Category: Life in a once-great nation

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

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.

A new zoo in Wisconsin

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No need to visit, the animals are being brought to your house.



The skies over Sparta have never been as busy as when the Biden administration decided to dispatch 13,000 Afghans, including at least one pedophile, to Wisconsin.

Sparta, a small town of less than ten thousand souls, whose claim to fame is being the “Bicycling Capital of America”, could only watch as a population of Afghans outnumbering its own population created a new Afghanistan on the premises of Fort McCoy.

None of the Afghans at Fort McCoy have a Special Immigrant Visa. Biden left the SIV visa holders behind in Afghanistan. The Afghans who have overrun the Wisconsin base are the ones whom the Taliban, for their own reasons, decided to allow through their checkpoints.

And they’re living up to the high cultural standards of the Taliban.

The problems began with the toilets. Then there were issues with the rice, the sexual abuse of young boys, and Afghans simply leaving on their own despite promises of taxpayer cash.

“Afghans were confused and upset by hygiene practices,” a Wall Street Journal article described. “Every toilet on base was Western style, with a seat and toilet paper. But a number of Afghans are accustomed to restrooms that allow them to squat so they don’t have to physically touch the toilet. It led to some cases of Afghans relieving themselves outside.”

This shouldn’t have surprised anyone after two decades in Afghanistan. But political correctness has mostly suppressed accounts of even the most basic facts about the beneficiaries of our great nation building project leaving Americans confused by the behavior of the new arrivals.

A Czech journal article from the Department of Military Hygiene noted that Afghan “people in rural areas were found to defecate almost everywhere according to convenience. It is important to observe that particularly the rural population does not know or does not use toilet paper.”

More accurately, Islamic law is held by some authorities to ban the use of toilet paper.

“You should consider very carefully shaking hands during the contact with the local population,” the journal article warned. Unfortunately their local population is now our local population.

An account of the toilet practices of the defunct Afghan National Army described how our soldiers were forced to “share their toilet with the ANA, as they had been ordered to do by their commanding officers” to win their “hearts and minds”. Unfortunately “it was the custom of the ANA to wipe themselves with their hands, smear their excrement on the walls of the toilet, and rinse their hands in the sink, which left the sinks reeking.”

While great care is taken by Muslims to keep their clothes clean so that they are not “impure” during prayers, bathrooms can be left in a horrifying state because they’re already unclean.

After a horde of troglodytic Muzzrats have passed through, yeah, I expect they are at that. On the bright side, though, just think of all the fascinating new Third World diseases that will soon be spreading like wildfire across every American town the “Biden” junta unloads another passel of these unassimilable knuckledraggers on!



No worries, bigoted white-supremacist Cheeseheads; here’s one of the junta‘s pet “generals” with some reassuring lies to calm you awful H8RZZ down.

General Glen VanHerck however visited Fort McCoy and assured reporters that the enlightened Afghans were much more law-abiding than the racist Americans.

“I’ve done some research and how that compares to populations across the United States,” VanHerck declared. “For example, in six weeks in Operation Allies Welcome, in a population of 53,000, there have been eight reported cases of robbery and theft.”

VanHerck neglected to Google the statistics for assaulting children and women. Or to note that this isn’t a measure of Afghans having lower crime rates than Americans, but a much lower willingness to report crimes to infidels who don’t resolve problems with the use of Islamic law.

“And how long are the Afghans going to be on U.S. military bases?” the FOX News correspondent asked.

“We’re prepared to be here as long as we need to conduct this mission,” VanHerck replied. “We’ll be ready if we need to support through the winter months and into the spring.”

Forget the ‘Forever War’ and get ready for the ‘Forever Refugees’.

It’s almost as if we never actually withdrew from Afghanistan.

Americans are funding three Halal meals a day for tens of thousands of Afghans, our bases are full of mosques, our soldiers are trying to keep Afghans from killing and abusing each other, and we are on the hook for every dollar in welfare spending lavished on the Afghans while Americans struggle. As the Afghans leave Fort McCoy, the occupation of America will begin.

Biden didn’t withdraw from Afghanistan. He brought Afghanistan to America.

Surely there must be SOME way we could thank him properly for that, among so very many other things.

Update! Lest other Red Staters out there get to feeling all smug and superior towards the poor Cheeseheads: you probably shouldn’t just yet (Sorry, forgot to include the link earlier—M).

Four hundred fifteen Afghan evacuees are headed to Nashville, Tennessee, where they’re certain to fit right in. However, instead of breaking out the “Refugees Welcome” signs and patting themselves on the back for their commitment to diversity, as any good politician would, Tennessee’s Senators Marsha Blackburn and Bill Hagerty, along with its Governor Bill Lee, all Republicans, have written a letter to Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, asking him what steps have been taken to ensure that as these people settle in the state, Tennesseeans will be safe. What’s this? American politicians concerned for the wellbeing of their own people? It’s practically unheard of in these halcyon days of Biden’s handlers’ administration, but apparently in Tennessee, some people still care about Americans.

Sorry, Robert, but I’m afraid I’m gonna wait before I sign off on the idea that they’re sincerely concerned, since so far all they’re doing is “asking questions” to which they’ll never get any honest answers. This is so for the following among several reasons:

  • The Occupation Government can’t afford to give honest answers, because the truth is they don’t give a flying fuck at a plate glass window whether Tennesseeans will be safe or not
  • There have been NO steps whatever taken to vet any of these savages, nor will there ever be
  • There can be NO meaningful assurance that American infidels should ever assume themselves safe or secure once hordes of murderous jihadis have been imported to live among them

If the three Repugs truly do think that even the most “strongly worded” letter imaginable can be sufficient to shield their constituents from violent primordials with absolutely NO respect or fidelity to American law, they’re in for one hell of a harsh lesson on that. Unfortunately, the consequences for said constituents will be a lot harsher.

According to Fox News, the letter goes on to “lay out a number of questions, including what steps the administration is taking to assist U.S. citizens and Afghan allies ‘left behind’ in Afghanistan.” Blackburn remarked: “Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan put terrorists in control and left Americans, Special Immigrant Visa [SIV] holders and applicants, and allies stranded. A very small percentage of Afghans evacuated have proven service to the U.S. military. We do not know who the other Afghans Biden evacuated are, and Tennesseans are demanding answers.”

“Demand” in one hand, shit in the other. You know the drill.

Blackburn stated, sensibly, that immigration officials must “thoroughly vet all Afghans brought into the United States.”

Yeh, whynt’cha hold your breath waiting on it.

But it is not at all clear that such vetting is taking place, or that woke Biden administration officials who identify “white supremacists” as the chief terror threat would know an Islamic jihadi even if he was screaming “Allahu akbar” and slicing off their heads. Accordingly, Blackburn added: “While our state is ready to welcome those Afghans who put their lives on the line to serve our country, the Biden administration owes it to publicly inform states like Tennessee before resettling evacuees into our communities.”

News flash for ya, Marsh: “those Afghans who put their lives on the line to serve our country” were mostly left behind—along with God only knows how many Americans—to the less-than-tender mercies of the Taliban. Ie, those pitiful few who haven’t already been brutally killed surely will be, and that right soon.

Maybe you should think about writing another letter “demanding answers” from our Taliban partners in peace, eh?

Big, meddlesome government: is there ANYTHING it can’t fuck up?

Posted on      by     

The root of all evils.

On the surface, the supply chain crisis that’s left ships off both U.S. coasts facing a month of waiting before they’re unloaded is caused by bottlenecks following a post-COVID retail flush, rising shipping costs, and a lack of truckers available to unload containers waiting offshore (Redstate covered that angle here). That’s what labor unions told the Daily Mail, anyway, no doubt with the intent to remind everyone of their importance.

But scratch the surface, and supply chain problems are revealed to be much more complicated, driven by bureaucratic intrusion, and effectively look like a mini-war between shippers and carriers, one that the Biden administration and the Democrat-led House of Representatives aren’t interested in working on until at least November, making the problems we’re seeing today extend into the Christmas season.

Oh, those problems are going to be extending a whole lot longer than that, I’m afraid. As I said from the very start of the Covid clusterfuck: you can’t just shut an entire national economy down, as if the action was no more complex or potentially destructive than flipping a light switch off—for fifteen days to flatten the curve a year and a half to consolidate a tyranny and train a Sheeple—then nonchalantly flip the switch back to the “On” position, emboldened by a level of confidence only the truly witless ever get to experience, that things will just pick up and carry on as before with no lasting disruption and/or damage. Their monstrously inflated egos and delusions of omnipotence notwithstanding, the idiot ProPols badly overestimated their own smarts, competence, and capabilities—exactly as they always have—and now every damned man Jack of us is going to have to pay a severe price for allowing them to do it—exactly as we always have.

Part of the problem lies with the Biden administration’s “Executive Order on America’s Supply Chains,” issued on Feb. 24, 2021, which set up a “‘sectoral supply chain assessment‘ of six industrial sectors, including transportation. It requires the secretary of transportation, consulting with the heads of the department’s modal agencies, to submit a report to the president within one year of the executive order that assesses ‘the role of transportation systems in supporting existing supply chains and risks associated with those transportation systems.’”

See what I mean? My God, the EGOS on these little tin gods, daring to imagine that diddling around in affairs that are much too big for pygmies like themselves could ever lead to anything other than disaster, widespread human misery, and societal chaos. Any genuinely intelligent, sane person would have known better. Clearly, the professional politicians…don’t. Does that suggest anything about the advisability of restricting government at all levels to no more than the merest minimum of authority and power? Why, it seems so NO DUH! obvious, so self-evident and beyond argument, that I’m shocked that nobody ever thought of such a thing before now, nor attempted to codify, explicitly and in writing, how a government strictly and sturdily fenced by such restrictions might possibly be established. A real head-scratcher, that one is. Oh well, maybe someday.

While over 150 companies and trade associations have written a letter to encourage Congress to work on the bill, there’s some concern within the industry that the legislation would only create tension between shippers and regulators and carriers.

OH yeah, by all means let’s get Congress involved too! Having them waddle their fat asses on up and thrust their snouts into the slop trough will SURELY straighten this whole mess out with a quickness. Won’t it?

In short, government involving itself and imposing new regulations while also refusing to update existing regulations have played a familiar role in the slow down of a market that is trying to bounce back after COVID stopped the machine.

Update existing regulations, my baggy white ass. The one and only treatment for what ails us that stands a ghost of a chance of curing the affliction is to take a broadaxe and start chopping as many as can be reached into little, tiny pieces.

Apropos of not a whole lot, the Red State companion-piece mentioned in the first excerpted ‘graph is worth a read in its own right.

Cargo ships anchored off California and New York, and in rail yards and on trucking routes, shipping consumer goods are incredibly backlogged due to a lack of manpower and pandemic restrictions to unload the goods. And now, there are warnings that the supply chain may be on the brink of collapse.

Shipping ports which normally only had one or two ships in dock waiting to be unloaded prior to the pandemic now have dozens lined up, waiting to be unloaded for up to four weeks, slowing the whole chain. In Los Angeles and Long Beach, as many as 73 vessels were waiting to be unloaded last month. The bottlenecks at the ports are also impacting railways and trucking. In Chicago — that has one of the largest rail yards — it was at one point backed up for 25 miles.

This is a disaster about to blow up.

If you were trying to do-in the country, I’m not sure what you would do that the Biden team hasn’t been doing.

Hey, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck…

It makes for some pretty grim reading, all the moreso since there really is no way the Great Chaos Engine our damned fool politicians cranked up and set in motion can be stopped at this late stage. All any of us can do now is brace for the impact of the imminent crash. Hopefully, the survivors can come up with some way to repay them for all the wonderful things they’ve done for us.

4

A near thing

Posted on      by     

Bill survives a close encounter with the “American” “health” “care” establishment, if only by the skin of his teeth.

The mental stress of dealing with the health care system plus worry that I might be dying of cancer, coupled with the physical stress of the fast/weightlifting/vertigo issues has pretty much flattened me for today, but I’m feeling better now, and hope to be back to normal tomorrow. Although my neck is as sore as if I’d been stabbed in the throat three or four times. Probably because I was stabbed in the throat three or four times.

Good LORD. Glad you lived to tell the tale, buddy.

2

Generals, then and now

Posted on      by     

Right from the opening paragraph, this article is proof that some things never change.

On September 1, 1939, Brigadier George C. Marshall took the oath of office as the 15th U.S. Army chief of staff, a post he held until November 1945. When the ceremony ended, General Marshall confided to his aide de camp, “There is enough dead wood in the Army’s officer corps to light several forest fires.”

Marshall was more right than he knew. If the U.S. Army and Army Air Corps fought shoulder to shoulder with the French Army in 1940, American arms would have suffered the same fate as the French and British Armies—total defeat at the hands of the German Wehrmacht. This fact was made painfully obvious 14 months after the Second World War broke out.

In February 1943, 11,000 German troops smashed through the 30,000 soldiers of the U.S. Army’s II Corps at Kasserine Pass. The U.S. commander, Major Gen. Lloyd Fredendall, a swaggering blowhard, was relieved and sent home. It was not the last time that a cigar-chewing imitation of a real general would fail in action against the German onslaught, but the experience strengthened Marshall’s intolerance of general officer failure in action.

Today, the task of finding senior military leaders with character, competence and intelligence is immeasurably harder than it was in Marshall’s day. Under the Bush and Obama administrations, the American media’s adulation for four stars transformed general officers such as Petraeus, McChrystal, Mattis, Allen, and Austin into instant celebrities.

Four stars now automatically become part of a mutual general officer admiration society, that cheers even mediocre performance in general officers chosen for high command, because, like “made men” in the Mafia, senior leaders agree not to turn on their peers. Eliminating failed general officers, even when failure is found out the hard way in action, is deemed dangerous to a promotion system based on nepotism that presents itself as infallible.

Political leaders are of no help.

Quite the opposite, I’d say, of course and as always.

The point is that General Mark Milley is not an isolated example. He’s the product of an environment that has existed for nearly 30 years, if not longer. Behind Mark Milley stand another two dozen four stars ready to take his job that are indistinguishable from him in their attitudes and career patterns.

Is the situation hopeless? History answers with an emphatic “No.”

After the defeat of the U.S. Army’s II Corps, General Sir Harold Alexander, Eisenhower’s British deputy, commented on Fredendall to his American allies, “I’m sure you must have better men than that.” Eisenhower agreed. Major Gen. Patton, a man who but for the outbreak of WWII would have retired as an obscure cavalry colonel, replaced Fredendall.

As the author says, the correct answer to the question “is the situation hopeless” is “an emphatic ‘No,'” and always will be. As such, the question is immaterial. The question that matters is: Are we up to the challenge of doing everything required of us to prevail over the exigencies that make the situation APPEAR hopeless? That question is strictly pass/fail, and will NOT be graded on a curve.

Update! This might look to be unrelated at first glance, but I assure you it ain’t.

Mike responds to a post of mine from yesterday, and finishes with:

Yes, the whole system is rotten to the core, to the point that it can never be fixed or restored via traditional, peaceful means. AS ZMan put it, a system that is immune to voting is not going to be fixed by more voting.

I agree with this, of course. And while my assessment may sound bleak, I still believe it to be accurate. People, especially patriotic Americans, have been willing to swallow damned near anything to avoid admitting to themselves just how bleak the situation actually is. Why? Because if they do admit it, they then are face to face with the next question: What the hell do we do about it?

And that is a very painful question, because there are no good, painless answers. Oh, sure, you can gargle a big glass of normality bias and pretend that voting gooderer and harderer will fix things. Or that some deep counter-Qspiracy is going to defeat the Ruling Class and its Deep State. But that, of course, is simply denying the reality you have to admit and confront in order to deal with it on a personal basis going forward. That’s the thing, see? It’s going to hit you personally, whether you want it to or not. It won’t go away just because you ignore it, or tell yourself it’s not really what it looks like.

Read on to find out just how very related it is. In fact, the thing that sometimes makes me sit up a little straighter and rub my eyes in awe and wonder is how deeply interconnected all the issues confronting us are—yet another of those things that, once seen, cannot be UNseen.

4

Election theater

Posted on      by     

America’s Ghost Government.

One reason the imperial capital revolted when Trump was elected is he was a break in the long evolutionary chain. By 2016, the people who actually run the government had come to see the president as window dressing to appease the masses. The real work of governance was done by the thousands of people who live, work and socialize in the world’s largest small town. From their perspective, he was a threat to their democracy, because their democracy had become one party rule.

A good current example of how things really work in American democracy is the case against former Clinton campaign lawyer Michael Sussmann. The judge in the case is Christopher Cooper, who is married to attorney Amy Jefress. She represents key players in the FBI Russia hoax like Lisa Page. Sussman’s lawyers are long time legal insiders serving the Democratic Party. The Lawfare Group, which was deeply involved in the Russia hoax, is helpfully providing commentary to the media.

The reason that there could never be a legitimate investigation of the FBI plot to overturn the 2016 election was everyone involved is connected to everyone who would investigate or prosecute the case. Washington is a separate society that is independent of the country over whom it rules. Again, if you imagine it as a secret club, politics makes a lot of sense. The part we see, campaigns, politicians, elections, is controlled by the part we never see, the semi-permanent ruling class.

There is also reason to suspect that many of the people working in politics are just as gullible as the people voting Republican. The FBI-organized protest last weekend looks like it was more for the people inside the wire than outside the wire. They wanted the rank and file in Congress to see the storm troopers cracking skulls and flag waving barbarians screaming for the cameras. The whole thing was an amusing flop, but it kept Ocasio-Cortez up at night, which was the purpose.

Long ago, Pat Buchanan observed that local politicians are often quite sensible, which is how they get bumped up to the House of Senate. The people supporting them hope they will be a sane voice for their interests. When they get to Washington, they quickly go native and become just another voice of the ruling class. Buchanan wrote it off to social influence, which is certainly true. The newly minted Congressman is quickly socialized into the culture and is then assimilated into the Borg.

Another reason though is the shadow government. These vast global consulting firms that operate in every western capital but are based in Washington operate like a secret society. They produce the people who get appointments in every administration, and they produce the candidates for spots on the bench. They don’t write regulations and legislation, but they develop and curate the people who do. They have evolved a system that is immune to the virus of elections.

What this means is that voting has become pointless. A system that is immune to voting is not going to be fixed by more voting. In fact, voting provides a false sense of legitimacy to the system. The dynamic of liberal democracy is that voting not only strengthens the system, making it even more resistant to elections, but it also encourages more voting. The more that people participate, the less their voice matters and the more shadowy the true ruling elite pulling the strings.

As long as American “elections” remain the corrupt dumbshow they are at present, “voting” will remain nothing more than a mug’s game.

9

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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

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