Life in a once-great nation

RuiNation

Posted on January 2, 2023January 2, 2023 by Mike

Anybody who has ever worked for a medium-to-large-sized corporation in America has experienced this same sort of thing. Even working for a small, strictly-local B-drayage hauler in the air-freight business for many years, I most certainly have.

What happened to Southwest Airlines?

I’ve been a pilot for Southwest Airlines for over 35 years. I’ve given my heart and soul to Southwest Airlines during those years. And quite honestly Southwest Airlines has given its heart and soul to me and my family.

Many of you have asked what caused this epic meltdown. Unfortunately, the frontline employees have been watching this meltdown coming like a slow-motion train wreck for sometime. And we’ve been begging our leadership to make much needed changes in order to avoid it. What happened yesterday started two decades ago.

Herb Kelleher was the brilliant CEO of SWA until 2004. He was a very operationally oriented leader. Herb spent lots of time on the front line. He always had his pulse on the day-to-day operation and the people who ran it. That philosophy flowed down through the ranks of leadership to the front-line managers. We were a tight operation from top to bottom. We had tools, leadership and employee buy-in. Everything that was needed to run a first-class operation. When Herb retired in 2004 Gary Kelly became the new CEO.

Gary was an accountant by education and his style leading Southwest Airlines became more focused on finances and less on operations. He did not spend much time on the front lines. He didn’t engage front line employees much. When the CEO doesn’t get out in the trenches then neither do the lower levels of leadership.

Gary named another accountant to be Chief Operating Officer (the person responsible for day-to-day operations). The new COO had little or no operational background. This trickled down through the lower levels of leadership, as well.

They all disengaged the operation, disengaged the employees and focused more on Return on Investment, stock buybacks and Wall Street. This approach worked for Gary’s first 8 years because we were still riding the strong wave that Herb had built.

But as time went on the operation began to deteriorate. There was little investment in upgrading technology (after all, how do you measure the return on investing in infrastructure?) or the tools we needed to operate efficiently and consistently. As the frontline employees began to see the deterioration in our operation we began to warn our leadership. We educated them, we informed them and we made suggestions to them. But to no avail. The focus was on finances not operations. As we saw more and more deterioration in our operation our asks turned to pleas. Our pleas turned to dire warnings. But they went unheeded. After all, the stock price was up so what could be wrong?

We were a motivated, willing and proud employee group wanting to serve our customers and uphold the tradition of our beloved airline, the airline we built and the airline that the traveling public grew to cheer for and luv. But we were watching in frustration and disbelief as our once amazing airline was becoming a house of cards.

A half dozen small scale meltdowns occurred during the mid to late 2010’s. With each mini meltdown Leadership continued to ignore the pleas and warnings of the employees in the trenches. We were still operating with 1990’s technology. We didn’t have the tools we needed on the line to operate the sophisticated and large airline we had become. We could see that the wheels were about ready to fall off the bus. But no one in leadership would heed our pleas.
When COVID happened SWA scaled back considerably (as did all of the airlines) for about two years. This helped conceal the serious problems in technology, infrastructure and staffing that were occurring and being ignored. But as we ramped back up the lack of attention to the operation was waiting to show its ugly head.

Gary Kelly retired as CEO in early 2022. Bob Jordan was named CEO. He was a more operationally oriented leader. He replaced our Chief Operating Officer with a very smart man and they announced their priority would be to upgrade our airline’s technology and provide the frontline employees the operational tools we needed to care for our customers and employees. Finally, someone acknowledged the elephant in the room.

But two decades of neglect takes several years to overcome. And, unfortunately to our horror, our house of cards came tumbling down this week as a routine winter storm broke our 1990’s operating system.

The frontline employees were ready and on station. We were properly staffed. We were at the airports. Hell, we were ON the airplanes. But our antiquated software systems failed coupled with a decades old system of having to manage 20,000 frontline employees by phone calls. No automation had been developed to run this sophisticated machine.

We had a routine winter storm across the Midwest last Thursday. A larger than normal number flights were cancelled as a result. But what should have been one minor inconvenient day of travel turned into this nightmare. After all, American, United, Delta and the other airlines operated with only minor flight disruptions.

The two decades of neglect by SWA leadership caused the airline to lose track of all its crews. ALL of us. We were there. With our customers. At the jet. Ready to go. But there was no way to assign us. To confirm us. To release us to fly the flight. And we watched as our customers got stranded without their luggage missing their Christmas holiday.

I believe that our new CEO Bob Jordan inherited a MESS. This meltdown was not his failure but the failure of those before him. I believe he has the right priorities. But it will take time to right this ship. A few years at a minimum. Old leaders need to be replaced. Operationally oriented managers need to be brought in. I hope and pray Bob can execute on his promises to fix our once proud airline. Time will tell.

It’s been a punch in the gut for us frontline employees. We care for the traveling public. We have spent our entire careers serving you. Safely. Efficiently. With luv and pride. We are horrified. We are sorry. We are sorry for the chaos, inconvenience and frustration our airline caused you. We are angry. We are embarrassed. We are sad. Like you, the traveling public, we have been let down by our own leaders.

Herb once said the biggest threat to Southwest Airlines will come from within. Not from other airlines. What a visionary he was. I miss Herb now more than ever.

Whether they know of him specifically or not, many people do. Or almost certainly will, as time grinds on.

The American economic juggernaut was built on the idea that people would start at the bottom of any given enterprise and work their way up based on experience, talent, and knowledge of the business from soup to nuts. Alas for us all, the advent of the MBA replaced that excellent system with nebbish dweebs coming in from outside to “manage” the business without ever having set Foot One on a loading dock, factory floor, or assembly line in their entire lives, which has all but done away with any concept of making it on merit. Those overcredentialed-but-undereducated, shiny-loafered, smug college-boy types have been nothing but sand in the gears of what was once the mightiest wealth-producing engine in all of history.

Look back in anger sorrow

Posted on January 2, 2023 by Mike

Diplomad takes a look in the ol’ rearview, not just at the disastrous annum just past, but a lot further back than that.

This is where I go full old man.

This no-good, horrid year of 2022 draws to a close–none too soon for my taste–and I can only hope that 2023 will prove better. Will it? While I have no great powers of observation and foretelling, what little I do have tell me that things will not get any better. Sorry to be so cheerful.

The impending death of the current year has me reflecting on my own life, and what I have done and not done with it. First, my own life. What have I done? Not much really. I spent some 34 years in the State Department; my tenure there will pass, as they say in Spanish, “sin pena ni gloria,” i.e., unnoticed one way or another. I devoted my adult life to what I thought was my country, its values, and interests. I am now wracked with doubts that that was the case. As we see from the “Twitter Files,” the doubts I had about what was really going on have proven out. I am deeply saddened and depressed by that. Those institutions with which I worked closely for so many years, e.g., FBI, CIA, DOJ, have turned out to be the real enemies. The Taliban, AQ, PRC, or the USSR, could not undermine our nation to any degree comparable to what has been done by our high-tech mafia, allied with the pro-regime media, and the key institutions of the Deep State. The enemy is here; they are in our house, and as we so graphically see every day on our border are openly working to tear it apart. Not just here. I see the same happening in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and all over Western Europe.

The assault on the values, even the most basic ones, of our civilization is relentless. The world we leave our grandchildren is a horrid one: Twerking drag queens in our libraries and schools; feral youth owning the streets; malicious cretins dominating our legal, educational, and public health institutions; an entertainment industry promoting violence and perversion. Not cheerful.

Given the way things currently stand, only a fool, a hermit, or a still-slumbering Rip Van Winkle could be.

Raise a glass!

Posted on December 31, 2022 by Mike

I’ll drink to that.

Most of today’s regulatory framework for alcohol traces back to the immediate post-Prohibition years. The basic assumption was that alcohol consumption is bad but unavoidable. The goal, then, was to regulate in ways that led people to drink less, via high taxes and inconveniences, without returning to the bootleggers and speakeasies of the disastrous Prohibition era.

Though things have lightened up a bit since then, that’s still the basic philosophy today. Alcohol discussions tend to turn on things like liver damage, impaired driving, violence and so on.

These negative consequences are real. But as Slingerland makes clear, they aren’t the whole story. There are a lot of less-heralded positives.

Given the downsides, alcohol consumption must also offer some advantages, Slingerland reasons, else it would have died out. But it hasn’t. In fact it’s hard to find successful civilizations that don’t use alcohol — and those few that qualify tend to replace it with other intoxicants that have similar effects.

Drinking doesn’t just make us feel good,

Until the hangover sets in.

it also makes us get along better,

Until the brawl breaks out.

cooperate more effectively

Until the obstreperousness spills forth.

and think more expansively.

Until the blackout occurs.

Of course, drinking isn’t all upside, but that isn’t the point. The point is that it’s not all downside, either — yet we regulate it, essentially, as if it were. We need a more balanced approach.

Said a mouthful there, Glenn.

And it isn’t just alcohol. As our culture has veered in an increasingly bossy and punitive direction, the tolerance for any sort of downside is vanishing. The “playground movement” at the beginning of the last century argued “better a broken arm than a broken spirit.” Today’s society takes a different approach.

Indubitably so…and there’s a reason for that, too. In present-day Amerika v2.0, broken spirits are the goal, the real point of the whole exercise. Why? The better to oppress you with, my dear. Docile slaves are much easier to lord over than resentful, belligerent ones, you see. The bottom-line problem propping all this foolishness up? The deep-seated Progressivist aversion to any and all risk.

During the pandemic, we saw a degree of safety-ism that discounted the value of humans getting together in the face of tiny or even notional risks, leading to absurdities like ocean paddle-boarders being arrested for paddling maskless. There’s much more value in the activity than risk in being unmasked at sea.

The list of cases where killjoys focus excessively on the negative is huge, and anyone reading this can think of many examples. But what do we do about it?

Ain’t but the one thing: start killing the killjoys. It really is the only way to be rid of them for any meaningful length of time, although even that isn’t permanent.

A non-competitive “competition”

Posted on December 18, 2022 by Mike

Glenn calls it “the new space race,” but China is the only nation running in it at the moment: China completes seventh space launch inside 10 days.

Not “stupid,” not “weak,” not “clueless”—COMPLICIT

Posted on December 12, 2022December 12, 2022 by Mike

None so blind as those who will not see.

What Moves the Voters Republicans Lost?
Unless there is a major turnaround in the culture, the Republicans will have to deal with a strong and vocal opposition in future elections.

In “The Republican Struggle with Defeat,” Conrad Black lays out the situation that the Republican Party confronts after its unexpectedly disastrous midterm elections. Despite Joe Biden’s unpopularity and the range of problems he and his party have caused—from broken borders and inflation to the cultural radicalization of both the military and public education, and debacles abroad—the Democrats did unexpectedly well at the polls. Unlike during the Obama Administration, Biden’s party won the Senate, several governorships, a number of state legislatures, and held its defeats in the House to a minimum.

Black avoids exaggerating the Trump factor in the defeat of Republican candidates. One can point to some worthy Trump picks, including Kari Lake, Blake Masters, Adam Laxalt, Lee Zeldin, and J. D. Vance, even if other picks, such as Herschel Walker and Doug Mastriano, were duds. But there is no convincing evidence that Trump’s support for a candidate was the decisive factor in any person’s defeat. Other circumstances, as Black points out, led to those candidates’ losses. If the United States now “plods on with a one-and-one-half party system” and “veers harder to the left,” we should look elsewhere for the most decisive reasons.

A major cause for the midterm results, argues Black, “is the apparent inability of the Republicans to master the harvested ballot. Trump correctly warned in 2020 this would be used to rig the election, but he was completely inadequate in the counter-measures he took to prevent that.” In my view, one can’t stress enough the games that the Democrats have mastered in changing electoral procedures. From vote-harvesting and voting without personal identification to election outcomes being determined by insecure mail-in ballots sent in more than a month before scheduled in-person voting, these Democratic “reforms” should have met unrelenting Republican resistance.

Unfortunately, they didn’t, which raises the question: How would the elections in Arizona, Nevada, and Pennsylvania have turned out if these states had the voting laws that are in force in Florida?

An utterly pointless debate, an exercise in abject futility, perhaps even outright misdirection, at least in some cases. Those laws are NOT in force; the Vichy GOPe did NOT resist, and only a delusional fool expects that they ever will. If they had any interest in such piffling bagatelles, they would have done so already. Get your head around it already, ferchrissakes, and deal with current reality at long, long last.

For obvious reasons, Republicans are hesitant about contesting questionable ballots.

“OBVIOUS reasons,” is it? Name three for me, please. Don’t strain yourself, I’ll wait.

They quake at the thought of being accused of election denial or suppressing minority votes. This hesitancy puts them at a disadvantage against a radical leftist party that shows no compunctions about cheating or election denial.

Not hardly, amigo. What actually makes them quake at the thought of it is the prospect of upending a comfy, too-familiar applecart, thereby disrupting a wholly rotten system in which they’ve long since accepted their assigned role—a system which has made them rich beyond the dreams of avarice, despite their demeaning status as junior partners therein.

This hesitancy puts them at a disadvantage against a radical leftist party that shows no compunctions about cheating or election denial. The fact that Democratic Party organizers and politicians can engage in their legerdemain with unfailing media protection makes them even more brazen.

That lack of compunction and brazenness is a very, very old story, told from deep within a very crowded memory hole.

Democrat Voter Fraud: A Brief History
This is a “brief history” because the complete history of Democrat electoral malfeasance reaching back to Tammany Hall and Tweed would require four volumes or more. (I’m running into the same problem with a new book I’m outlining analyzing the Democrats as a criminal organization, much like the Mafia or the Camorra.)

So a brief history it is, limited to the past thirty years or so. Believe you me, there’s no lack of cases even in that short span.

The Dinkins Magic Voting Machines

Just days before voting in the 1993 David Dinkins/Rudolf Giuliani election, the New York Times reported that a number of voting machines had been found in a closed Manhattan school. All the machines were loaded with votes for Democrat incumbent David Dinkins.

Voting proceeded without the help of those machines, and of course Rudy was elected. But that was the end of it. As far as I’ve been able to learn, there was no investigation, no inquiries, or, for that matter, any further reportage on it.

Votes from the 8^th Dimension

The 2004 Washington state gubernatorial contest between Republican Dino Rossi and Democrat Christine Gregoire ended with Rossi up by 261 votes. A machine recount left him still ahead by 42 votes. The state Democrats paid over $700,000 for a hand recount, and whaddaya know… Votes started appearing from any and all conceivable sources. A bag containing votes here… an electoral official’s car there… it’s surprising they didn’t start falling out of the sky like the frogs in Magnolia.

By the end of the year Gregoire was ahead by 130 votes and was inaugurated on January 12. Rossi, God love him, continued fighting, taking Gregoire to court over the blatantly illegitimate votes. A Pierce County judge tossed the votes out, only to be overruled by the Washington State Supreme Court. A final decision didn’t come for six months, when Judge John Bridges, a Democrat appointee, tossed aside the concept of “chain of custody” to find in favor of Gregoire. Rossi should have continued on to the U.S. Supreme Court – after all, a critical legal concept was being overthrown – but he does get an E for Effort, since he did more than any other Republican in recent memory.

The Washington case enshrined the concept that all Democrat votes, whether they emerged from a portal into hyperspace or were discovered in a 2000 B.C. Sumerian temple, had to be counted no matter what the circumstances. GOP votes… not so much.

Goshdarnit, People Liked Him

A similar chain of events occurred in the election of Al Franken in Minnesota in 2008. Incumbent Norm Coleman originally prevailed with over 700 votes, which were mysteriously whittled down to 200 in short order. Franken called for a recount, and begorrah, the votes suddenly started appearing. Some, anyway — an envelope of votes from one county simply disappeared, but were counted regardless, the totals evidently being read out from tea leaves. By the time it all ended, Franken was ahead by 312 votes. Coleman, a Republican gentleman of the old school, made perfunctory efforts at protest, but was undercut by the GOP itself, led by former governor Arne Carlson, a RINO to rule them all, who had refused to endorse Coleman during the campaign.

Shortly after the election, it was discovered that at least 1,099 illegal votes had been cast by felons, and this had been known during the vote count, but had been ignored. Franken exchanged his diapers for a suit and spent the better part of two terms voting the way he was told and embarrassing his party before being forced out during the “MeToo” craze.

Lots more where that come from, and remember, these are contemporary examples only. Back to the AG piece for the sad, sorry denouement.

The solution to these problems for Republicans is to ignore the righteous accusations and to challenge unwaveringly suspicious ballots.

It isn’t a “solution,” it’s their sworn and sacred duty, or would be in a better, less ruinously-crooked system than this one is.

It would make even more sense to get voting to take place on election day and in a precinct station under bipartisan surveillance. It is just plain dumb for conflict-averse Republican leaders to tell their constituency to learn to do mail-in voting months ahead of Election Day. Most Republican voters cast ballots, as they should, in the assigned places on Election Day.

Fine suggestions all, not a single one of which has a ghost of a chance of ever being implemented. The larger problem?

Even more problematic for the Republicans are the large voting blocs they are losing by ever larger numbers: 18-to 29-year-old voters, in which the proportion of college students is rising. In November, unmarried women voted 70 percent for the Democrats, and in Pennsylvania they helped significantly in electing the brain-injured radical John Fetterman. More than 70 percent of college students voted, and 63 percent of them broke for the Democrats. Although the Republicans have made modest inroads among black voters and while the Hispanic vote has increased for the GOP by 10 points since 2018, they are losing badly key constituencies. These blocs are mostly on the woke Left and not likely to be won over by appeals to “conservative values.”

Heh. “Not likely,” he says. Understate much, pal?

Further, there is no indication that the electorate cares about Democratic scandals and failures. Republican attempts to call attention to such issues or to the damaged brain of our new Pennsylvania senator or to Joe Biden’s obvious decrepitude fall on deaf ears with these voters. Unrestricted abortion rights count for them far more than broken borders or the venality of the Biden family.

That’s because more and more of us are being brought around to the grim realization of the uselessness, the hopelessness, of Voting Harderer!™ at them to provide a way out of this stinking bog for us. The cynicism and disgust at the wholesale, systemic corruption of “elections” in Amerika v2.0 is growing by leaps and bounds, which I take as a positive sign. The more of us who acknowledge the farcical nature of the whole shit-circus, however unpleasant a reality it might be to confront, the sooner something meaningful might actually be done about it, I believe.

It’s a mad, mad, mad, mad world Left

Posted on December 10, 2022December 10, 2022 by Mike

Nucking futs.

No description of the activist minorities bent on erasing America as we know it would be complete without delving into the sexual revolution, which has taken a form that even hippies in the hedonistic late 1960s would scarcely recognize. Do you think women have penises or that men menstruate? If you do not agree with those statements, American institutions ranging from Proctor and Gamble to the National Hockey League consider you to be a “divisive” individual, lacking empathy.

The preposterous extreme to which the woke gender warriors are trying to take America is incomprehensible to any sane person. Do you believe it’s appropriate for drag queens to recruit five-year-old children to learn how to twerk? Should states be boycotted because their legislatures had the courage to prohibit biological men from using a women’s restroom, or participate in women’s sports? Do you object to surgeons removing the sexual organs of children? Careful how you answer. Sanity is insurrectionary.

The public agenda of Antifa and BLM is “equity.” For the Homeless Industrial Complex, it’s “compassion.” For climate militants, it’s “saving the earth.” For gender warriors, it’s to end “discrimination.” But in all of these cases, their hidden agenda is to advance the power of the state, to divide and demoralize the population, to destroy conventional traditions and norms, and consolidate private property ownership in the hands of a small elite.

Coincidence? I think NOT. TL takes it further.

The point is that every avenue of power has been captured from the people, there is nowhere to turn for justice. The individual rights secured by the Constitution have been targeted for their power and finally diluted with the pandemic to nothingness. Whatever the government wants to do, it’ll just do. Merrick Garland will send his thugs out to beat on people angry at their school boards to send a message. The government will keep political prisoners in isolation and degradation forever as a warning not to protest from the right. It’s okay to burn blocks down and riot for several months if you’re of the communist persuasion, though. THAT is their message: abandon all of this “republic” nonsense with its individual rights and power and get on board the damn train!

The politics are rigged, the military’s woke, the opposition party’s an illusion, the police don’t enforce the law, in fact, no one is enforcing the laws that need it, but minor transgressions are prosecuted with deadly force and life sentences. The social media are teamed up the the FBI to rig elections and the corporations like FedEx and UPS are feeding gun sales info to the ATF. What was that definition of fascism? When government and business collude against the people? Huh.

I repeat: Coincidence? I think NOT. Vote harderer at them? Don’t make me laugh.

Our elections are still being rigged and stolen. The Georgia US Senate election is Exhibit A. I’ve predicted for two weeks now that Herschel Walker didn’t stand a chance of winning. Because Georgia is rigged.

Raphael Warnock is literally a radical Marxist. He hates America. He allegedly abused and beat his ex-wife (actually worse, according to her testimony). He defended the anti-American, racist and anti-semitic rantings of Rev Jeremiah Wright.

Yet we are to believe he beat Herschel Walker in a Southern State, in an environment of the worst inflation, crime and open borders in our country’s history- all produced directly by Democrats who aren’t even as radical as Warnock. Really?

It all makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? And I have a bridge to sell you, in Vegas, over the Atlantic Ocean.

You’re being gaslighted. This is all B.S.

Pretty much, yeah. But hey, in a country where a befuddled, patently unfit rutabaga like Fetterman can be “elected” to the Senate, nothing ought to surprise us, I suppose.

Terminated

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

John Whitehead makes an airtight case that the US Constitution has been.

Consider for yourself.

We are in the grip of martial law. We have what the founders feared most: a “standing” or permanent army on American soil. This de facto standing army is made up of weaponized, militarized domestic police forces which look like, dress like, and act like the military; are armed with guns, ammunition and military-style equipment; are authorized to make arrests; and are trained in military tactics.

We are in the government’s crosshairs. The U.S. government continues to act as judge, jury and executioner over a populace that have been pre-judged and found guilty, stripped of their rights, and left to suffer at the hands of government agents trained to respond with the utmost degree of violence. Consequently, we are at the mercy of law enforcement officers who have almost absolute discretion to decide who is a threat, what constitutes resistance, and how harshly they can deal with the citizens they were appointed to “serve and protect.” With alarming regularity, unarmed men, women, children and even pets are being gunned down by the government’s standing army of militarized police who shoot first and ask questions later.

We are no longer safe in our homes. This present menace comes from the government’s army of bureaucratized, corporatized, militarized SWAT teams who are waging war on the last stronghold left to us as a free people: the sanctity of our homes.

We have no real freedom of speech. We are moving fast down a slippery slope to an authoritarian society in which the only opinions, ideas and speech expressed are the ones permitted by the government and its corporate cohorts. In more and more cases, the government is declaring war on what should be protected political speech whenever it challenges the government’s power, reveals the government’s corruption, exposes the government’s lies, and encourages the citizenry to push back against the government’s many injustices. The ramifications are so far-reaching as to render almost every American who criticizes the government an extremist in word, deed, thought or by association.

We have no real privacy. We’re being spied on by a domestic army of government snitches, spies and techno-warriors. This government of Peeping Toms is watching everything we do, reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, and monitoring everything we spend. Beware of what you say, what you read, what you write, where you go, and with whom you communicate, because it is all being recorded, stored, and catalogued, and will be used against you eventually, at a time and place of the government’s choosing.

We are losing our right to bodily privacy and integrity. The debate over bodily integrity covers broad territory, ranging from forced vaccinations, forced cavity searches, forced colonoscopies, forced blood draws and forced breath-alcohol tests to forced DNA extractions, forced eye scans, and forced inclusion in biometric databases: these are just a few ways in which Americans continue to be reminded that we have no real privacy, no real presumption of innocence, and no real control over what happens to our bodies during an encounter with government officials. The groundwork being laid with these mandates is a prologue to what will become the police state’s conquest of a new, relatively uncharted, frontier: inner space, specifically, the inner workings (genetic, biological, biometric, mental, emotional) of the human race.

We no longer have a right to private property. If government agents can invade your home, break down your doors, kill your dog, damage your furnishings and terrorize your family, your property is no longer private and secure—it belongs to the government. Hard-working Americans are having their bank accounts, homes, cars electronics and cash seized by police under the assumption that they have allegedly been associated with some criminal scheme.

Sadly, tragically even, that’s only the beginning of a long list of “abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evincing a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism“—not a single item of which I can find anything to quibble with or contradict. Ah, but how did it happen, you ask, and who is ultimately to blame? That’s the most depressing part of all.

Unfortunately, we have done this to ourselves.

We allowed ourselves to be seduced by the false siren song of politicians promising safety in exchange for relinquished freedom. We placed our trust in political saviors and failed to ask questions to hold our representatives accountable to abiding by the Constitution. We looked the other way and made excuses while the government amassed an amazing amount of power over us, and backed up that power-grab with a terrifying amount of military might and weaponry, and got the courts to sanction their actions every step of the way. We chose to let partisan politics divide us and turn us into easy targets for the government’s oppression.

Mind you, the powers-that-be want us to be censored, silenced, muzzled, gagged, zoned out, caged in and shut down. They want our speech and activities monitored for any sign of “extremist” activity. They want us to be estranged from each other and kept at a distance from those who are supposed to represent us. They want taxation without representation. They want a government without the consent of the governed.

They want the Constitution terminated.

“We” may have contributed to our downfall through our inaction and gullibility, but we are also the only hope for a free future.

Unexpectedly and against all odds, Whitehead concludes on an optimistic note. Read it all.

Whistling past the graveyard

Posted on December 7, 2022December 7, 2022 by Mike

There’s a larger point to be made about the Moore County power outage, and Denninger makes it.

Question: Why couldn’t this be immediately fixed?

Answer: They don’t have spares for the parts that were damaged.

Why do they not have the spares?

Because we sent our supply lines overseas, we made no provisions to have spares, and the regulators at the state and federal level sat on their hands and played with themselves instead of requiring that providers of critical services, such as electricity, had a sufficient stock of spares to cover both routine failures and those caused by weather or low-grade assaults perpetrated by small numbers of people.

This is the gross incompetence we have throughout our society. It is the manifestation of “oh nothing bad will ever happen so we don’t have to be prepared for it” that has shown up in all manner of other places, such as the cars that are completed except for chips in their engine computers without which they will not run, and thus they’re sitting in a field unsold.

Rather than insist that such critical items be produced here in the United States, including all precursor components over the last couple of decades we did nothing of the sort. We allowed the nickel to be “saved” and then pocketed by the shareholders, directors and officers while offshoring supply to China and other places which have no duty to US citizens.

We then went further in our official malfeasance and performed no audits or forced corrective action when the spares were not available and resupply looked possibly challenged, to the point that vehicles are stacked up and can’t be sold for want of a chip and now power is out in an entire county because the switchgear and transformers in two bog-standard substations that feed the area were damaged and the power company has no spares available to immediately replace them.

What you should learn from this is that this sort of disruption is tiny compared to what ever one hundred dedicated men, uncorrelated and thus unable to be interdicted in advance could do any time they decided to.

Further, while I’m sure they’ll find the parts somewhere in the US and restore power if the damage was to fifty counties instead of one the odds are high that said parts would not exist at all in the United States and might not be available in sufficient quantity to actually restore service to everyone for months or even longer.

A commenter over at Aesop’s joint hammers it in deeper.

Just in case you all are not aware of the reality of our power grid and the companies that maintain them. Regional depots have maybe 1 or at most 2 of those larger HV transformers sitting in a warehouse, these are the ubiquitous monsters about 10×10 ft that convert the high tension down to more usable voltages for local distribution in our towns and factories. The smaller pole mounted units, perhaps in the few hundreds per depot, seeing they are a more common failure point due to heat, leaks, lighting strikes, trees falling or wayward ordnance.

What this means is that if there is ever a real effort to damage our grid by enemies, foreign or domestic, there is not enough replacement equipment on the ground in the entire country to fix it quickly.

Now the cute kicker or as they say, “and now the rest of the story”. Most of our grid maintenance parts come from, yep, the PRC. And guess who will conveniently have “issues” in ramping up production for the export market, especially when they themselves are using most of the factory output internally (remember those 5 new coal plants going live/week over there)? Yes good sirs, we are royally screwed if any untoward events suddenly ramp up.

Bayou Pete brings it on home for us.

As a former Civil Defense sector officer, trained in disaster planning and recovery, allow me to assure you, that commenter is absolutely correct. His words apply to every country on the planet. The electrical utilities simply can’t afford to stockpile large quantities of replacement transformers. The bigger and more expensive the transformer, the fewer they’ll have on hand. Even simple components such as the glass insulators used on high-tension electrical cables criss-crossing the country are only stocked in limited quantities. If random individuals were to pause alongside rural roads and shoot out, say, a thousand of those insulators, there’d be the devil to pay to replace them all in the short term. If they shot out ten thousand…forget about it. There aren’t enough power crews, let alone insulators, to repair that sort of damage in anything less than weeks, possibly months.

At this writing, there’s somewhere north of 35,000 North Carolinians sitting in the dark, in 30-degree weather, who won’t be getting their electricity restored until Thursday, as of the last estimate I saw. Not good. Not good a-TALL.

BOTTOM LINE: The US electrical grid, not just in semi-rural Eastern NC but nationwide, is fragile, hopelessly out of date, and entirely vulnerable to being taken down with preposterous ease—interminably, no training or specialized tools necessary, by any motivated passerby with a point of his own to make. Make of all that what you will. As Peter says: food for thought, indeed.

Update! AP puts it bluntly: “A LESSON IN ASYMMETRIC WARFARE IN MOORE COUNTY.” Pretty much, yeah, for anyone inclined to interpret it as such.

What we’ve lost

Posted on December 3, 2022December 3, 2022 by Mike

Or, more precisely, was taken from us without our consent.

During the hurricane that was the Brett Kavanaugh hearings, it wasn’t just my high school friends and I who were on trial—it was an entire decade. That decade was the 1980s.

To understand the ’80s, and how our generation, Generation X, was formed, it helps to start with the 1970s. Specifically, with the movie “The Bad News Bears.” “The Bad News Bears” is one of the most hilarious and politically incorrect films ever made. It came out in 1976—when America was a more freewheeling place, for better and worse—and was a huge hit. It portrayed kids realistically. The Little League “Bears” cussed, used stereotypes, thought their alcoholic manager Morris Buttermaker (Walter Matthau) was useless, and got into fights. They were real kids. That includes the girl pitcher Amanda Whurlitzer, brilliantly played by Tatum O’Neal. Amanda fired right back when the boys razzed her, and mowed them down with her fastball. She was tough, smart, and independent.

Those real 1970s kids became the teenagers of the 1980s. They—we—often continued to be rowdy, independent, and rambunctious. I was born in 1964, which means I was 12 when “Bears” came out and then a teenager in the early 1980s when I was a student at Georgetown Prep. Things were a lot looser back then. You learned to fend for yourself (not everyone got a trophy), even as you tried to navigate the total wave of drugs and alcohol that were available. The hippie culture ruined a lot of lives.

Before political correctness and the #MeToo movement, before iPhones and the internet and Twitter and outrage culture, there was an understanding that beneath the veneer of civilization was something wild, dangerous, and joyful—a soul electric with sex and slapstick.

Compared to previous generations, kids today are less likely to have sex, drive, work, drink alcohol, date, or go out without their parents. A lot of this has to do with the advent of smartphones and social media. Kids these days are terrified that if they do something bold—or stupid—it will wind up on Facebook, YouTube, or Snapchat. In 2015, pop singer Ariana Grande, then 22, licked a doughnut—and it wound up on “The Today Show.”

In the 1980s, we didn’t live in fear of our every action being caught on a cell phone or security camera and then posted on social media. You could go out on a Saturday night, drink beer, see a band, take a long walk by yourself, hit on a girl, toilet-paper a neighbor’s house, and speed on the way home. You could do all these things while remaining almost completely anonymous. By 2002 that became more difficult, and, by 2012, it was damn near impossible.

Today’s porn- and outrage-saturated media, and our inability as a culture to deal with the ambiguities of male sexuality, lay at the heart of the Kavanaugh imbroglio. My videos and writings were interpreted to indicate hostility toward women when they, in fact, express love, healthy masculine desire, and a deep appreciation for their mystery, power, and beauty. You’re not really allowed to be in awe of women anymore. It’s all interpreted as hate.

But it wasn’t just Brett and me who were on trial. It was the entire era in which we grew up. An era of robust cultural confidence when men and women were equally celebrated, the 1980s have now, in the rearview mirror, become fodder for our modern media scolds.

For instance, several journalists noted during the hearings that I had written in praise of Hugh Hefner, who is now considered a symbol of toxic masculinity. This was taken as evidence of my retrograde sexual attitudes and projected onto Brett as proof of his being unfit for a seat on the nation’s highest court. What a crock of bullshit. The farther away I get from it, the angrier I feel.

As well you should—as well we ALL should, actually. The roots of America’s decline into a sickly, emasculated, terrorized, and psychically-impoverished culture aren’t at all difficult to discern; one doesn’t have to look very hard or very far to find them, they’re all around every one of us, every minute of every day.

Broken

Posted on December 2, 2022 by Mike

Methinks Tablet editor in chief Alana Newhouse and her correspondent Ryan are definitely onto something with this idea.

At one point last year, Ryan said something that struck a nerve. “I don’t know what I identify as these days, because everything has gotten so scrambled,” he noted. “I’m not a Democrat or a Republican, I don’t even think I could define myself narrowly as either a liberal or a conservative anymore. The one thing I know that I fundamentally do believe is the premise of your piece, that the dominant institutions of American life—in education, in the arts, in politics—are either totally broken or so weak or corrupt that they’re becoming irrelevant. In a way, the only thing I know that I believe in is…brokenness.”

Ryan went on to explain that, when he gets into political debates with friends and acquaintances these days, those on the “other side” aren’t all liberals or all conservatives or in fact all from any other previously recognizable camp. Instead, they are the people in his life who, regardless of how they vote or otherwise affiliate, remain invested in the institutions and political ideologies that now leave Ryan cold. Many of them acknowledge that there are problems, even serious ones, with universities, newspapers, nonprofits, both political parties, what have you, but they see these as normal, fixable challenges, not signs of fundamental brokenness. To them, the impulse to consign weighty institutions to the dustbin of history feels impulsive and irresponsible—like arson. To Ryan, staying committed to decrepit structures, and insisting to others that they are fundamentally safe when they’re clearly not, is what feels reckless.

Most Americans don’t fall squarely into one of these two camps. Around 40% don’t even vote. But among the people who do engage in debates about this country’s future, the ones doing it most compellingly are not those still stuck in the battle between “Democrats” and “Republicans,” or “liberalism” and “conservatism.” The most vital debate in America today is between those who believe there is something fundamentally broken in America, and that it’s an emergency, and those who do not.

…Many people understandably see our current moment as a wave of change that can be ridden successfully—without overblown diagnoses or radical solutions. These are status-quoists, people who are invested in the established institutions of American life, even as they acknowledge that this or that problem around the margins should of course be tackled. Status-quoists believe that any decline in quality one might observe at Yale or The Washington Post or the Food and Drug Administration or the American Federation of Teachers are simply problems of personnel, circumstance, incompetence, or lack of information. Times change, people come and go, status-quoists believe—this outfit screwed up COVID policy, yes, and that place has an antisemitism problem, agreed. But they will learn, reform, and recover, and they need our help to do so. What isn’t needed, and is in fact anathema, is any effort to inject more perceived radicalism into an already toxic and polarized American society. The people, ideas, and institutions that led America after the end of the Cold War must continue to guide us through the turbulence ahead. What can broadly be called the “establishment” is not only familiar, status-quoists believe; it is safe, stable, and ultimately enduring.

On the other side are brokenists, people who believe that our current institutions, elites, intellectual and cultural life, and the quality of services that many of us depend on have been hollowed out. To them, the American establishment, rather than being a force of stability, is an obese and corrupted tangle of federal and corporate power threatening to suffocate the entire country. Proof of this decay, they argue, can be seen in the unconventional moves that many people, regardless of how they would describe themselves politically, are making: home-schooling their children to avoid the failures and politicization of many public and private schools; consuming more information from YouTube, Twitter, Substack, and podcasts than from legacy media outlets; and abandoning the restrictions, high costs, and pathologies of the coasts for freer and more affordable pastures in the Southeast and Southwest.

Brokenists come from all points on the political spectrum. They disagree with each other about what kinds of programs, institutions, and culture they want to see prevail in America. What they agree on—what is in fact a more important point of agreement than anything else—is that what used to work is not working for enough people anymore.

Worse, the people for whom it IS still working are the selfsame nefarious wreckers who broke the whole damned system in the first place, intentionally and with malice aforethought.

(Via WeirdDave)

A Woke military is worse than no military at all

Posted on November 3, 2022 by Mike

Man, this decline-and-fall business isn’t turning out to be nearly as amusing as it looks like being in all those old movies about the Roman Empire in its final days.

Our Disunity Is a National Security Threat
The military now reflects the selfishness and fragmentation of our culture. Welcome to the looting-the-treasury phase of imperial decline.

In the lawsuit challenging Harvard’s affirmative action practices, a group of senior retired military officers filed an amicus brief, which argued that maintaining affirmative action was a “national security imperative.” Those signing off include four former chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, six former superintendents of the service academies, and 17 retired four-star generals, including Wesley Clark and William McRaven.

A ““national security imperative”? SERIOUSLY? Sorry, fellas, but I’m gonna need you to explain to me, in detail, exactly how you arrived at THAT bizarre conclusion.

Recruiting an adequate number of troops and increasing their quality also seems pretty important. But we know that recent efforts at recruiting have been a disaster, amplified by the mass expulsion of troops who refused the COVID vaccine.

While things carried on for a while out of habit, eventually the patriotic, mostly white, rural Americans who formed the backbone of the military started doing an about face. Polls show that fewer veterans now want their kids to follow in their footsteps. Conservative Republicans, once the most stalwart supporters of the military, have lately become more critical and less trusting.

No real mystery about that. Hell, I’ve wondered for a while now what the hell any new enlistee might think he’s signing up to defend with his very life, literally, and what the hell might be keeping career soldiers in the ranks nowadays.

Declining interest in service by conservative and white Americans is not irrational. Why fight for a governing class that hates you, deems you the central political problem, seeks to humiliate you, and disrespects your ancestors at every opportunity? Why serve an American empire that pursues foreign wars like those in Iraq and Ukraine that have almost no relationship to actual national security and explicitly serve a left-wing ideology?

One might respond that military service is good even under these conditions in order to get useful training and make a living. But even under such a self-serving standard, the incentive to do so is declining, as white men within the military are subject to a rigged game, where it is harder to get ahead, and the old standards of excellence no longer matter. This will only get worse without a dramatic reset in the culture of our military and political leaders.

During the War on Terror, lavish praise for military service flowed from a widespread feeling of guilt. After the 9/11 attacks, the country wanted safety and revenge—but, other than service members and their families, very few Americans carried the burdens of war. The civilian-military gap was amplified by the increasing self-perception of servicemembers as “warriors,” rather than mere soldiers. From this romantic view of military service as a superior way of life undertaken by superior people, we see the first seedlings of a warrior aristocracy.

A constitutional republic and a warrior aristocracy are polar opposites. The European aristocracy found its origins in rewards for battlefield merit, where particular acts of bravery led to a title bestowed on the hero and his heirs, as well as land, the right to income from taxes for land-bound peasants, and exemption from taxes otherwise owed to the king.

Since every national military establishment must necessarily be representative of the broader society it both serves and is drawn from, how could anybody find any of this at all shocking? As corruption, venality, and self-absorption have gradually become endemic in American society, its military has declined right along with it, in direct proportion. How could any reasonable, rational person possibly expect otherwise? Thus:

In exchange for the prestige and perquisites of military service, one thing is absolutely essential: loyalty to the country, the Constitution, and the American people. Without patriotism, the military becomes a very sophisticated gang, one that easily can be turned against the American people. Some will scoff that such a prospect is unthinkable, but one would have thought General Mark Milley undermining the commander-in-chief or a Marine selling his services to the Chinese were impossible too.

Again: shocking? Unexpected? Hardly. “Loyalty to the country, the Constitution, and the American people” have all become mighty thin on the ground amongst the general populace, over many decades. In effect, the military amounts to a mirror held up to American faces, no more nor less. If Americans don’t like what they see there, the only people who can change that is…well, guess who.

Shady strategery

Posted on October 29, 2022October 29, 2022 by Mike

Don’t get cocky, but not for the reasons Glenn seems to be thinking of.

If there is anything that we learned from the 2020 election, it was to prove that elections could be rigged. After all, they did it in the open, bragged about it, then Time Magazine even did an article admitting to their part in it. We know that they will do it again. We know that there has been shenanigans in elections for decades. The only question remains: Can and will they do it again?

The election next month will be the test. We are less than a week and a half from finding out if we still live in a Republic where the democratic process chooses our representatives, or if we are living in a country ruled by oligarch fascisti. All of the polls, all of the data, and even history are pointing to a major landslide to the right in this election.

History usually marks a loss for the sitting president‘s party.

Watch each of those races closely. If a pile of them go the other way, start looking for fuckery.

I have to say, I’ve slowly come around to a somewhat different conclusion on this. Seems to me that perhaps it’s more likely that the DemonRats might well content themselves with laying off said fuckery and allowing the GOPe to appear to prevail this time ’round, thus keeping their election-theft powder dry and ready for 2024. With the integrity of American “elections” shredded to hell and gone by hinky “elections” going all the way back to JFK at least, it’s in the Uniparty’s best interests to bolster the voting public’s fading faith in the whole miserable charade now and again, and I’m sure they know that quite well.

Could easily be all wet on this little speculative theory of mine, who the hell knows anymore.

Update! And right on cue, if maybe a little earlier than is typical for them, the shitlibs start in with the usual howling about how “UNFAAAIIIR!!!” it all is.

What happened? Journalists and other Democrats have already started blaming voters for the party’s (likely) defeat in the midterm elections.

Seriously? Yes. As the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this month, Democrats and their allies have a history of lashing out when American voters decline to validate their preferences at the ballot box. The election is in 12 days, but things aren’t looking great for Democrats. Polls suggest they are going to lose control of the House and possibly the Senate as well. That’s why the voter-blaming is already underway.

What are they saying? What they always say in these situations.

Follows, a representative sampling of the phony weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth, of which my personal favorite has to be this one:

“It’s terrifying how many Americans will choose literal fascism, female serfdom, climate collapse, and the reversal of everything from Social Security & Medicare to student loan relief [because] they think giving Republicans the power to investigate Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices.”
— Joy-Ann (Pro-Democracy) Reid, MSNBC host

Actually, you shrieking bint, not a single one of those notional transgressions you’re sqwee-sqwee-sqwee-ing so hysterically about has the proverbial snowball’s chance of ever coming to pass. By the numbers:

“Literal fascism” is YOUR side’s thang, not ours
“Female serfdom” doesn’t exist in this country, and never has
“Climate collapse” is likewise total bullshit, whether you’re intelligent enough to know it or not
The chances of the GOPe ever laying a reform-directed finger on SSI, Medicare, and probably even the “student loan relief” swindle as well hovers exactly where it always has: somewhere between None Whatsoever and Don’t Make Me Laugh, You Bastard

As for the spurious notion that any sentient being believes “investigating Hunter Biden will bring down gas prices,” who the fucking fuck do you think you’re fooling with that transparently fatuous codswallop? The only thing a thorough, honest investigation of Hunter Biden is likely to bring down is Hunter Biden, as well as maybe the Big Guy and his ten percent along with him.

No, what even the GOPe knows for sure and certain—as most shitlibs do, I strongly suspect; they KNOW it, they just don’t LIKE it, that’s all—is that the one and only way to bring gas prices down over the long haul is simplicity itself: take the US domestic-energy industry off the strangulating leash you shitlib idiots have put around its neck and free them to do their fucking jobs—finding, drilling for, and processing the oil we have in plenty. Y’know, as Trump recently confirmed, to the enduring horror of every Swamp creature currently extant.

There are readily-comprehensible reasons why gas, oil, and diesel prices have soared to record-high levels under the maleficent regency of Pedo Joe Biden and his skulkabout minders. Putin, the Ukraine, and Cracky Hunter’s underpants are assuredly NOT among ’em.

The eternal tease

Posted on October 27, 2022October 27, 2022 by Mike

Never mind the self-driving ones, where the hell is my flying car?

Why Self-Driving Cars Are NOT The Future
Technological hurdles aside, if we could develop the AI that makes self-driving cars as safe as human-driven cars, they’d still have quite a few other hurdles to overcome before going mainstream.

The biggest hurdle, perhaps, is the problem of liability.

Last week, a man in North Carolina was driving at night, following his GPS. The GPS led him to a bridge that the man couldn’t see was unfinished. He then drove off the bridge, crashed upside down in the river below and died. His GPS didn’t show that a portion of the bridge had been washed away – instead it went on mindlessly recommending it as the fastest route. After the man’s death, questions came up about who should be held responsible. Was it all the man’s fault? What about the fault of the city for not repairing the bridge? The state? The bridge manufacturer? What about the GPS technology that got it wrong? Should they pay out? It wasn’t clear where the fault lay and for that reason, all parties involved were vulnerable to lawsuits.

The list of liabilities continues to expand as well. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration (NHTSA) has only demanded more and more accountability from car manufacturers regarding auto safety regulations over the years. According to NHTSA (an arm of the Department of Transportation), all vehicles MUST include specific types of seatbelts, they MUST disclose the locations of where all their parts are assembled (via the Labeling Act), they MUST follow all cybersecurity restrictions, and if a new safety recall should arise, the manufacturer MUST fix them at their own expense. Today, about one in four vehicles on the road have an unresolved safety recall on them which has increased every year since the recall program’s inception.While some may say this is a good thing to have that much oversight around safety, it also does a lot to discourage manufacturers from sticking their necks out for potentially unsafe innovations.

The EPA is also squeezing vehicle manufacturers with new regulations – tightening its emission standards and adding restrictions that car manufacturers find increasingly difficult to abide by. As David Shepardson from Reuters said,

New rules [that] take effect in the 2023 model year… require a 28.3% reduction in vehicle emissions through 2026. The rules will be challenging for automakers to meet, especially for Detroit’s Big Three automakers. General Motors (GM.N), Ford Motor Co (F.N) and Chrysler-parent Stellantis NV (STLA.MI).

With all this red tape, automotive manufacturers are already feeling the weight of big brother pressing on their shoulders and would be reluctant to go all in on self-driving vehicles without all the safety concerns rigorously tested and approved to the point they can be sufficiently indemnified from lawsuits.

Perhaps in another country with a more authoritative government, the liability issues can be overcome.

Perhaps. But you can bet that, in a country with a LESS authoritative government whose citizenry was jealous enough of their liberty to see to it that their central government remained firmly within its Constitutional corral, we’d probably have workable autonomous and flying cars both by now. The lesson: bloated, meddlesome, too-powerful governments stifle creativity and innovation; capitalism and liberty encourages them, and rewards them richly. In Amerika v2.0, unless and until We The People have internalized that lesson fully and put its teachings into full effect, the day of the flying car can never dawn.

It is to laugh

Posted on October 26, 2022October 26, 2022 by Mike

That, or cry, I suppose.

The inherent humor to be found in a president ordering a cut in gas production and then wondering why gas prices rise, all while blaming it on the greed of oil companies—a scenario previously demonstrated beyond doubt just a half dozen years ago by another president—is difficult to ignore.

It will be a sardonic laugh we can all have as we cool our heels and wonder why the diesel-powered trucks are not delivering the goods this winter. The scare of global warming, the supposed cause of this specific governmental overreach, will do us little good come January, but the frightening cure will likely have destroyed the most innovative economy in history—and any potential for a practical solution.

And on Tuesday, November 8, be assured that the huge imbalance of Democratic votes that appear magically when and wherever an establishment hack is in danger of losing his or her sinecure, is nothing to be concerned about. The election is not “stolen.” It is only borrowed. The software in those election machines was not tampered with, it was corrected. The names of those voters who are deceased but voted nonetheless was just a clerical error, and those who voted twice did so only by accident. Anyway, it didn’t happen, but believe us now, and it will never happen again.

How then should we describe the psychosis that gripped our nation and the world over the past two years? Wearing masks was suddenly not just a Halloween trick or treat. There are countless books about mass murderers, but the stories are usually so much the same. Nice boy. Quiet. A loner. But this one is unique. You can expect more books, but now it will be the victim’s fault—some people just didn’t Fauci fast enough! You know the litany about lockdowns, school closings, rising crime, ineffective vaccines, all of it misinformation!

But wait! What about all of those people who are still wearing masks? The overwhelming negative evidence about the social, psychological, and physical effects of wearing masks is now over two years old. And then there is the total criminal stupidity of giving children COVID vaccinations, and boosters—where does this actually end?

Speaking of children’s treats, isn’t it special that the tall muscular girl in your daughter’s gym class gets to shower with the rest of the team? You had brothers, so it was nothing new for you, but wow! You must know, don’t you, that he’s the one—I mean she’s the one—who got the team into the State championships! What can be wrong with that? Well, of course, your daughter didn’t quite reach the mark this year. But we all have to make a few sacrifices, don’t we?

WE do, yeah. Shitlibs, freaks, headcases, Democrat Party victim-class constituencies, and sundry other reprobates never seem to, somehow.

The Great Undoing

Posted on October 13, 2022October 13, 2022 by Mike

Sido calls a spade a spade.

One of the marvels of White civilization that we take for granted is how easily one can travel enormous distances in a relatively short amount of time. I am not talking about air travel, that is a whole different beast also resulting from White ingenuity, but rather travel by car.

For example, if I wanted to hop in the car and go see Big Country Expat in Florida I could get there is just over 16 hours, travelling a little over 1,100 miles. Let’s call it 17.5 hours to account for stopping for gas. That means that every hour I would go 62 miles. Back in the pioneer days, going 15 miles via covered wagon in a day was a solid day so I can basically cover the equivalent of four days of wagon travel every hour. For contrast, for me to walk to nearby Toledo, Ohio would take over a day on non-stop walking while I can drive it in about an hour and a half. Riding a bike, something I haven’t done since the 1980s, would take around 7 hours.

Automobiles, cheap gas, the intricate highway system and our travel infrastructure which includes gas stations every few miles on most highways make travelling across our nation a breeze. With a credit card and a reliable vehicle you can go anywhere in the continental U.S. of A in just a few days, even from Bangor, Maine to San Diego in just 48 hours of driving. Add in a built in GPS included with most phones and if you give me an address, I can hop in the car and land right at that doorstep with no preparation.

No one really thinks about it. It just is, just as we rarely think about having unlimited potable water coming from the tap or unlimited electricity (except in California) when we flip a switch. Getting to that point where amazing conveniences are something we don’t even notice took centuries of innovation and hard work.

Undoing all of that innovation and hard work is taking a lot less time.

Well, naturally; after all, it’s easier, especially for a muttonheaded shitlib wrecker who really can’t comprehend doing anything else. Arthur goes on from there to dispense with the EV scam, in the process linking to the incomparable John Wilder’s thoroughgoing, leave-no-rare-earth-stone-unturned evisceration of same. As always, it’s tough to excerpt Wilder’s stuff without leaving out something important, but here’s a taste.

Electric cars are, in most ways, absolutely inferior to cars powered by Oil, Our Slippery Friend™. Why? The technology is relatively new, the first electric car (really a locomotive, but who’s counting) having been invented only in 1842 in Edinburgh by engineer Robert Davidson. It traveled at the breakneck speed of 4 miles per hour, which is roughly 4 miles per hour faster than Davidson could move after a fifth of something that John Walker® (yes that one) might have been selling back then.

So, it’s not fair to judge electric cars, since they have been only developing for 180 or so years. It’s still an infant technology. Oh, wait.

But California has decided to ban the sale of new gasoline cars by 2035. Hurray, California! You’re geniuses beyond imagination! You’ll single-handedly solve global warming.

Or…will that pesky math get in the way?

Let’s see – in order to get California girls to the beach, it takes 13.8-15 billion gallons of gasoline. We’re skipping diesel for now, and just dealing with gasoline. I’ll use 15 billion gallons because in the immortal words of the captain of the Hindenburg, “Close enough.”

Let’s do the math.

15 billion gallons of sweet, sweet gasoline is 500 TW-h (that’s terawatt hours, which is the metric equivalent 5,000 bushels per fortnight). California produces in electricity, in total…drumroll please, 277 TW-h. So, California produces slightly more than half the electricity needed by its stunning new fleet of cars.

To keep just the same level of energy production available for homes (because, presumably, all new citizens between now and then will live in tents) that California will need to triple the amount of power it produces. If you count in increased uses for the iAndroid™ Eleventy-X® and GameBoxStation 2000©, the grid will have to multiply by four or five times. And, remember, we skipped diesel engines, so it’s nearly certain that my estimate is low.

It all reminds one of Heinlein’s classic quote from The Notebooks Of Lazarus Long.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now & then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.

This is known as “bad luck.”

Indeed. So with shitlibs firmly in charge, we can count on an extended run of nothing but the very worst sort of “bad luck” for the foreseeable future, until enough of us get enough of a bellyful of this shit to remove the icy, dead hand of Leftism from around our necks.

You’ll want to read all of both Arthur’s and Wilder’s excellent posts, folks.

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