Life in a once-great nation

The return of the Stone Age

Posted on May 19, 2022May 19, 2022 by Mike

Your Leftist masters would like to remind you not to get too attached to having air conditioning, lights, kitchen appliances, and all the other blessings of modern civilization, ‘kay?

Over Half The Country At Risk Of ‘Energy Emergencies’ This Summer, Electric Grid Analysis Shows
Millions of Americans across the Midwest, Southwest and West are expected to face blackouts throughout the summer months, an industry analysis concluded.

A variety of factors, including drought conditions and low wind conditions, are expected to put Americans in roughly 28 states at risk of experiencing blackouts this summer, according to a report from the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a U.S. regulatory authority, published Wednesday. The region managed by the Midcontinent Independent System Operator (MISO) across 15 Midwest states is at the highest risk of “energy emergencies” during the summer due to capacity shortfalls, the analysis showed.

“The Western Interconnection, Texas, Southwest Power Pool (SPP) … are at ‘elevated risk’ of energy emergencies during extreme conditions,” NERC added. “[MISO] is in the ‘high risk’ category, facing capacity shortfalls in its north and central areas during both normal and extreme conditions due to generator retirements and increased demand.”

Bold mine, because I found it so funny I nearly sprung a short rib chortling at it. Don’t miss the aerial photo of an ugly, useless scar on the Nevada landscape included in the article.

Everything louder than everything else

Posted on May 19, 2022May 19, 2022 by Mike

My title, of course, is one of the great Lemmy Kilmister’s most well-known lines, as well as the name of an album by Lemmy’s band. So I’m sure you can easily guess what I’m going to be embedding for this evening’s Tune Damage segment.

Mass shootings just one sign of the systemic collapse of western society… more hunger, violence, debt and destruction yet to come
We are watching the downfall of western civilization as we know it.

The rule of law is dead. Elections are rigged. Free speech is disallowed and a criminally corrupt government now runs an actual Ministry of Truth “disinformation” board. “Science” is a total fraud and the medical system is a murder system. Most of the youth refuse to work, and real-world skills are practically non-existent among those under the age of 30. The education system is run by pedophiles and groomers, Hollywood has gone all-in with satanic programming of children and the US military, under the leadership of woketard Pentagon officials, has become a pathetic shadow of its former self.

On top of all that, the dollar is collapsing in real world value, even as it rises against other currencies (temporarily). The Fed is trapped in an inescapable economic collapse scenario, and the housing bubble is in the process of bursting. Our “president” is a dementia patient who was installed in a rigged election, and our news media — if you can even call them that — are journo-terrorists who parrot CIA lies and corporate disinformation to invoke race wars and covid panic while pushing depopulation vaccines that are designed to exterminate humanity.

None of this is going to get resolved through sanity and reason. It’s all headed for collapse. And when I say “collapse,” I mean the total collapse of western civilization as we know it. This includes the collapse of Western Europe, which is also run by retarded lunatics who are wholly incapable of functioning in any sort of rational way whatsoever.

The West has lost the ability to reason. Logic no longer applies to anything, not science, medicine, journalism, elections, etc.

Oh, I assure you it still DOES apply, and always will. It’s just that most “Americans” have fully bought into the Left’s cherished delusion that logic, like reality itself, can be suspended completely at their capricious whim, then reinstated soon afterwards with no real harm done.

“Journalism” is now just parroting the lies of the corporations and deep state agenda-setters. “Elections” now simply means Democrats running vote-stuffing mules to achieve whatever number of faked votes is necessary to “win.” “Science” means rigging studies, censoring data and destroying the careers of scientific whistleblowers who dare to speak out and warn the world. “Medicine” is a process whereby hospitals and doctors gain financial wealth by murdering patients for profit. “Wall Street” is a Ponzi scheme propped up by seemingly endless money printing. The “gains” are ephemeral. Pension funds and retirement funds are ghosts, and they will collapse toward zero as the house of cards collapses.

Western countries like the USA manufacture almost nothing. We have virtually no domestic supply chain for steel, rare earth minerals, electronics or industrial chemicals and polymers. We are a nation that has abandoned industry and embraced “financialization,” which is the scam of creating make believe wealth by pretending to move numbers around on computer screens, creating derivatives and CDOs and “synthetic CDOs” and other incomprehensible financial instruments that ultimately produce nothing in the real world.

Meanwhile, as China is stockpiling grain in anticipation of a global food shortage — and India has just banned all exports of wheat in order to feed its own people — America continues to export corn, wheat, soy, millet and other agricultural products to China, helping make sure that China won’t starve even while America’s population faces mass famine this year (and next).

There is no longer anything resembling sanity or reason in America. The nation has lost its mind, and the oblivious masses are getting angry enough to start shooting each other with greater frequency. This should come as no surprise.

Believe me, it doesn’t. But odd as it may seem, it ain’t a bad thing, nevessarily. In fact, it’s abundantly clear by now that “shooting each other with greater frequency” is our only way out of this mess. To be specific: sane, sensible, normal Americans are gonna have to start shooting Leftards in job lots if they want their situation to improve. As the saying goes, you don’t have to like it, you just have to do it.

(Via WRSA and Bracken)

Update! Dang it, forgot the embed.

Why yes, of COURSE I have a great story about meeting and hanging out with Lemmy once. Ill have to tell ya all about it sometime.

Updated update! A 2009 live version so racy it has to go below the fold. Continue reading “Everything louder than everything else” →

Pull the other one, Joe, it has a bell on it

Posted on May 13, 2022May 13, 2022 by Mike

Dang that Putin anyhow. Horrible, horrible man; why must he torment us so?

As Gas Prices Set New Records, Biden Nukes More Oil And Gas Projects
CBS News revealed the Biden administration canceled more oil and gas leases across the country this week as soaring gas prices reached new heights Wednesday.

The Department of Interior canceled plans to drill in more than 1 million acres in Alaska’s Cook Inlet, arguing “lack of industry interest,” on top of canceling a pair of leases in the Gulf of Mexico over “conflicting court rulings.”

“Until now, the White House had remained silent about the massive Alaska lease,” CBS reported Wednesday night, citing political headwinds against the president responsible for record-setting pain at the pump. According to AAA travel agency’s tracker, gas prices reached new milestone Wednesday, at a nationwide average of $4.40 a gallon of regular unleaded and $5.55 for diesel. The prior record for unleaded was set in March, at an average $4.33 per gallon regular, and diesel at $5.54. The latest inflation numbers also out Wednesday revealed all prices still rising at a rapid pace of 8.3 percent annually, exceeding expectations.

“They don’t want to get hit by Republicans in light of high gas prices,” explained an “environmental advocate” to CBS granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive topic related to White House discretion on the leases. “They’re getting killed on attacks based on inflation. The most visible sign of inflation is high gas prices.”

While Biden has blamed Russia’s war in Ukraine for the continued price hikes, the trends began long before President Vladimir Putin launched his February invasion, and analysts say it’s clear that Biden is making things worse by banning companies from exploring sources of U.S. energy independence.

Well, duh. He’s a Demonrat. That means he’s a moron, he hates America, Americans, and the internal combustion engine because GAAAAIIIIIAAAA!!! As with every Demonrat, exorbitant, endlessly-rising gas prices confirm he’s Doing His Part to save the planet. This gives him a delightful full-body frisson of pride in the knowledge of his innate superiority to lesser beings than Himself. What a guy!

“President Biden remains absolutely committed to not moving forward with additional drilling on public lands,” White House climate adviser Gina McCarthy pledged on MSNBC.

SSSHHHH! You’re not supposed to say that out loud, dammit!

Really, though, it’s not as if we don’t all know it well enough anyway. I mean, of COURSE he does. For Joe, for any and every shitlib currently extant, what’s not to like about unaffordable gas?

It feeds their boundless arrogance and conceit as the Supreme Beings they can’t ever stop telling everybody else they are
It inflicts grievous injury on ordinary American families who must drive to work, school, the grocery store, &c
It strangulates the American economy
It damages American oil companies, whom they hate with the intensity of a thousand suns
It increases the price of just about everything else, including those godawful McDonalds corporate earthworm-and-pink-slime doo-doo burgers which really ought to be banned, the revolting things
It reduces the hated US to beggar-nation status, forcing it to crawl on hands and knees to the Saudi oil ticks importuning them to please, please, PLEASE increase production, a sight they enjoy more than a good, hot lezbo/interracial/chubby-chaser/transgender-gangbang flick
It puts additional pressure on Americans to switch to one of their precious little electric go-karts, or so they tell themselves

So I repeat: what’s not to like here for these smarmy libtard cock-knockers? Unaffordable gas does so many things they want to see done, hurts people they love to see suffer, and makes them feel good about themselves all at once. They dwell in blissful ignorance about the godawful knock-on effects their presumptuous nitwittery will bring about; they really do seem to believe that you can run a First World industrial-age economy on nothing but batteries, wind, sunshine, and dorm-room fantasies. They’re totally unaware of what will happen when the trucks are no longer able to get to the grocery store down the street; for them, the equation of bare shelves suddenly not being restocked within a couple of days anymore simply does not compute. Hey, there’s always the Magical Froot, their personal-fave vegan restaurant, right? They’re BOUND to have something good to eat there, right?

S’cuse me, did I just hear somebody say something about trucks not being able to get to the grocery stores?

It has often been said that if you chase the global climate change ideology to its natural conclusion, we end up in communal groups sitting around a tepid campfire eating some form of sustainable algae cakes and picking parasites off each other…Prior to Joe Biden that prediction might have seemed like hyperbole. Now, not so much.

Indeed, the Green New Deal energy policy of Joe Biden creates massive downstream consequences. Unfortunately, the White House doesn’t seem to care. The high prices and scarcity of critical goods are a feature, not a flaw, as they chase their climate friendly Build Back Better agenda.

Following the continuum of intended consequence, now we have diesel fuel shortages beginning to hit the U.S. economy; and with scarcity comes higher prices of an almost astronomical scale. “The national average price of diesel is now $5.54 per gallon, which is an increase of 22 cents from last week, which was when the most recent record was set. Data shows there’s no state that’s currently seeing diesel prices below $5.12 per gallon.”

Making matters even worse is a drop in available inventory of diesel fuel which is about to become a crisis for the east coast of the U.S. Some Truck Stop operators like Love’s and Pilot are already warning their big rig customers they may not have fuel for truckers.

Never forget: the criminal cartel masquerading as a political party known as the Democrat Party WANTS THIS. They are FOR THIS, they think this is a GOOD THING. If We The People hope to save ourselves, our children, and whatever is left of our nation, then EVERY FUCKING DEMOCRAT must be forcibly removed from office without delay, by any means necessary. Going forward from there, NO DEMOCRAT can be allowed anywhere near the levers of power EVER AGAIN.

And that, friends, is IT. Full stop, end of story.

The calamity we now see unfolding all around us is EXACTLY the sort of thing the muttonheaded, unworkable policies favored by Democrats result in EVERY TIME THEY ARE TRIED. The historical record is rife with past examples. Reportage of current events from socialist shitholes still hanging on in every corner of the globe—Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea, Bangladesh, Zimbabwe—reaffirm the dismal truth about life under THE VERY SAME IDEOLOGY ESPOUSED TODAY BY THE DEMOCRAT PARTY.

It’s only early innings yet, but already things are happening which are without precedent in this once-prosperous nation—circumstances and conditions all too common in a tragically large portion of the world, but quite literally unheard of here. Alas, Americans are soon to learn all about unpleasantries such as hunger, want, poverty, cold, homelessness, and the multifarious hazards associated with them—from savage, predatory street thugs, to sadistic cops, to disease, to feral animal packs, to other poverty-stricken skels—in more intimate detail than they would probaby wish.

Remember when I told you a few weeks back about the ongoing discussion between my brother and a few of his trucker buddies about what, if any, future they might have in the biz if diesel went over five bucks per gallon? Well, guess what: he said that earlier this week three of his co-workers have parked their rigs, locked ’em up, and hung a For Sale sign on ’em, intent on leaving the industry for good. The trucks are all what’s known in the biz as “glider” trucks—older models not subject to the crippling restrictions newer trucks have to run under. Gliders are the most desirable used trucks out there, and go for top buck if you can find one. My brother was lucky enough to score a nice Freightliner Classic XL—freshly-rebuilt Detroit 60 Series under the hood, ultra-clean, not a mark on it inside or out—for a relative pittance, thanks to another of his road-dog friends. Now Jeff spends a fair percentage of his time whenever he’s fueling up at the Flying J fielding endless offers to buy his glider from him on the spot. He just smirks at ’em, waves his old-school paper logbook in their faces (legal for gliders, none of the snooper-tech you have to put up with with the computer logs), and drawls “Nawwwww, I think I’m good here.”

We’re squarely in the Real, the Bad, and the Scary now, folks. Ain’t no way out of it, ain’t no way to reverse course, ain’t no way to fix it; all’s we can do now is just ride it out best we can, and hope to survive. Karl brings the double-plus-ungood tidings:

The other Gorilla in the room, fuel oil aka diesel fuel, is up 80% from last year. Until and unless that is stopped and the price comes back down, which will only happen if and when the government ceases its war on fossil fuels, there is no way for the general upward pressure on prices to be reversed. Every piece of farm equipment forward to the delivery of the food to your store runs on diesel. Every single item you buy travels at least the last part of its journey moved by diesel. I do not care how you “feel” about the issues related to the use of fossil fuels, the simple reality is that without them you have no fertilizer, no food and nothing in the store so all of the claims of virtue you issue will make you broke or even cause you to starve.

The part in Denninger’s italics and my boldface is the bell sounding our doom, because as long as the US government remains in place, unimpeded, unaltered, and in the control of Democrats, there is absolutely no hope that their lunatic, suicidal War On Fossil Fuels will end. And that, as Karl flatly states, means that there is no significant price relief in store for us, not in the foreseeable future. Whatever the reason for it—incompetence, stupidity, ideological rigidity, or as a component of the Great Reset plan—the Democrats refuse to relax their all-consuming loathing for fossil fuels even slightly. Not even to save their own lives, they won’t. They’re either too damned unimaginative and knotheaded to conceptualize the predictable end-result of their own noble cause, or they arrogantly assume themselves to be way too lofty and important to be brought down by it in the same bloody, broken pile of tribulation as all those other luckless peasants—the eggs for the collective omelet.

And so here we all are. The American people haven’t faced a situation this grim since the Great Depression, and I expect we’ll surpass the darkest days of those times before too much longer. More macabre than anything is that we’ve been brought to this desperate pass not as the result of some natural disaster, or by some ghastly accident. No, the firestorm of immiseration soon to engulf us all is intentional, the product of human creativity, planning, and coordination.

Never forget that this hellish project’s intellectual ancestry can be traced directly back to the Democrat side of the American family tree, particularly so with the specific issue discussed in this post. The berserker fanaticism driving their years-long campaign to do away prematurely with the very fossil-fuel industry which made this the wealthiest nation in human history has been such a rousing success that sane, normal Americans are left with no choice but to deal with them firmly—harshly, even. Stopping them is now a matter of self-preservation, of life and death, literally and imminently—no longer an unattractive, questionable, or melodramatic overreaction to a more or less trifling provocation. If Real Americans stay our hands for much longer, we will condemn ourselves and all that we hold dear to a most ignoble fate—a coward’s death—thereby staining ourselves with a soul-deep shame which can never be scrubbed clean or erased.

Bayou Pete has plenty more on this dark subject, none of it in the least reassuring.

Stupidity ain’t cheap

Posted on May 13, 2022May 13, 2022 by Mike

The current supply-chain problem is only one installment of a REALLY big bill.

These “supply chain disruptions,” as everyone is painfully aware, are doing everything from starving babies to shooting up the price of everything, as Wednesday’s 8.3 percent annual inflation number affirmed again. They are also not random, and they’re not a virus’s fault. They’re the direct and foreseeable consequence of ill-advised global lockdowns that nearly all of our nation’s political leaders refused to take into account when they and corporate media colluded to gaslight the world into accepting them.

Our historic “supply chain problems” are not the result of happenstance. They are the result of cowardly, ignorant, and just plain malevolent leadership throughout the entire Covid era.

Lockdowns never needed to happen. Global lockdowns were never before advised or attempted for much worse pandemics, they were based on faulty models, and the Information Age doesn’t change their imprudence. The “supply chain” consequences alone, as well as many of the other horrific medical and social consequences, should be enough evidence for all rational people to conclude that we must never, ever lock down again.

It’s a good article, but CF Lifers won’t be hearing anything in it that they haven’t heard at this here hogwallow from the earliest days of the whole Vaudeville act. For example:

The reality is, it is impossible to just hit “pause” on an economy. An action like this must have millions of unforeseeable effects, and the phrase people are using to summarize some of these butterfly effects now is “supply chain issues.”

Anyone who had any familiarity with the insane complexity of making anything or any cooperative activity such as education should have logically deduced that “pausing” an entire society is entirely impossible and idiotic to even suggest. The pause will always have its own effects that make a restart at best really complicated and possibly never able to occur.

Sound familiar? It should; I was saying as much in Spring 2020, in almost the exact same words. Not to toot my own horn or anything, mind. After all, a catastrophe of this magnitude is hardly a bragging matter. Just sayin’, that’s all.

This foolish Covid “cure” of lockdowns will end up being much, much worse than the disease. And it never needed to have been foisted on Americans and the entire West in the first place.

Needed? Well, no, of course not; tyranny is never “needed.” But unless stamped out upon its initial presentation without delay, it is inevitable. And be ye not deceived: when we speak of lockdowns, mask mandates, and vaccine blackmail, it’s ultimately tyranny that’s under discussion, all those other things being just specific sub-categories of the larger affliction.

All it would have taken was a few more courageous leaders or a less demonic press to protect the American people from responding to a natural disaster with even bigger man-made disasters. But we don’t have either, so Americans punished themselves by suffering 10 times what was in store had we just followed common sense and ridden out the storm with more courage and honesty.

I’m still flabbergasted at the number of us who were taken in by the whole grift, lots of them people I know personally, respect, and consider friends—intelligent, aware people who I expected to react much differently, especially as the reality of what was going on became more and more apparent. Yes, the first reports from China on this mysterious new virus were indeed alarming. But when governments pounced with such fierce alacrity on this perceived opportunity to restrict their populations to a far greater extent than they’d ever in their wildest dreams imagined they might get away with before, the jig was up. At that point it seemed to me undeniable that, whatever the facts about the virus and the seriousness of the threat it represented in those first days may have been, The Virus!!!™ had been fully co-opted by government, becoming in effect a cloak to obscure its nastiest manipulations and skullduggery beneath while they got on with the real work of all governments: erecting permanent structures to celebrate, indulge, and expand their own power, greed, and self-regard.

The least we can do to help rectify and correct our shameful behavior is be honest about what we’ve done. Acknowledging that one did wrong is the first essential step towards repentance, which is the first essential step towards restoration and wholeness.

One way would be to stop blaming Covid-19 for our irrational response to it. Instead of saying Covid or “the pandemic” caused the supply chain issues, like Biden does, we can start saying that lockdowns did so. To go a step farther, we can stop calling them “supply chain” issues at all, and call them “lockdown consequences.” That is the truth.

We can all also etch in our memories who exactly was complicit in leading us into panic and devastation, and hold them accountable. That is going to require some electoral changes, starting with the man at the top and going right down through state and federal “health” agencies. No funds for them until they clean house.

Not gonna happen, sorry. What you’re proposing is the most foolish of fool’s errands, for all sorts of reasons. Why focus on personnel when the problem is actually systemic? Allowing the system to accrue power enough that it could then be used to lock down society en bloc was our mistake. Once such a system is in place, it’s only a matter of time before people temperamentally inclined to such will come along to wield that power, a universe of possible atrocity and bad behavior suddenly unfolding before them.

Remembering the “who” is pointless; there will never be a shortage of their kind in this poor world. No, the important thing is to avoid putting temptation before such people in the first place. “Electoral changes” will never suffice to turn the trick—not when the “elections” are for offices in charge of a government whose power is effectively without limit, they won’t. You can’t resolve a cockroach infestation by bringing in new cockroaches to replace the old ones. You gotta get rid of the things that attract cockroaches, no more nor less.

MOAR POWER PLEEZE!

Posted on May 12, 2022May 12, 2022 by Mike

They never miss even the smallest opportunity, do they?

Pelosi Pushes Democratic Bill That Would Give Biden Power To Control Gas Prices

Gee, wouldn’t you say he pretty much has it already, as evidenced by the way he caused prices to double via shutting down pipelines, yanking oil leases, forbidding drilling and exploration, etc? But then that’s Demonrats for ya—always looking for any excuse at all to expand federal power and control. The rest of the article is so badly bloated with shitlib megalomania it’s too fat to get up off the sofa and walk to the kitchen to grab Fauxcahontas Warren “one o’ them thar beers.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) blamed the continued record surge in gas prices on “exploitation” by oil companies, and touted a bill that would essentially allow the president to control prices.

During her weekly press briefing, Pelosi touted a Democrat-backed bill called the “Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act,” which would allow the president to declare an “energy emergency” giving him the ability to regulate prices by preventing fuel companies from selling their products at prices deemed to be “unconscionably excessive” and “exploiting” such an emergency.

“Next week on the floor of the House, we will have another piece of our lowering-costs-for-the-American-people legislation,” Pelosi said. “House Democrats, led by [Washington] Congresswoman [Kim] Schrier and [California] Congresswoman [Katie] Porter introduced the ‘Consumer Fuel Price Gouging Prevention Act.’ While families are struggling to pay higher prices at the pump, oil and gas companies are recording record profits, with [the] seven largest oil companies announcing buybacks that could total $41 billion this year alone. Again and again, we see gas prices rise, sometimes when the cost of oil drops, oil prices drop, and price gouging needs to be stopped. This is a major exploitation of the consumer because this is a product that the consumer must have.”

“Again, the Putin [Price] Hike at the pump is a part of this,” Pelosi continued. “You would think that the oil companies would compensate for that rather than exploit the opportunity that it — so in this bill, what this bill does [is] — price gouging needs to be addressed, including new tools at the [Federal Trade Commission] to address those abuses. Our bill enables the president to issue an energy emergency declaration making it unlawful to increase gas and home energy prices in an exploitative and excessive way, which is part of the business plan of these companies.”

The bill authorizes the president to declare an “energy emergency” anywhere within the United States, and use federal powers to regulate prices to combat it. “The President may issue an energy emergency proclamation for any area within the jurisdiction of the United States” within one week of a “reasonably foreseeable emergency” for a period of up to 30 days, the bill states. These proclamations can be renewed for consecutive periods.

Hey, we can always rely on the Demonrats to solve the problems created for us by…um, the Demonrats. Wherever would we be without ’em?

Don’t look now

Posted on May 12, 2022May 12, 2022 by Mike

Looks like somebody didn’t get the “Saddam had NO WMDs” memo.

Gulf War Syndrome mystery SOLVED: US scientists blame the condition on SARIN gas released into the air when Iraq’s chemical weapons cache was bombed

Quarter of veterans who served in Gulf War suffering unexplained symptoms

Scientists left flummoxed by the cause fatigue, memory problems and body pain

But now US study has found the usually fatal nerve gas sarin is to blame

UNPOSSIBLE, I SAY!!! I have been assured by All The Best People that Saddam had no WMDs, never did have them, and had no interest whatsoever in acquiring any. The whole thing was just a lie dreamed up by Chimperor Shrub II to provide an excuse for launching his Forever War against an entirely blameless nation for the sole reason that the damned drunken fool believed that Saddam was plotting to assassinate Daddy Shrub. All those truckloads of WMDs that were seen filing into Syria for safekeeping just before Operation Desert Shrub opened had no WMDs in them, either.

In fact, there’s NO SUCH THING AS WMDs, period. Even if there were, Moslem shitrapies in the Middle East would be the last place you’d be likely to find them, Pisslam being the Religion Of Peace™ and all that. Hey, did you know that the word “Islam” actually means “Peace” when translated into English? Because it does. I bet you didn’t know that at all, did ya, H8R? Well, you do now.

Monstrous trains

Posted on May 11, 2022May 11, 2022 by Mike

An aspect of the supply chain collapse most of us haven’t given a lot of thought to, if any.

Imagine a train 16,400 feet in length weighing 17,500 tons: That is three miles, 560 feet and 35 million pounds. One train. And it is hauling hazmat, tanks of say, chlorine gas, or anhydrous ammonia. Just one tank car alone weighs 131 tons, that is 262,000 pounds. To give an example from history, 262,000 pounds of chlorine gas is approximately two-thirds of what the German army used during the trench warfare of all of WWI. One tank car alone.

“And then we pick up more enroute! My conductor is three miles away while I reverse this train into an active rail yard! Crossings don’t matter, and communities? Are you kidding? No sane country would move materials like this. These trains exceed the coupler and drawbar limits of the very cars themselves. The risks the Class I carriers are taking is a race to disaster. It is absolutely dreadful and grotesque.

Another Precision Scheduled Railroading factor in supply chain failure: Even when the majority of these PSR trains make it, without dramatic ends, they rarely get across the road during a crew members hours of service (HOS) time limit, which is 12 hours. Several factors:

“The rail infrastructure, in particular rail yards and sidings, were designed and built during the great Industrial Age. They did a lot of things right: they overbuilt bridges, for one. But it is not a failure of imagination that they could not foresee, from a sane perspective, that someday the bosses would want to normalize 15,000-foot trains.

“Yards and sidings do not accommodate this scale. It is a clash of function and design. So, imagine this: A 15,800-foot train with distributed power locomotives placed in the middle and at the rear of a train, comes to work a station with 4,500-foot tracks and needs to pick up and set out cars in the middle and rear of the train. This will not be lickety-split.

Plenty more at the link, all of it both fascinating and terrifying at once. Bayou Pete follows up:

All I can say is, my hat’s off to anyone who takes on a job like that. The stress must be beyond most people’s imagination. Also, if something goes badly wrong and the train is involved in a major derailment or collision, the crew’s safety is probably anything but guaranteed. The inertia built up by such weights, at such speeds, makes it impossible to slow down or stop in any meaningfully short distance. The crew are going to have to jump for their lives (at speeds almost guaranteed to cause serious injury or death) or ride it all the way to impact, in the desperate hope they won’t be smeared all over the wreckage like strawberry jam. That’s not much of a choice.

When I think of the long, long trains of tank cars and chemical cars that I see rumbling through our little town every single day, and realize that even one of those cars carries enough potentially lethal cargo to kill every person within city limits in a matter of minutes…it puts a whole new perspective on rail safety.

Don’t it, though. Don’t it just. Over the years I’ve known a cpl-three guys who worked as train engineers, brakemen, even one out in Arizona who was a conductor, if I remember right, for Amtrak. My cousin Steve, who has had a huge fascination with trains his whole life and is locally famous for his incredible collection of HO-scale model railroad builds, used to say to me: “I really wanted to work for the railroad, until I found out the job would involve having to go out and decouple those big steel boxcars during a lightning storm. That’s when I lost all interest in it.” As it happens, that’s also when I realized how happy I was that I’d never had any interest in it to start with.

Electric bricks

Posted on May 8, 2022May 8, 2022 by Mike

We used to have a fine old term for this that got used quite a bit back in the 70s: planned obsolescence.

None of these are old cars. In fact, the oldest Spark is younger than the average non-electric car currently in service as a daily driver, which is about twelve years old. Most of these with many more years of useful service left, because they don’t have battery packs that cost more than the car is worth (by then) to replace.

Which is a built-in problem for all electric cars. Some may recall the case of the irate Finnish man who TNT’d his not-very-old Tesla Model S when he found out that replacing its dead battery pack would cost him on the order of $20,000.

But at least a replacement battery was still available.

Without that, you’ve got nothing – no matter how much you’re willing to pay for it. And unlike non-electric cars, there is very little you can do about it – other than eat the loss and move on to the next one. This is because an EV’s dead battery pack is not like a non-electric car’s failed transmission or engine – or even both, together. In the case of the latter, it is almost always possible to swap in a used or remanufactured/rebuilt transmission or engine – and drive on. It is not possible with electric cars for which there aren’t any replacements available, new or used.

And even if the original manufacturer no longer makes new replacement engines/transmissions for a given IC car, these can usually both be rebuilt at a price that’s worth the doing. Electric car battery packs, once dead, are throw-aways – just like the dead battery that no longer powers your sail fawn. At which point, you throw away the sail fawn.

The electric car, too.

The difference being you probably paid a lot more for the electric car.

Interestingly, there has been little-to-no coverage in the general or even the automotive press about this business. It’s interesting – because you can imagine the uproar that would arise if any other barely ten-year-old car was no longer supported by its manufacturer – and had a built-in design feature that assured it would be rendered useless years before it reached the age of the average non-electric car currently in service.

Of course, the reason for the absence of such coverage is because it might call attention to the shorter useful lifespan of electric cars, due to the shorter useful life of their battery packs relative to the useful life of an IC car’s engine or transmission. These are expected to last at least 12-15 years – and most last longer. If they fail sooner, the car – and its maker – gets a well-deserved reputation for shoddiness and most people will avoid buying a car made by that maker.

It is discharge-recharge cycling that ages a battery. Especially “fast” charging. You can limit the damage by not “fast” charging – and not discharging – the EV battery. But then the EV isn’t much use, is it?

No such issue exists with non-electric cars in that driving down to fumes in the tank has no effect at all on the useful service life of the vehicle. A non-electric car that’s 15 or 20 years old holds as much gas in its tank – and travels just as far – as it did when it was new. An electric car’s battery pack is unlikely to be capable of holding the same charge it could when new when it is ten years old – and maybe sooner.

And if there’s no replacement battery available – or it costs more than it’s worth to replace it – the car is useless.

Many people will find out about this after they bought an EV. It probably explains another interesting thing about EVs that the general press (and the automotive press) haven’t covered much, which is that a large percentage of first-time EV buyers didn’t buy a second one.

Yeah, well, you know what they say about “fool me once, fool me twice.” Guess that smug, superior feeling an EV owner gets from knowing he’s being a good, obedient little shitlib and Doing His Part to help save Gaia only goes so far when, after being a full-time pain in the ass the whole time he’s had it, his little toy strugglebuggy shits the bed for good at the exact same time his neighbor’s Focus or Elantra is only just beginning to hit its stride.

NASA beclowns humanity

Posted on May 5, 2022May 5, 2022 by Mike

Remember, these are America’s greatest minds we’re talking about here.

NASA to launch naked pictures of humans to space in hope of ‘attracting aliens’

DUDE! Have you seen what humans look like these days? Most of us have devolved into doughy, flubberous tubs of jigglesome goo at this point, barely hardy enough to peel themselves off the dangerously over-stressed sofa and lumber over to the fridge for another desperately-needed snack. The remainder of us hoo-mans are, quite literally, starving—horrifying, dead-eyed skels who more closely resemble Auschwitz survivors about ten minutes after being liberated by Allied forces than anything else.

Not for nothing, folks, but I’m thinking “attract” might not exactly be the mot juste here.

NASA scientists plan to launch pictures of naked humans into space in the hope of luring aliens to us.

The depictions will also include an invitation to respond should an intelligent alien race find the space nudes.

Fortunately, the hypothetical aliens shouldn’t be too shocked by the unsolicited nudes.

The pictures aren’t graphic photographs of naked humans but a drawing of a naked man and a woman next to a depiction of DNA.

The article includes this space smut, which is…well, let’s be charitable and call the pre-K level drawing “good enough for government work” and just leave it at that, shall we?

The main aim of the BITG project is to send a message to any alien civilizations that could be out there.

Scientists think the pixelated illustration of a naked man and woman waving hello could help us finally make contact with extraterrestrials.

Oh, sure. Either that, or guarantee that they will never, ever permit such contact, preferring to make a mad dash for galaxy’s edge instead. NASA’s ridiculous and inartful scribblings are more likely to instill in Marvin the Martian a frantic desire to put as much distance between himself and humanity as he possible can, seems to me. The next passage glosses over something important.

Scientists think a binary-coded message is most likely to be understood by aliens.

The scientists explain in their study: “Though the concept of mathematics in human terms is potentially unrecognizable to extra-terrestrial intelligence, binary is likely universal across all intelligence.”

Across all HUMAN-type intelligence, you mean—intelligence itself being strictly definable in terms comprehensible to HUMANS. Me, you, NASA, everybody—none of us have any clue as to alien physiognomy. We don’t know if they even HAVE brains, never mind how those brains work or how advanced their cognitive function might be. IF they have brains at all. Alien perception of basic physical reality might well diverge so radically from our own as to disallow any possibility of communication between our two species. Such an unbridgeable chasm renders NASA’s fanciful speculation that “binary”—an exclusively HUMAN construct, mind, never independently present in Earth’s planetary bioforms, geology, or atmosphere—is “likely universal across all intelligence” the callow daydream that it most definitely is.

This is where we must pay our respects to an irony so deep, so powerful, so profound it almost has a discernible aroma about it: only our most brilliant scientists and thinkers could be arrogant enough to blithely skate past the abundantly obvious possibility that alien life forms are likely to be so wildly at variance with us in every imaginable way—not to mention the UNimaginable ones, which would of necessity be beyond counting—that the very idea of ANY commonality between us physically, intellectually, or emotionally is patently absurd.

Not so for the good-enough-for-government-work Superbrains of NASA, however. These impeccably well-educated and competent “experts” seem to think it squarely within the expansive ken of such Übermenschen as themselves to make certain assumptions without squandering a second of their priceless time and energy pondering whether or not those assumptions are valid. Funny, innit, that one of the bedrock prequisites which help to not only identify true intelligence but also elevate it from mere gauzy potentiality into a genuinely useful thing—from the nebulous stuff of idle fantasy into real-world practicality—would turn out to be plain, familiar old humility.

Funnier still that arrogance should be the easiest, most natural-feeling attitude for most humans to adopt, the very first resort of both the egotistical but otherwise well-intentioned chowderhead and the conniving scalawag whenever forced to confront his own insufficiency of knowledge, his unwarranted overconfidence, his fallibility—while humility is by far the most awkward, toilsome, and wholly alien-seeming and oblique character trait to summon, much less to maintain. The demands humility imposes are numerous, non-trivial, and painful. But the rewards it bestows are rich beyond belief, a fulsome bounty reinforced and multiplied every time we choose it as our response to challenge or adversity.

Arrogance always makes one look like a goddamned jackass in the end. Worse still, most who succumb to its empty blandishments never even know what utter fools arrogance has made of them, their heads being crammed too far up their own asses to see the light of day. Those capable of inculcating and bolstering a proper sense of humility, on the other hand, will find themselves widely admired and respected for the very trait that did so much to ensure their success, whatever their chosen field of endeavor may be.

They added: “The proposed message includes basic mathematical and physical concepts to establish a universal means of communication followed by information on the biochemical composition of life on Earth, the Solar System’s time-stamped position in the Milky Way relative to known globular clusters, as well as digitized depictions of the Solar System, and Earth’s surface.”

“A universal means of communication.” Do these people even hear their words? Across, what, about 2-300,000 fucking years of the existence of what we think of as “modern” man, no “universal means of communication” has ever been developed. EVER. Dios mio, mankind has never created a universal language in all that time, nor is there the slightest prospect of such a thing on the horizon. But hey, that can’t stop the bright boys at NASA, and why should it? They’ve been sooooo incredibly successful since the halcyon days of the 1960s and 70s, right?

The concept of sending depictions of naked humans to space isn’t new.

The Pioneer plaques sent to space on the 1972 Pioneer 10 and 1973 Pioneer 11 missions, also featured drawings of naked humans.

The plaques are attached to the antennas on the crafts.

They’re still sailing away from Earth to this day.

With nary a peep heard from any of our prospective alien friends from that day to this. Those NASA folks might be smart, but they don’t seem to have learned a whole lot. But hey, I’m probably just too dumb to understand such heady stuff; it’s all probably WAY over my head. So shamed am I by my intellectual inadequacy, I’d never even DREAM of asking the NASA brain trust to explain—in detail and with extensive confirmatory references in the footnotes—exactly what all that taxpayer money bought for us.

Hope those brainiacs will remember to request access to the FBI “evidence” locker so’s they can glom some kiddie-porn to slap onto that phallic launch vehicle of theirs. Celebrating the entire spectrum of human sexual “diversity” is what the modern American “space program” is all about, don’tchaknow.

Oh, and Mooselimbs too. Gotta throw a few Korans in there, maybe a nice set of those checkered kitchen drapes they like to wear on their heads.

2000 Cheating Husbands know the score

Posted on May 4, 2022May 4, 2022 by Mike

Wayne Root presents an intriguing thought-experiment.

How powerful is “2,000 Mules”? Why do you think the Supreme Court decision on Roe v. Wade was leaked right at this exact moment? This is the first Supreme Court decision that has ever been leaked — and it just happened to occur on the eve of the release of “2,000 Mules”?

Look who this historic criminal act targets: female voters. It’s no coincidence.

But I have a message for female voters, wives and mothers. Ladies, have you ever had a boyfriend or husband cheat on you? Did you need actual proof of your husband cheating to know the truth? Or would this be enough to know for sure?

Your husband comes home at 3 a.m., reeking of booze, lipstick on his collar, the smell of a woman’s perfume on his body, and when you ask him where he’s been, he replies, “Shut up. I did nothing wrong. You’re crazy. You’re a conspiracy theorist. No, you can’t look at my text messages. No, you can’t look at the GPS of my phone. How dare you ask? If you ever talk about this again, I’ll kick you out of this home. Good luck being homeless on the streets.”

What would any woman believe at that point? Do you need any further proof? Or is your husband’s reaction all the proof you need? Are you crazy or a conspiracy theorist for seeing the truth with your own eyes?

That’s the 2020 election to a T. We all know what happened. We don’t need what Democrats and the establishment media call “proof.” The Democrats’ angry response is the proof. The media’s cover-up is the proof.

They call us crazy. They call us conspiracy theorists. They refuse any investigation. They fight against forensic audits with armies of lawyers. They ban any discussion. They refuse any debate. Is this normal?

Well, you can bet your very last farthing that it will be from now on.

But the only proof any smart wife or mother needs is the response. Just like a cheating husband, the Democrats’ response is so rancid, so ridiculous, so over-the-top with fake outrage, we all know the truth. The proof is in the response. We know.

If you made a bet on the election (as I did), you know. Donald Trump was running away with a landslide electoral victory at midnight on election night when suddenly five key states announced at the same time, for the first time in history, that they were stopping the vote count until morning. Nothing strange there. Nothing suspicious there.

Trump had insurmountable leads in all five states. Yet when we woke up, the leads were gone. Hundreds of thousands of new votes — almost 100 percent for Biden — were found overnight. And they were found with no GOP witnesses in the counting rooms. No problem there, right?

But you don’t need “2,000 Mules” to know for sure. “2,000 Cheating Husbands” tells the real story.

Simply tell every Democrat you know that you believe the 2020 election was stolen. Then watch their reaction. They’ll act exactly like your cheating husband, at 3 a.m., with lipstick on his collar.

Not me, bub. I wouldn’t tell a Demonrat where the men’s room was—not even if his eyes were rolled back in his head, his teeth were chattering, and he had a dark, wet stain spreading across the front of his trousers, I wouldn’t. Wayne closes, correctly, with the eternal question we’re all waiting with bated breath to have answered. Whichever way it shakes out, you can be certain that Team Tyrrany will be running the exact same play against us again.

Diversity-Americans: not up to snuff

Posted on May 4, 2022May 4, 2022 by Mike

Forget it, Jake, it’s Coontown.

When you order ice cream, you don’t want to hear “We’re out” or “It’s broken,” yet it has been happening so often across the United States in recent years that it became somewhat of a cultural meme that spawned considerable media interest. Reports indicate that up to a quarter of McDonald’s ice cream machines are not operational at any given time.

Ice cream sales make up 3% of total McDonald’s sales (over $22 billion annually), amounting to about a quarter of a billion dollars a year. If the company is losing out on roughly 25% of that, we have a $56 million question on our hands every year.

Media outlets looking to cover the story and capitalize on the “McBroken” meme published dozens of quite lousy pieces concluding that the extensive cleaning process and heat sanitization cycle are to blame for the machine’s maladies. I never bought that story for a few reasons. One thing that doesn’t add up with the “cleaning” explanation is why any restaurant would clean a machine while it is open, and how it could be true that ten to 25% of all working hours in them are dedicated to “cleaning.” Perhaps nobody wants to clean the machines, so they merely say that it is not working.

Then, in April 2021, a YouTuber named Johnny Harris uploaded a now-viral video with over nine million views titled, “The REAL Reason McDonald’s Ice Cream Machines Are Always Broken.” In this 30-minute exposé, Harris elaborates a new theory that has gained acceptance as the actual reason for the McDonald’s ice cream downtime. Harris explains that the manufacturer of the ice cream machines, Taylor, is to blame. Taylor is the industry standard and the same company that makes ice cream machines for most quick-service restaurants, and has been supplying the equipment to McDonald’s since 1956. The next time you see an ice cream machine, look for the manufacturer’s name. It’s probably a Taylor.

Harris posits that Taylor has made the machines intentionally onerous to operate so they can generate future revenue out of repair contracts. The theory is that Taylor deliberately makes ice cream machines that are always in need of service and are generally too complicated for restaurant workers to understand. Hence, they call Taylor’s service technicians, which keeps the company flush with cash flow. It’s an interesting theory, and the video hams it up. There are plenty of suspenseful cuts, long stares into the camera, and moments when you are supposed to be in shock as facts are uncovered, such as the long working history between McDonald’s and Taylor. Harris wants you to believe that corporate greed on Taylor’s end is to blame. In a way, Harris created the perfect scapegoat: shifting the blame from restaurant workers to shadowy business practices. People loved it, too. And it is entirely wrong.

There are some holes in this story as well…

Of all the outlets to cover the story, none of them got close to what I found, including The Wall Street Journal, Business Insider, Mashed, Boston Globe, Wired, and Inc. Vice News almost got there; they had the proper dataset to solve the mystery, but they fumbled, as expected.

First, I had to dig back a couple of years to find an article I remembered seeing which confirmed something we already know: restaurants owned by blacks, in black areas, do not perform as well as those in “less diverse” communities. McDonald’s has over 200 black franchisees out of the 1,700 or so owners — enough to make the data statistically reliable. Stores that the black franchisees own an average of $68,000 net less per month than all franchise stores. That’s $816,000 per year, per store, lower than the chain’s average.

There are probably many reasons for this disparity. Some black franchise owners postulated that a lack of black leadership in the McDonald’s corporation is an issue. I’m not sure there is a connection. Another issue raised was that black owners tend to own stores in black neighborhoods, where costs are high and sales are lower. There is a notion that nebulous socioeconomic issues tied to things like “white privilege,” “white supremacy,” and “systemic racism” are to blame: i.e., blacks have less money as a whole to spend on fast food, therefore making the sales of black-owned McDonald’s restaurants lower. To the extent that socioeconomic forces are genuine and legitimate, I will say the issue is not systemic racism or white people, but sub-Saharan genetics.

One of the black franchisees was interviewed about his experience. He said “my stores are hellholes,” and lamented that they are robbed once or twice per month. His further comments revealed that his stores are often vandalized: people destroy the bathrooms and break the windows, and a murder had even taken place on the premises of one restaurant.

The murder in the McDonald’s reminded me of a grocery store in Atlanta called “Murder Kroger.” The Ponce de Leon Avenue Kroger earned that nickname by being the stage for many violent crimes. Some Kroger stores actually left black neighborhoods not far from where I live because their outlets there were the worst in the company, suffering from extreme shoplifting and security issues. After pulling out of these neighborhoods, the company was declared “racist” and blamed for contributing to “food deserts” in black communities. The stores were simply not profitable and not worth the headache to keep open. Although some argue there is a white supremacist conspiracy theory keeping blacks from having nice grocery stores in their neighborhoods, the black community itself runs them out of business through their behavior. As states and cities continue to decriminalize shoplifting, this trend will continue.

Another black McDonald’s franchisee said that his stores were among the worst in the company. They have low cash flows, serious staffing problems, and are often robbed. The black owners often blame McDonald’s corporate. Still, they did not seem to realize that their real gripe is with their own community and the behavior of their racial cohort. Part of the extra costs that the black franchises have to pay are for security, high insurance premiums, and constant repairs.

I interviewed a McDonald’s employee who works in a very “diverse” restaurant. He confirmed some of my theories and observations and added great additional insights. He mentioned that the restaurant where he works often has to repair bullet holes resulting from drive-by shootings in the street where they are located. Sure, racism could be blamed for the lack of sales in black stores in black neighborhoods, but one might also suggest that many people don’t want to put their lives at risk for a McFlurry or Big Mac.

With that information in mind, and knowing that demographics affects the rate of “broken” ice cream machines, we can draw further conclusions.

Ice cream machines do not know they are in black and Hispanic neighborhoods. Thus, we can probably rule out the existence of “racist ice cream machines” that make a conscious decision to stop working so they can deprive black and Latinx communities of ice cream.

Here is where we intersect with the meta-story about journalism. The objective of journalism is no longer to inform the public, but to weave a story of their choosing into a larger tapestry. Here, we see that the mainstream media was not willing or capable of telling the full story. Millions of people reading and watching the dozens of articles and videos on the matter have been led to believe in a conspiracy theory about ice cream machines and corporate greed, when the reality — and much more plausible tale — is one of basic biological differences between groups of people.

Further, it’s possible, and perhaps even likely, that the current mainstream journalist class is made up of people entirely incapable of uncovering deeper truths and unwilling to process any information that might contradict a larger societal theme. Much like the black franchisees, I’m sure they found a way to blame anybody but those actually responsible.

As is the case with everything else in my “social capital anthology,” this isn’t an article about broken ice cream machines. This is about what happens to a society when even the base level of social functionality — the bare minimum standard required to have something that looks like a real society — cannot be met.

At some point along this trajectory, there will no longer be any upside rationalizations to be found. There will come a time when the people who cannot run the ice cream machine are not doing you a favor by making you choose better food options. There will come a time when the people who cannot run the ice cream machine are running things of a much greater importance. What will society look like when the person who is today a McDonald’s Assistant Manager who can’t or won’t ensure that the fries are hot is tasked with staffing air control towers or repairing bridges and roads? What happens when the worker who decided it “wasn’t his job” to clean the ice cream machine feels the same way about inspecting the brakes on your car? What happens when you very much need something to be done correctly, but everybody at the department in charge of whatever you need are those people who could barely keep an ice cream machine running for a full day?

How does that society look?

A very easy question for contemporary Americans to answer, most especially those unfortunate souls trapped in our urban hellholes. All they need to do is look out their window to see it crashing and burning all around them.

A lengthy excerpt from a lengthy article, of which you simply must read the all.

(Via WRSA)

Just another American “election”

Posted on April 26, 2022April 26, 2022 by Mike

You knew this was coming.

Musk’s Twitter Purchase Fails After 138,000 Board Votes Found Overnight
SAN FRANCISCO, CA—Elon Musk’s bid to purchase Twitter came up short after 138,000 board votes were found at 2 a.m., a company spokesman confirmed Tuesday. Musk had been in talks to purchase the company for $44 billion.

“We really thought Musk was going to pull this one out,” said Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal. “The yes votes had a strong lead when I went to bed last night, but that was before we counted all the mail-in votes that one of our employees found in locker 142 at the bus terminal.”

When the final votes were tallied, the takeover bid failed by a final tally of 10 votes for, 138,000 votes against. While the final result came as a shock to most observers, Agrawal said the election was fair. “Twitter takes election integrity very seriously,” he noted. “I can confidently say this was the most secure election in American history.”

Musk, after losing fair and square, went on to level baseless charges of fraud, ballot rigging, and other tampering—wantonly undermining our sacred democracy in so doing—before announcing there would be a violent, seditious protest cum riot cum insurrection held on May 6 in front of Twitter HQ, with the FBI providing hors d’ouevres, party favors, and the Bouncy Castle. Twitter immediately suspended the treasonous Musk’s account for questioning the integrity of what was inarguably an honest, clean, totally above-board election. Now let’s all talk about something else, shall we?

Update! Can’t help but append another sweet Bee-bopper riff.

Eccentric Billionaire Accomplishes More For Free Speech In One Afternoon Than Republicans Have In Decades

Hrm. Better check this one out; I thought it was fanciful satire from the Babylon Bee, but it appears it may be an article from the scalawags over at Not The Bee, being factual and all.

WORLD—According to sources, an eccentric immigrant entrepreneur from South Africa just accomplished more for free speech than Republicans have in decades of controlling the government, wielding Federal power, and spending trillions of dollars.

Experts concur that Twitter being purchased by a private entity instead of publicly owned by shadowy corporate interests and foreign governments will help secure Twitter’s place as a free speech platform. Other changes, such as an open-source algorithm, clear and fairly enforced rules, and a commitment to the free exchange of ideas are expected to accomplish more for freedom and human advancement than anything Republican congressmen have ever done in their entire careers.

“Man, why didn’t I think of doing something like that?” said the Republican Senator. “If you vote for me, I’ll form a committee after the election season to explore the reasons we didn’t think of that!”

To save face, Republicans have promised to cook up something extra special for voters next year in the form of a strong resolution saying free speech is good.

In fairness to Vichy GOPers, though, it really isn’t as if they give much more of a shit about free speech than the Demonrats do. Plus, talking a big game and then spinning their wheels until everyone quits watching and ambles on off to the hot dog stand is sorta their thing, y’know? So it would be only natural for them to react that way this time too; by now, it’s a conditoned response.

The worst has happened. Anything on Netflix tonight?

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Mike

Oh no, not that. Anything but THAT.

BREAKING: U.S. Capitol Evacuated Due to ‘Probable Threat’ From Aircraft

Please, dear God, no.

The United States Capitol was evacuated Wednesday evening due to a “probable threat” from an aircraft, the U.S. Capitol Police said.

How perfectly awful.

“The USCP is tracking an aircraft that poses a probable threat to the Capitol complex,” the statement said, according to an email posted on Twitter by a Capitol staffer.

Gee, hope everyone’s okay. It would be just terrible if anyone was hurt.

Moments later, Capitol Police informed staffers that the aircraft no longer posed a threat.

Oh, good then. Sean Davis mines the rich, rich vein of hilarity here for all he can extract.

It took all of 30 seconds of Googling to figure this out.

Capitol Police have no problem digging up dirt on staff, visitors, or even on *pastors officiating funerals*—they apparently love using Google for that.

But this they missed? Shocking, criminal incompetence. https://t.co/6nMxVi7kQp

— Sean Davis (@seanmdav) April 20, 2022

The Golden Knights, eh? Military Appreciation Day? What on earth would lead one to assume any reptile slithering and sliming around in the Mordor on the Potomac cesspool would know, or care, the first dang thing about THAT? Jesse Kelly Goes Sean one better:

I never believed a plane was trying to breach the Capitol because if it was the Capitol Police would have let it in and then complained about it afterwards.

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) April 20, 2022

It’s funny ’cause it’s true, and you know it is. Being ever the optimistic type, I’ll content myself with considering this a dress rehearsal.

Goin’ down

Posted on April 20, 2022April 20, 2022 by Mike

Robert Spencer asks a pertinent question.

Does the Western Lifestyle Put Societies on the Path to Extinction?

Apparently, yes. Yes, it does.

The rest of the world is noticing the West’s pronoun madness, trans madness, grooming madness, and other evils, and is drawing the obvious conclusions. The deputy commander-in-chief for coordination of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), General Mohammad-Reza Naghdi, said in a recent interview on Iranian TV that Europeans were losing the sense of their own national identity, and that the Western lifestyle had placed European societies on the path to extinction. He could have said exactly the same thing about the United States of America.

The March 31 exchange on Iran’s Ofogh TV began when an interviewer asked Naghdi: “If I am not mistaken, you expressed an opinion about the French national soccer team. You said that out of the 23 team members, 15 were Africans, and that of the 12 members of their national basketball team, ten were Africans. You inferred that France has no national identity.” It was an interesting question, because if an interviewer had asked it in France or any other country in Europe, or in the U.S., he or she would have been excoriated as a “racist” and likely fired, simply for asking the question. When a topic, any topic, can be more freely discussed on Iranian TV than on American TV, you know there is something wrong.

Naghdi didn’t berate the interviewer for “bigotry.” Instead, he answered: “The West delineates a certain lifestyle for societies, and how we should live. What has this done to the West itself? It has caused negative population growth, which forces them to import population from abroad. European societies will reach a point, within several decades, where you will have to search for a single person of the European race in France or in England, for example.” Well, yes, and not just France or England. Germany’s Federal Statistical Office (Destatis) recently conducted a “micro-census” that found that fully twenty-five percent of the people in the country have a “migrant background.” Given the low birth rates of native Europeans all across the continent, it isn’t hard to see where this is tending. As far back as 2005, the renowned historian Bernard Lewis said that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century, “at the very latest.”

Naghdi continued: “In this situation, there is no more meaning to national identity. According to statistics, if you hold free elections in England in 2060, a Pakistani or an Indian will be the prime minister, and [British] Parliament will be filled with [immigrants] from Iraq, India, and so on. What will be the meaning of national identity there? There will be no such thing as the English people anymore. This will be a different nation and different society.” As if aware of what the Western establishment media would make of such talk, Naghdi added: “Some people might interpret what I say to be racial discrimination, but if you care about the value of preserving a nation’s identity and the continued existence of that nation, [know that] the path [the West] outlined for human society will ultimately be the annihilation of future generations.”

This Eye-ranian dude is one brainy cat, no doubt about it— perceptive, quite canny both historically and politically, and right on the beam. Which is NOT a sentence I ever imagined I’d have occasion write, much less actually mean.

Drool, Britannia

Posted on April 18, 2022April 20, 2022 by Mike

I’m thinking Vera Lynn is probably doing some serious reconsideration of that old “There’ll always be an England” chestnut of hers right about now.

Women can be strip-searched by trans officers who were born male, say police

Guidelines issued to forces urge chief officers ‘to recognise status of transgender colleagues from the moment they transition’

The policy says it may be ‘advisable’ to replace officer carrying out search if detainee objects

But if ‘the refusal is based on discriminatory views’ it could be ‘recorded as a non-hate crime incident’

The guidance, quietly issued in December, was brought to light by retired Superintendent Cathy Larkman

Female suspects can be strip-searched by police officers who were born male but identify as women – and could be accused of a hate crime if they object, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

New guidelines issued to forces around the country state: ‘Chief Officers are advised to recognise the status of Transgender colleagues from the moment they transition, considered to be, the point at which they present in the gender with which they identify.

‘Thus, once a Transgender colleague has transitioned, they will search persons of the same gender as their own lived gender.’

The controversial advice, issued by the National Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) — the body representing British police chiefs — says it may be ‘advisable’ to replace the person carrying out the search if the detainee objects, but adds: ‘If the refusal is based on discriminatory views, consideration should be given for the incident [to] be recorded as a non-crime hate incident unless the circumstances amount to a recordable crime.’

Fantastic, I love it. Andrea Widberg strongly disagrees with my tres cynical, serves-ya-right attitude on this delightfully preposterous story:

What this means is that fully intact male police officers who identify as “lesbians” can be in charge of strip-searching female suspects.

It’s no joke about them identifying as “lesbians.” After all, just yesterday, news broke about two women in an all-women’s prison getting impregnated by a fellow inmate. This was not a miracle. These pregnancies reflected the fact that this inmate was a fully intact man who finagled his way into a women’s prison (a place I’ve heard is cleaner and safer than a men’s prison) by announcing that he is a woman.

There are few things more misogynistic than the pretense that men who claim to be women actually are women, rather than being merely mentally ill or opportunistic men. If you want a comprehensive list of women who have been abused by these sick, often psychopathic men, check out the site Women Are Human.

What’s happening in England is disgraceful, but England is scarcely unique. Gender madness has infected America, too. This must stop. Men are men, and women are women, and that’s true regardless of how they feel. I’m not a religious person, truly, but I can’t help but feel the presence of a great evil behind this press to destroy the biological binary genders that have helped define the entire mammalian world since time immemorial.

As far as I’m concerned, the further we go off into the deep end with this nut-hatchery, the sooner Western Civ might possibly come to its senses, put a halt to it, and stop prostrating itself before a stastically-insignificant proportion of the population, one facet of whose mental disorder is a stubborn determination to be miserable no matter how humbly they’re kowtowed to. Personally, I won’t consider the battle to be truly won until cringeworthy desecrations of the English tongue like “their own lived gender” are stricken from the language, never, ever to be spoken again.

Oh, and y’all enjoy a pic of one of these fetching “transgender” English coppers. No need to thank me, I’m glad I could do it for ya.

Now just you TRY and convince me this delicately beautiful feminine confection is anything but all woman. Go on, I dares ya.

CF Search

Login, RSS, &c

CF Archives

Categories

2A/Mostly Guns

Alt-American

Big Dogs

Essayists

Mil

Nuttin’ But News

Odds Bodkins

Overseas/Non-US

Portals

Pure Bloggery

REAL Journalism

Substack Scalawags

The Funny Pages

Comments policy

CF Glossary

Subscribe to CF!

Shameless begging

Correspondence

Allied territory

Notable Quotes

RSS feed

.