Category: Life in a once-great nation

America that was, America that is, America that shall be

Blowback for Brandon

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Hey, if the shoe fits…which, y’know, it does.

BREAKING: Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers BLAST Joe Biden for LYING about American oil production

Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers had choice words for President Joe Biden in a Fox News segment Saturday. Focusing on soaring gas prices across America, the segment included interviews with a group of laid-off workers.

“We should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question,” one worker told Fox News.

The Fox News reporter then asked: “If we want to get the price of gas down right now, we want to drop the price of gas, what do we need to do right now?”

“Put us to work right now. And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it,” the worker replied.

Workers then turned attention to Biden. “He’s pushing for solar and wind power, but it’s been proven over and over, that’s just not as efficient as burning natural gas, refining crude.” Another worked continued, saying: “We are sick of hearing, ‘This is Putin’s price hike.'”

Plenty more where that came from—every word a gem, every word the plain and simple 24-karat truth, the most salient insight helpfully emphasized above by moi. Brandon and his co-conspirators should be made to own their intentional sabotage of American energy independence, though. After all, it’s not as if they haven’t lectured, hectored, and pimped their silly, emasculated electric toy “cars”—along with the whole kit and kaboodle of their obsolete and unworkable “sustainable energy” folderol—long enough for everyone to know their true colors by now: Green, and Red.

It’s not as if they don’t realize the damage their lunatic jihad against fossil fuels—the most efficient, reliable, easily-gleaned and -managed energy source there is as of right this minute, the only one even remotely capable of powering a robust industrial economy—has and will do to the US, its economy, and ordinary Americans, mind. They know full well. It’s just that they don’t give a flying fuck at a plate-glass window about it, that’s all. At this point, they appear to have lost all patience, abandoned the gauzy illusion of logical persuasion and fair debate, and have moved on to openly waging economic war against the legitimate interests of the nation and her people—a most cruel and abominable war indeed.

Alas, but this is who they are. This iswhat they do. For the Left, the Almighty Agenda—raw, untrammeled power and control—always and forever comes first, overriding all other concerns. T’was ever thus, or nearly so. The last honest, honorable, and sincerely patriotic Democrat expired along with JFK or thereabouts, leaving us with the bizarre degenerates we’re saddled with at present. The modern bumper crop of amoral, hedonistic Democrats are an affliction, a cancer, one that must be excised completely, by whatever means necessary, if the body politic is ever to be restored to some semblance of health. Mike Walsh knows the score…mostly.

A specter is haunting America—the specter of the Democrat Party. Like an evil spirit that cannot be exorcised, the Democrats have been plaguing the United States since Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Ferociously pro-slavery, the Democrats divided the country practically from its inception, blocked the path to abolition and eventually took up arms against the nation after the election of the first Republican president, firing on Fort Sumter and seceding en masse from the Union. And, a week after they had lost that war, one of them assassinated Abraham Lincoln, elevating a Democrat from a Confederate state to the presidency, and plunging the country into more needless turmoil.

With a track record like this it’s a wonder the party is even still legal.

It really shouldn’t oughta be, and I mean that with every fibre of my being, literally and sincerely. No nation-state with the least regard for its own legitimacy is in any way obligated to tolerate the existence of a powerful political party flatly sworn to undermine, weaken, and injure said nation-state, even as it is diligently beavering away at that self-same project. As for the tyrannies, look to history to provide numerous examples of just how forgiving a dictator and/or ruling cabal usually is when it comes to clutching national parties fomenting unrest and insurrection fondly to its bosom, allowing them to carry on unmolested.

Hell, in those places you’re liable to the get the chop merely for walking around in public view with the smallest, most respectful and innocuous protest sign conceivable hoisted over your shoulder. Anything more radical than the most obsequious and Milquetoast-ian dissent, and the State’s bullyboys will fall on your doomed head like a crap-ton of sizeable rocks. Won’t be no dragging of the feet about the matter, either. The absolute least such an igner’nt fool can anticipate is to wake up next morning chained to a wall of a damp, noisome cell enjoying a ferocious headache; a seriously split lip; a whole passel of fresh new aches, pains, and deep-purple bruising scattered about his body; and little to no memory of how he got himself into this sorry state.

Make no mistake: rhe more strident you wax in your political agitation, the worse things are going to get for you. Count on it. Far better to just keep your lip zipped; walk with a bit of a stoop and a shuffle, no hint of any confident strut showing through; accept whatever Authority gives you without question or complaint; and make sure you’re always securely tucked into the middle of a crowd of other people, safely out of easy sight whenever you’re out and about, and you’ll be all right. Probably. Think “grey, ordinary, bland” so hard you actually project that image bodily, so that the aura of your shy, harmless nature rises off of you in visible waves.

For more on this, you want to take a leisurely stroll through the indispensable Julie Kelly’s AmGreat Jan 6 “riot” archive. These columns are an unflinching examination at the mid-to-late stages of America’s godawful descent from more-or-less proper governance into Tyranny Most Dire, vital material for anyone with a stomach strong enough to handle them. It’s dismal, ugly stuff, trust me it is—achingly painful reading for any poor naif still clinging to the battered belief in the ongoing existence of his cherished but long-extinct Republic, however far afield it may have strayed from the golden dreams of its Founders. Be sure you have a fifth of something stout handy when you do this. Trust me, you’re going to need it.

And yet, after the bloodiest war in our history—and with a sizable component of “peace Democrats” in the North actively rooting and voting against Lincoln in the election of 1864 while supporting his opponent: the failed Union general George McClellan—they’re still around to plague us. It wasn’t until the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant as commander of all the Union armies in 1864 that Honest Abe found the right man for the job: someone who would mercilessly crush the life out of the Democrats and their armies, destroy slavery, and reunite the states.

The midterms are still eight months away but Real America is crying out for succor right now.

Well, DUH. They’re worried, they’re out of work, the grocery-store pickin’s are mighty slim. Which is no real issue anyhow: even if there WAS food on those shelves like in the Goode Olde Days of yore, they couldn’t afford to buy any thanks to Bidenflation. Certainly, a few gallons of gas for the drive over is WAY out of reach. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans are confronting real deprivation and want, after long luxuriating in the plenitude created by the system they passively watched being ruined a-purpose, when they weren’t actively helping destroy it. Worse, as I’ve said before, this is only the beginning of our national nightmare. When it will end, IF it will end, is known only to God Himself.

I only wish I could believe that this planned disaster, with its concomitant needless suffering, would be enough for Americans to finally and fully understand what the bitter, toxic fruits of Demonrat rule have been for nigh on a century, and to firmly decide they don’t want anything more to do with the lousy bastards. If the howling hell-storm now unfurling all around us finishes the criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party for good, erasing all traces of their malignant misrule forever, I’d consider it well worth the suffering. Sorry, but I can’t.

Hoping that their Uniparty partners-in-crime might be taken down along with the Dems is just bugfiucknuts. Oh, I suppose it’s barely&mdas;BARELY—possible, sure. But it’s wildly, grotesquely improbable. Nobody should waste any time fantasizing about it, lest such useless woolgathering obscure or distract us from the arduous real-world work required to actually get the thing done.

Gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, natural gas—the prices continue to soar, already past the point of recent plausibility and heading into economic terra incognita. Millions of illegal aliens pour across the nearly erased southern border. A befuddled Joe Biden threatens to sleepwalk us into an armed conflict with the ghost of the old Soviet Union in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and disinformation is rife on both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine. In a parliamentary system, Biden’s government would have fallen right after the debacle in Afghanistan—but barring a miracle we’ve got another three years to suffer.

For just over a year, Americans have watched with admirable patience as their economy collapsed, their legal system was perverted to serve the interests of a few, their nation’s military degraded, and their freedom of speech subverted via the government’s fascistic and unconstitutional co-opting of the social media sites. Meanwhile, woke corporations and a thoroughly compromised media crack down on the commercial and personal privacy of anybody that runs afoul of the New Normal while manic Greens demand a return to the days of three-masted schooners and windmills. Such relentless cultural and economic sabotage would be considered an act of war if done by anyone else—but here it goes by the fellow-traveler names of “dissent,” “patriotism,” and “progressivism.”

Walsh goes on from there to lob a few undeserved stinkbombs at Trump as if he was still at all relevant, and then this:

The other is Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Smart, pugnacious, and unflappable, DeSantis has emerged as the chief thorn in Joe Biden and the Left’s side. After his narrow win over a guy who was later found dead drunk in a Miami Beach hotel room he was sharing with a gay porn producer who had overdosed on crystal meth, DeSantis has cemented his hold on the former swing state, turning it solid red. Unlike Trump, who at the moment is powerless, the squeaky-clean DeSantis upstages Biden and the Democrats on a regular basis; his canny and unflappable handling of the “pandemic” has given rise to a new nickname for the Sunshine State: the Free State of Florida.

DeSantis, 43, can make no public noises about seeking the presidency at this point. He must get past his re-election for governor in the fall first and hope the voters rally to take back control of Congress from the narrowest-of-narrow Democrat majorities. With his wife, Casey, now seemingly recovered from a bout with cancer, he is sitting pretty.

It’s widely thought that if Trump declares, DeSantis will wait his turn in 2028. But why should he spend four years on ice behind a lightning rod with no further political future? Polls already show him creeping up on Trump and a smashing re-election victory will only gain him more prominence. Lots can happen in three years, especially when his possible primary opponent is getting on in years. After Biden, will America want another geriatric president? Or will the voters prefer a guy 32 years younger, with nothing but upside?

I hope and pray he stays on in Florida instead. DeSantis can render the remaining handful of non-authoritarian fragments of what was once the great American republic far greater service there than in Mordor On The Potomac, where the Deep State’s legions of orcs, trolls, and winged Nazgul will rip him to bloody gobbets of raw meat as they did Trump.

Sorry, Mike, but there really, truly is no voting our way out of this. However it comes about, something far more direct, proactive, and potent than toodling on over to the local polling place to cast a meaningless ballot in a systemically corrupt “election” is gonna be required of us. Possibly, a way may yet be found short of actual, violent revolution against the bloated, evil Federal Leviathan. We should all pray for that. But it WILL involve some level of violent upheaval, of that I’m certain. The yawning divide between us is simply unbridgeable to allow for anything less, and unless and until the Left’s marrow-deep megalomania is well and truly extinguished the conflict will rage on, even intensify.

For my own part, I find myself losing interest more and more in national politics and the DC doings. After all we’ve witnessed since Inauguration Day 2016, the DC charade and rot so gallantly exposed by Trump has left me largely indifferent as to who might be installed in the now-tainted White House as figurehead-of-state, beyond whatever entertainment value one can derive from it. Our self-declared Masters are gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless, leaving the workaday schlubs to pay the freight for their disastrously inept folly as per usual. Until they’ve been thrown off, by hook or by crook, there really isn’t a whole lot for the little guy to do other than just grin and bear it.

Update! More on Brandon’s wholly-intentional and pre-planned fuel-price assault on America.

Nonprofit food deliveries concerned cost of gas could price out volunteer drivers
It’s never been more expensive for volunteer food drivers to make deliveries for nonprofits. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high.

Meals on Wheels volunteer driver Sal Depasquale brings food to 89-year-old Frances Crowder once a week.

“He’s always on time,” Crowder said. “Oh boy, I don’t know what we’d do without Mr. Sal.”

Inserted betwixt the above paragraph and the next one, we find one of those ubiquitous clickbait links to another related article, which I found modestly amusing:

BIDEN: ‘CAN’T DO MUCH RIGHT NOW’ TO LOWER SOARING GAS PRICES, ‘RUSSIA’S RESPONSIBLE’

Gratifying to see this hapless liar floundering so desperately, innit? Allow me to translate Dopey Gropey’s usual ham-fisted prevarication into Truth:

  • Say not “can’t,” Gropey. Say “won’t,” or if that doesn’t suffice to keep the risible, pathetic attempt at deception semi-viable and your lying ass covered, try “have no desire to” instead.
      • Okay, the closing schnauzer-slodder is getting quite damned stale at this point. After so many years watching you blaggards fellate your beloved USSR, all dewy-eyed and face lovingly aflush as you were gratingly demanding the US hew closely to its horrid example, later compounded by your latest beloved candidate for Token First Female President’s use of the Rooskies to underhandedly, illegally, even treasonously slither her way into the White House, your sudden volte face into frothing hatred for all things Russia and/or Putin has a distinctly malodorous aroma wafting from it. As for Putin himself, I just can’t make myself jump into those waters along with everybody and his sister’s cat’s grandmother, seemingly. Yes, yes, yes: dictator, strongman, warlord, thug—got it, granted, so stipulated. So what the bloody deuce did y’all expect from Russia, anyway? I mean, it’s Russia, ferchrissake. Throughout its history, whenever they’ve slipped up and allowed somebody who really WASN’T one or all of those things to take power as head of state, they’ve bestirred themselves to correct the error toot sweet. I do heartily disapprove of his jumping poor Poland, yes; I would much prefer the valiant, indomitable, and admirable Poles to remain free and independent. But is there a soul so innocent and/or oblivious as to have been at all surprised by it?

      His deplorable Ukraine incursion aside, though, which I’m confident will be undone sooner rather than later, I must confess I’m just a wee mite fond of Putin. His sneering, openly-expressed contempt for President Mommy Jeans I thoroughly enjoyed; his proud basking in traditional masculinity and its multitude of related sins, with none of the obllgatory genuflecting and fashionable groveling towards the LGBTQIXN39Whatthefuckever herd-orthodoxy I find refreshing. He’s something of a throwback to an earlier era, a more clear, natural, and honest age. I must say, if the choice was offered of either Putin or the decrepit bleeding hemorrhoid we’re suffering under now as the US president, I’d take the unevolved Rooskie trog any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. We could use a strong, no-bullshit leader like ol’ Vlad right about now, I think.

In any event, Brandon’s odd reflex to blame anything and everything on Russia has not a thing to do with reality and everything to do with Gropey’s will to somehow survive politically, to stanch the copious bleeding of his innumerable self-inflicted wounds. But enough of that, back to the original topic we go.

Meals on Wheels is a nonprofit food delivery service. Depasquale has been a volunteer driver for more than 10 years. 

“It’s a valuable service, and it helps people who need help,” Depasquale said.

It’s never been more expensive for drivers to make deliveries. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high. Depasquale makes three or four deliveries every week. He’s concerned if prices continue to skyrocket, volunteer drivers like him will drop out. This could dramatically increase his workload and pain at the pump.

Cross Services, Meals on Wheels’s parent company, is watching gas prices around the country. The company still has enough drivers to make deliveries, but are afraid that could change if prices stay this high.

“Hopefully we’ll retain them,” said Cross Services Senior Services Coordinator Mary Jo Buettner. “But, again it depends on how long that price of gas stays up so high and keeps going up.”

As long as Democrats are in charge, be assured that that is precisely what they’ll do. For them, this situation is no disaster, no terrible problem that must be remedied. It represehts the successful implementation of a long-standing policy goal—a win, not a loss or mistake. The misery will not just continue, but increase…until they have been removed from power. Far from being complex or difficult to understand, it really is just that simple, folks.

Want to Make America Great Again, Heritage Americans in flyover country, small towns, and suburban enclaves? You have to Make Democrats Afraid Again, then see to it they stay that way. Like it or not, it’s the only way; nothing less will do the trick.

A final note: my brother tells me that his conversations with other truckers indicate that, should diesel passe the five-dollar/gallon mark, a large number of his fellow independents and owner/operators intend to shut ’em down. They’ll do it too; they’ll have to, they won’t have any choice in the matter. My brother his own self is near that point already; he told me the other day that his every-other-day fillup, formerly around 250 to 300 dollars, cost him well over eight hundred bucks last time. No business can go on hemorrhaging that kind of money for very long before quickly bleeding out. Think the huge truck-driver shortage, a genuinely dangerous situation, couldn’t possibly get much worse than it already is? Think the price of every good, every commodity, can’t keep rising so insanely? Think this is a crisis we’re in now? Just you wait until thousands more trucks, the lifeblood of our economy, have been taken off the road for good.

Again: only the beginning, now unstoppable, needless and nonsensical. All of it, every last bit, a man-caused disaster created entirely and intentionally by Leftard Democrats, for nefarious purposes. That’s the long and the short of it. I won’t be lending my endorsement by participating further in American “elections,” as if they were above-board and credible, thereby granting tacit, open-ended license to my oppressors to do as they please, rather than the bread-and-circuses theatrical distraction they in fact are. But I do wish someone who feels differently about it would sit down and explain to me how ANY decent, reasonably intelligent and informed adult—seeing all that we’ve seen, knowing all that we know, at least nominally awake and of sound mind generally—could even hypothetically justify voting for a Democrat, ever.

And yet.

Where such people are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes, when I’m in a twee coffee bar or near a spontaneous drum circle, I can feel them.

The mind, it boggles.

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Milestone reached

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Anybody remember when State Media ran those somber “grim milestone” reports each and every night on the TeeWee “news,” reminding everyone of Shrubya’s totally unacceptable body count in Iraq and Afghanistan?

Nah, me neither.

The total number of adverse reactions reported in the USA is 1,084,457 as of that date. Over one million adverse reactions…yet the media, and the medical establishment, trumpet how “safe” the vaccines are! If that’s “safe”, then I’m Mata Hari! (The reports for Europe are just as bad, if not worse in certain countries.) Of particular importance is the incidence of heart problems (particularly pericarditis and myocarditis) encountered among the vaccinated. Another looming issue is the rise in stillbirths among vaccinated pregnant women: “We are currently on pace to see a yearly total of 2,838 recorded fetal deaths following COVID-19 shots, while the yearly average of recorded fetal deaths following the vaccination of pregnant women for the past 30 years has been an average of 74 fetal deaths per year.”

Do bear in mind that those record-setting numbers come from the VAERS numbers, which even the CDC itself has admitted almost certainly amounts only to a fraction of the real total.

Medical “science” is racing to explain away those reactions (which, as the bottom graphic above shows, are worse than all previous vaccines of any kind since records began to be kept). Guess what excuse they’ve just invented?

Oh, I’m sure it’s a good one. The deadly OMIGAWD!!™ variant? White supremacists? Trump? The heartbreak of psoriasis? WHAT?!?

Guess what? It’s not the vaccines’ fault at all – it’s stress! That’s why so many vaccine recipients are dropping dead with heart problems!

Note, too, that this excuse will also be used to motivate more money for the medical establishment: “without at least doubling the current funding, the NHS will not be able to tackle the ‘trauma timebomb’, which could have potentially fatal consequences for those suffering with long-term PPSD”. Yeah, riiiiiiiiight. It’s not the vaccines’ fault, so go on foisting their poison on as many people as possible – and give us more money while you’re at it, so we can treat a wholly invented, non-existent stress disorder!

D’you ever get the feeling that the medical establishment as a whole is trying to play us all for suckers?

Sure, and why not? It seems to have worked out extremely well for them so far.

If you haven’t, I suggest you don’t understand the reality of the situation. Do they really think we’re that stupid?

Of course they do; who could possibly imagine otherwise? Have they ever given anybody a single reason to think that they don’t? The big question here is: ARE we? Because frankly, having put up with everygottdamned thing they’ve done over the last nigh-on two years at the very least without a murmur of complaint, I’ve not seen just a whole lot of evidence so far that says they’re wrong in that insulting assessment.

In all the previous pandemics in human history, nobody ever even thought about, or postulated, or theorized, or investigated this syndrome…yet suddenly, out of nowhere, it’s a major factor in fatalities among the vaccinated?

Hate to say it, but in a very sad way there may be a fairly plausible argument in support of the idea, especially when you consider the lamentable reality that the vast majority of Americans today are NOT the sort of stout, independent-minded, indomitable souls their forebears were. Not even close, they ain’t. In a nation populated shore to shore with thoroughly steercotted fruits, flakes, and nuts who get their panties in a bunch over some sane person offhandedly referring to them as “he” instead of “XHRSHIMX” or some other stupid horseshit, the real shocker is that falling over stone-dead because OHHH, I JUST CAN’T EVEN!!! isn’t a lot more common than it is.

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Of Ford Rangers and fascism

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It might seem like something of a stretch, to some of you out there. Would that it were so.

The Diesel Ranger That’s Probably Not for Us
The redesigned 2022 Ranger – it’s bigger than the current model we can buy here in the U.S. – has just been launched “globally.” Actually, hemispherically – since our hemisphere (the North American chunk of it) will not get the new Ranger until 2023.

And we will probably not get the new turbodiesel V6 that will be optional in the new Ranger in other hemispheres. Including even Australia – where people are tackled by armed government workers for not “masking” outdoors…but diesels are still largely free to roam.

Not so much here.

It is harder to get a diesel engine past through the needle’s eye of government ukase pertaining to allowable emissions than it would be to stuff an actual camel through such an attenuated aperture. Even with the grafting on of chemical exhaust scrubbers, DEF tanks and the re-engineering of the once-simpler, once less-complex diesel engine to a state of greater complexity than a current gas-burning engine, they still have difficulty making the cut.

The few – and it is very few, indeed – that do are very expensive as a result.

As a for-instance, the only Ranger-sized truck that’s available with a diesel engine in America as of the 2022 model year is the Chevy Colorado and its GMC-badged twin, the Canyon. The diesel is, however, only available in crew cab Canyons and Colorados near the apex of the trim pyramid and then only if you buy it as part of a $5,185 package, which means spending at least $35,000 to get the diesel in this truck.

That makes it too rich for most Americans.

Or rather, makes it too expensive to make much sense – especially in view of the slight – about 6 MPG – fuel economy benefit vs. the gasoline V6 that’s available as a much less costly option in lower-trim/lower cost versions of this pick-up.

It’s likely that these same factors will keep the diesel engine outside this market – precisely because it no longer is one.

The balance has tipped decidedly in the direction of a fascist economy.

It’s a case I’ve made here myself numerous times over lo, these many years. The depressing thing is that, rather than dwindling over time, supporting evidence is piling up faster than ever before. More depressing realizations yet to come, which we will be addressing anon.

The  relevant – the defining – element of fascism is: private property allowed – but controlled and directed by the state.

You’re allowed to build cars – and trucks – but only within the parameters laid down by the state. You can buy a car or truck, but only those cars and trucks the state says you may buy (and then, you may retain possession only so long as you pay the required – and ongoing – mandatory tithes and use it in accordance with the state’s allowable usages).

That is fascism – which doesn’t fundamentally alter whether said in German, Italian or American.

Unlimited power to decree what they (the car companies) can sell and what we may buy. It is why we cannot get the diesel engines – plural – that are already available in the current Ranger, on sale in places like Australia.

Which, by the way, is also available with a manual transmission. But not for us. The Ranger we get – now and pending – is and will be automatic-only, for the same reason we won’t get the diesels.

It’s not just cars and trucks, either – as hardly needs to be stated. It is everything. Or rather, there is nothing – in principle if not in actual fact – that the government hasn’t asserted its power to allow or not and if the former, under what conditions.

It’s a shame there aren’t goose-stepping soldiers saluting the Leader – in high definition color.

People might notice it then.

Possibly, some might even object.

SOME will object, of course. But how many of us won’t? Worse, how many would actually be in favor of such a development, even enthusiastically so? Which brings us to the worst, most depressing realization of all: In light of how radically the Left has retailored the national fabric—altering the nation’s character and identity with malice aforethought—could those dangerously deluded fools have become a majority of Americans? Because if that’s the case, it strongly suggests that those guilty of “not noticing” just became the very least of our concerns.

On the other hand, I do have to confess that, on my most jaded and cynical evenings, a correctly-aligned dictator or military junta seems like it could well be a significant improvement over the Democracy Theater™ shit-circus we’re being thorougly and painfully snootered by at the moment. A Royal Highness, Generalissimo, Emperor, or scowling, beetle-browed Il Duce might come as a breath of fresh air, long as he hated Leftists with a fierly passion that burned with the heat of a thousand Suns and wasn’t above the judicious application of thumbscrews, stretching ’em on the rack, or tossing their sorry asses in the Iron Maiden for a goodish spell now and again, just to keep the conniving, nefarious bastards in their place and freshen up their memory as to who’s really in charge around this joint.

Perhaps a dictator is no different than a great many other things in this life: Neither entirely good nor entirely bad overall, necessarily. The main thing is making sure you get yourself the right kind of dictator, that’s all.

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Explicating the inexplicable

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I’ve for the most part dropped any further mention of how the theft of the 2020 “election” was accomplished, as well as endless recounts and the like. I can’t really forego the pointless and delusional onanism common in certain quarters insisting that soon—ANY MINUTE NOW!!!—***”president”*** Brandon’s transparently fraudulent “victory” will surely be decertified, whereupon the true President will be restored to his rightful position, since I never bought into any of that starry-eyed silliness in the first place. We all know full well that Trump, along with every Real American who believes he has a God-given right to his say in how and by whom he is governed, was robbed.

The deed has been done; the palace coup which began with the original crime wet firecracker Bill Barr correctly called “one of the greatest travesties in American history” went off without a hiccup, a YUUUUGE success. There is now only one means by which that crime can possibly be addressed, by which justice can be achieved at last. We all know full well what that means is, too.

All that said, though, this thorough and unique analysis is just too damned good to let pass by without at least taking note of it.

Eleven months after the 2020 American presidential election, the official results remain so incongruous, they merit an empirical exegesis.

The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination is necessary to reassure Americans the official result was, in fact, the actual result.

The political establishment’s narrative is that Biden won an unexpectedly close race, and the outcome requires no further examination. Yet, Biden’s victory is so statistically suspicious, so riddled with ahistorical outcomes, that a detailed data examination is necessary to reassure Americans the official result was, in fact, the actual result.

Official tallies record 161.3 million votes cast in 2020. Donald Trump got 75 million of those votes, 12.1 million above his 2016 total, and the most votes ever received by an incumbent president. Joe Biden received 81.2 million votes, the most votes for anyone who has sought the presidency.

Biden received 306 Electoral College (EC) votes to Trump’s 232. The individual vote totals behind that victory show an amazingly slim margin of victory for Biden. He won Arizona (11 EC votes), Georgia (16 EC votes), and Wisconsin (10 EC votes) by a combined 43,809 votes, which made the difference between victory and an Electoral College tie.

Now, let’s consider nine categories of suspicious anomalies that led to Biden’s squeaker of a victory.

I. Census Bureau Data
In 2020, the Census Bureau found 5 million fewer voters than the number of ballots counted. This is the largest gap recorded since these post-election surveys began in 1964. These 5 million excess ballots account for most of Biden’s national popular vote lead. To cite one state-level example, the Census Bureau found 4.8 million voters in Georgia, but Georgia reported 5 million counted ballots.

The Census Bureau’s validated voter survey is a very thorough and comprehensive piece of post-election data analysis. Historically, it has been far more accurate than exit polling and other post-election surveys and studies, as Robert Barnes, a leading political analyst and successful political prognosticator, explained in early May on his “What Are the Odds?” podcast.

The nationwide excess of counted ballots over registered voters in 2020 is extremely unusual. Census data usually finds a very small differential between the number of people they identify as having voted in the previous presidential election and the official total number of ballots counted in that election. In 2016, Census voting data matched almost precisely the number of ballots counted.

Historically, when Census data has differed from the official ballot count, it has tended to overestimate, rather than underestimate, the number of voters. The opposite was the case in the 2020 election.

Most revealingly, the Census data shows the turnout surge was almost exclusively among White blue-collar voters, an overwhelmingly pro-Trump cohort. Yet, somehow, the surge favored Biden in the end.

Turnout in 2020 was 6.7 percentage points higher than in 2016. The Census data on overall turnout, and turnout among specific demographic groups, closely aligns with the macro- and micro-turnout predictions made respectively by Barnes and Richard Baris, the preeminent pollster and managing director of Big Data Poll, and polling data at my firm, Democracy Institute, which forecast a Trump win.

I won’t excerpt any more of it, although the temptation to post a much bigger bite is pretty powerful. The piece is broken down into nine sections, each of which approaches its individual issue from a highly unusual and intriguing angle. It’s a long ‘un right enough, but when you reach the end of it you’ll swear it ain’t anywhere near long enough, I bet. The closer:

A synthesis of the empirical evidence, innumerable anomalies, and predictive metrics leads to an inescapable conclusion about the 2020 presidential election. Although it is statistically possible that Biden won, clearly it is statistically implausible that he actually did.

If you go through the comments section you’ll find the usual shitlib sophists and pedants straining mightily to pooh-pooh the inescapable conclusion in their usual fashion, disingenuously sidestepping the real crux of the matter: Even if one is willing to dismiss this well-reasoned article’s arguments, it still amounts to a single evidentiary nugget mined from a whole quarry’s worth of malfeasance and skullduggery.

It’s almost possible to “prove” that a given election was indeed stolen, as even NPR admitted back in 2007. But when there are causes for suspicion as numerous as this, none but an insensate fool (or a co-conspirator) could fail to perceive a rank odor of corruption wafting off the whole rotten enterprise. In lawyerly circles, what we have here is known as a preponderance of the evidence. And, as the late Rush Limbaugh always said, words mean things. To wit:

preponderance of the evidence

Overview
Preponderance of the evidence is one type of evidentiary standard used in a burden of proof analysis. Under the preponderance standard, the burden of proof is met when the party with the burden convinces the fact finder that there is a greater than 50% chance that the claim is true. This is the burden of proof in a civil trial.

In the trial we might call 2020 Election Thieves vs Real Americans, the evidence is voluminous, diverse, and entirely credible. It clearly establishes Defendant’s guilt for wilfully and knowingly perpetrating the serious crime of election fraud, if only by the sheer number of items and instances introduced into evidence by the prosecution. As such, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, your vote must be, can only be, to convict. The evidence demands it. The law demands it. Most important of all, perhaps, JUSTICE ITSELF demands it.

Sentencing to follow.

“There’s No ‘Supply-Chain Shortage,’ Or Inflation. There’s Just Central Planning”

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Put another way, it’s just government, doing what governments always do once they’ve been allowed to slip the leash and run amok.

The supply lines of February 2020 were impossibly complicated structures that no politician could ever hope to design. Think billions of individuals around the world pursuing their narrow work specialization on the way to enormous global plenty. Put another way, the shelves in economically free countries were heaving with all manner of products based on economic cooperation that was staggering in scope. Brilliant as some experts claim to be, and brilliant as some politicians think they are as they look in the mirror, they could never construct the web of trillions of economic relationships that prevailed before the lockdowns. But they could destroy the web. And they did; that, or they severely impaired it.

In which case let’s please not insult reason by talking about “shortages” or “inflation” now. Let’s instead be realistic and talk about central planning. We know from the 20th century that when politicians, authoritarians or both substitute their intensely narrow knowledge for that of the marketplace that immense want for very little (and lousy) supply is the logical result. Yes it is. When we’re not economically free, bare shelves are the inevitable result.

Conversely, product and service abundance is a certain consequence yet again of the infinite actions and trillions of economic relationships entered into by billions of people. These commercial tie-ups were constructed by consenting individuals over many years and many decades only for them to be wrecked by a political class arrogantly seeking to protect us from ourselves. That’s what happens when command-and-control replaces voluntary order. The remunerative ties that bind us fray, or vanish altogether. Consenting, profitable economic activity was suddenly illegal. Yet politicians and other experts are only now wringing their hands about a lack of supply?

Really, what did they think was going to happen?

They thought they’d get richer, more powerful, and would attain even tighter control over their hapless subjects. Tragically for all of us, they were right about that. Don’t fall into the common mental trap of believing they give so much as a lumpy Brandonfart about anything whatsoever else, please. The erroneous assumption that their goals and intentions are even remotely in harmony with those of the people they misrule is part of what got us into this mess in the first place.

We don’t suddenly have an inflation problem. To say we do is the equivalent of saying that the Soviets had inflation because all the goods worth getting were both difficult to find, and incredibly expensive if they could be found. In our case we’ve had a lockdown problem care of nail-biting politicians that suffocated commercial cooperation around the world. And with work divided less than it used to be care of government force, productivity is naturally lower than it used to be.

Please consider modern productivity in terms of Smith’s pin factory example yet again, and ask what it would do to supply. The only thing is supply shortfalls are not evidence of inflation. A rise in one price due to lack of supply implies a fall in other prices. Yes, we have a central planning problem. Were he around today, Adam Smith could diagnose this in seconds.

Anyone with a lick of sense could, really. It’s not difficult or complicated for those adequately schooled on an inflexible, ironclad principle our Founders knew very well: The sole raison d’etre of government is to attain, consolidate, and expand its own power. And that, folks, is absolutely, positively IT—period, full stop, end of story. Which makes it of primary importance that any government Constitutionally established and constrained must never, never, never be allowed to exceed its explicitly specified limits.

Once government has been allowed to escape its proper box, it quickly becomes extremely difficult if not impossible to force it back in again without the spilling of blood. The unloosed beast grows at an incredible pace, in every dimension and direction it can. Having bloated, engorged, and extended itself to monstrous proportion, it will naturally resist every attempt to trim it back to a more manageable size ferociously, using all its considerable might and cunning to maintain its own untrammeled freedom even as it continues to gluttonously devour the few remaining scraps of yours.

The price of freedom, as Jefferson cautioned, is eternal vigilance. We are about to find out what relaxing our vigilance costs.

Update! Blast it, forgot to include the “Via…” link earlier, which was good ol’ Divemedic. Sorry ’bout the slip-up, buddy.

1

IT’S MORNING IN AMERICA!!!!!ELEVENTY

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THANK GOD WE GOT MITT YOUNGKIN ELECTED SAVED WE’RE ALL SAVED FREE AT LASS FREE AT LASS PRAISE GAWD AWMIGHTY WE’S FREE AT LASS

Now let’s all be sure to hold our breath really, really hard while we wait for Amerika v2.0—or even the Commonwealth of Virginia, for that matter—to be put right again, mmkay?

It’s important to keep elections in perspective. The Youngkin win in Virginia was a backlash against wokeness and willful societal destruction in the name of not being a horrible person. The old saying “nice guys finish last” reflects the rough and tumble world of politics. For those who would rather maintain civility, decency and self respect, it’s sometimes better to lose than to get into the gutter with one’s opponent just to win, depending on what one stands to win. When it comes to a bonus, or a raise, one might opt to remain decent and faithful to the virtues one promotes to his children. When it comes to the survival of the nation or the culture, there are no depths that should not be plumbed in order to win that fight, because no virtue is taught by starvation or execution. 

The Youngkin win was a BFYTW win. It doesn’t solve anything. It doesn’t make voting any more valid or trustworthy or the way out of anything. It might stop CRT from being taught in Virginia schools for a while, but that fight isn’t over until the school boards are ripped up and replaced. It might prevent a few 14-year-old girls from getting raped in the bathroom by skirt-wearing sexual deviants, but it won’t stop rape. There are bigger issues to be addressed on that score. There is a whole segment of society attempting to normalize sodomy and rape of little boys and girls that no vote will alter or eliminate. That’s up to serious men aware of the issues and prepared to solve it once and for all.

I was a huge proponent of getting out the vote in Virginia, because it had a force-multiplier effect. Democrats losing the governor, lieutenant governor and attorney general offices sends a message to AOC and the squad. The close governor’s race in New Jersey is a virtual slap in the face to vaxx mandates. It emboldens the moderate Democrats. All of that, pushes back against the $5 Trillion-dollar infrastructure and budget momentum, giving Democrats in largely red districts the backbone to push back against AOC and her Green New Deal. Preventing a huge budget expenditure slows inflation, which pushes down on the price of food and other goods ahead of a dark winter. But it goes no further than that. It’s one battle in a long war, but seeing a few willing to fight boosts morale. Still, the only reason the election in Virginia went off with success is because they had 100% roles filled in election officials and monitor positions instead of the customary 28%. They had RNC officials on the phone ready to answer concerns when raised at polling places and officials there ready to respond. That comes back on the people to get involved locally, fill all of those spots and make sure there is someone on the other end of the phone when it rings. 

The turnout and success of the governor’s race in Virginia was nothing other than a stalling tactic and anyone who thinks it’s anything else isn’t paying attention, but that was a needed respite from the drumbeat march of communism, forced injections, woke schools and border madness. It’s much more important for its symbolism to a demoralized “right” than it achieves practically. There are still uses for politics, but for those seeking one-off solutions, politics won’t achieve it. Nothing will, because there are no one-off solutions. 

This is a war. That was a battle. It’s good to win once in a while; to have the front moved back a few yards now and then, but the war rages on.

As it will do, whether we like it or not. The orgy of back-slapping triumphalism and self-congratulation on Our Side are all fine and well, I guess, but don’t look for me to join in. OF COURSE the Uniparty cabal is willing to allow a milquetoast Vichy GOPer win one now and again. And lest anybody think I was kidding or exaggerating when I referred to Virginia’s new Potemkin governor as “Mitt Youngkin” just now, I implore you to reconsider.

Glenn Allen Youngkin (born December 9, 1966) is an American businessman and politician who is the governor-elect of Virginia. He is expected to be inaugurated as the 74th governor of Virginia on January 15, 2022. A member of the Republican Party, Youngkin defeated former Democratic governor Terry McAuliffe in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election. Prior to entering politics, he spent 25 years at the private-equity firm the Carlyle Group, later becoming its CEO. Youngkin stepped down from the Carlyle Group in September 2020, and announced his candidacy for the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election in January 2021.

Hmmmm…Carlyle Group, is it? I dunno, sounds kinda familiar.

Carlyle is a unique model, assembled at the planetary level on the capitalism of relationships or “capitalism of access” to use the 1993 expression of the American magazine New Republic. Today, in spite of its denials, the group incarnates the “military-industrial complex” against which Republican President Dwight Eisenhower warned the American people when he left office in 1961.

That didn’t prevent George Bush senior from occupying a position as consultant to Carlyle for the ten years ending October 2003. It was the first time in United States’ history that a former president worked for a Pentagon supplier. His son, George W. Bush, also knows Carlyle well. The group found him a job in February 1990, while his father occupied the White House: administrator for Caterair, a Texas company specialized in aerial catering. The episode does not figure in the president’s official biography. When George W. Bush left Caterair in 1994, before becoming Governor of Texas, the company was in bad shape.

“It’s not possible to get closer to the administration than Carlyle is,” asserts Charles Lewis, Director of the Center for Public Integrity, a non-partisan organization in Washington. “George Bush senior earned money from private interests that worked for the government of which his son was president. You could even say that the president could one day profit financially, through his father’s investments, from the political decisions he himself took,” he adds.

The collection of influential characters who now work, have worked, or have invested in the group would make the most convinced conspiracy theorists incredulous. They include among others, John Major, former British Prime Minister; Fidel Ramos, former Philippines President; Park Tae Joon, former South Korean Prime Minister; Saudi Prince Al-Walid; Colin Powell, the present Secretary of State; James Baker III, former Secretary of State; Caspar Weinberger, former Defense Secretary; Richard Darman, former White House Budget Director; the billionaire George Soros, and even some bin Laden family members. You can add Alice Albright, daughter of Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State; Arthur Lewitt, former SEC head; William Kennard, former head of the FCC, to this list. Finally, add in the Europeans: Karl Otto Poehl, former Bundesbank president; the now-deceased Henri Martre, who was president of Aerospatiale; and Etienne Davignon, former president of the Belgian Generale Holding Company.

Carlyle isn’t only a collection of power people. It maintains holdings in close to 200 companies and, above all, provides returns on its investments that have exceeded 30 % for a decade. “Compared to the five hundred people we employ in the world, the number of former statesmen is quite small, a dozen at most,” explains Christopher Ullmann, Carlyle Vice-President for communication. “We’re accused of every wrong, but no one has ever brought proof of any kind of misappropriation. No legal proceeding has ever been brought against us. We’re a handy target for whoever wants to take shots at the American government and the president.”

Carlyle was created in 1987 in the salons of the New York eponymous palace, with five million dollars. Its founders, four lawyers, including David Rubenstein (a former Jimmy Carter advisor), had the -limited- ambition at the time of profiting from a flaw in fiscal legislation that authorized companies owned by Eskimos in Alaska to give their losses to profitable companies that would thus pay reduced taxes. The group vegetated until January 1989 and the arrival at its helm of the man who would invent the Carlyle system, Frank Carlucci. Former Assistant Director of the CIA, National Security Advisor, then Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary, Mr. Carlucci counted in Washington. He is one of current Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s closest friends. They were roommates as students at Princeton together. Later, their paths crossed in several administrations and they even worked for a time at the same company, Sears Roebuck.

SO, basically the money-laundry for the Perpetual War department of the Deep State, then. Or, if it better suits you, one of the glass panels on the notorious revolving door all ProPol grifters rely on for their self-enrichment. Onwards.

Youngkin won the nomination at the party’s state convention on May 10, 2021, after multiple rounds of ranked-choice voting at 39 locations across the state. He defeated six other candidates. All the Republican candidates, including Youngkin, stressed their allegiance to Donald Trump and Trumpism, although other candidates for the nomination, such as state senator Amanda Chase, were the most vocally pro-Trump. After winning the party’s nomination, Youngkin was endorsed by Trump. Youngkin called the endorsement an “honor” but has sought to distance himself from some of Trump’s most ardent supporters. The New York Times wrote in October that Youngkin had sought to localize the race. Youngkin openly courted both anti- and pro-Trump supporters.

According to PolitiFact, before the Republican convention, Youngkin “toed a delicate line when asked if Biden was legitimately elected. He acknowledged that Biden was president but would not clearly say whether he thought the president was fairly elected. After the convention, Youngkin began acknowledging that Biden’s election was legitimate.” Amanda Chase, who has advanced conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, acted as a campaign surrogate, and the Associated Press noted that Youngkin “failed to refute a conspiracy theory” about the 2020 election; when asked at one of his rallies if Trump could be restored as president, Youngkin replied “I don’t know the particulars about how that can happen because what’s happening in the court system is moving slowly and it’s unclear.”

I can only doff my cap in awe of this remarkable display of supple, practically boneless fence-straddling. Even for a ProPol, his “flexibility” stands out.

While running in the Republican primary, Youngkin pledged to “stand up against all of the legislation that has been passed by the Democrats” and to be an opponent of abortion. Youngkin criticized the Texas Heartbeat Act, which bans most abortions after the sixth week of pregnancy, stating he instead favors a “pain threshold bill,” which occurs around twenty weeks. Youngkin personally opposes same-sex marriage, but has said he would not interfere with the issue as governor.

THAT’S telling ’em, Gov!

He spoke out against gun legislation that Democrats had passed, including expanded background checks, handgun purchase limitations and red flag laws. After winning the nomination, he de-emphasized these social issues, seeking to appeal to suburban swing voters. In July, he was caught on a hot mic telling an activist that he would limit his comments about abortion during the campaign so that he would not alienate independent voters. Also in July, the National Rifle Association (NRA) declined to endorse Youngkin after he declined to fill out their candidate survey. In September, a Democratic-aligned group began running ads in conservative parts of Virginia, seeking to diminish Republican turnout by attacking his lack of an endorsement from the NRA.

Youngkin supports the COVID-19 vaccine, but opposes mask and vaccine mandates. He supports eliminating the grocery tax, suspending the gas tax increase, offering a one-time rebate on income tax, doubling the standard deduction on income tax, cutting the retirement tax on veterans’ income, and implementing voter approval for any additional increase to local property taxes, which the Associated Press has called the “most wide-ranging and detailed” plan of his campaign.

Enough already. The one thing we can all be sure of about this Mark-1, Mod-0 shitweasel is that not ONE of this greasy weasels’ empty campaign pledges—nebulous and changeable as they already are—will be even half-assedly pursued, let alone implemented, without first receiving approval and permission from The Power.

Yeah, a victory once in a while can be a heartening thing, good for morale, even when it’s one as self-evidently meaningless as this one is. Nonetheless, the sad, central fact remains: it changes nothing, and nothing will be changed by it. As I’ve said so many times: Amerikan “elections” are meaningful solely as entertainment. They are theater, nothing more. At this point, they are the very acme and omega of what is meant by the phrase “bread and circuses.” If that still trips your trigger enough to actually go out and cast a vote—hey, have it, and more power to ya. You won’t need to elbow me aside to do it, I assure you.

Which does not in any way mean that all of us shouldn’t be rubbing Demonrat noses in it nonetheless; certainly, we should, and I mean every single chance we get. The more they suffer, the unhappier they are, the better off Real Americans are, no matter what. Back to TL for the denouement.

The problem is, and always has been, that states like Texas don’t recognize their own strength and abilities to exercise the power of the Tenth Amendment against a federal government that refuses to “faithfully execute” the laws. There are court cases to be brought, but answering the threat can’t wait for court cases. It’s easy to get frustrated by the lack of will of anyone on the right to do their job, push the envelope and solve the problem. People like Governor Abbott will never do it. They aren’t creative, they aren’t brave enough to face the federal government down in the interest of the citizens of Texas. He’s a peacetime governor, not a wartime governor. He simply doesn’t understand the serious nature of the threat.

Beyond the election there are more important issues. Every state is teaching CRT somewhere. Every town is a border town when the federal government flies these illegal immigrants all over the country to avoid the optics of them piling up on the border. Every state is pushing the vaxx mandate. There’s a lot of work and we need to stay on top of it. 

Indeed. If elections alone could change anything, they’d be illegal.

3

An outsider looks in

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Rose-colored glasses: OFF.

I am not an American. I am a native born Canadian who practiced law in Toronto and London before becoming a law professor. I have worked in law schools in pre-handover Hong Kong, in New Zealand, and for the last 16 years in Australia. I have had sabbaticals in the United States, Canada, and Britain. And yet despite not being an American I am going to be presumptuous enough to offer some comments about the United States. +

These won’t be disinterested comments because I like the United States a lot. I think America has been, and is, a force for good in the world. Who better today to be the world’s most powerful nation? Of course, I would have said the same about the British Empire up to its post-World War II petering out, so some readers may wish to stop reading right now. Yet my point is that I defer to no one in claiming the crown of being the most pro-American, non-American law professor there is working outside the United States today.

Start with how you run elections.

I won’t excerpt the next part—the point I want to cover comes later in the piece—but you definitely want to read it for yourself. Some may find it shocking. ALL of us should find it horribly embarrassing, infuriating, and…motivational, shall we say.

Then there is Joe Biden. I’d say he won firstly because of COVID (no COVID, no Biden presidency) and secondly because he sold himself as a moderate, safe pair of hands that suburban voters and so-called “NeverTrumpers” could convince themselves wouldn’t go too far to the political Left. Instead, and I quote a savvy political scientist friend here in Australia, “these suburban voters got precisely what they saw and knew, but pretended not to notice.”

This is a president who is barely articulate; who is unable to field two or three consecutive tough questions; and who looks to any disinterested observer to be significantly impaired in terms of his mental facilities. Think back to the sort of press conferences former President Trump fielded and the level of press hostility to him that oozed through the room, day in and day out, with all the back and forth. Were it not for a sort of journalistic praetorian guard around the current president, one that shields him from all but the softest of softball queries—and even these are frequently fumbled and make for excruciatingly embarrassing TV clips down here in Australia—we would all be openly wondering how much longer he could stay in office. This decline was obvious to any observer before last year’s election, of course. Trump Derangement Syndrome may have given lots of voters grounds “not to notice.”

But there is a price to pay for willful blindness. That price is especially high for voters on the Right of the political spectrum, those who very much disliked former President Trump’s coarseness, vulgarity and brawler’s instincts and hoped for a relatively painless return to civility in the political sphere without too much long-term damage. From this observer’s perspective that chimera was never on offer. It was a mirage, a fantasy. And any honest assessment should have concluded that was the case before last year’s election. Indeed, if today’s polls mean anything (an open question), then with Biden now down to below 40 percent approval and completely underwater not just with Republicans but with Independents, buyers’ remorse has set in. Big time. Alas, that is not how elections work. As President Obama made clear (when he won, not when Mr. Trump won), elections have consequences.

I’m with H.L. Mencken on this. Voters deserve to get what they wanted. And they deserve to get it good and hard. For more than a few suburban and NeverTrumper Republicans, I suspect that is precisely how they are getting it at the moment. Whether they can admit as much, to others or to themselves, is a separate question.

A fair enough point, with one crucial issue carefully elided, namely the patently fraudulent 2020 “election,” stolen in front of our very eyes with total impunity in what has to be the all-time record setter for Most Audacious In A Scummy Role. That successful hijacking suggests the need for a revision of Mencken’s classic aphorism, which in full says: Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard. Updated to more precisely reflect contemporary American reality, it should run more along the lines of: American “democracy” is the theory that the common people deserve to get what they’re willing to put up with, good and hard.

That one should hold until such time as the limit on what we’re willing to put up with has been reached and overtopped, at which point everything goes pear-shaped, the more astute bettors cash out and quickly leave the casino.

1

Doomed

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Taiwan on its own.

According to Russia’s Interfax news agency, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov recently announced, “Just like the overwhelming majority of other countries, Russia views Taiwan as part of the People’s Republic of China. This is the premise we proceed from and will continue to proceed from in our policy.” At the time of this statement, Russian forces were conducting joint naval exercises with Chinese forces in the Pacific—culminating in a 10-ship joint formation sailing through Japan’s Tsugaru Strait on October 18.

This, following a series of unprecedented Chinese military aircraft incursions into Taiwan’s airspace, has rattled Taiwan and America’s other allies in the region, namely Japan, the Philippines, Vietnam, Brunei and Malaysia. During the first week of October, over 150 aircraft, including advanced SU-30 fighters and H-6 heavy bombers, flew into Taiwanese airspace. An unprecedented 56 tactical aircraft penetrated Taiwan’s airspace in a single 24-hour period on October 4, the highest single day total to date.

China has already taken control of multiple islands claimed by these allies in an effort to access vast oil and natural gas resources, as well as project its military power in the contested territorial waters of the South China Sea. China’s ongoing trade dispute with Australia has also ratcheted up tensions in the region.

The U.S. foreign policy establishment has rushed to assure Taiwan and its other allies that the United States intends to honor its regional security agreements. Of late, Joe Biden has publicly pledged to defend the Japanese Senkaku islands, which China claims as its territory.

BWAAAA-HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!! The notion of the ever-more-enfeebled FUSA actually leaping into the fray to make war against the ChiComs in defense of our RoC allies is ludicrous, and has been for a while now. Realistically, it’s inconceivable that any president since Reagan at least would have dared to honor the explicit US treaty commitment to act militarily in defense of Taiwan against ChiCom aggression—today, the idea is even more bizarre. For numerous reasons, it’s gone from inconceivable to…well, ludicrous.

Thanks to past U.S. economic and domestic policies, we allowed our manufacturing base to be exported to China. While offshoring American jobs to cheaper labor in China was good for U.S. multinational corporations, it resulted in China effectively capturing the bulk of American industrial capacity for consumer goods. This gives China immense leverage within the U.S. economy.

Look now at the supply disruptions spreading across the United States, which result in no small part from our inability to offload Chinese consumer goods at West Coast ports. Consider how U.S. sanctions against China might create an even greater disruption in the supply of goods that the U.S. no longer has the ability to produce. This dynamic gives China considerable sway with a U.S. political donor class that derives its wealth from Chinese industrial capacity. It makes the idea that the Biden Administration would have the will to impose crippling U.S. sanctions as a check against a Chinese invasion of Taiwan unrealistic.

In contrast to China’s relative position of strength, the world has watched as America lost two wars in our failed Global War on Terror. Our withdrawal from Afghanistan was exceptionally humiliating, not just to America, but also to our allies. It was so bad, the UK parliament held Biden in contempt for his mishandling of the withdrawal. Americans swallowed hard when it was revealed that the U.S. general in charge of the evacuation asked the British SAS commander to stop conducting rescue missions to retrieve UK citizens because it was embarrassing the airport-bound U.S. military. We went on to leave thousands of U.S. citizens behind in Afghanistan with only a shrug of Joe Biden’s shoulders.

Today, the United States is a deeply divided nation on the brink of open internal conflict. The Biden Administration is gleefully running down a list of ill-conceived policies that historically have resulted in civil unrest and rebellion. Oblivious to its own incompetence or the concerns of working-class America, it has labeled half the population domestic extremists, including parents angry that their children are being indoctrinated into woke-Marxist ideology. Just this past week, Biden’s national approval rating hit 38 percent and is dropping rapidly. It’s no secret that he appears to be suffering from cognitive decline and who, exactly, is running the country has yet to be revealed. America is at its weakest point in at least a century, and China, as well as the rest of the world, notices. 

Numerous reasons, as I said, but the boldface bit is the one that dwarves all the others. As the American populace has grown ever more complacent, indecisive, and vacuous, their will to victory—their willingness to even countenance making war at all, for any reason—has proportionately withered as well, in mirror-like reflection. It’s unlikely in the extreme that present-day American lotus eaters in any great numbers would support military action to defend this country.

Taiwan? Shhyeeeaaah, pull the other one, whydon’tcha. It has a bell on it.

Which may actually turn out to be a good thing in the long run. Fact is, Real Americans have much bigger and more pressing issues confronting us right here at home—issues that will have to be dealt with, issues that simply cannot be back-burnered, ignored, or blithely waved away. Hate it for Taiwan and all, but the rip in our national fabric is so profound that it’s no easy thing to define the FUSA as a nation at all anymore, except in the loosest terms. In a great many minds, the Great Schism has already taken place. And in a non-trivial percentage of those, there is little or no desire to knit the country back together again.

With regard to a China-Taiwan conflict, the danger to America does not necessarily come from what happens to Taiwan. The danger comes from how radically the geopolitical status quo in the Pacific might change should China retake Taiwan by force in the face of U.S. opposition—or lack of opposition.

If the United States opposes China and fails to stop its move against Taiwan, then we will have shown ourselves incapable of fulfilling our security agreements in the Pacific.

Which is, y’know, true.

If the United States demurs and abandons Taiwan to the Chinese, then we will have shown that our security agreements are not worth the paper on which they are printed.

Which is also, y’know, true.

Either way, this likely results in the restructuring of alliances in the Pacific away from an impotent or feckless United States to accommodate the new global hegemon—China. The second and third order effects of our losses in the Pacific would reverberate across Europe, particularly in areas threatened by an expansionist Russia…which has opportunistically positioned itself for just such a situation. 

This, too, could be looked at as a good thing from some perspectives, or maybe a not-entirely-disastrous one. The cold reality is that Amerika v2.0 is a paper tiger, a hollowed-out shell whose only resemblance now to the once-mighty military, economic, and geopolitical juggernaut I call America That Was (swiped from the finest TV show ever conceived, natch) is entirely superficial. As Morton points out, every imaginable Taiwan scenario ends badly for this third-rate power, worse for Free Taiwan.

The post-WW2 treaties promising pipsqueak nations a US defensive shield against Commie aggression now only serve to highlight the unpleasant fact that our antecedents wrote a lot of checks that the current generation hasn’t the means to make good on. The sooner our feckless, braggadocious ProPols admit this forthrightly, sit down, and stop running their fat yaps as if it was still 1947 the better I’ll like it. Because the sad delusion of an American colossus permanently astride the globe, omnipotent and unchallengeable, is getting to be pretty embarrassing at this point.

7

Supply chain SNAFU

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An industry insider outlines the multifarious problem.

Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here’s a thread about what I learned.

First off, the boat captain said we were the first company to ever rent his boat to tour the port to see how everything was working up close. His usual business is doing memorial services at sea. He said we were a lot more fun than his regular customers.

The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow.

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis.

If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed.

WIth the yards so full, carriers / terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties.

Also containers are not fungible between carriers, so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up. This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now (as of 10/21) at his yards.

This is a trucking company with 6 yards that represents 153 owner operator drivers, so he has almost 3 containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team.

He can’t take the containers off the chassis because he’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether.

With the chassis all tied up storing empties that can’t be returned to the port, there are no chassis available to pick up containers at the port.

And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting off shore. This line is going to get longer not shorter.

This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy.

Alright how do we fix this, you ask? Simple. And we can do it fast now,

When you’re designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t choose it, you aren’t running an operation. It’s running you.

You should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. In a port that’s the ship to shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they’re waiting for another part of the operation to catch up.

The bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It’s yard space at the container terminals. And it’s empty chassis to come clear those containers out.

In operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t design for it to appear, you must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK!

Miscellaneous side angles I haven’t seen or heard mention of anywhere other than in casual conversations with my brother and several of his coworkers at Horizon Freight:

  • Chassis are extremely scarce currently; my brother has been working only two-three days/week over the last two weeks because there are just too few chassis in Charleston available for use—no chassis, no haulee containers
  • Amazon has taken to reserving way more container space than they need, then offering to resell it to shippers at eight to ten times the usual rate, which adds up to a lot of empty space in a lot of containers
  • Horizon has two dispatchers responsible for assigning chassis and containers to specific drivers who are charged with hauling them out of the Charelston and Savannah ports. These dispatchers are absolutely worn to a frazzle, working frantically to get these containers out of the ports and on the road to their destinations, for a damned good reason: there’s a firm deadline by which each container MUST be removed from the port, usually only two-three days after arrival. After the deadline, the dispatcher her own self gets whacked with a several-thousand dollar fine…compounded EACH AND EVERY DAY said container doesn’t move, applicable to EACH INDIVIDUAL CONTAINER

I repeat: in shutting down entire national economies on a pretext that grows more threadbare each and every day, politicians and bureauweasels have meddled in affairs much too big for them. Contrary to their personal God Complex delusions, the extremely complicated, intricately interdependent, and fragile systems they wilfully fucked up are FAR beyond their meager ability to restart or repair. The unbridled arrogance and conceit of ProPols have created a catastrophe that the entire world can only watch unfold with horror and dread. There is no power on Earth capable of stopping what’s coming now.

Here’s a simple plan that @POTUS and @GavinNewsom partnered with the private sector, labor, truckers, and everyone else in the chain must implement TODAY to overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate again.

Not one proposal of which plan is ever going to happen.

This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don’t need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.

We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can’t stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don’t work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.

The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it’s getting worse not better every day that goes by.

I’d be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government if asked. Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point.

Nope, nope, nope. One of BRM Peter’s commenters says it concisely and correctly.

government diddling caused this crap storm.

More government diddling will not fix it.

Nailed it. The one positive contribution federal and/or state governments might make here is also the one they’re wholly incapable of making: get the hell out of the way and allow the innumerable moving parts of the system of supply and logistics freely begin the slow and painful process of healing itself. Sadly, tragically for all of us, the self-styled Superior Beings who made this mess will never go along with it; such a thing is constitutionally beyond them, and goes against their nature. Their vanity, their bloated sense of their own importance, their every belief stands in direct opposition to the very concept. Indeed, they would resist any attempt at relaxing their grip on our throats to their dying breath. Which, y’know, can be easily arranged for them, and in fact ought to be.

Elsewhere, Karl digs down to unearth one of the deepest roots of our sorry situation.

I get it that everyone would like to just wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. There are people out there who claim they can — and have. They’re wrong. I may not be the CEO of Flexport but you shall see that going from a 2-stack to either 4 or 6 (depending on approvals) in the trucking company yards will solve nothing; the problem simply does not lie there.

The problem is that all the constraints have produced a labor shortage end to end in various places, including in warehouses, transportation hubs, drivers and similar. As a result the freight is not being unloaded and the empties not being returned on schedule.

When the ship gets here and unloads its several thousand containers those containers must ultimately return to the source to be loaded again. If the cycle is interrupted and there are none to load for the return trip then the source will run out. Unloading more containers into a chain of events that is constrained all the way through does not accelerate the rate of return for the journey back to the source!

You have to return the cycle from unload time to the return of the empty to the port to its expected rate and time in-transit or you do nothing. That means getting rid of the reasons that problem exists – which all revolve around labor and working conditions.

Some of those have been building for quite some time but a hell of a lot of them are external and imposed by governments related to lockdowns, mandates of various sorts and similar. The former ones building for quite some time will take some time to resolve but the others can be removed on an instant basis by the very government entities who placed them.

Phew—transcribing all of Karl’s characteristic bolds, underlines, and italics is hard work. But the man ain’t wrong about the scarcity of willing grunt-workers. Why, one might almost start to wonder whether—after going on two years of lockdowns, business closures, and being paid handsomely to lounge about at home in one’s jammies—this all might possibly be more than happenstance, coincidence, or sheer bad luck. Yeah, I know, I know, excessive paranoia, a ridiculous conspiracy theory, sorry I brought it up.

All the same, though, we might want to ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits, that is, from tighter control over individual freedom and mobility; reinforcement of fear, uncertainty, and doubt; making 24-7 surveillance and tracking of the Serf Class much easier; increasing Serf Class dependence and helplessness, among other things? We wonders, yes we wonders.

4

Putting it straight

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Not sure where I ran across this one—it’s been just sitting quietly on my desktop for days now, waiting for me to make some P-shop adjustments and then put it to good use here—and I can’t say I know who this Langan fellow might be, either. But I dunno, the part I highlighted in blue just tickled me no end.

Don’t hold back, Chris, tell us how you really feel.

4

“The training and readiness of the ship’s crew were deficient”

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Gee, ya THINK?!?

A cascade of failures – from a junior enlisted sailor not recognizing a fire at the end of their duty watch to fundamental problems with how the U.S. Navy trains sailors to fight fires in shipyards – are responsible for the five-day blaze that cost the service an amphibious warship, according to an investigation into the July 2020 USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) fire reviewed by USNI News.

The investigation into the fire aboard Bonhomme Richard, overseen by former U.S. 3rd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Scott Conn, found that the two-year-long $249 million maintenance period rendered the ship’s crew unprepared to fight the fire the service says was set by a crew member.

“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” Conn wrote in his investigation, which was completed in April and reviewed by USNI News this week.

“In the 19 months executing the ship’s maintenance availability, repeated failures allowed for the accumulation of significant risk and an inadequately prepared crew, which led to an ineffective fire response.”

Full props to ADM Conn for his desert-dry understatement. Fret not though, Squids, there’s a newly-minted admiral in town who’s SURE to unfuck the USN in a mere trice.

Assistant Secretary of Health Richard Levine, a man who identifies as a woman and goes by the name of Rachel, has been sworn in as the first “transgender” four-star admiral in America, as reported by the New York Post.

On Tuesday, the 63-year-old Levine was named as an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which is not one of the armed forces of the United States military. Following the swearing-in ceremony, Levine tweeted that he was “deeply honored and grateful to join the ranks of men and women across this great nation who have committed to defend the United States against small and large threats, known and unknown.”

Prior to his role at HHS, Levine had served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, where he oversaw a disastrous order to force COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, exposing thousands of vulnerable senior citizens to the virus. Levine himself came under fire when it was discovered that, upon the implementation of the order, he made sure to have his own mother moved out of such a nursing home and into a private facility. During his tenure, Levine also violated lockdown orders by secretly negotiating for a major exclusive car show to take place in Pennsylvania back in August, despite orders at the time banning such large gatherings.

Levine suffers from transgenderism, a mental disorder which leads people to believe that they are the opposite gender from the one they were born.

It remained unclear at presstime exactly how Mrxskkjnnxxx Levine plans to “defend the United States,” as per her HISTORIC!!! COURAGEOUS!!! statement, from her palatial office heading up a bureaucracy with no affiliation whatsoever with the US military. But I’m sure he/she/whatever will do a fine job of it nonetheless. In other news:

Meanwhile, China is expanding its nuclear missile silo field and just launched a new hypersonic nuclear-capable missile that circled the entire globe at low-orbit.

China’s new space nukes could evade the US’s missile defense systems.

While China is flexing its nuclear muscle, the “woke” Biden Admin is focused on white rage, maternity paratrooper suits, French manicures and promoting transgenders.

Levine, who previously served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, has a horrible track record.

The Coronavirus ravaged nursing homes across the US because of deadly Democrat policies of forcing people infected with COVID-19 back into the long-term care facilities.

Dr. Levine however made sure his 95-year-old mother was removed from the death box and transported safely to a hotel.

Okay, my apologies to ADM Conn for being overly sanguine just now. Actually, this looks like a most apposite time to begin fretting, sir, and to continue fretting away to your heart’s content. Wringing of the hands and gnashing of the teeth remain completely optional at this time, but are nevertheless heartily recommended. Carry on.

2

“Your Vote Won’t Count”

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News FLASH from Dan Gelernter. And also, y’know, moi.

We’re coming up on another election of national importance—the Virginia governor’s race is November 2. My friends are hopefully suggesting on social media that this will be the election that turns things around, where the full anger of the common folk at being bossed around by autocratic overlords finally manifests itself and we throw the bums out.

Mind you, they were saying the same thing with the same hope about the California recall election. And I said at the time, weeks before the vote was tallied, there was no point in hoping that patriotic anger would outbalance the massive machinery at work behind the scenes: Your votes didn’t matter in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t matter in the California recall, they won’t matter in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and they won’t matter next year.

And the national circle-jerk goes right on a-circling, the self-perpetuating wank-a-thon producing the usual tedious and unsatisfying climax at the close of another “Election” Day. After another late-night disappointment, conservative commentators awaken Wednesday morning to feign astonishment that the desperately longed for conservative “wave” petered out on them yet again—UNEXPECTED!™—without ever generating enough kinetic energy to finally curl over at the top and forcefully crash onto the encrusted slime and filth we so desperately hoped might at last be washed away from these shores. Hopefully, the ever-phantasmagorical “wave” election might usher the ugly detritus far out to sea, whence the disgraceful blight would then gradually dissipate into nothingness—the whole sorry mess scrubbed from memory as thoroughly as the incoherent, puzzling nightmare you had two weeks ago, a chaotic brain-jumble brought on by the highly questionable shellfish you optimistically had for dinner before turning in.

The commentariat, rising to the challenge of duty and responsibility, blearily springs into action once more to flog analyses and explanations of how such a befuddling thing could possibly have occurred, against all odds and in contradiction of the very latest polls—or, for the more brazen pundits, peddling the shopworn claim that the latest stinging defeat was in fact a momentous triumph for Repugnican candidates who will never be either sworn into the offices they sought, or be heard from again. EVER.

Dan does a quick fly-by past the 2020 dumbshow before moving on to describe the three crooked legs of the election-fraud stool.

So what’s the situation now? Vastly worse. This huge Time-documented conspiracy only half-expected to get away with stealing the election from Donald Trump. They discovered unexpected allies in three vital places: First, the courts, including the Supreme Court, refused to hear a single case of election fraud on the merits. They dismissed all the cases for lack of evidence or standing, which was much safer than letting the plaintiffs present their evidence in court.

Second, the Department of Justice was happy to say they’d found no evidence of election fraud, without drawing attention to the fact they hadn’t been looking. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any investigation at all: How many of you are aware that it was the relentless pressure of private citizens in Yuma, Arizona, who provided photographic evidence that the Justice Department couldn’t ignore, which led to indictments (so far two public) for vote fraud in the 2020 election? But even as the government was forced to charge the little people who were getting paid to collect ballots and cast them illegally, they assiduously refused to investigate where that money came from. Perhaps it came from a well-funded cabal of powerful people?

But third, and most important by far, the thing that ultimately renders our elections meaningless is people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. They are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections, precisely because we expect them to be fighting on our side. Fraudulent elections cost Republicans seats—cost Republicans the presidency—so why wouldn’t the most powerful people in the Republican Party be fighting just as hard as they could to expose fraud and pass laws requiring in-person voting with ID?

Here’s the secret answer: These people hate you. Sure, they’re willing to pay lip service to America as a great nation, to churchgoing values, and so forth. But they’re really just Democrats with different special interests: They want to funnel all your money to military contractors instead of environmentalists. People like Donald Trump interfere with that. People like you interfere with that. Because you want the government to mind its own goddamned business. And, on that issue, Mitch McConnell is united with Senator Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) against you.

These people live for power. They exist for the pleasure of spending your money to retain that power. And, now that they’ve managed to separate that power from public accountability by legalizing mail-in, no-ID, drop-box, multiple-ballot, and similar voting practices, you think they’re going to give all that up?

Of course not. The power, the perks, the ill-gotten gains will all have to be taken from them. Like it or not, that can only be accomplished forcibly. Coming up next: The Flinch.

There is no solution to this problem short of a Constitutional Convention that restores our elections to their original format: Voting on election day, and in-person. Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one. That is precisely what the Mitch McShumer crowd wants you to do: hope. Hope is an excuse not to act. Don’t take it.

After repeated tries, this hail-Mary pass just might take the prize for Worst Play yet. Just who does Gelernter imagine will be in charge of planning, managing, and overseeing this Con-Con, anyway? Why, the very professional politicians who are most endangered by any fair, open, and honestly-conducted one, that’s who. He gets everything perfectly correct, right up until this sentence: “Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one.” He’d have done much better to omit the opening clause, starting instead at “there is no point” etc and continuing from there. Dan starts off nicely, earning himself a solid “A for Effort” only to close out the semester with a failing grade.

I’ve mentioned previously that, while I wouldn’t be so presumptious as to deride or condemn foljks who doesn’t feel the same as I do about it, I absolutely, positively WILL NOT waste my time voting in American “elections” from here on out, no matter who the candidate might be. In my opinion, it’s far more productive to refuse my endorsement and consent via participating in a process I know from the git-go is nothing but theater, a complete fraud. I see no possibility of anything useful or positive resulting from it, with plenty of negatives in the pan of the scale—beginning with my tacit acceptance of the insult to my intelligence that willing complicity in my own disenfranchisement amounts to. Anybody out there who DOES perceive any constructive aspects of continuing to act as if the “election” grift retains a single scrap of credibility is welcome to have at it, and more power to ya. Perhaps you’re right about which is the better approach. Could be I’m full of shit; I have been before, just once or twice. But whether I am or I ain’t, I am fully and firmly OUT.

Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, as Little Richard used to say.

Bottom line: a deeply corrupt system can never be reformed by resort to the rules, procedures, and bureaucratic entities created and controlled by that very same corrupt system. It’s such a simple, transparently obvious waste of time as to beggar belief that otherwise intelligent people could be oblivious to it. What’s under discussion here is the restoration of order, decency, and rationality using the pointless and wrongheaded expedient of making civil, adult appeals to the malefactors inflicting disorder and insanity a-purpose, using those things and more besides as the weapons to utterly destroy the advocates of civility and rationality they so viscerally loathe.

We’re well past the point where moderate means can be of any use whatsoever. Only radical measures can avail us now. Too many of those able to clearly identify the problem and even recognize the iron-hard seriousness of our plight are nonetheless not yet ready or able to make the final, terrifying leap into full acknowledgment of the one non-negotiable imperative: That Team Liberty MUST prevail, no matter how terrible the measures required to gain ultimate victory over the soulless abominations presently waging all-out war against us.

Update! The view from Oz looks very, very familiar, don’t it?

There was no violent revolution. No overthrow of the government. No military coup. But the results have been as dramatic as the changes that occurred in the past when the communists or the fascists took power.

Prime ministers have come and gone. Elections have been held. Such events no longer seem to have any significance. You cannot point to any of those prime ministers and say, “it was all his fault.” Under each new prime minister both countries have lurched further in the direction of totalitarianism. Whether Labour or the Tories have been in power, or in the case of Australia Labor or the LNP, has made no difference whatsoever. The process of creeping totalitarianism has continued, slowly but inexorably. It’s clear that elections no longer matter at all.

It’s clear that whoever is in charge it’s not our politicians and it’s not our elected governments. You really don’t need to be a crazed conspiracy theorist to have noticed that.

Liberalism has been abolished. The individual has never been less important, and has never had fewer rights. What matters is the state and the corporation. The individual exists to serve the state and the corporation.

If we stubbornly insist on disagreeing with either the state or with the private corporations who rule society in conjunction with the state, our opinions are ignored. If we continue to be stubborn we are silenced. Dissent is not permitted. Individuals do not have the right to act for themselves, speak for themselves or think for themselves. If you try it on the internet you’ll be banned from social media, or (more likely) you will simply be shadow-banned. You’ll be silenced and you won’t even know it’s happened. In Britain you’ll probably be arrested.

And you don’t have to break any actual laws, because social order is now maintained by the state and by corporations to whom the law and legal rights are irrelevant. If you dissent in any way, even in a way that is technically quite legal, you will be silenced.

Liberalism didn’t fail. It was overthrown by a new ideology which for want of a better term we can call neo-fascism. Nothing matters but the state and the corporation. The individual is irrelevant. Individualism is now an anti-social act that will get you into deep trouble. We learn to obey the state and to obey its corporate partners.

1984 is already here but we pretend it isn’t that bad because the reality is too painful to face.

The irony is, the harder we resist facing reality, the more viciously reality will rub our noses in it.

7
2

Whole Point: missed, and badly

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What we should be asking is, who the hell cares.

(CNSNews.com) – “Where’s Pete Buttigieg?” a growing number of politicians and pundits are asking.

Buttigieg, President Biden’s transportation secretary, hasn’t had much, if anything, to say about the disruptive, multi-day Southwest Airlines flight cancellations that have stranded thousands of passengers; or the nation’s supply chain logjam, where dozens of container ships wait off the California coast for the opportunity to unload. The backlog is partly blamed on a shortage of trucks/drivers to pick up and return the shipping containers.

“The supply chain disruption is a crisis,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted on Monday. “This will impact every American, especially those who can least afford it. It’s past time for President Biden and Pete Buttigieg to explain what they’re doing about this.”

In a second tweet, Cotton said: “Pete Buttigieg was completely unqualified to serve as Secretary of Transportation. But Biden still picked him. Now, Pete is absent during a transportation crisis that is hurting working-class Americans.”

Heavens to Murgatroid, is there NO ONE who can save us?

STRONG HINT: If you sincerely consider yourself a Constitutionally-literate conservative, yet your first thought whenever a problem rears its ugly head is to demand that government step in and fix it—particularly when THE FUCKING PROBLEM WAS CREATED ENTIRELY BY GOVERNMENT IN THE FIRST GODDAMNED PLACE—then you are DEFINITELY Doing It Wrong, and should rethink a few things.

Yes, yes, hoisting new mom Pete Buttplug on xhwyrmmzz’s own Big Government petard might offer some small, transitory entertainment value. I get that, I really do. Nonetheless, Cotton’s kneejerk demand to be told “what they’re doing about this” rather than calling attention to the conspicuous absence of any grant of Constitutional authority for FederalGovCo to be micromanaging the supply chain, the trucker shortage, or the economy itself illustrates just how far Left the Overton window has been pushed. The widespread assumption that there’s a proper federal role to be played in addressing each and every issue says a lot about how very far afield we’ve strayed from our Founding ideals, none of it good.

8

Stuck in the loop

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The six-step EnviroNazi Virtue loop, that would be.

One: Britain goes big on wind turbines in order to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from traditional power sources.

Two: The wind don’t blow and the power don’t flow.

Three: A subsequent massive increase in demand for natural gas as a power source drives wholesale gas prices through the roof.

Four: CF Fertilisers, a US-owned British fertiliser business that also produces carbon dioxide for commercial use, suspends production because high gas prices have made the business unprofitable.

Five: Carbon dioxide is a required component for meat packaging. Without reliable supplies of commercial carbon dioxide, Britain faces a food shortage.

Six: The British government, which spent millions of pounds to cut carbon dioxide emissions, will now give millions of pounds to CF Fertilisers so it can produce carbon dioxide.

Perfect.

Perfect indeed—for the Environuts and their self-perpetuating Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly “the weather”) scam. For saner sorts, not so much. The thing to remember about the 6S-EV Loop is this: you can step aboard anytime, but the only way you can get back off again is by shooting a whole slew of the sonsabitches who talked you getting onto their little forever-go-round in the first damned place.

3
2

This time for sure, Charlie Brown

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What, you thought things were gonna be different this time around?

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is asking Gov. Ralph Northam to waive the witness signature requirement for absentee ballots cast by mail in this fall’s election.

The board voted 9-1 for the proposal by Chair Jeffrey McKay to send a letter to Northam, with Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity, the board’s only Republican, casting the only vote against the motion.

McKay said that waiving the witness signature requirement – as was done during the 2020 election – is necessary due to the continued threat of COVID-19.

Herrity said that waiving the requirement would be a “blow to election integrity.”

Uhh, hate to have to be the one to etc and all, Pat, but “blow(s) to election integrity are the whole fucking point. TTPTB have but one interest when it comes to election integrity, and you can bet your sweet bippy it does NOT involve finding ways to secure and/or maintain it. Bayou Pete has questions.

So, what’s going on here?  Let me ask a not-so-rhetorical question.

Question:  Why would you change the security rules for mail-in ballots in the middle of an election that’s already under way?

Most likely answer:  Because you’ve looked at the ballots that have already been received, and realized that you’re losing.

That’s what I’m sure is going on here.

And you would be correct, sir. Pete backs up his case with a little historical perspective:

Liberals and progressives often try to model the U.S. on Western European countries, but you never hear them arguing that we should adopt their voting rules. There is a reason for that. Banning mail-in voting or requiring people to use photo IDs to obtain a mail-in ballot is quite common in developed countries, especially in Europe.

These countries have learned the hard way what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.

France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and voters cast multiple votes. Mail-in ballots were used to cast the votes of dead people.

The U.K., which allows postal voting, has had some notable mail-in ballot fraud cases. Prior to recent photo ID requirements, six Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office after what the judge described as a “massive, systematic and organized” postal voting fraud campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of the local Labour Party. There was “widespread theft” of postal votes (possibly around 40,000 ballots) in areas with large Muslim populations, because Labour members were worried that the Iraq War would spur these voters to oppose the incumbent government.

In 1991, Mexico’s election mandated voter photo IDs and banned absentee ballots. The then-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party had long used fraud and intimidation with mail-in ballots in order to win elections. Only in 2006 were absentee ballots again allowed, and then only for those living abroad who requested them at least six months in advance.

If concern about voter fraud with mail-in ballots is delusional, it is a delusion that is shared by most of the world. Even the countries that allow mail-in ballots have protections, such as government-issued photo IDs. But Americans are constantly assured even this step is completely unnecessary. Without basic precautions, our elections are on course to become the laughingstock of the developed world.

“On course to become,” is it? For any forthright, halfway knowledgeable soul, it’s a bit late for indulging such a Pollyanna-ish point of view. This is why the usual late-stage reports of Repugnicans “closing the gap” in the (rigged) polls—thereby “narrowing” and “heating up” the “race”—are so drolly amusing, at least to me. Throw the increasingly common “don’t get cocky” trope into the mix, and the whole charade is just 24-karat comedy gold.


Contrary to received wisdom, establishing a modicum of integrity and trustworthiness in the fraud-rife American “election” system would not be a complex task, neither expensive nor beyond the capability of mere humans. All it would take is a little unambiguous, no-nonsense legislation:

  • Forbid ALL use of electronic voting machines in any US election
  • Forbid ALL mail-in ballots, except perhaps for dot-mil, diplomatic personnel, or other specific goobermint personnel deployed overseas on election day; absolutely NO other exceptions considered
  • Require in person, election-day-only voting, using paper ballots exclusively, proper photo ID to be presented by ALL voters before they’re allowed to enter their local polling place

And then we could…uhh…well, actually, that’s it. Nothing more than just those three little things. All dead simple, low-cost, and totally fair. All comprehensible, all very easily implemented. Take these three easy-peasy steps, which would take little to no time, and you will have un-fucked American “elections” pretty much completely. Congratulations are in order for you; you have just successfully re-installed a quite valuable thing, an essential component that hasn’t been part of the broke-down American electoral machine since before the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall at least: credibility.

Unless and until these common-sense reforms have been effected, voting in American “elections” expecting anything but more of the same shite is a mug’s game, the Founding concept of self-government and the primacy of the expressed will of the people no more than fantasy. There’s a word that pops unbidden into mind:

Definition of gossamer (Entry 1 of 2)
1: a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm clear weather

2: something light, delicate, or insubstantial

And there you have it. Describes the overall situation pretty nicely, I think.

Tinkering around the edges of the current system in trivial ways—the approach favored in those few states where any reform at all has been undertaken so far—is NOT enough to fix this. Simple and obvious as they are, the three options laid out above are in fact revolutionary changes, which partly explains the fierce howls of outrage at any mention of them from the malefactors profiting from the present wretched dysfunction. However unhinged the opposition to it, though—and however devious and dishonest the hidden motives behind it—nothing short of revolutionary measures will get us out of this. Thus, our national kabuki production will creak and totter on, strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, signifying nothing. Until one day, suddenly—UNEXPECTEDLY!!™—the badly-needed revolutionary reform occurs, after which it will be heard no more.

Speaking strictly for myself, I haven’t the least intention to provide my tacit endorsement via participating in it. But YMMV, as always. Those who choose to continue participating in American election theater, for whatever reason, are perfectly welcome to do so; they can expect no opposition, interference, or condemnation from me. But maybe it would be better for all concerned for those folks to acknowledge, if only to themselves, the shadowy presence of the con artist behind the curtain, director of the whole sorry show. If real reform is ever to take place, such a quiet, internal admission of the unreality and ultimate pointlessness of the whole sham could show us a way forward. In the meantime, I’ll rerun my instant-classic meme.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

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