Life in a once-great nation

Are you of The Body?

Posted on June 13, 2021June 13, 2021 by Mike

I’ve mentioned before just how damnably difficult it usually is to excerpt our friend and esteemed (and possibly estoned and esdrunked, to swipe a great line from my old friend Pfouts) colleague John Wilder* without just ruining things. It’s because John is quite adept at covering a lot of seemingly far-flung territory in his posts, then deftly tying all the threads together by the end to create a cohesive, non-ravelable knot. This is not meant as a complaint, mind, not at all. Actually, I consider it praise, strange as that might seem to some. That ability is characteristic of most any gifted essayist, something I definitely believe John to be, bless his coal-black heart.

Eric Peters is another writer with whom it can often be brain-bustingly hard to keep the excerpting within reasonable limits, rathen than just saying to hell with it and C&Ping the thing in its entirety. I’ll give staying within fair-use boundaries the old college try here, but can’t guarantee I’ll succeed.

It has to be the “news.” What is heard – and read – by people who listen – and obey. It is the only thing that explains the regional Diapering I’ve been seeing in my area.

In Roanoke, Va., Diapering appears to be on the wane. At Kroger – the supermarket I visit regularly to gauge the spread of the national pathology, it is now the case that only about half the patients are Diapered. A month ago, almost everyone you saw in the joint was Diapered.

They suddenly seem to feel better and it shows. You can see it – literally.

But in Floyd, Va., roughly thirty-five miles away from Roanoke, about two-thirds of the patients are still quite sick, if one goes by how they look. Including healthy young men donning Diapers in the parking lot, prior to entering the joint. It was quite a sight – and I saw a lot of it.

In neither area are the bodies stacking up, as they have never been – anywhere – outside of nursing homes. But in my area, which used to be a healthier area, you’d swear they were about to – any minute now! – if you went by the visuals.

It looks like what it used to look like in Roanoke, a month ago.

It is the power of Landru. Of the images generated by the machine – the TeeVee – which tells them to be afraid of what they can’t see but must believe. Many of them do. The “mandates” aren’t being enforced much in either area but that is no longer necessary. All that is necessary is to know what Landru – the glowing image – expects of them.

It doesn’t matter that they’re fine. That they have been fine, all along. They are told by Landru that all is not fine, that they risk not being fine. That they must – for the good of the body – continue to wear the Obedience Rag.

Perhaps you have been seeing it, too.

It tells us much about the power of programming.

Which supersedes the evidence of their eyes; blanks out the knowledge assimilated by their brains – if they chose to assimilate it. Effaces their judgment. Lobotomizes their skepticism. Instead, a fear reaction to the Tele-Prompter’d injunctions of Landru, Star Trek shorthand for the god in the box.

Okay, I figger that oughta be enough to convince you to read the whole thing, which you definitely, definitely should. Although I just can’t stop myself from including this part too.

In freshman philosophy, they used to teach the cogito ergo sum of Descartes. I think, therefore I am. But what of those who don’t think? Who react?

What are they?

Well, they are pitiable for openers. In the manner of a chrysalis that never opens, of potential never manifested. Of abortion – and failure. One feels sadness – initially – when seeing them dutifully, robotically, reaching in their pocket for their Face Pampers and putting them on as they exit their cars and head toward the entrance to the store that isn’t making them put them on anymore.

Some – even sadder – continue to wear their Pampers within their car. It is like watching someone who has not only shit their pants but walks around with the brown spot showing and being almost proud of showing it.

Heh. Yes, there is an accompanying image for that last text, both of which amalgamate gracefully to create a blast of contemptuous opprobrium that is just fucking hilarious. Eric’s final ‘graphs—coining the ingenius idiom Terror enobled, which I simply adore—are likewise not to be missed. Trust me, folks: if you DON’T read it all, the only person you’re depriving is yourself.

Peters’ use of Landru as a metaphor for the irrationality of the Branch Covidians led me to poke around the IMBD page for the “Return Of The Archons” episode of ST/TOS to refresh my fading memory, since I haven’t seen that one in a goodish while. The ep provides an eerily prescient peek at life as she is lived in present-day Amerika, one that’s way too close for comfort. I mean, come ON, man! A shuffling, zombie-like populace whose sole desire is to do exactly as they’re told? A rigidly-constructed, coercive society planned and managed from above, whose rulers wield unlimited power without effective oversight? Ostracism and involuntary re-education of all resisters and nonconformists? “Lawgivers“, ferrchrissake? An applicable quote or three:

Landru: The good of the body is the prime directive.

Mr. Spock: This is a soulless society, Captain. It has no spirit, no spark. All is indeed peace and tranquility – the peace of the factory, the tranquility of the machine, all parts working in unison.

Captain James T. Kirk: You said you wanted freedom. It’s time you learned that freedom is never a gift. It has to be earned.

That last one is probably the most frighteningly applicable of them all.

* John provides a perfect example in his latest brilliantly-composed post, which includes this gem: “The Exorcist is a feel-good movie. Well, at least it is for me.” Also a devilishly hot babe, Hulk Hogan, and Senile Joe, groping. Now go ahead and tell me how you excerpt a post like without leaving out something important. I dares ya.

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The worst is yet to come

Posted on June 13, 2021June 13, 2021 by Mike

And y’all thought Jimmeh Peanuthead’s economy was bad.

The poor economy of the 1970s can be traced not to Jimmy Carter, but to Lyndon Johnson. With the spending that the Biden administration is implementing and, even more, that it has proposed, a return to the stagflation of the 1970s may be mild in comparison to what we can expect to get from policies of the current Congress.

The same can be said of the shutting of the Keystone Pipeline and canceling of domestic drilling and oil production. These actions could have results that make the gas shortages of the 1970s pale in comparison.

There is another policy of the Biden administration that is similar to a law passed in 1965: the Hart-Celler Act. This was known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. This act changed dramatically the immigration policy of the United States. Our immigration policy went from one of bringing in immigrants who could contribute to the betterment of the country to one in which immigrants were chosen by where they came from.

It is similar to the fiasco that Biden created on our southern border with his reversal of President Trump’s immigration policies. The three executive orders he signed to this effect place more financial strain on the nation. With jobs going to illegals and illegals receiving benefits at taxpayer expense, there is added cost placed on our economy.

The American philosopher George Santayana said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” This was stated in his work, The Life of Reason: Reason in Common Sense. The political left seems to do this all the time and is quick to give the same excuse when confronted with the truth: “It didn’t work in the past because we didn’t throw enough money at it.”

We may be returning to the economy of the 1970s, but that poor economic period had its roots in the 1960s. If we are witnessing what has been compared to the 1970s, what does our future have in store for us?

Nothing good. Which brings us to tonight’s Tune Damage embed.

The “Science” vs the truth

Posted on June 12, 2021June 12, 2021 by Mike

It’s ~~turtles~~ lies, all the way down.

Syllogism: Dr. Tony Fauci says he is The Science…Dr. Tony Fauci lied to the nation early and often about his relationship with the Wuhan lab and his role in the development of the Covid-19 virus…therefore, The Science is a liar! Say what…? Yet another revered institution bites the dust! At this rate, will America ever be able to get its mind right?

Let’s face it: the government has done everything wrong around the Covid-19 episode from the start, and continues to this day. For a whole year since the outbreak, The Science (Dr. Fauci) managed to evade and bury the fact that he helped fund the gain-of-function (GOF) research of a bio-weapon for China’s People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The Science (Dr. Fauci) hid the fact that Dr. Fauci knew as early as 2012 that an Asian bat virus was in GOF development. In October, 2014, the Obama regime declared an official pause on funding for GOF research on influenza, MERS, and SARS viruses (though the Pentagon secretly kept funneling money into it). The Science (Dr. Fauci) got the official pause lifted on January 7, 2017, eleven days before Mr. Trump’s inauguration, unbeknownst to Mr. Trump. Development of the enhanced SARS Covid-19 variant disease continued.

Ordinarily, vaccines that produce a very few cases of dangerous side-effects are held back from distribution. But under the emergency declaration for Covid-19, the mRNA “vaccines” are proffered even more aggressively. Through May, 2021, The Science (Dr. Fauci) presses to “vaccinate” as many Americans as can possibly be rounded up, including people who have recovered from Covid-19 and have developed their own natural antibodies. Lately, The Science (Dr. Fauci) has militated for children and teenagers to get “vaccinated.”

Only, now it turns out that scores of “vaccinated” young people are showing up with inflammation of the heart muscle (myocarditis), otherwise extremely rare in that demographic. Say what, plus huh, plus WTF?

Does it not seem as if The Science (Dr. Fauci) has lurched from one blunder to the next, while also withholding the truth from the public, lying about the origin of the disease, and its (his) role in the development of the “vaccines,” and now rather desperately, it seems, trying to cover its (his) ass?

What does “Joe Biden” & Co. do about The Science (Dr. Fauci) now? More and more, it (he) looks like an albatross the size of Rodan the Flying Reptile around Mr. B’s withered neck. But if they throw it (him) to the wolves, they can no longer use Mr. Trump as the whipping boy for all the damage wreaked by Covid-19 and the government’s response to it (not to mention its role in creating the goshdarn thing.)

I guess we’ll have to stand by on all that. For the moment, “Joe Biden” is overseas, dazzling the leaders of foreign lands with his charm and perspicacity. I wonder if he’s heard the new caution from the CDC that people who have been “vaccinated” should not fly in airplanes for more than four hours at a time due to the possibility of developing harmful blood clots (deep vein thrombosis) at altitude. “Joe Biden” suffered a cranial aneurysm, 1988, requiring a 13-hour brain surgery. “Joe Biden” has been vaccinated. Just sayin’.

If the lowest-common-denominator, good-enough-for-government-work mediocrity Herr Doktor Fauci is the best we can come up with to represent actual science, then I’m a diplodocus.

Update! Still think we can peacefully coexist with people like this?

Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, whined to Chelsea Clinton in a new interview this week that the “phenomenal amount of hostility” that he endures is “astounding.”

“I’ve been the object myself of a phenomenal amount of hostility merely because I’m promoting what’re really fundamental simple public health principles,” Fauci said while appearing on Clinton’s podcast. “That seems astounding that that would generate a considerable degree of hostility, but it is.”

So, any of y’all want to try explaining to this witless toad the difference between “simple public health principles” and the pervasive, all-controlling fascism he’s been using the Coof dishonestly for the past year as an excuse to pimp? Or do I have to do it?

Eh, there’s no need to bother, really. Bureaucrats, “elected” junta officials, and civilian shitlibs all live in a self-created alternate “reality” that is wholly incompatible with the ACTUAL reality the rest of us inhabit. Herr Doktor Fauci’s stated puzzlement at why Real Americans might feel hostile to the likes of him is probably genuine, the only honest words he’s uttered in years.

His incurable blindness to the fundamental illegality of lockdowns, mask mandates, and all the other contra-Constitutional edicts of the past year and a half ought to confirm, to every Real American’s satisfaction, that not only is it impossible to live peaceably among he and his ilk as a free people, it’s undesirable as well. They will always constitute a serious threat to individual liberty and self-determination because that’s their nature; they simply can’t be anything else.

Updated update! Worlds, colliding (from the previous link).

Fauci said this when he was asked about how to rebuild trust in science in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he admitted that the solution to rebuilding public trust is elusive to him.

See what I mean? Here’s a serpent who has lied, backpedaled, obfuscated, and contradicted himself so many times it’s damned near impossible to keep up with it all, yet still seems to believe that the people he wilfully deceived remain such biddable dolts that they can be convinced to trust him again nonetheless. Herr Doktor might want to acquaint himself with an old saw: Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on ME. Obviously, his mama never told him that one after he was hatched.

“I don’t know the answer to your question,” Fauci said. “It’s a seemingly simple question, but a complicated answer. We’ve got to reach out to people and get them to understand that this is for their own safety, their own health and also what I refer to as communal responsibility, your responsibility to society.”

My safety and health are my own private concern, thanks, and neither your nor FederalGovCo’s business, according to the US Constitution. As for any “responsibility to society” I may bear (if any), that too is a private affair, a matter to be conducted solely between myself, the authorities involved…and absolutely no one else. WARNING: Continued intrusion, meddling, and hectoring in regards to the private affairs of Real Americans may result in their “reaching out” to get YOU to understand just what your proper role is and is NOT—from a great enough distance you’ll never even hear the explosive craack! of sudden enlightenment being sent on its way.

All thumbs

Posted on June 11, 2021June 11, 2021 by Mike

No construction, all destruction.

The Great Replacement came to Jackson, the capital city of Mississippi. A little more than 50 years ago, Jackson was majority white. The civilization these white people was for a far different demographic than the racial group that inherited the city once white flight created a black majority.

Sustaining the infrastructure they were bequeathed via white flight (curiously, wherever white people fled to in metro Jackson, they created thriving civilizations out of the wilderness), the now nearly 90% black city of Jackson watches as the civilization regresses to the African mean.

Kersey next quotes extensively from a whole shitpile of NYT boo-hoo-hooing over the sinister racist implications of this shiftless-man-caused disaster:

Once again, Lavern Avant was spending her day scouring Mississippi’s capital city, hoping to get her hands on a basic necessity that she and many of her neighbors had gone without for weeks.

She made her newly familiar rounds, driving in and out of parking lots, picking up cases of bottled water for herself, her husband and her neighbors. This had become her new normal since mid-February, when a strong winter storm blanketed a wide swath of the state in ice and nearly collapsed the notoriously rickety municipal water system.

It was wearing her down, she said, and was “more than a mental challenge.”

The crisis, while this time protracted, is not new in Jackson, a city of about 160,000 where a majority of residents, including Ms. Avant, are Black. In Jackson, boil-water notices are common and an enduring municipal drama has played out for decades, as white flight, an eroding tax base and poor management have left the remaining residents with old and broken pipes, but without the public funding to fix them.

Mayor Chokwe Lumumba,

Oh good God.

a Democrat and African-American,

Any further questions?

has estimated that modernizing the city’s water infrastructure could cost $2 billion. Last week, he asked Gov. Tate Reeves, a Republican who is white, for $47 million to help repair the city’s damaged water system.

In an interview this week, Mr. Lumumba said he hoped the current crisis would finally push both state and city officials in the direction of a long-term solution.

He’p us, he’p us, Blue Eyed Debbils! We’s in trubbah baaaad!!

“There’s a saying that you should allow no crisis to go to waste,” he said. “It’s crises like these that really allow us to take stock of conditions of where we are as a city, where we are as a state and hopefully it allows us to build the resolve to address it.”

What you need to be taking stock of is exactly what the fuck it is about you people that leaves you wholly incapable of creating a civilization on your own more complex than mud huts, grass skirts, and obtaining meals via pulling grubworms out of a hole in the ground with a stick and eating them raw…or even just maintaining one after it’s been handed to you by Whypeepo as a total turn-key operation.

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International laughingstock

Posted on June 11, 2021June 11, 2021 by Mike

Pretty vacant.

G7 Is More A G6.5 With The Cognitively Challenged Biden In Attendance
The Group of Seven Summit begins Friday with the leaders of the U.S., Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Canada meeting in Great Britain through Sunday. One of those leaders, however, is not like the others. Which puts America at a disadvantage.

If readers think we’re saying that President Joe Biden is not all there, then we plead guilty. Clearly he’s not. His flubs, stumbles (both verbal and physical), empty gaze, the where-am-I pauses when he speaks in public (even with the aid of a teleprompter he has trouble following), the mangling of sentences, and his inability to recall the names the Declaration of Independence and Defense Department are signs of a man deeply in decline. He shouldn’t be allowed to run a sidewalk hot dog cart on Pennsylvania Avenue, much less be the primary occupant of that street’s most famous and important building.

Yet there he is, in Cornwall, ostensibly representing and aggressively promoting America. (Of course even in his best days of yesteryear, expecting Biden to do what’s right for his country was expecting too much.)

To be honest about it, though, even in his long-since-past “best days of yesteryear” Senile Uncle Gropey was never blessed with a surplus of either intelligence or integrity. He’s never been anything but a stupid, venal, corrupt scoundrel, a pluperfect exemplar of everything wrong with American politics. That We The People would ever allow such a disgraceful oxygen thief to bootjack his way into the White House rather than having him shot on sight should the sleazy blaggard dare to approach to within fifty yards of its outer perimeter says more about us than it does about him, really—none of it complimentary. Follows, a sampling of what the Cousins are saying about the senescent old fraud.

An unnamed conservative Brexiteer said “America should remember who their allies are,” then added that, “unfortunately” Biden is “so senile that he probably won’t remember what we tell him anyway. Unless an aide is listening I’m not sure he’s going to remember for very long.”

“This is elder abuse; the man should go. But what is just as bad is all we get from a new Biden administration, brainwashed by the left; they can trot out anything to him and he will say what he likes. It is just woke nonsense.

“We can’t be serious that this is the leader of the Western world.”

Fret not, bub; he isn’t, rest assured. If there’s one thing we should have all learned from the humiliating insult to the intelligence of the American serf class that is the “Biden administration” it’s that the FUSA is actually run by shadowy malefactors who will never come up for a vote, whose names their hapless subjects will never know, who are interested not in our confidence, our consent, or our approval, only our compliance. It’s a lead-pipe cinch that this didn’t begin in 2020, either.

Biden does whatever his behind-the-scenes handlers tell him to do, signs whatever they tell him to sign, and says whatever they tell him to say; it doesn’t matter in the least whether he actually understands what he’s doing at any given moment or not. He’s a mere figurehead, a bumbling, fumbletongued actor grotesquely miscast in a role much too big for his paltry abilities. He has no more influence on what FedralGovCo does than you, I, or any random housefly buzzing around the WH lawn does. He’ll never be allowed anywhere near the actual levers of power.

All of America’s original core principles: government of, by, and for the people; the right of the people to have a say in how they are governed via free and fair elections; elected officials as “public servants” working in close conformity with the will of their constituents, and answerable to them should they prove to be deficient in integrity, trustworthiness, or fidelity to their sworn duty; a duly-limited, well-run government operating in strict accordance with the US Constitution, a living affirmation of the Founders’ vision that all Americans can be pride of—all these noble ideals have been twisted, degraded, and abused by swine like Biden so that the government entire is now nothing more than third-rate theater, a dumbshow only a true rube would ever be taken in by.

This is the man America elected to act on the country’s behalf in international affairs. To stand up to thug nations, to nurture relationships with allies, to be the custodian of the economic interests of the U.S. Yet what the public gets is a tweeted photo of the unelected Jill Biden “prepping for the G7.”

“Elected”? Exactly how sure are you about that? How sure can any of us be? Not that it matters now; he’s what they gave us, he’s what we’re stuck with. For now, at any rate. The shape this shambolic buffoon is in, it’s anybody’s guess how much longer that might last.

Joe Biden appeared to get lost at the G7 summit on Friday.

Biden wandered off and looked lost.

“How are your meetings going in Cornwall, Mr. President?” a bystander asked.

A confused Biden turned around and said, “I beg your pardon?”

“How are your meetings going in Cornwall?” the bystander asked a second time.

“Very well,” Biden said as nurse Jill came to the rescue.

“Come on!” Jill Biden said to Joe while grabbing his hand and leading him away like a lost child.

Onlookers busted out in laughter.

Another day, another humiliation for Gropey. No sympathy from me; he’s earned every last morsel of it, and plenty more besides. Eat it, Joe.

The peasants are revolting!

Posted on June 9, 2021June 10, 2021 by Mike

Tax revolting, that is.

Fells Point businesses write letter to city demanding municipal services be restored
More than three dozen Fells Point business owners have sent a letter to Baltimore leadership including Mayor Brandon Scott, City Council President Nick Mosby, Councilman Zeke Cohen, State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby and Police Commissioner Michael Harrison.

“What is happening in our front yard — the chaos and lawlessness that escalated this weekend into another night of tragic, unspeakable gun violence — has been going on for far too long,” a portion of the letter says.

The letter demands that city leaders restore “basic and essential municipal services” including trach pickup, enforcement of traffic and parking laws through tickets and towing, stopping illegal open-air alcohol and drug sales and empowerment of police to responsibly do their jobs.

The business owners threaten to withhold tax and permit payments, placing those funds into an escrow account, if the city doesn’t respond to their request.

in the past, I would usually say something snarky about who might have voted those same mayors, councilmen, and other civic “leaders” into office, especially in the Democrat-run urban shitholes. But after the shenanigans of the 2020 “election” there’s no way of knowing if ANY of these people, not just in Baltimo’ but all over the damned country, were actually voted in or not.

Update! Not really related, but apropos that last line above, kinda-sorta: People Fleeing Collapsing Economies of Blue States Advise Those Who Remain: ‘Start Making Better Decisions on Who You Vote For’. Always sound advice, which those to whom it most applies will almost certainly ignore, if recent history is any guide.

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Legitimate, and…that other thing

Posted on June 9, 2021June 9, 2021 by Mike

Y’know, what the FUSA now is.

Readers may wonder why I keep returning to the theme of legitimacy. The reason is simple: legitimacy is the ground on which Fourth Generation war is fought. It is, above all, a contest for legitimacy, and winning (or losing) is measured by gains or losses in legitimacy. Fourth Generation war on our own soil is by far the greatest threat this country faces, and as the legitimacy of the government, and even more of the state itself, wains, Fourth Generation war spreads and intensifies.

From this perspective, barometers of legitimacy–anything that helps us measure the rise or fall of the legitimacy of the current order of things–are earnestly to be sought. I can identify at least three. The first is widely recognized: opinion polls that ask Americans how much trust they have in various institutions. These include the Presidency, Congress, the courts, and, perhaps most important, the integrity of the electoral process. As I noted in a previous column, the latter is the equivalent of a claimant to a throne having (or lacking) royal blood. Nothing else in the political system is as important for legitimacy. For decades, polls have shown a downward trend in Americans’ trust of all these institutions. Since the 2020 election, distrust of the electoral process has spiked, not surprisingly given the abandonment of long-standing rules designed to prevent vote fraud.

Not as much as it really should have, in my estimation. Then again, that must be expected when fully half the population is content to ignore all things political and just live their lives. Then again again, though, the ability to disregard politics without adverse personal consequences is a luxury available only to those who live in a more or less free, prosperous, and stable nation—all of which conditions look like they’re beginning to falter as the Auld Empire lapses gradually, then all at once, into the final stages. As the sun sets once and for all on America That Was, those who hadn’t previously troubled themselves to pay attention to politics will learn to their great dismay that, to adapt Trotsky’s adage, you may not be interested in politics, but politics is interested in YOU.

In all of these barometers we can read the change in political weather most easily if we compare what is happening now to life in America’s last normal decade, the 1950s. President Eisenhower was widely popular. Congress did not top anyone’s list of most trusted institutions, but ordinary Americans did not think they had to invade it to make their voices heard. The Warren court was disliked and distrusted by many conservatives, for good reason, but the problem was Warren, not the court itself. Everyone knew vote counting in some big cities might be crooked, but elsewhere the process was trusted. As to vaccines, when the polio vaccine became available virtually every kid in the country took it, because mom and dad told them to. And gun violence was rare, beyond mobsters killing each other. The government and the state were accepted as legitimate by the vast majority of Americans.

No more. The future looks grimmer still, because no one in the establishment will consider for a moment how their actions affect legitimacy. Add in the coming debt crisis and inflation and it begins to look a lot like Weimar. As was true then, what replaces the current dysfunctional mess will come from the right, not the left.

One can only hope.

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Open letter

Posted on June 8, 2021June 8, 2021 by Mike

That’s definitely gonna leave a mark.

Dear Boomer,

No one, since the literal creation of Man, has accepted “but the Devil made me do it” as an excuse. No one forced you to reject your history, your traditions, your nation, and your ancestors. No one made you neglect your children and your grandchildren. No one forced you to go into debt and eat the seed corn.

You did those things. No one did them for you or to you. You were presented with more freedom than nearly any other generation in human history and you freely chose to be wicked. You created the “latchkey children”. You failed to pass on a functional society. You failed to pass on the knowledge that your fathers passed on to you. You planted no trees. You strip-mined the economy. You left your wives, and left your husbands, and you shattered your families, simply because no one forcibly stopped you. And if anyone tried to convince you otherwise, you dismissed them as fascists and religious freaks.

So don’t blame your parents, society, the Jews, Vietnam, the black community, the communists, Kondratiev waves, or anything else. None of your excuses matter and none of them will be accepted by anyone. The more you defend yourself, the more you will be despised by the younger generations and the generations still to come. You’re not sexy, you’re not cool, and the Beatles will be forgotten about five minutes after the last Boomer dies. Seventy is not the new twenty.

You will never be forgiven because you will never repent of your wickedness. So, eat, drink, and be merry today, for the Day of the Pillow is coming.

Ok, Boomer?

I’m a tail-end Boomer myself, but I ain’t gonna argue. I’ve long thought of my parents’ generation as the last to really, truly GET the civilizational values America That Was had rested upon: the creation and nurturing of families, neighborhoods, stability, and general prosperity. The modest aspirations of decent men and women—a little plot of land and a home of their own; the right to have some say in how they were governed; a fair salary for an honest day’s work; a non-intrusive government that kept the peace but otherwise left them mostly alone—were the essential ingredients that went into making the most successful nation-state in history.

That generation was the last to either understand or care about how a healthy, fulfilling life in a generally free society might be properly built and maintained. Such things don’t happen by accident, and are neither cheap nor easy. Our problem today is that succeeding generations have been intentionally misled into regarding the blessings of liberty as not worth the effort or cost—those who don’t think of that long-gone nation as literally, incontrovertibly evil, that is—and so-smugly believe themselves to be the moral and intellectual betters of any who do not.

Sure, the Boomers went astray, and badly. But their progeny have gone right off the road and into a deep, deep ditch, wrecking something rare and precious beyond all hope of repair. The important thing now is not to point fingers and assign blame, but to somehow crawl from the wreckage and find a way back home.

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To ask it is to answer it

Posted on June 6, 2021June 6, 2021 by Mike

Not a silly question, necessarily. But if your country has reached the point where such an invidious comparison even comes to mind, then blithely dismissing or ignoring it is a serious mistake—because you’re already in trouble deep.

Is The United States On The Same Calamitous Path As Yugoslavia?
I am not here to present an in-depth analysis of the eventual breakup of Yugoslavia, only to examine the conditions that triggered it. I believe there are some interesting similarities to burgeoning conditions within the U.S., along with some distinct differences.

Economically, conservative states are greatly outperforming leftist blue states in terms of recovery exactly because they have removed pandemic restrictions. Blue states have become stimulus dependent and will likely need even more stimulus dollars as the year progresses. With red states in defiance of the global reset and pandemic restrictions, it is only a matter of time before Biden (like Milosevic) asserts the need for “unity,” and accuses those states that want freedom of seeking to “weaken the nation.”

This will probably happen before true hyperinflation bubbles over, but in the meantime prices on goods will continue to rise exponentially. States that show fealty to the federal government will receive their subsidies (their table scraps), while defiant conservative states will be cut off completely. The fracturing of the U.S. is inevitable at this point.

This is not to say that this is a bad thing in the long run. It is a necessary outcome for economic and personal freedom to survive. But, it is important that we learn from examples in history so that we can remain prepared. Some people will claim that the U.S. and Yugoslavia are nothing alike, but we are unfortunately much closer than we should be. America is no longer a free market society, and we haven’t been for decades. We are an increasingly socialist nation with all the frailties associated with such cultures.

One defining difference that could save us is our heritage of independence and the will to return to a self reliant system. For Yugoslavia, communism was all they knew, and adapting to an alternative economy was hard to imagine. Black markets arose out of necessity, but these are merely stop gap solutions to structural decay. There has to be a revolutionary return to free markets, production and sound money for a country to rebuild, but I believe this is possible in the U.S. given at least half of Americans want this already. They don’t need to be convinced.

And, like Yugoslavia, civil war will eventually follow American balkanization, but that is a discussion for another time. It is enough for now to understand that to solve the economic decline caused by socialist and communist policies, more of the same is not the answer.

But…but…but more of the same is all they have, all they’ve ever had.

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DOG BITES MAN!

Posted on June 6, 2021June 6, 2021 by Mike

Another of those “shocking but not surprising” stories.

A person believed to be among the highest-ranking defectors ever to the United States from the People’s Republic of China has been working with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) for months, sources inside the intelligence community have told RedState on condition of anonymity. The defector has direct knowledge of special weapons programs in China, including bioweapons programs, those sources say.

The information provided to RedState corroborates and clarifies Thursday evening’s reporting by journalist Adam Housley.

RedState’s sources say that’s partially true. FBI Director Christopher Wray was “ambushed” with the information, they say, and Langley was also unaware. Sources say DIA leadership kept the defector within their Clandestine Services network to prevent Langley and the State Department from accessing the person, whose existence was kept from other agencies because DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.

UPDATE 12:30 PM PDT, June 4, 2021

Sources tell RedState the defector has been with the DIA for three months and that he has provided an extensive, technically detailed debrief to US officials. In DIA’s assessment, the information provided by the defector is legitimate. Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci, adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector.

Andrea Widberg asks a silly question:

Are our federal intelligence agencies compromised?
A lot of people have been wondering why, suddenly, the leftist establishment is embracing the idea that COVID came from the Wuhan Institute of Virology (which is tied to the Chinese military) after denying the possibility for so long. The answer may lie in the fact that the Defense Intelligence Agency has for months been debriefing a high-level Chinese Communist Party defector — but withheld the information from other agencies until recently because of fears that those agencies are compromised. In other words, it’s a twofer: China did create and release the virus, and our federal government cannot be trusted.

Well, I mean, DUH. On both counts.

The really shocking information is why we’re suddenly hearing about all of this now.

No, the real shocker is that we’re hearing about it AT ALL.

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s very unlikely that those “spies or sources” inside the federal agencies are people from China or people of Chinese descent. Instead, and again I’m guessing, they’re probably college graduates who were taught that America is an evil country, or they’re Marxists who see China as the way to advance Marxism in America, or they are such fanatic NeverTrumps that they were willing to compromise America’s national security to destroy Trump’s chances of reelection.

Fair enough, although I see no reason, as in so many other contexsts, not to embrace the healing power of “and” here myself.

When the next true patriot comes to the White House, whether it’s Trump, DeSantis, or someone else,

IF, you mean. And a very, very big “if” at that.

that president needs to recognize that the federal bureaucracy must be cleaned out with the thoroughness and ferocity that Hercules brought to cleaning the filth in the Augean Stables.

Which is precisely what Trump vowed he’d do, and for whatever reason, did not. Which means that the job will have to be done by We, The People, if it’s to be done at all.

The real clean-up starts with the Biden crime family, which, we hope, will be brought to justice at the earliest possible opportunity.

Yeah, hope in one hand, shit in the other. See which one gets full the quickest.

Marxist science

Posted on May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 by Mike

Groucho Marx, that is.

I’m a Doctor, but COVID’s Broken My Faith in Medical Research — I Can’t Believe Anything I Read or Accept Any Mainstream Facts
Those who decide to shut down and stifle debate – whatever they may believe themselves to be doing – are, in fact, traitors to the cause of science.

Those of us who put forward an alternative view to the prevailing orthodoxy on the virus or on vaccinations are being vilified, threatened and cancelled. This is not how science, or a functioning democracy, works.

The main purpose of science is to question and attack. To subject ideas to the greatest scrutiny. Those who decide to shut down and stifle debate – whatever they may believe themselves to be doing – are, in fact, traitors to the cause of science. Stranglers of the enlightenment, assassins of progress.

They are not alone, and things have gotten far worse in the past year or so. Science has taken a terrible battering during Covid-19, though I have always known that dissent against a widely held scientific hypothesis is difficult.

Just trying to get published is a nightmare. The peer-review system is one of the many weapons used against innovative thinking. ‘Let’s see what the current experts think of this new idea which threatens to overturn everything they have researched and taught over the last 30 years, and have built their reputations on… I wonder if they will like it and approve it?’

Expertise is great. ‘Experts’… well, that is a completely different matter. We certainly have a few formidable ones kicking about with Covid-19. In the UK, we have the great and good of the SAGE committee made up of – who knows? – and chosen for whatever reasons. They wield enormous power, and never disagree on anything. In the US, we have Fauci and the CDC. Ditto.

In the background we have the World Health Organisation (WHO)… who can tell you what way the wind is blowing if nothing else. They remind me of Groucho Marx’s famous comment. “These are my principles. And you if you don’t like them… I have others.” However, we at the WHO would like to make it clear that nothing about Covid-19 has anything to do with China, in any way. Can we have more money please?
Anyway, where are we with this virus, and with science?

In my opinion, Covid-19 succeeded in breaking my last vestiges of faith in medical scientific research. I cannot believe anything I read. I accept no mainstream facts or figures.

We are told such utter nonsense. For example, the ‘fact’ that vaccination protects against Covid-19 more effectively than having had the disease itself… This is just utter nonsense.

We were told that the virus was spread by touching contaminated surfaces… Really? We were told it spread through droplets, not aerosols. Which is the most complete garbage. We were told that everyone has to wear a mask. We were told it could easily be passed on by asymptomatic people. Based on nothing at all. I could go on.

No need to, really. Welcome to the party, pal.

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Doomed by diversity

Posted on May 29, 2021May 29, 2021 by Mike

A peek at the state of the union, and where it might be leading.

Is there no limit to the racial, religious, ideological, political, cultural and ethnic diversity the nation can accommodate before it splinters into its component parts?

In professions of religious belief, atheists, agnostics and secularists have become our largest “congregation,” followed by Catholics and Protestants, both of which are in numerical decline.

Diversity of faiths leads to irreconcilable, clashing opinions about morality on the most divisive social issues of our era: abortion, homosexuality, same-sex marriage, etc.

Racial diversity, too, is bringing back problems unseen since the 1960s.

America was almost 90% white in 1960, but that figure is down to 60% and falling. In 25 years, we will all belong to racial minorities.

Are we Americans still united in our love of country? Do we still take pride in what we have done for our own people and what America has done for the world in the 400 years since Jamestown?

One of you guys wanna break the news to him, or should I? Just kidding; it’s Pat Buchanan, and he already knows.

Some look at Western civilization as 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, slavery and segregation — practiced against people of color. This is the source of the West’s wealth and power, it is said, and that wealth and power should be redistributed to the descendants of the victims of Western rapacity.

For many, equality of opportunity is no longer enough. We must make restitution, deliver reparations and guarantee a future where an equality of rewards replaces an equality of rights.

Something is seriously wrong with a country that professes to be great but whose elite cannot abide the mildest of heresies to its established truth.

There’s not a damned thing wrong with the country that couldn’t be fixed toot-sweet by just ridding ourselves of the craptastic old elite and replacing it with a better one, really.

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How the Tenth was lost

Posted on May 27, 2021May 27, 2021 by Mike

Unsurprisingly, the profoundly nefarious 17th played an important role in its destruction.

Michael Finch, the President of the David Horowitz Freedom Center, has an excellent article over at the American Thinker making clear where the Progressives are in their fight against the Constitution. He identifies what the Biden administration intends to accomplish—nothing less than completing the project of centralizing power in the federal government begun by the Progressives over a century ago. Finch very correctly observes that “the 10th Amendment, with its clear limitations on federal power, has been seriously eroded over the past century,” and that Biden and his handlers intend to put an end to the remaining limitations on federal power.

The Progressives certainly have gotten away with trampling on the 10th Amendment for more than a century, but that raises this question: how did they manage to get away with doing that?

The answer is that the Progressives tricked Americans into repealing the 10th Amendment without realizing that was what they were doing. It was very cleverly done, so cleverly that even today Americans by and large do not understand what happened. When in 1913 America approved the 17th Amendment, the amendment that provided for the direct election of senators, the 10th Amendment was doomed.

How can that be? After all, the 10th Amendment says nothing about the election of senators. The point of the all-important 10th Amendment is that the Founders created a federal government of strictly limited powers. Here it is in full:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The 10th says the powers of the federal government (here referred to as “the United States”) are limited to the enumerated powers, the limited powers assigned it in the Constitution; the individual states (here referred to as “the States”) retain all their powers not delegated to the federal government. But the important point for us to understand is that the Founders’ method for selecting senators was the key to keeping the powers of the federal government limited.

In the Constitution and in the original American republic, senators were selected by the state legislatures. The wisdom of the Framers is nowhere more evident than in this feature of their constitutional design. This was the central pillar of that design. It secured the 10th Amendment by the power of the Senate. As I wrote in my book about the founding entitled Common Sense Nation:

The Senate had been a barrier to the passage of federal laws infringing on the powers reserved to state governments, but the Senate has abandoned that responsibility under the incentives of the new system of election. Because the states no longer have a powerful standing body representing their interests within the federal government, the power of the federal government has rapidly grown at the expense of the states.

Before the 17th Amendment, the state legislatures controlled the upper chamber of Congress. There was no way the federal government was going to usurp the power of the states. The 17th Amendment disempowered the states, and the 10th Amendment promptly began eroding away.

Americans in 1913 were fooled by the Progressives because too many Americans no longer understood the Founders’ design for liberty. You have to give the Progressives credit. They did understand the Founders’ design, they picked their target brilliantly, and by selling the 17th Amendment as a reform, they won a great victory.

And America That Was, in consequence, has been circling the drain ever since, spiraling ever faster as it slips down the pipe to its ultimate doom. Mike’s Iron Law #1,246: whenever Progressivists win, America loses.

1

Another look in

Posted on May 27, 2021May 27, 2021 by Mike

More on the outrageous and intolerable persecution-by-prosecution of an entirely blameless young man, Lucas Gerhard.

LSSU is something of an “aggie” college, with a large and respected criminal justice program. Still, as is the case for 99% of American colleges, it manages to have a “social justice and community activism” page as part of its campus life — although the link to that page is dead. One of LSSU’s leftist students, a young woman, frequently argued with Lucas, so much so that he blocked her on social media.

In the summer of 2019, Lucas bought himself an AR-15, which he brought to campus with him. At the time, he promptly followed school rules, checking his gun and ammunition in with the LSSU safety office. At around the same time, Lucas sent a private Snapchat joke to friends, showing a picture of his kitted-out rifle, with the message, “Takin’ this bad boy up, this outta [sic] make the snowflakes melt, aye?” As if it wasn’t already clear that this was a joke, he added, “And I mean snowflakes as in snow.”

Two leftist students saw that image on a friend’s phone and took a picture of it. The young woman who fought with Lucas then used the Snapchat image to file a report with the police, claiming that Lucas was making threats.

When the police showed up, Lucas explained that he was just making a joke about people whose brains melted when they were faced with an opposing political ideology. Nevertheless, the police arrested him the next day and charged him with violating Michigan Penal Code §750.543, which governs making terrorist threats. Under the law, a person makes a terrorist threat if he “[t]hreatens to commit an act of terrorism and communicates the threat to any other person.” The penalty calls for up to twenty years in prison plus as much as $20,000 in fines.

During the pre-trial hearing, the prosecutor claimed that Lucas had multiple “contacts” with the law, which was a lie by omission. While campus leftists frequently tried to sic the police on Lucas, he was invariably found innocent of the charge against him. One example was when he wore his OCSO cadet uniform while carrying an authorized bag of police training gear to a lecture he was giving — another “threat.” There were no charges, nor were there charges when someone vandalized his car.

Even worse, during the pre-trial hearing, the prosecutor played a graphic video of the mosque shooting earlier that year in Christchurch, New Zealand. Faced with the prosecutor’s “evidence,” the court denied Lucas bond. Instead, he was sent to jail, where he spent 83 days, a problem for a Type I diabetic, before his father could bail him out. He’s been under complete house arrest ever since, with a $500/month tether and no access to education or the internet.

So why am I writing about this case? Because every conservative needs to understand that, while we’re still slack-jawed with disbelief and dismay about events in America in the last year, leftists at every level — the White House, Congress, statehouses, courts, prosecutors’ offices, colleges, and dormitories — are engaged in all-out war.

Bingo. Which only makes the very next sentence seem all the more odd. And, frankly, embarrassing.

If we are to avoid cultural, political, and constitutional defeat, we need to adopt their legal tactics: letter-writing campaigns, phone calls, non-violent protests…anything to raise the volume.

We most certainly do NOT, thenksveddymuch. The “justice” system is now just another wholly-owned subsidiary of Leftist Inc, having been co-opted and subsumed long ago, just as nearly every other important American organization and institution has. Appeals for justice made to offices and/or processes under complete Enemy control may make some of us feel better about their plight, if only for a brief spell. But such appeals—or entreaties, or supplication, to call things by their rightful names—won’t do a damned thing to halt a seemingly endless train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, that we all bear witness to each and every day.

Might as well ask the Tooth Fairy to flit in and save us while you’re down there on your knees begging. That’s about as likely to produce the desired outcome, and can’t be any more of a waste of time and effort.

How liberty is lost

Posted on May 22, 2021May 22, 2021 by Mike

It’s always a mistake to accept their premises.

Last week, the Centers for Disease Control did an about-face, announcing that the fully vaccinated among us may resume normal activities. The news came more than a year after California initiated the first lockdown on March 19, 2020.

The CDC’s new posture comes with some narrow exceptions. If you’re traveling on a plane or find yourself in a homeless shelter or in a medical or correctional facility, you still need to wear a mask; and the CDC made sure to clarify, apparently out of great deference for federalism and Hayekian spontaneous order, that its guidance does not predominate over the requirements of federal, state, local, tribal, or territorial laws, rules, and regulations, including local business and workplace guidance.

Before the CDC updated its pandemic guidance, this was exactly the position espoused by libertarian law professor Ilya Somin of George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia School of Law. Writing from his regular perch at the legal blog The Volokh Conspiracy, Somin’s argument is summarized nicely in the subheading of his piece, “Free the Vaccinated from COVID Restrictions”: “Doing so will protect constitutional rights, reduce vaccine hesitancy, and increase liberty—all at once.”

The CDC’s shift undoubtedly is a welcome development, all things considered. But people like Somin could not be more misguided in supporting it as a matter of best practice. In doing so, they ratify a pernicious principle that has the potential to destroy our long-term freedom. Instead of reasoning from first principles, Somin works from within a techno-scientific, experts-know-best framework that, unsurprisingly, constrains his thinking and directs him to validate the public health bureaucracy’s authority and priorities. One need only examine what accepting the totality of the CDC’s guidance would truly mean to see the short-sightedness of Somin’s position.

That the CDC, or any other institution, would presume to strip us of our God-given natural liberty to buy groceries or see a play or play with our children in a park, all in the name of some dubious goal of “public health,” and then purport to “return” our rights—but only if we jump through a vaccine-related hoop—is a grievous affront to the salutary legal revolution brought on by the birth of America that Jaffa identified. We are being ordered to accept the submerged premise of the CDC’s new position, namely, that we are free to do only what the government explicitly permits us to do. Sadly, a great many Americans are only too willing to comply.

It is deeply shameful that we let a virus with a roughly 1.8 percent death rate upend completely our society’s habits, customs, practices, mores, and ways of thinking about the interaction of law and liberty and the legitimate domain and reach of each. (Recall that SARS had a 14-15 percent death rate, and we did not feel compelled to shut down the country for over a year.)

Actually, it wasn’t a virus that did it. The Left was allowed to “upend our thinking about liberty” many decades ago, transitioning (ahem) far too many of us from stout, indendent citizens to simpering dependents content to suckle at Mommy Government’s flabby teat forever. After that “fundamental transformation” was accomplished, pulling off the Covid coup de grace was simplicity itself, practically a fait accompli.

1

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