Ford F-150 Lightning, the 2022 Rivian R1T, the 2022 Volkswagen ID4, the 2022 Lucid Air Grand Touring Performance, and the 2023 Hyundai Ioniq 5 when holiday travel peaked, the weather and temperatures turned nasty, or they simply headed to far-flung destinations.

If you thought that was tons o’ fun, just wait till our antiquated and way-overtaxed power grid crumbles into pieces-parts under the weight of all these state-mandated struggle buggies. The only practical answer? This.

Chris Reed: I’m going to still drive the same vehicle I am now in 2040. I won’t be alone.

Assuming you’ll be allowed to, that is.

People routinely go down memory lane when they see decades-old vehicles — lovingly and ingeniously kept up for years despite replacement parts no longer being readily available — still on the streets long after they typically would have been consigned to scrap heaps. While wealthy collectors of older vehicles focus on classic sports or muscle cars, those with economic motives often prefer those they grew up with, such as the Volkswagen Beetles first sold in 1949. It was the best-selling car in the world in 1968 — popular in the U.S. in large part because of its countercultural associations, popular elsewhere more for its durability, affordability and excellent (for its time) gas mileage. In 1972, the Beetle passed the original Ford Model T to become the most manufactured vehicle in history.

Now there is an increasingly strong chance that this phenomenon — of aging vehicles still being a common sight long after they were first sold — will just keep growing in the United States, and that it could be strongest of all in California.

So I guess they’ve finally gotten it done, then: we are all Cubans now.

1

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

Substack Scalawags

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed

.