Leftward ho! – Page 8

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.

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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.

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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

Mandatory miscegenation

Posted on January 28, 2023 by Mike

It’s a non-negotiable requirement…provided you’re white.

The Ugliest Front In The Race Wars

If you search for “Dating apps for whites,” you might find one or two – I did – but you’re guaranteed to find articles denouncing them as well. I searched for “dating apps for blacks” and “dating apps for Asians,” and failed to find any such articles. The distinction could hardly be clearer.

But Quartz wants you to know that you don’t need a dating app for whites:

The creator of the online dating website WhereWhitePeopleMeet has been getting some questions about why he and his wife would build such a site. The answer, according to the website’s “About Us” page, is “why not?”

But despite criticisms that the website is inherently racist, Sam Russell, the 53-year-old Utah man who founded the website with his wife Tami, told the Washington Post that the site is not racially motivated in any way. He insisted that it was born of the idea that singletons of “every origin, race, religion and lifestyle” can find someone for them, even white people.

“It’s about equal opportunity,” Russell said. “The last thing in the world I am is racist.”

He compared WhereWhitePeopleMeet to Christian Mingle and Farmers Only as examples of preference-based dating websites. In addition, there’s also Tinder, for mobile-first millennials, and Hinge, for anyone who’s afraid of Tinder, and Grouper, for those who prefer to bring two friends along to blind dates. The League caters to a crop of Ivy League graduates and high-earning young professionals. Grindr is a popular option for gay men; Her bills itself as a dating app for lesbians built by lesbians.

But what seems to have escaped Russell is that white people can already find each other with ease on these apps—and in real life, especially in Russell’s state of Utah, which is 91% white. The country as a whole is 77% white. ”Where White People Meet” could pretty much describe almost every online dating website.

Got that? It’s all in your head! The constant hectoring about “white supremacy,” the barrage of “anti-racism” ploys and pitches, the demands for “reparations,” the barrage of entertainment that always contains an interracial couple, and the instant, savage condemnations of any mechanism by which white people can find one another for any reason or none. You’re imagining it all! It’s just one more artifact of your “white privilege” and your “systemic racism.”

As I said, I have some experience in this matter, though it was pre-Internet and conducted through a dating service. Today, as singles strive to connect with someone to love through the Web, the tech giants are doing their best to “debias our desire.” What’s that you say? You don’t find black or Asian woman attractive? You prefer to be with your own kind? You want your children to look like you? YOU RACIST MONSTER!

Many years ago, when I first confronted the thesis that there’s a sotto voce genocide in progress against the white race, I was skeptical, to say the least. No longer, though I have no idea how to counteract it. I hope someone is working on it.

They’d better damned well not be. Not unless they can find some way to sidestep the vituperous condemnation they’ll receive for it to so much as go out for groceries without being chased down the street by a shrieking, pitchfork-and-torch-wielding mob of rage-maddened shitlibs.

4

A coup, if you like

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Mike

Just now noticing it, are ya?

Jeremy Clarkson: We’re in the midst of a coup. Who the hell’s behind it?

Not in the middle of one; it’s long since been over and done with, I’m afraid. As to wondering who’s behind it, you can’t really be serious about that one.

My son came over for a father-and-son pre-football supper the other day, and as he fussed over the Aga, making a particularly fine stir fry, we laughed about what innocuous word had been banned that day and who’d been cancelled. And then, after a pause, he said with a solemn face, “You do know there’s a war going on, don’t you?”

He wasn’t talking about Ukraine. He was talking about a full-on left-wing campaign to unstitch and burn the fabric of Britain. And the genius is that no one really knows that what they’re doing is serious. We laugh as they change the name of the Sir Francis Drake Primary School to something less slavey. We think it’s all a big joke. But it isn’t.

Think about what typically happens in a military operation and then look what the woke left has done here. It’s seized control of our television and radio stations to such an extent that last week Sophie Raworth said, on the BBC News at Six, with a straight face, “And over now to our LGBT and diversity correspondent …”

And TV drama? Unaffected? Right, and when was the last time you saw a fictional police force hunting a gang of Muslim extremists? It’s always the far right. And it’s the same story in comedy. Say anything you like about Boris or Rishi and the laughter track is turned up to 11. Make a joke about she/him pronouns or Greta Thunberg and they’ll blow a piece of tumbleweed across the stage.

You probably think, because you don’t know this war is going on, that when you drop little Johnny off at the school gates he’s going to learn the nine times table that day. No, he isn’t. He’s learning that he might actually be a girl, which is why there are probably tampon dispensers in the boys’ lavatories.

When some young people with green hair glue themselves to the road, large numbers of officers are dispatched to stand around looking at them. And they are only ever removed from the tarmac if they promise to go immediately to the nearest art gallery and throw some soup at a painting.

You’ll definitely want to read all of this one, folks. Even though he’s writing about Jollye Olde, across the pond we’re tailgaiting them down the same sorry road ourselves.

2

VDH getting blackpilled?

Posted on January 21, 2023 by Mike

So JJ Sefton contends, and if Hanson’s latest is any indication, he might well be right about that.

One overriding principle of the new Democratic Party is asymmetry—or the notion that the Left’s moral superiority earns absolute exemption from the very methods they employ against their opponents.

Disproportionality explains why the historic Mar-a-Lago raid was constructed in bogus fashion as a legitimate search for “nuclear codes.” Yet it would have sparked outrage had the FBI, on rumors of Biden sloppiness, sent armed agents into Jill Biden’s underwear drawers looking for classified papers concerning Ukraine and Iran, or towed away Joe Biden’s Corvette to get access to a garage full of unlawfully stored classified papers, or strewn Biden’s papers across the floor for an FBI concocted photo-op.

Well, sure, but then again who in their right mind would WANT to go through “Dr” Jill’s underwear drawer, anyway? Please pardon me whilst I throw up in my mouth, just a little.

The buffoonish protestors and rioters of January 6 were to be jailed for months without formal charges, put in solitary confinement, and often sentenced to the maximum punishment possible. But the rioters, shooters, and killers of 120 days of mayhem and violence during summer 2020 were calibrated as “summer of love” rowdies. Antifa and Black Lives Matter sort of, kind of got a little bit out of hand in torching a police precinct, a federal courthouse, and an iconic Washington, D.C. church, as well as trying to storm the White House grounds, sending the president into an underground bunker.

That Antifa and BLM plotted much of their anarchy and violence on social media unimpeded was unremarked upon. That fact mattered not at all in comparison to the illegal paraders and rioters of January 6. Police who shoot unarmed protestors usually have their identities immediately revealed; yet when they lethally shoot the likes of an Ashli Babbitt, their identities are suppressed, and their questionable conduct lauded.

Donald Trump was deemed crazy. A Yale psychiatrist made the rounds on television and in Congress to claim he needed an intervention and straitjacket. The FBI and an interim attorney general discussed wearing a wire to entrap Donald Trump and convince his cabinet he was nuts. If the FBI and the Justice Department did the same to Joe Biden, the Left would have claimed a coup was in progress.

Joe Biden daily forgets where he is and what he is doing. Someday historians will fault those who knowingly used a non compos mentis septuagenarian, without regard for the interests of the American people, to mask a radical neo-socialist agenda.

Biden shakes imaginary hands. He insists his son died in Iraq. In his mind, Brian Sicknick was murdered on January 6. In Walter Mitty-style, he brags that he has been a semi-truck driver, an arrested civil rights activist, a major college football prospect, a U.S. Naval Academy scholarship prospect, and on and on. If Biden was given the Montreal Cognitive Test, as was Trump, he would likely flunk it outright.

Conservatives should be aware that they are not dealing with the party of JFK and LBJ. The Democratic Party has nothing in common with the agendas of a slick Bill Clinton and is well beyond the “fundamental transformations” of arch-narcissist Barack Obama.

We are faced with a strictly disciplined, no-nonsense revolutionary party, well known from history that aims to change the nation into something unrecognizable by most Americans. And it feels that it has now created the means to do it.

“Aims to”? AIMS?!? My God, man, they’ve DONE it. The question before us now is whether or not it can successfully be wrested back from them, and the question remains an open one.

2

4

OF COURSE they’re not coming for your gas stove!

Posted on January 20, 2023January 20, 2023 by Mike

I understand they also have some very nice beachfront property in Arizona up for sale, too.

Democrat-led cities are already moving forward with gas stove bans that will affect millions

Former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in 2021 if his city could ban natural gas, ‘any city can do the same’

Yeah, well, the joke’s gonna be on you soon, Red “Bill”. Because guess what kind of stove practically every restaurant in the entire damned world runs?

Go on, guess. I dares ya. Yes, that would include those exclusive, hoity-toity, exorbitantly-priced eateries you self-proclaimed “elite” types so enjoy frequenting.

Democratic leaders in major cities nationwide have already moved forward with bans on natural gas stoves even as the Biden administration has pumped the brakes on similar regulations at the federal level.

Cities including Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle and New York City — which are collectively home to more than 10 million Americans — have enacted varying restrictions on natural gas hookups impacting gas-powered furnaces, ovens and stoves.

Leaders of the Democrat-led cities have argued that transitioning away from natural gas would help achieve climate and net-zero ambitions.

“New York City is proof that it’s possible to end the era of fossil fuels, invest in a sustainable future, protect public health and create good-paying jobs in the process,” former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio said in December 2021. “If the largest city in America can take this critical step to ban gas use, any city can do the same.”

Following his remarks, de Blasio signed a law requiring the phase-out of fossil fuel usage in new buildings. The law, which goes into effect this year and mandates new buildings are fully electric by 2027, made New York City the largest city and first large cold-weather city to phase out fossil fuel combustion in new construction.

Electricity which comes from where and is generated using what, again now? We wonders, yes we wonders.

Eedjits, the whole sorry lot of ‘em. Eedjits, scoundrels, and reprobates.

1

Why we call it Once-Great Britain

Posted on January 20, 2023 by Mike

So very much wrong here it’s tough to know where to even start.

Britain’s top food watchdog recently warned that bringing cake to the office is comparable to subjecting coworkers to second-hand cigarette smoke.

So-called “second-hand smoke,” like so much else these days, is the bunk.

Professor Susan Jebb, chair of the UK’s Food Standards Agency, told The Times Health commission, “We all like to think we’re rational, intelligent, educated people who make informed choices the whole time and we undervalue the impact of the environment,” adding that “If nobody brought in cakes into the office, I would not eat cakes in the day, but because people do bring cakes in, I eat them. Now, OK, I have made a choice, but people were making a choice to go into a smoky pub.”

Yeah, thanks be to God that you took care of that whole “making a choice” problem for good, eh?

“With smoking, after a very long time, we have got to a place where we understand that individuals have to make some effort but that we can make their efforts more successful by having a supportive environment,” Jebb argued. “But we still don’t feel like that about food.”

Oh, so THAT’s what we’re calling “authoritarian meddling” now, I gather.

Well, maybe that’s because food in the office only affects the individuals who eat it — unlike second-hand smoke, which is inhaled by everyone in close proximity to the smoker.

Sorry, but again: no.

Jebb went on to say that junk food ads are “undermining people’s free will,” yet claimed that restrictions are “not about the nanny state.”

Oh my NO, perish the thought. Sheesh.

These are the same people who are trying to make us eat crickets and believe that cauliflower tastes like rice. And the same people who told us to eat margarine for our health before reversing course and saying it will kill us, and now claiming that it’s good for us again.

And they have the exact same right to do so now as they did then: none whatsoever. Which is the REAL point at issue, not whether they’ve ever gotten a damned thing right, since ever. Or it ought to be, anyhow.

But yeah, you Limeys go ahead and forego that cake, it’s bad stuff. Plus, it’s difficult to eat with those bendy, non-scary plastic knives and forks your NotANanny State has forcibly relegated you chumps to.

1

Beria’s apostles

Posted on January 16, 2023 by Mike

America That Was was overthrown and taken without resistance.

I’ll be honest, I’m not patriotic to the United States of America. I’m patriotic to the concept of individual rights and freedoms. When the United States of America was a vessel to carry those rights and freedoms to every American, I was patriotic to it. When it became hostile to those rights and freedoms, I stopped being patriotic to it. Where the United States of America has embraced an ideology in contravention of those principles, reaching more and more into the surveillance state and seeking every means of control, i.e., food distribution, energy rationing, electrical grid manipulation, capturing and enslaving children in indoctrination centers, the mind control and even genocide that has lately been exposed, I reject it completely and in every way.

The clever and important distinction is when they captured our politics and politicians they left in place the traditional means of gaining support through elections, but completely corrupting them to the point where no success for individual rights and freedoms could be won through the vote. Despite the fact that the Brunson case was refused by the Supreme Court does not make it’s point invalid, in only means we have cowards and traitors in the Supreme Court and the congress of the United States. No surprise, because the United States Constitution has been overthrown. This is not a theory, it’s a fact. While some judges and some courts might still entertain the concepts of the Constitution in their rulings, it is most often performative and a way to continue the ruse that there has been no coup. But there has.

You are living in a foreign nation. This fact is driven home by the unabated invasion of the world’s population through the southern border. The absence of borders is a capitulation to the world of a non-nation. America is a an open playground for pedophiles and drug dealers. Fentynal is killing almost as many young people as the vaxx. Yet, there is no backlash, no investigation, no criminal charges, just a lot of people dying at the hands of an overactive or underactive police state.

This is the point, they prosecute the people who expose the truth and refuse to prosecute the people who are committing the crimes. A nation can be no more compromised than that.

I’m not saying we should start a war against these people, I’m saying that they have started a war against us and we’re not putting up any resistance. We’re worse than France, because at least they had a resistance to the Nazis, we don’t.

Worse than those cheese-eating surrender monkeys? Dammit, TL, that smarts.

5

Thinking ahead

Posted on January 14, 2023January 15, 2023 by Mike

Make no mistake here, folks: what we just saw with the gas-stove trial balloon is part of a process, a long-range plan.

Progressive cities such as Berkeley, San Francisco and New York City have already banned gas stoves and other appliances in new buildings. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week proposed a ban on gas equipment including stoves in new small buildings in 2025 and larger ones in 2028.

Come 2030, New Yorkers won’t be allowed to replace their gas stoves with new ones if they break down. “As you begin making a transition, everyone will have to switch out appliances,” a state official explained. This is how the left’s green-energy “transition” will work for all things. Come 2035, New Yorkers and Californians won’t be able to buy new gasoline-powered cars either.

The Biden Administration is also aiding and abetting the anti-gas stove cause. Last year it filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting a gas ban by Berkeley, Calif. The departments of Justice and Energy argued that cities and states should be able to exercise police powers to prohibit the use of “dangerous or unsafe items.” Why would the federal government weigh in on a local regulatory case, if not for ideological climate solidarity?

Rest assured, it’s not just about Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ alone. That’s just cover, a ruse. Rather, the CC agenda itself is part and parcel of the tyrant’s eternal ambition to let nothing escape his gaze or his grasp.

Progressives claim that gas stoves produce pollutants that are harmful to human health. But pollution comes from cooking with poor ventilation, not from natural gas. Electric range-tops have the “hidden hazard” of potential burns, to borrow Mr. Trumka’s words.

There really is a culture war coming over gas stoves, and everything else involving fossil fuels, because climate has become for the left a matter of core cultural identity. Progressives want to impose their values on the lifestyle of everyone else, including in the kitchen. If subsidies don’t work, coercion follows. When they can’t win the political debate, they resort to brute government force. They really are coming for your stove.

Along with everydamned thing else. Remember: there is NOTHING they won’t try to fuck with, take over, control, and ultimately, ban. Nothing. It’s who they are, it’s what they do.

5

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