Life in a once-great nation

The whole enchilada

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Ace links to an absolutely brilliant theory-of-everything thread, which I ran through ThreadReader so you don’t have to. CAUTION: excessively lengthy excerpt follows, for which I make no apology because there was just no way around it.

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them (from) getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

Believe it or not, there’s still a lot I left out, of which you should read the all. If anybody has done a better job of pulling together all, and I do mean ALL, of the events of the last five years than this, I’ve yet to run across it. Bravo, MartyrMade, and a humble tip of the ol’ chapeau to you for this most excellent work. In the end, it all boils down to Ace’s closer:

It’s time to start talking seriously about the crisis of illegitimacy in the former America republic, and what exactly the subjects of the Ruling Class — not the citizens, we’re not that, we’re subjects, and we will pretend no longer — will do about it.

Actually, it’s way PAST time. We’ve been doing precisely that here at CF for quite a while now.

Update! JD Rucker picks up on this masterpiece, correctly identifying it as a must-read.

Must-Read Twitter Thread: Here’s Why We KNOW the 2020 Election Was Stolen
Twitter is general(ly) a cesspool of bad ideas argued by people with even worse takes on those ideas. The days of being entertained by Twitter disappeared when Donald Trump and tens of thousands of conservative Twitter accounts were banned in January. Occasionally, a gem still pops up.

This is one of them. Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. Normally I post the thread in its original form, but this one is 36-Tweets long. There’s also a good chance it will be deleted because it makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it.

Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.

Indeed we won’t, nor should we be. At this late date, anyone gullible enough to place the tiniest iota of trust in anything coming from the maw of FederalGovCo is too damned stupid to figure out how to tie their own shoes. Even if they have Velcro straps instead of laces on ’em.

Updated update! I already knew that Rucker is the proprietor of the NOQReport portal blog, which I’ve had in my bookmarks since, like, forever. What I didn’t realize until just now was that I hadn’t installed NOQR in the Portal category in Ye Olde Blogrolle yet. Oversight duly addressed, with a big fat mea culpa and most humble apologies to JD.

1

SO, how’s that globalism working out for ya, anyway?

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Not too good.

So, have you heard about the massive international shipping crisis coming out of China, and the accompanying shortage of overseas shipping containers?

Actually, I have, lots of times—seeing as how my brother hauls containers out of Charleston and Savannah for a living, and calls me about five-six times a day, five and sometimes six days a week, to yell about one dipshit “good enough for gummint work” problem or another he’s currently dealing with while he’s sitting in endless lines at the port waiting to get either a container or the chassis the container sits on to pull back to NC. He’s been particularly perplexed over the sudden scarcity of both containers and chassis lately, and we’ve spent a good bit of time on the phone trying to suss out what the reasons for that might be.

Turns out, it’s a pretty complex problem.

Freight shipping is in the midst of a unique and unusual predicament. An unforeseen cascade of events caused by the pandemic has us facing a worldwide container shortage crisis. It’s a crisis because the lack of containers has a ripple effect down entire supply chains, disrupting trade on a global scale.

As the pandemic spread out from its Asian epicentre, countries implemented lockdowns, halting economic movements and production. Many factories closed temporarily, causing large numbers of containers to be stopped at ports. To stabilize costs and the erosion of ocean rates, carriers reduced the number of vessels out at sea. Not only did this put the brakes on import and export, it also meant empty containers were not picked up. This was especially significant for Asian traders, who couldn’t retrieve empty containers from North America.

Then, a unique scenario developed. Asia, being the first hit by the pandemic, was also the first to recover. So while China resumed exports earlier than the rest of the world, other nations were (and still are) dealing with restrictions, a reduced workforce and minimal production.

A consequence of this is that almost all of the remaining containers in Asia headed out to Europe and North America, but those containers did not come back quickly enough. Massive workforce disruptions due to coronavirus restrictions in North America affected not only ports, but cargo depots all across the country as well as inland transport lines. Without adequate staffing, containers started to pile up. As borders tightened, customs became more complicated to clear as well, worsening congestion. In addition, there were rapid shifts in tradelane demands that were challenging for carriers to adapt to.

Now, that seems a little odd, since it doesn’t explain why containers and chassis would be so difficult to find on the US East Coast at all. In fact, the central premise of the article seems to completely contradict the issue my brother has been dealing with every day, for a cpl-three months now. But attentive readers can pick up at least one solid hint from the piece, involving what happens when instant despots—Just add Covid!!™—start behaving as if economies as sprawling as ours can be stopped and started as easily as flicking a light switch on and off, with no unanticipated ill effects.

Maybe Buck’s next link can clear things up a little further.

Never before has the humble ocean shipping container been this important to American business. If you can’t get one, you can’t move your international cargo — and supply has never been tighter. The cost of global trade is now contingent on how many containers exist, where they are and where they aren’t.

How many containers exist is controlled by China. Virtually every ocean shipping container in the world is built there.

Just three Chinese companies account for the majority of production, with Chinese factories now building more than 96% of the world’s dry cargo containers and 100% of the world’s refrigerated containers, according to U.K. consultancy Drewry.

Ahh, the Dinks, then. Quelle surprise.

Buck has plenty more along these lines, but the above ought to provide sufficient confirmation that allowing FederalGovCo to incentivize nominally American corporations to stab their employees in the backs with their own weaponized tax dollars via relocating virtually all US manufacturing to Red China might not have been such a hot idea after all. His closer:

I’ve got a simple idea that can mitigate a whole lot of these problems. Products that are to be sold in the USA can also be manufactured in the USA. Once manufactured, they won’t be impacted by exotic new virus outbreaks in China, or by a lack of Chinese containers, or by backups in Chinese ports, or even by the ick factor of China’s slave labor.

Even if manufacturing is simply moved from China to other countries, it is way past time to disengage from China.

Do I even need to remind anyone that Trump had made a pretty good start on that during his term, having already secured agreements with major US firms to either keep domestic plants running that they had been planning to shut down, or to build new facilities here? Of course, we all know how that ended up.

No Sooner Is Trump Out Of Office, Ford Is Switching US$900 Mln Investment From Ohio To Mexico
The Ford Motor Company has backed out of a pledge to invest US$900 million in an assembly plant near Cleveland, Ohio and will instead switch production to Mexico.

In 2019 – when Donald Trump was president – Ford had promised to invest in the factory in Avon Lake, which employs 1,700 workers producing the Ford E-series van and Super Duty pickup truck.

As a lifelong Ford fanatic, you can easily imagine how I felt about that. Bastards.

1

The Graveyard of Empires: “A complete and utter waste, aye?”

Posted on July 8, 2021July 8, 2021 by Mike

Aye.

Only other retarded thing I heard was some midwit fucktard reporter breathlessly talking about the weapons we left behind…So fucking what I sez Aye? Small arms. Big deal. MRAPs? So what? Like they’re going to form up a caravan of the fucking things and head to Europe overland? And do exactly what? 10 to 1 those over-sized over-armored RVs, once they fucking break down, (and believe me they -will- break down…ask me of how I know this) they’ll be stripped of any useful resalable metal, and turned into either small shelters, or just left to rot in place like they did to all the former Soviet Armor that got left behind.

Big. Fucking. Deal.

Mind you -I- personally was responsible in 2013 for signing off on the demo of a metric shit-ton of MRAPs. I also, no Bullshit, witnessed the reason for the “No Ship Home/Demo Excess” orders. Quite literally, there I was, in 2013, on Bagram. I waiting for a minibus to get me to work when:

Follows, a gin-yoo-wine Ho Lee SHIT!!! video of the actual 747 crash BCE goes on to discuss next, a horrifying thing to watch. Onwards.

Now, didn’t see the plane.
HEARD the impact.
Shit, felt that motherfucker.
Saw the fireball/impact like in the immediate aftermath. At first I was worried it was a C-17. When I got to work, word had gotten thru the contractor grapevine that it was a 747 Air Cargo that’d augured in. Ye Olde Contractor Grapevine used to work quicker n’ the pony express I swear. That particular shitshow came aboot because the DotMil -tried- to ship some MRAPs out of theater via air. The heavy motherfuckers broke loose during takeoff (instead of chains, they’d used cargo straps or some such retarded shit like that,) and you can see the moment when the whole cargo ‘shifted’ right before the plane completely smokes in in the vidya. End result of it was we got orders a few weeks later.
Scrap ’em.
Can’t take ’em out the way they came in via Air, and overland to ‘friendly lines’?
Whelp, ain’t no such t’ing mon.
So, Demo Time

7 billion in MRAPs.
65 Million of that -I- personally signed off on. No shit… I did the 1348A-1, to include the DEMIL annexes on the excess-to-needs first go around MRAPs in Kandahar. Almost exactly 100 of the fuckers. $600K and change per fucking truck. And without any sort of bullshit, some of them? Like the lowest mileage ever on a DotMil Truck. We’re not talking about beat-to-fuckall trucks. Nope. Brand. Fucking. New. Bit weather-worn, as these were replacements, some of them being the ‘on deck’ replacements. Try 6.7 MILES on one of them. Reason for this was that the trucks that units had on hand already? Already on hand, already on their property books. ALL the parent-child serial numbers too. To break out a new truck from deep storage, paperwork and time wise is a stone bitch. Most units didn’t want/need the fucking hassle. Hell, as the property book manager for 60 units, I needed the extra paperwork like another hole in the fucking grape.

So, via con Dios new trucks. Paperwork done, they went to a scrap yard, where quite literally, they were stripped of any and all useful shit that was quick and easy to remove, and then they were pushed into they BIGGEST metal eating grinding machine I’ve ever seen. MRAP in one side, large chunks of metal out the other side. I couldn’t take pics tho, as the DotMil was all ‘leery’ of ‘bad optics’ of brand new MRAPs going into the chipper.

A complete and utter waste Aye?

‘Fraid so, bro, ‘fraid so. I try, but can’t find any way around it. It’s sick-making, that’s what. Your tax dollars at work.

Of people lives, killed or wounded
Nevermind permanently damaged and psychologically shattered.
Of resources
Squandered money that would have been better spent elsewhere.
Of National Honor, if there ever was such a thing
And yet we’re saber rattling at Russia…again for the ten millionth time.
“”Maybe you aren’t up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!” Hudson, ‘Aliens’
AFTER the Russians got theirs kicked by the same exact farmers, goatfuckers, and wild-eyed Islamic Mountain men. I honestly said in 2001 that if we -did- invade Affy, we’d lose. Afghanistan is the “Graveyard of Empires”…The Brits tried it not once, but twice, thrice if you include them on this particular jaunt. The USSR at the height of it’s “We’re Badass Ivan!” times and they got their asses handed to them as well.
By doodz with Henry Martini rifles, AKs, supplied Stingers and a patchwork pastiche of small arms for the most part. As pure a guerilla war as could be. Tenacious badass hardcore Islamic fuckers who died in droves but never, ever gave up.

Talk about not learning from history.

Reminds me of the socialists/communists these days…”But that wasn’t real -insert ideology- This time it’ll work!” Also like them fucking idiots saying “Voat harder” after all the current shenanigans and bullshit.
Leave me the fuck out of it Aye.
Let me have my patch, my guns, my buzz, my woman and my family.
The rest? I’m content to watch it burn.

Likewise, plus. Glad you made it back, BC. All too many didn’t.

5

Oathbreakers

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Mike

See if you can guess who said this.

“My heart starts racing like most other Black men in America when I see those blue lights behind me,” he claimed. “You don’t know the anxiety, the despair, the heartache, the fear, the rage and the disappointment that comes with living in this country…every single day.”

So what kind of guy might say something like this, anyway? A few possibilities for your consideration:

A grungy punk rock kid idling on a St Mark’s Place apartment building’s stoop in lower Manhattan
A rabid Marxist Harvard student…or professor
A Los Angeles BLM “protester”
A vagrant crackhead taking a dump on a San Francisco street
A Chicago gangbanger/arsonist
A Nation of Islam weirdo
LeBron James

A: None of the above. Ready for the big reveal, gang? If you had your money on Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright, top advisor to former Chief Of Staff of the United States Air Force David Goldfein, please go to the pay window to collect your winnings.

Okay, then. Here we have a high-high-brass USAF non-com who raised his hand and swore an oath most solemn, of his own free will, to lay down his very life if necessary in defense of the selfsame country for which he feels nothing but “anxiety, despair, heartache, fear, rage and disappointment” over being condemned to live in, the poor dear. Does that strike anybody out there as being really, really close to disloyalty?

Ready for the truly scary part? Wright is by no means alone in those sentiments in today’s military. Not by a long yard, he ain’t.

This is Chief of Staff Charles Q. Brown Jr’s new Air Force.

Brown, the first black Chief of Staff of the Air Force, ought to be a living symbol of opportunity. Instead, like other disloyal military leaders, including his predecessor, Chief of Staff David Goldfein, he’s smearing America, and conducting a witch hunt for imaginary racism.

The racial attack on the U.S. Force from within began with the Black Lives Matter riots.

“I am a Black man who happens to be the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force,” Chief Master Sergeant Kaleth Wright tweeted using his official Air Force account. “I am George Floyd…I am Philando Castile, I am Michael Brown.”

Even Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison admitted there was no racial element in the Floyd case and had not even tried to add to the wrongful prosecution with hate crime charges.

But Wright, the top advisor to former Air Force Chief of Staff Goldfein at the time of the Black Lives Matter race riots, suggested that he could be killed by white police officers at any moment.

It made you wonder why Wright hadn’t left America for somewhere safer like Cuba.

It makes me wonder why every self-respecting American patriot still in hasn’t gotten the hell out already.

The Air Force’s top enlisted leader smeared America, identified with criminals, and urged everyone to be angry. He ranted that he had been inspired by socialist rapper Killer Mike to pursue “plotting, planning, strategizing, organizing and mobilizing”. And together with his boss, Goldfein, they would be working on a “full and thorough independent review of our military justice system”. The review, predictably, accused the military justice system of being racist.

Air Force Chief of Staff Brown claimed that the report contained “things I’ve actually felt”.

Feelings were now more important than facts not just on college campuses, but in the Air Force.

What about actually defending America?

Air Force Magazine said that Brown and Chief of Space Operations John Raymond suggested that there “should be a balance between mission readiness and ensuring people’s voices are heard”. Mission readiness was only at best equivalent in value to conversations about racism.

And before long, mission readiness will be less important than accusing America of racism.

Before long? What with Amerika v2.0’s all new LGBTQ, PurePC, and femiNazi-friendly military; its nigh-traitorous general-offiçer corps; and its inability to notch a clear win since WW2, looks to me like that ship has already sailed.

1

Bye bye, Miss American Pie

Posted on July 7, 2021July 7, 2021 by Mike

The small-business levee is dry.

Lockdown proponents across the media are smugly patting themselves on the back, proclaiming that stay-at-home policies didn’t harm the economy. Try telling that to the millions of small-business owners who were irreparably damaged by prolonged and irrational restrictions.

With many big corporations deemed “essential,” and a stock market propped up by the Federal Reserve, it’s easy to see economic strength and miss the glaring weaknesses.

While Walmart and Target continue to beat earnings expectations, small businesses struggle to survive. Nearly two-thirds of them are hitting only half or less of their pre-lockdown monthly revenue levels, according to Alignable’s June Road to Recovery report.

Then there are the businesses that never recovered at all. The Biden administration recently projected that more than 400,000 small businesses have closed permanently, but that’s likely a massive underestimate: Already by June 2020, the Hamilton Project had counted 400,000 closures. Opportunity Insights data, meanwhile, show that by the end of May 2021, there were 38.9 percent fewer small businesses open nationwide than at the outset of 2020.

Small business forms the US economy’s backbone, accounting for more than 99 percent of all business entities, and before 2020, around half of growth domestic product and jobs.

And these businesses bore the brunt of lockdowns. The Alignable report found that 37 percent of small businesses couldn’t pay their rent in full and on time. Millions of small-business owners have six-to-seven-figure debt liability, much of it personally guaranteed.

And as if lockdowns weren’t enough, those small firms desperately trying to save their businesses now can’t find workers, thanks in large part to government interfering in the labor market via enhanced unemployment benefits and direct stimulus payments that incentivize not working.

If the government actively set out to reward big businesses and punish small ones, how would it look any different?

This is an American tragedy. Small businesses provide economic freedom for tens of millions of people.

Which ought to make it crystal clear why it happened. We’re looking at an American tragedy right enough, but killing off small business isn’t all of it. The incremental erasure of entrepreneurship has been ongoing for years now, and is but a single component of a much larger tragedy: the end of America That Was itself.

Understand: whether it’s automobiles, single-family homes, Christianity, honest elections, speech, guns, or small businesses, there is absolutely NO aspect of freedom and self-determination they won’t try to undermine, discredit, and ultimately do away with.

Update! A small-business story that ain’t nothing but pure-tee, hunnert ‘n’ ten proof America, in all the very best ways.

BUCKSTOWN, Pa.—The Duppstadt’s Country Store, sitting high on a plateau along the Lincoln Highway between Stoystown and Reels Corner, has served Somerset County residents and weary travelers since 1903. When you open the heavy wooden door and hear it creak with age, you get the sense you have entered somewhere special.

Not because it has stayed frozen in time, but because it has stood the test of time—surviving all the winds of change while adjusting and prevailing through every decade it has stood on its perch.

From Civil War veterans stopping on their way to Gettysburg to celebrate the anniversaries marking that pivotal battle to the World War I troops on their way to the 10th Regiment of the Pennsylvania National Guard headquarters for Company C before heading to areas of conflict to today’s young families shopping for necessities, this place has seen it all.

It was here both shoppers and the owners saw Flight 93 pierce the clear blue skies on September 11, 2001, shaking the ground under them when it slammed into a field just over the hill in Shanksville.

Anyone in the store that day or next door at the Lincoln Cafe diner stood momentarily frozen at the sight of the black smoke rising from the crash. Many of those same people then rushed in their cars to the fire stations where they volunteered and were the first on the scene to help a clearly helpless situation.

The Duppstadt family is the third family to own the store since it opened in 1903, according to Mike Duppstadt, one of five siblings who co-owns the business. This store was started by the Williamson family, who operated it for a while before Jack and Helen Spangler bought it and called it the Clover Leaf Farm store. Duppstadt’s parents bought it in 1971 from the Spanglers.

As I speak to him, Mike is sitting outside the store on a long wooden bench with his sister Michelle. All five siblings have full-time jobs outside of the store. He is a contractor, she is a nurse, and they rotate shifts working at the store along with nieces and nephews.

Next door, his wife Robin and their daughter Kate are handling the kitchen of the Lincoln Cafe diner. The family just bought it in March. The cheeseburgers are arguably the best you’ll ever find, and they’ve added a bakery case in the front of the diner with sugary raised donuts that are divine.

I just bet they are at that. Somehow back in my frequent endless rides through backroads Pennsylvania, I missed this little store, but Salena Zito’s article almost makes me want to get back out on the road again for a visit. Read on, it’s good stuff.

6

I preminisce no return of the salad days

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

Another Ironbear masterpiece of commentry that needs to be moved out front here.

There is no going back. We live in post-America now, and have for quite some time. We can’t go back to the America of the Founding any more than we can go back to the bright, shiny, thriving, hopeful and optimistic America of the ’50s. There is no time machine that will take us there.

Conservative thinkers like Smith, Codevilla, and the rest err in thinking that there is somehow some way to dismantle and excise the degeneracy of Progressivism while keeping the worthwhile parts of what Codevilla calls “Republican America”.

There is not.

Post-America is not going to somehow revitalize and go back to being America. We’re in the degenerate phase of a decadent civilization, and, to date, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a degenerate civilization that has reversed course and revitalized into a thriving, growing, and vital civilization.

Breakup and partition is inevitable at this point. Empires always fall apart.

What grows out of that is no more going to resemble the America of George Washington than the Western Civilization that grew out of the breakup of the Roman Empire resembled Classical Rome.

The primary question at this point, and the one that thinkers like Smith and Codevilla refuse to face squarely – because that would require admitting that they’re spinning their wheels – is whether the breakup and collapse will be slow and gradual over centuries like Rome, or fast and bloody like Yugoslavia.

I don’t believe that quick and peaceful like Czechoslovakia or even the Soviet Union is in the cards for us.

The secondary question is: What comes next? What grows out of rubble?

Smith and Codevilla can’t answer that for the same reason I can’t: the caterpillar can’t envision the butterfly.

Yup, that’s about the size of it. I myself am frequently guilty of using phrases like “restoring America” and the like, despite knowing that such a thing not only won’t happen, it in fact CAN’T happen. We’re walking on uncharted and extremely dangerous ground now, and the destination is uncertain at best.

“Our bossy society is completely losing sight of the value of risky behavior”

Posted on July 2, 2021July 2, 2021 by Mike

Gee, ya think? Yet again: not an accident, not a coincidence. Part. Of. The. Plan.

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

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

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

All simply part of the yin-yang tug-of-war that suffuses every last aspect of life on this planet. A properly Constitution-calibrated government would never dream in interfering in such niggling personal choices, without reference to either negative or positive consequences as justification. That’s because a properly Constitution-calibrated government would know that such choices are simply none of the government’s business, and would therefore stay in its own lane.

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

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

Just letting children play unsupervised outdoors can draw a visit from Child Protective Services nowadays, and bureaucrats aren’t the least bit concerned with protecting the children from having their spirit broken by too little play.

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

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

Oh, that’s the easiest question of all to answer, although in perfect accord with that tug-of-war between yin and yang thing I mentioned earlier, it simultaneously presents us with the toughest choice: kill the killjoys, until the ones we haven’t gotten around to yet are too terrified to open their fat yaps ever again.

3

Days of future past

Posted on June 27, 2021June 27, 2021 by Mike

Bear writes a letter of explanation to a future that is by no means assured.

Dear Future Generations,

How did this happen? How did America go insane, and destroy itself? How did…

Renaming “French Fries” to “Freedom Fries” become the same as “I don’t like what you said, so I’m going to dox you so someone can find and physically attack you, destroy your business, cancel your social media presence, close your bank accounts, and hound the would-be survivors to death” cancel culture?

“Silence is violence” but “violence is speech” become a respected take?

Looting is reparations?

2 + 2 = 4 is racist?

Equality in opportunity is equity in outcome?

Politicians actively agree to actively violate state election laws to aid the opposing party?

A human with XY chromosomes is female, not male?

And we’ll pass laws forcing everyone to believe that (or at least actively fake it)?

That’s but a taste of a necessarily lengthy list, arriving here:

Future generations, I did not make up any of that. It was (is, as I type) real. How, you ask. It started generations ago. In America; the roots go back to the 19th century and more. But I’ll give you the short form. Maybe you’ll find books that survived the burning that has started, that will explain more details.

It’s a long ‘un, of which you should certainly read the all. Really, though, the explanation is summed up concisely by the very next ‘graph:

People wanted power over others. America had a Constitution that limited their ability to simply seize it, so they tried something else.

Annnnd BINGO. The same old problem, whose only solution is extremely distasteful to every decent human being of sound mind. Yet those same decent, peaceable people will forever be forced to embrace said unpleasantness nonetheless, which is no more nor less than the price of liberty. The day any particular generation declines to shoulder the cost of securing and maintaining their freedom and natural rights is also the day they admit themselves unworthy of them. Taken all together, these are the overarching paradoxes of life on this existential plane.

(Via WRSA)

A warning

Posted on June 25, 2021 by Mike

Of something that we should all already be fully aware of by now.

Rudy Giuliani’s suspended law license is a warning to Conservatives… the Left’s coming for you
The fact that Rudy Giuliani had his law license suspended in the state of New York should be a warning to us all: If you believe the 2020 Presidential Election was stolen, the Left is coming for you.

That classification is much too narrow; the fact is that if you dare to disagree with the Left in even the most trivial way, they’re coming for you too. Taking down Rudy—the man who literally saved NYC during the time I was living there, bringing the damaged city back to greatness for a while after decades of decay and ruination under its previous mayors, then capping it all off with his brilliant handling of the now-forgotten 9/11/01 atrocity—is no more than a diabolical stratagem to get their hooks into Trump, that’s all.

Bringing serious pressure to bear on underlings so as to intimidate them into rolling on the Left’s real target is straight out of the Leftist playbook, one they’ve run again and again to hamstring and/or bring down their most hated enemies. In fact, we already saw this underhanded but reliable ploy used repeatedly in the ongoing war against Trump via the personal destruction of Flynn, Stone, Papadopolous, et al.

By no means am I suggesting we all shouldn’t be paying strict attention to their plight, mind. What we’re seeing here is a real-world demonstration of an ugly truth: if the Left is ruthless and powerful enough that they can take down well-known and influential people like Giuliani, Flynn, and the rest in broad daylight, what couldn’t and wouldn’t they do to poor workaday schlubs like us? Bottom line:

What we have to realize about this, as tragic as it is for Rudy, this is a warning shot to the rest of us. If we continue to hold the line and fight for election integrity, we face similar pressure from the powers-that-be.

It might come in the form of IRS audits, as happened under President Barack Obama. It might come through pressure from Big Corporations, as we are seeing with Wells Fargo closing Lauren Witzke’s bank accounts. Or it could be through losing your job or livelihood because you have an opinion that flies in the face of the mainstream narrative.

No matter what, we are facing a new America with these power-hungry leftists in power. They are using whatever they can to discredit, intimidate and suppress us and our message. My good friend, Pastor Ken Peters, just had a visit from the FBI because he was in Washington DC at the MAGA Rallies.

Let me be clear…Rudy Giuliani losing his law license is not the end game. It’s just the start of their strategy to overthrow America. Next will be Conservative political leaders, both in positions of power or simply talking heads. Then it’ll be the conservative influencers, such as all of us here at Freedom First Network. And then they’ll be coming after you… simply because you love America and will defend it from enemies foreign and domestic.

Understand that we are facing a tough fight. The globalists have overthrown our government and have all of its assets and resources at its disposal. There are no rules anymore. There is no fairness. It’s simply that the Left is doing whatever they have to do to hold onto power as long as possible, by whatever means necessary.

Egg-zackly. Like it or not, we are now at war with the hateful, authoritarian Left. It is absolutely imperative that all Real Americans get their heads around that, accept it, and start fighting back vigorously, if we’re to have even the faintest hope of defeating our would-be oppressors.

8

Up and up and up some more

Posted on June 25, 2021June 25, 2021 by Mike

BidenFlation, let’s call it.

Okay, I’m gonna go way out on a limb here and suggest that this CAN’T be a sign of anything good.

All this, mind, in only one (1) year. Actually, less, since the drooling moron and his Shadowman handlers only usurped power a few short months ago.

(Via Vanderleun)

3

“Freedom” Day

Posted on June 22, 2021 by Mike

As Steyn says, it’s been postponed till further notice.

To our readers in the United Kingdom Happy Freedom Day! By proclamation of “Boris” Johnson (phoney name, phoney guy), today was supposed to mark the end of all lockdown restrictions in his benighted land. Unfortunately, freedom has had to be “postponed” until July 19th, supposedly because of the “Delta variant”, which is puttering along nicely while the ChiComs fine-tune the Epsilon variant in time for its soft launch in Chad or Bolivia around July 12th.

On the surface, naming the day “Freedom Day” concedes the case of old Boris chums like Toby Young and James Delingpole that the year-plus lockdown is a massive unprecedented assault on free peoples’ core freedoms. On the other hand, naming the day “Freedom Day” also reminds the masses that freedom is not an inalienable right but the gift of the state, and the state giveth and taketh away and in this third decade of the third millennium inclines more toward the latter.

The citizenry (if it is not entirely risible so to dignify them) is getting used to it. One almost suspects the now routine leaked video of our rulers “accidentally” whooping it up maskless at the G7 or Nato cocktail soirées mwa-mwa-ing each other with triple-kisses and hugs and Uncle Joe sniffing the Euro-chicks’ hair while their experts recommend masks for the rest of us in perpetuity is intentional: it is designed to accustom the Great Tested & Jabbed Unwashed to the distinction between us and them.

Anthony Fauci has been in his present job since 1967. When he was first appointed, he reported to the Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare, who has since become the Secretary of Health and Human Services. But, whatever you call them, there have been twenty of them since Fauci took lifetime office: Does it really make any difference to him who’s attending Cabinet meetings? A year or two and some other transient schlub will be there; what’s the diff?

Oh, well, ultimately the Secretary of Health and Whatever reports to the President, who is chosen (mostly) by a self-governing people. But Fauci took office when Lyndon Johnson was president. So he has “served” a quarter of all presidents in the history of the republic. Last year I started joking that Fauci was the J Edgar Hoover of public health, but the gag does him an injustice: He has already outlasted three more presidents than Hoover and he intends to be here for President Kamala, President Ocasio or whoever’s next.

As you know, I get complaints that I don’t write more about Mitch McConnell or Joe Manchin – and the short answer is it’s because it’s like following an exciting badminton match during the Blitz. The Fauci emails are fascinating because they reveal the corruption of the bureaucracy. We babes in the wood assume that when you want to infiltrate and compromise a government you try to wangle somebody into the laughably misnamed “intelligence community” – as Hillary did with dossier boy Christopher Steele. But the sophisticates in Beijing figured out the opportunities in infiltrating as boring a backwater as public health. The key revelation in the emails concern the bureaucracy’s determination to quash any suggestion that Covid might have originated in the lab of their Chinese-controlled/US-funded friends – to the point where by last summer all meaningful investigation by the United States Government of the origin of an ongoing global pandemic had ceased…because it was stymied not by the ChiComs but by US bureaucrats.

You don’t need a presidency-for-life if you’ve got a bureaucracy-for-life – and, if you’ve got the right bureaucracy-for-life, you don’t need life, as the good folks of many parts of the “free world” have come to accept.

The greatest day in the lives of our globalist, authoritarian oligarchs was the day they all learned that they wouldn’t need to bother taking anybody’s freedom; we were perfectly willing to hand it over quietly, with no resistance, out of sheer panic.

1

Air Farce

Posted on June 22, 2021June 23, 2021 by Mike

Somewhere, Putin is laughing.

Exclusive — Nellis Air Force Base Hosts First-Ever Drag Queen Show: ‘Essential to the Morale, Readiness’
The Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada recently hosted its first-ever drag queen show at one of its on-base dining and entertainment clubs, according a base spokesperson.

Nellis Air Force Base said in an email statement to Breitbart News:

Nellis Air Force Base and the 99th Air Base Wing hosted its first-ever drag show Thursday, June 17, at the Nellis Club. The event was sponsored by a private organization and provided an opportunity for attendees to learn more about the history and significance of drag performance art within the LGBT+ community.

Ensuring our ranks reflect and are inclusive of the American people is essential to the morale, cohesion, and readiness of the military. Nellis Air Force Base is committed to providing and championing an environment that is characterized by equal opportunity, diversity and inclusion.

The drag queen show came to light after Air Force veteran podcaster “BK” posted a digital flyer for the event that read: “DRAG-U-NELLIS” and “CLASS IS IN SESSION.”

“Discover the significance of Drag in the LGBT+ Community at the Nellis Club,” it said.

And maybe—just maybe—when they’re not spending their time on the promotion of mental dysfunction, the Chair Farce might be able to squeeze in a few scant minutes of something that involves aerial-combat strategy and tactics, weapons and ordnance, and establishing and maintaining air superiority over the 21st century battlefield? Maybe?

Naaaah. Just kidding. As you were, “men.”

WTF update! BCE relates a tale of life in the New Model Army.

True story from the Days of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.
My best friend from Basic went on to become a Platoon Sgt in Germany of a TOW platoon. One of the first of the new ‘regenerated’ anti-armor units. Had a kid that was a little ‘off’ by normal standards, but not-so-off as to be worrisome. The ‘new Army’ no longer had room inspections, but “health and welfare” inspections to make sure you were in a ‘safe and healthy living environment’. In the Infantry, new name or not, it meant a balls-to-the-walls cleaning and prep for a good ole full white glove inspection, with wall locker layout of uniforms and gear.

Anywhoo, my boy “Sgt D” as I’ll call him, “D” went in, found dis fukkin’ guy standing in his class “A’s” at attention by his wall locker, dress-right-dress and squared away. “D” did the basic walkthrough with the Lieutenant, and then went to the Wall Locker. Door #1 was the uniform locker, and squared away.

Door #2 had his personal gear.
Now, looking in the ‘personal side’ was expected, not required. Needless to say, on relating the story, “D” and the El-Tee could only goggle with bugeyes at the sight.

Size 12 Patent Red Leather Heels
Couple of Dresses and Wigs
A vast selection of buttplugs and dildos
Glamour Makeup and the like.

Needless to say, after they saw it, “D” slammed the door shut, looked at the troop, muttered “Carry on.” and left, dragging the Lieutenant out of the room. Once in the hallway the LT opened his mouth to speak at which point “D” cut him off and said “May we never speak of this again. It didn’t happened, we saw nothing, we speak of nothing and if you ever open your mouth Eltee, I’ll deny being there.”

“D” filed his retirement paperwork shortly after.
The troop in question, well, whatever the word was, he was a good troop. Wasn’t the reason why “D” retired at twenty, but a contributing factor. “This ain’t –our– Army no more B.” is what he told me.
However: word -did- make it around about what was found. The Infantry gossips like a bunch of Wimmenz I swear…Word spread. And shortly after, this guy suddenly was -never- picked for any extra duty, nor stuff that a lot of regular troops -would- have been chosen for, based on that IF he complained, it’d mean the end of a career or three. He never was assigned a roommate either. He always seemed to get promoted, and never got ‘pinged’ for ‘stuff’ that others would have.

See a pattern here Aye?
This right here. THIS is why this sort of shit is so corrosive.
Because long after that inspection, “D” happened on the guy again after he retired at Fort Campbell. Where he then started laughing his ass off and related that the whole time, he was running a con. He –knew– that by ‘playing the fag’ in the “don’t ask-don’t-tell” that he’d become untouchable.

Makes you wonder what’s really going on in some cases.

Could be Cpl Maxwell Q Klinger was really onto something, a man well ahead of his time.

We went broke doing WHAT again, now?!?

Posted on June 22, 2021June 22, 2021 by Mike

Yet another of my not-quite-famous “shocking, yet unsurprising both at once” moments.

There are many great movies on the drug trade, but my personal favorite is Blow. The film stars Johnny Depp as George Jung (aka Boston George), a real-life drug smuggler who was sentenced to 70 years in prison in 1994.

Like most drug movies, Blow depicts the highs of the drug trade—parties, mansions, and rooms full of cash—as well as the lows: addiction, paranoia, and a loss of control. One thing that made Blow so good is it showed the incredible demand for drugs.

Whether they are dealing pot or cocaine, George and his partners can’t keep up with the huge demand no matter how much supply they get.

I bring up Blow in light of news that California’s legislature approved a $100-million plan to boost California’s struggling legal marijuana industry.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, the industry is in serious trouble. The growth of licensed cannabis shops has been dismal and far below state projections. Just 1,086 retail and delivery firms have been permitted to date—about 82 percent lower than the 6,000 cannabis shops the government anticipated.

How is this possible?

Three guesses. First two don’t etc. You guys know the drill.

Well, shortly after California legalized pot in 2016, lawmakers began burdening the industry with so many regulations—particularly myriad compliance orders associated with the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA)—that businesses are drowning under paperwork, fees, and delays.

“Many cannabis growers, retailers and manufacturers have struggled to make the transition from a provisional, temporary license to a permanent one renewed on an annual basis — a process that requires a costly, complicated and time-consuming review of the negative environmental effects involved in a business and a plan for reducing those harms,” the Times reports.

So let’s review then, shall we? Government at every level is so fucking inept, so fucking incompetent, and so fucking hopelessly retarded that it can find a way to lose its collective ass…even in the fucking drug-slinger game.

Feel free to take a minute or two to let all that soak in, people.

This, mind, while enjoying the otherwise-unavailable benefit of being able to make its own rules and regulations for how said drug-slinging must be conducted. The deck is decidedly stacked in government’s favor, but the flailing lackwits STILL can’t make a go of it. Oh, and lest anybody think this is merely a California thang? Don’t. Just…don’t.

The Ontario government lost $42M selling cannabis in the last year

And there you have it.

To recap once more, so as to drive the point on home: the goddamned goobermint, at all levels, can’t keep from losing scads upon scads of money in a business so effortlessly lucrative that…well, as Chris Rock says in Bring The Pain:

The drug dealers don’t really sell drugs. The drug dealers…OFFER drugs! I’m thirty years old, ain’t nobody ever sold me drugs. Nobody has ever sold nobody in this room some drugs! You ever in your life not thinking about getting high and somebody sold you some fucking drugs? Hell, no! The drug dealers offer: “Hey man, you want some smoke, you want some smoke?” You say “No”, that’s it! Now, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand…Shit!

No, man, drug dealers don’t sell drugs. Drugs sell themselves. Crack is not an encyclopedia, not a fucking vacuum cleaner! You know, you don’t really gotta try to sell crack, OK? I never heard a crack dealer go, “Man, how am I gonna get rid of all this crack? It’s just pilin’ up in my house!”

And some way, somehow, we see it’s just another damned thing government can’t get right.

(Via Ed Driscoll)

2

Cat toy

Posted on June 15, 2021June 15, 2021 by Mike

Putin is batting Senile Grampy Gropey around like one, and I’m enjoying the hell out of it.

Vladimir Putin sat down with NBC News for his first on-camera interview with a western news agency in more than three years.

For the most part defiant, and in some instances just plain trolling the Biden Administration, Putin showed the citizens of this country, using NBC News, why it is he’s going to wipe the floor with addle-minded Joe Biden as long as he remains in the White House.

“Did you order the assassination of the woman who walked into the Congress and who was shot and killed by a policeman?” Mr Putin said, referring to Ashli Babbitt, a California woman who died during the riot after being shot by a member of US Capitol Police, who was cleared of wrongdoing in her death.

“Do you know that 450 individuals were arrested after entering the Congress? And they didn’t go there to steal a laptop. They came with political demands,” said Mr Putin.

The US, he reasoned, was guilty of the same intolerance for political dissent as his government has been accused of harbouring.

Putting aside for the moment his reference to the death of Ashli Babbitt, his broader point regarding January 6 being a political protest that Democrats have demonized for political advantage is not inaccurate. Yes, some number of individuals — mixed in with the thousands there only to protest — came to the Capitol on January 6 prepared to undertake violent action if the opportunity presented itself.

Izzatso? Name three of ’em. That weren’t actually pAntiFa/BLM/Leftist provocateurs or FBI plants, that is.

More from Putin’s interview:

Putin said the U.S. allegations that Russian hackers or the government itself were behind cyberattacks in the U.S. were “farcical,” and he challenged NBC News, and by implication the U.S. government, to produce proof that Russians were involved.

“We have been accused of all kinds of things,” he said. “Election interference, cyberattacks and so on and so forth. And not once, not once, not one time, did they bother to produce any kind of evidence or proof. Just unfounded accusations.”

Asked about Biden’s criticism that Russia had added to global instability, he accused the U.S. of doing the same in Libya, Afghanistan and Syria. And the Russians aren’t cracking down on internal dissent, he said, any more than the U.S. is doing with its laws against foreign agents.

No doubt the press and Democrats will seize upon his words of praise for Trump but once again Putin is merely trolling both. The context of his comments, and what he says about Biden makes it clear that Putin is happy to see Trump gone as Biden is someone Putin believes will be much easier to manipulate and/or ignore.

More than once, Biden has recounted how he told Putin to his face that he doesn’t “have a soul” during a Kremlin visit in 2011 when he was vice president.

“I do not remember this particular part of our conversations,” Putin said when he was asked about the characterization.

That’s because, as usual with Grampy Gropey, it was a baldfaced lie. He’s always been that way, in case you didn’t know.

Asked what he thought of Biden, Putin said he was a professional and suggested that he could work with him.

Work him over, more like.

“He has spent virtually his entire adulthood in politics,” he said.

“Mr. Trump is an extraordinary individual, talented individual. Otherwise he would not have become U.S. president,” Putin said. “He is a colorful individual.”

But he also stressed the need for “predictability and stability” in Russia’s relationship with the U.S., adding, “This is something we haven’t seen in recent years.”

Keep in mind what I noted at the start — this is Putin’s first interview with a US news organization since 2018. He quit speaking in public during the Trump Administration because President Trump was not shy about responding bluntly and in public to things Putin said or did.

Now he’s taken the measure of the Biden Administration — and he’s happy for the change. He can “work with” Biden, and he’s free to speak out in public without fear of meaningful rebuke or repercussions from the feckless foreign policy team now in charge.

After all, he got Nordstream 2 approved and the Keystone XL pipeline shut down. Energy prices are high, and energy products are the No. 1 export from Russia to the world that keeps the Russian economy afloat.

Putin is going to say whatever he wants to say safe in the knowledge that Biden is unable to formulate or articulate anything other than a rehearsed response.

Well, what else can anybody expect? The raddled old fraud can’t even remember how to tie his own shoes or walk up a flight of stairs without breaking his fool neck. He never was the sharpest knife in the drawer anyway; nowadays, he’s so cognitively bereft he couldn’t find his own ass without using both hands and a compass. He’s nothing but a prop, a puppet, a front for the nefarious shadow-men who are actually in charge. It’s a measure of their contempt for Real Americans that they’d so brazenly foist such a hapless, inept clod on us and fully expect we’d just sit back and take it.

Personally, I’d be perfectly fine with shuffling “President” Gropey on off to some sort of home and installing Putin in the White House instead. God knows we’d be better off with him than the rolling abortion we’re afflicted by currently.

Update! It would take a heart of stone not to laugh.

And laugh, and laugh, and laugh, and laugh.

An invidious comparison

Posted on June 15, 2021June 15, 2021 by Mike

We resemble these remarks. Which makes this the saddest story you’ll ever read.

‘Even North Korea is not this nuts’: Defector slams ‘woke’ US schools
A North Korean defector said she viewed the US as country of free thought and free speech – until she went to college here.

Yeonmi Park attended Columbia University and was immediately struck by what she viewed anti-Western sentiment in the classroom and a focus on political correctness that had her thinking “even North Korea isn’t this nuts.”

“I expected that I was paying this fortune, all this time and energy, to learn how to think. But they are forcing you to think the way they want you to think,” Park told Fox News. “I realized, wow, this is insane. I thought America was different but I saw so many similarities to what I saw in North Korea that I started worrying.”

“I literally crossed the Gobi Desert to be free and I realized I’m not free, America’s not free,” she said.

Park said North Korea students were constantly informed about the “American Bastard.”

“I thought North Koreans were the only people who hated Americans, but turns out there are a lot of people hating this country in this country,” she told The Post.

Some pundits out there scoff at the idea that the nationhood of America That Was was built around certain values and ideals, preferring blood-and-soil nativism as the only conceptual framework that can ever be truly relevant. By their lights, someone like Park can never really be genuinely American, in any meaningful sense.

It’s codswallop. As far as I’m concerned, this fine young woman is way more American than any Democrat or shitlib will ever be, or in truth would want to be. What she says here is no more than the plain truth, coming from someone who certainly would know. It’s greatly to her credit that she’s courageous enough to tell it, however much it hurts.

1

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