Life in a once-great nation

High crimes and misdemeanors

Posted on October 4, 2023 by Mike

Seems there’s never a Fletcher Christian around when you really need one.

Elections used to be the means of turning the ship of state around, to go into a different and more beneficial direction. The people used to have some say, if not a great deal, often enough to let the natural inclination of the masses guide it away from the more disastrous of futures. It was this means that taught politicians how far they could go in any given direction, but the unwillingness to let the people speak through these elections means that there is no civilized way to change course.

That leaves only the uncivilized.

When the captain of a ship is clearly insane, or reckless, endangering the lives of the crew and indeed the ship they all need for survival, there are means of removing him from his position. There’s logic and reason, but when all else fails and the lives of the crew are at stake, only mutiny will suffice. It’s ugly and is fraught with danger, because, if unwarranted, it can lead to a death sentence, but someone has to utter the word, someone has to suggest the unthinkable to resolve a condition that is likewise unthinkable.

The trouble with America, right now, is that there is no more sane person to put in the captain’s chair. There is no way to effect a mutiny when the officers are as insane and reckless as the captain. It’s as if everyone in charge of anything significant is infected with the same suicidal, destructive disease.

And, it’s the people who will pay, not only in the immediate, but in the future as well.

We are facing the end of the United States of America no matter what we do, or don’t do. The financial situation just got worse with the passage of the Continuing Resolution (CR) and only more inflation can come of it. There is no political will to stop the disastrous spending put into every congressional bill. The BRICs nations will benefit from this act, more aid and comfort to those trying to destroy the US, but the competing nations are doing so because they recognize the insanity that has gripped the officers of our ship of state. Those nations see as well as most citizens that the United States is acting in increasingly irrational and self-harmful ways, taking their investments down with it, so they’ve stopped buying our debt and started liquidating our bonds as a defensive measure against our recklessness.

Americans can not just continue to use the means and methods that have always worked before, they no longer work. Elections, legal action, petitions, protests and revolts have been hijacked, turned into criminal activities instead of political expressions of disapproval. That ensures the United States can do nothing other than collapse, taking all of us down into the dark, cold sea.

Unless the common sailors stand up and challenge not only the officers, but any in authority, they will go down with the ship. In this scenario, they will try to kill us all before we can do that, but they’re doing that just to get to some enormously stupid Net-Zero. They are that evil.

They are undeniably that; the way our Masters and their pet-poodle media manufactory work in concert to conceal their motives and intent, deflect or misdirect any attempt to closely examine their actions, then flat-out lie about their results—all point unerringly towards that inescapable conclusion. I left TL’s final ‘graph out of the excerpt so as not to spoil anybody’s Christmas, but it states the underlying cause of this whole sordid, stinking mess flatly, concisely and with nary a flinch. The rest of the essay is every bit as well-written and direct, and you’ll probably never forgive yourself if you don’t go read the whole thing.

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Street justice

Posted on October 2, 2023October 2, 2023 by Mike

When vigilantism is all that’s left, then vigilantism it shall damned well be.

A 26-year-old taxi driver from the Middle East was reported for rape against a 14-year-old girl – and then found hanged in a nature reserve. Now the girl, her boyfriend and three of his brothers are suspected of the very troublesome murder, which according to the prosecutor had the character of “an execution”.

The events began in February this year when the then 15-year-old girl reported that the taxi driver had raped her when she was 14.

On March 26, a taxi was found abandoned, overflowing and with the taximeter in progress on a parking at Hjälstaviken nature reserve in Enköping municipality north of Stockholm.

On April 1, the taxi driver – was found hung in a tree 500 meters from the car.

Aww, what a shame. Bayou Peter says:

That’s what happens when the authorities can’t or won’t act against criminals, particularly unwanted alien intruders (of which Sweden has an outsize proportion among its population). It’s not limited to Sweden by any means. Friends, acquaintances and contacts of mine in law enforcement around these parts, ranging from Oklahoma City to Dallas/Fort Worth and from Amarillo to Texarkana, have all reported “unintended consequences” of crimes, sometimes fatal for the criminals, other times just very, very painful and/or impoverishing. I’d say I’ve heard of at least a couple of dozen occurrences over the past year or two, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

When police will no longer respond to a crime because it’s too “minor” for them to bother about, or because they’re too busy elsewhere, or because it’s politically incorrect to make a fuss about certain crimes and/or perpetrators…people will take it upon themselves to act. The authorities don’t like that, and will doubtless threaten dire consequences, but it’s already happening and it’s going to go on happening. After all, if those same authorities ignore the rule of law and the provisions of our constitution by encouraging (and even paying for) massive alien invasion, they shouldn’t be surprised when the crimes committed by those aliens (an increasing proportion of them, I’m told) attract consequences that also ignore the law and the constitution. One good (?) turn deserves another, and all that sort of thing.

BP unequivocally avows that he disapproves of such, but at this late date I can’t honestly say the same myself; far as I’m concerned, the bestial thug got exactly what he had coming to him, no more nor less. The Proper Authorities having consciously abjured their sworn duty to protect their citizenry in favor of political correctness, “diversity,” and multi-culti virtue signalling, I’m not exactly distraught at seeing the prey turn predator.

Ultimately, blame rests squarely on those in positions of trust and authority—both in Sweden, the US, and across most of Western Civ, sadly—who foolishly decided that importing Third World wolves en masse to have at the First World sheep without so much as a token nod towards assimilation and acculturation was a good idea. Left to their own devices, there’s only so much predation ordinary people will put up with, which is only meet and just.

The true immorality here lies neither with those finally forced to take action in their own defense, nor even with the wolves simply doing the things wolves will do. Rather, it rests with those who, having voluntarily taken solemn oaths to secure their nation’s borders and protect those within them, conspire to fling open the gates to the marauding hordes and allow them—hell, encourage them, in fact—to run completely amok. Such circumstances make vigilante reprisal inevitable; it not only will happen, it damned well ought to. Peter sums it up:

It’s very telling that many governments and their agencies are coming down more and more in favor of evil, and against good, in defiance of their citizens. It’s not just about crime – it’s about every aspect of our lives.

Precisely so. Bad as it is, what we have here is more than just defiance of said citizens, and worse as well. It’s active, open betrayal of them. Intolerable conditions will not forever be tolerated—not whilst the most tatterdemalion scrap of honor and self-respect remains among those put-upon souls subjected to them, it won’t. Every society has its breaking point, just as the individuals who created it do. Thus the day must surely dawn when the betrayed will rise up to repay their abusers in full measure, to the last bitter dregs. To expect otherwise is daylight barking madness.

Predator-class blaggards, note ye well. Their Ruling Class enablers: same-same, perhaps even moreso. We see you.

Update! Note, also, this unforgettable scene from The Watchmen.

“All the whores and politicians will look up and shout, ‘Save us!’ And I’ll whisper: NO.”

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Wide-screen TVs, 500 dollar sneakers, and KFC hardest hit

Posted on September 27, 2023September 27, 2023 by Mike

Another Nee-grow scumbag* offed by a cop in self-defense, another American city burned and looted by frothing, yowling baboons.

Widespread Mass Looting Overnight in Philly
Mass looting is being reported all over Philadelphia tonight. There are accounts of Center City stores being cleaned out by looters, including Lululemon, the Apple Store, a Foot Locker near the Liberty Bell, and many others.

One woman screamed, “Everyone must eat!” at the looting of a wine store.

Thugs even tried to loot a Popeyes restaurant:

Because OF COURSE they did. “Hey yo, we be loo-inn ‘n’ sheeit, yo!”

they really just tried to loot popeyes😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂 pic.twitter.com/Hlyxj9jhWC

— da flyest. (@Z4Bitch)

September 27, 2023

If you are surprised by anything at all in that video, you are beyond help and should probably check yourself into some kind of home. Onwards.

There are unconfirmed reports of looters livestreaming their crimes, monitoring police scanners, and coordinating their efforts on social media.

The looting is reportedly in response to murder charges being dropped against a cop who allegedly acted in self-defense during a traffic stop. Eddie Irizarry, who is Hispanic*, pulled a knife on cops while in his vehicle.

Hispanic, eh? Well, what the hell, any excuse will do.

According to Fox29:

A judge has dismissed all charges, including a murder count, against Philadelphia Police Officer Mark Dial who shot and killed a driver as he sat inside his vehicle last month.

Philadelphia Municipal Judge Wendy Pew made her ruling Tuesday after watching video of the fatal shooting of 27-year-old Eddie Irizarry. The defense had asserted that Officer Mark Dial was acting in self-defense when he fired his weapon at close range through the rolled-up driver’s side window of Irizarry’s sedan during a vehicle stop on August 14….

…Irizarry’s family has said that Dial deserves a long prison sentence. The defense, meanwhile, has blasted Krasner’s decision to charge Dial with murder.

“When police officers ordered him to show his hands, he instead produced a weapon and pointed it at an armed police officer,” lawyer Brian McMonagle told reporters this month. “In no world (are) those facts murder.”

Not surprisingly, the District Attorney’s Office, headed by Soros DA Larry Krasner, announced that it would appeal the decision. Philadelphia Mayor Jim Kenney inflamed the situation by tweeting his support for the man who pulled a knife on police officers.

Which, along with the rest of the PJM report, only means that the people of Philadelphia richly deserve whatever they get. As is usually the case, I’m with Sefton on this.

Honestly, my give-a-shit-ometer is barely registering. And I have many friends and acquaintances who live in or near Center City and in the outlying burbs, along with an abiding affection for that town. At least the town as it was years ago. Sorry to friends and family and others who voted for this as well as that overgrown, slovenly brain-addled sloth loping around the Senate and toking on spliffs in the cloak room, election after election. You got exactly what you voted for so enjoy it, my erstwhile friends. I pray you all wake the hell up and fast. I fear you never will even if you should come face to face with these poor innocent victims of institutional white supremacy. I’ve got news for you; flashing your BLM t-shirt won’t shield you.

Nor should it, either. As far as I’m concerned, the voters of Philly brought all this on themselves; now, they get to enjoy the ride they volunteered themselves for. So sit back and suck on it, assholes.

As of 11:45 p.m., looting is ongoing in the City of Brotherly Love, and police are struggling to keep up with all the reports. Pray for their safety tonight.

Shyeeeaaah, NO. Myself, I’ll be praying for casualties, as yet another shitlib city gets exactly what it voted for, good and hard. Maybe Abbott could send three or eight busloads of “migrants” to the City of Brotherly Love to help out in their time of trouble.

Local developments update! Breaking news from CLT: Gibmedats are gathering in the downtown area, threatening to “burn this mothafackah up ’n’ sheet” in a major chimp-out if De White Mayng doesn’t immediately agree to bring back Price’s Chicken Coop, in its old location.

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Truck THIS

Posted on September 24, 2023September 24, 2023 by Mike

Is this post related to the one immediately below? Oh, you just bet your numb ass it is.

Truck This: Why I’m Leaving the Long-Haul Industry
I’ve been a truck driver for over 20 years. I suppose I always knew I would be, ever since that career day in the third grade when among all the kids dressed like doctors and baseball players, there I stood dressed like Jerry Reed from Smokey and the Bandit. Pop culture in the 80s painted the picture of truckers as rugged men, wild and free, burdened by nothing except their own wanderlust. That romanticized version of the American truck driver still lingers in the back of my mind, but in recent years the burden of government regulation has proven to be greater than my desire to see what’s over the next hill.

Oppressive regulation in the trucking industry has been around almost as long as the iconic chrome bulldog on the hood of Mack trucks. Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Federal Motor Carrier Act (FMCA) of 1935 during his first term. This gave the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), an agency originally formed to regulate railroads, the authority to regulate the burgeoning business of moving goods by tractor-trailer. The ICC ultimately decided which companies could haul certain goods, for whom, where, and what they could charge. The ICC even decided if new transportation companies could enter the market by requiring eager upstarts to prove their services were “needed.”

The only exemptions to these laws were in the agricultural sector. FDR and his horde of central planners did not want to cause an increase in food prices during a time when many Americans were already struggling to put food on the table. Nevermind the tacit admission that the FMCA would raise prices on all other goods. This exemption had its own unintended consequences. While independent drivers, commonly referred to as wildcatters in driver slang, were not subject to the price floors previously mentioned, they were limited to hauling only agricultural goods. This limitation caused a significant logistical dilemma for wildcatters delivering in industrialized parts of the country, and is largely responsible for the mythos of the outlaw trucker we all know today from music and film. Whether in an old country song from Red Sovine or Kurt Russell’s character in Big Trouble in Little China, such renegades are almost always hauling agricultural goods.

Thankfully, a trend towards deregulation began in the 1970s, and the cesspool of cronyism and perverse incentives created by FDR was substantially reined in with the FMCA of 1980. This is why we now see hundreds, if not not thousands of company names sprawled along the sides of 53-foot trailers. Granted, we still have the ICC, though today it is known as the Department of Transportation, and any truck driver that has had to spend 10 hours at a scale house without a shower or a hot meal over a minor infraction of hours of service rules (another specter of the FMCA of 1935) will tell you it remains quite burdensome. But things are still better than they used to be.

Unfortunately, the federal government continues its misguided attempts to control an industry regulators know little to nothing about. But today’s attempts tend to focus more on something they understand even less than trucking: technology.

Odd, innit, how so much of the intrusive, meddlesome legislation that still hobbles ordinary workaday Americans to this very day originated with über-Left/liberal FDR—scion of one clan amongst several of a de facto if not de jure American Royalty class, a class which to this day we flatter ourselves does not, indeed cannot, exist—who is still worshipped by contemporary shitlibs as if he were some kind of demi-God.

The author goes on to discuss electronic logs, the godawful Regen/DPF devices, and speed governors, soon to be inflicted on big-rig jockeys nationwide by our know-nothing DOT czar Pete “Penelope” Buttplug, before arriving at his grim but inevitable conclusion:

However well-intentioned these rules and regulations might be, it’s clear that no one is consulting with the long haul truckers about the totally foreseeable bad outcomes. The great problem with all central planning is that regulators lack local knowledge, and are not inclined to speak to the people living with the consequences of their decrees. Probably because we would tell them what idiots they are.

The last two decades I’ve spent traversing this beautiful nation have, by and large, been a wonderful experience. I have countless stories to share with other drivers over a cup of coffee at my favorite fuel stops or with my more stationary friends over a cold beer. I wouldn’t trade the things I’ve seen, the binds I’ve been in, or the successes I enjoyed, for anything. But the burden that has been laid on these old tired shoulders by bureaucrats and central planners has become more than I’m willing to bear. I’ll always yearn for the open road, but now I’ll have to satisfy that wanderlust in my pick-up truck. I’m pulling the parking brake on this Peterbilt for the last time.

Having spent well over twenty years myself as a freight-humper (ie, loading-dock ape) and -hauler, whose younger brother still slaves away in the industry*, I can understand the sentiment—although I must disagree vehemently with the risible notion that restrictive edicts that destroy livelihoods, erode liberty, and ruin lives are in any way “well-intentioned.” On the face of it, they cannot possibly be any such thing, being just one part of a well-established historical pattern that has never ended well for hoi-polloi kulaks such as truck drivers.

* When his dispatcher can even find any work for him, which has dried up almost completely thanks to the Biden Economic MIRACLE!©

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To laugh, and to cry

Posted on September 21, 2023 by Mike

Pretty funny one, if bitterly so, from Kurt Schlichter.

America Is Becoming a Joke

Becoming, Kurt?

The United States just lost an F-35 as part of its campaign to reduce itself from the greatest superpower in human history to a pitiful punchline. Ah, the magic of leftism – only it can make a great country like America ridiculous. From an inability to find its fighters to an unwillingness to defend its borders or prosecute criminals – with the exception of conservatives framed for the crime of conservativing – our country has become the Three Stooges without the dignity.

The first question that arises from the mystery jet is not what happened – we can safely assume it was some manner of gross incompetence – but what the plane’s pronouns were. We had the spectacle of the Marine Corps high command dragging itself away from one of its drag shows to ask regular folks if they could pretty please give the jarheads a hand finding their wayward fighter. They couldn’t even spin this fiasco effectively and brag about how their not being able to detect the $100 million aircraft just goes to show how darn good our stealth tech is. No, instead it was just exactly what it sounded like. We can’t keep track of our jets. The only ones happy about it had to be the Navy, since this was a welcome respite from the mockery it earned smashing its destroyers into other boats. Our Army – with its colonels running sex kennels – used to recruit with slogans like “Be All You Can Be,” and now it would probably be better off with “We Suck Less Than That Other Service That Lost The Jet.”

Over on Capitol Hill, where the People’s House that you get sent to jail for peopling inside is located, we have the Republican Charlie Browns once again teeing up to kick the football held by the Democrat Lucys. Yeah, this time will be different! The GOP has only had the better part of a year to get ready for this debt ceiling thing and to plot out a course of action to get some concessions. But have they? Ha! Why win when you can lose?

And on the Senate side, our minority leader keeps freezing up like a Windows blue screen as everyone explains how it is perfectly normal for McConnell to stand there rebooting every time someone puts a mic in his mug. And, of course, there’s Chumley the Congressman insisting that the august institution conform to his desire to dress like a guy playing $2 blackjack hands at Circus Circus on a Monday morning.

We have a president who sounds both like English is his second language and that he’s gotten into the cooking sherry. We have a vice president who, if not for fractured cliches and bizarre cackling, would not be speaking at all. Biden takes the short stairs to get up to the short bus, which is what Air Force One now is. Hey, at least they haven’t lost it. Yet.

Heh. I especially like that “what the plane’s pronouns were” bit. He carries on in like vein from there, all of it good, juicy stuff. Best of all, he resists the urge to start up with the usual blibbering in the last two ‘graphs about how we’re gonna vote so hard we kick their sorry asses black, blue, and purple in the 2024 presidential “elections,” yo! Maybe Col Schlichter has at last outgrown all that airy-fairy horseshit.

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Hey, did somebody misplace a Turducken?

Posted on September 19, 2023September 19, 2023 by Mike

It would seem so, yeah.

Search for missing F-35 Lightning II fighter jet continues after pilot ejects during ‘mishap’
U.S. military officials are searching for a missing F-35 jet after a “mishap” caused its pilot to eject on Sunday afternoon.

Joint Base Charleston said on Facebook that the aircraft was a Lockheed Martin F-35 Lightning II belonging to Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort. The pilot ejected safely and was transported to a local medical center.

The base is working with Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort to help locate the missing aircraft. Emergency response teams have been deployed to find the jet.

“Based on the jet’s last-known position and in coordination with the FAA, we are focusing our attention north of JB Charleston, around Lake Moultrie and Lake Marion,” Joint Base Charleston said in a statement on Facebook.

Anyone with information about the jet’s whereabouts is urged to contact JB Charleston Base Defense Operations Center at 843-963-3600.

That strange sound you hear is hilarity, ensuing. For his part, BCE has a question.

Let me get this straight…
An 80 million dollar aircraft
Known as the “Flying Turducken” or “The Turd”
80 fucking million dollars, and they don’t even have the fucking thing LoJacked!?!
My car is fucking LoJacked FFS.

Not only that, but as I recollect, commercial airliners; boats/ships of a certain size both civilian and military; tractor-trailer rigs; and even most cars nowadays are all equipped with some sort of locator-beacon/tracking device or another. Have been for years, in fact. Yet somehow, a fully-tricked-out, state of the art, next-generation air-superiority fighter—supposedly the very best Amerika v2.0 can design, build, and deploy, the very tippy-top of the top of the line—ISN’T?

Naah, not sketchy AT. ALL. Now look, everybody, over there: SQUIRREL!!!

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“The writing is on the wall”

Posted on September 14, 2023 by Mike

What more is there to say, really? Because it IS.

We used to have a proper country but now McDonald’s is removing self-service soda machines and the writing is on the wall 😭
Welcome to the future of fast food.

You have to order at kiosks because the restaurants can’t afford cashiers. But they also can’t trust you to fill up your own Coke or Mickey D’s Sweet Tea, so you’ll have to get your beverage from the pimply teen at the counter who couldn’t take your order.

At least, within the next few years, that’s going to be the case at every McDonald’s restaurant in the US.

The official story from Mickey D’s is that this is to keep a uniform service to all customers so that everyone gets what they order.

But the real reason is that, in some locations, they have to deal with common criminals coming into the stores and using the soda fountain without paying.

It will also certainly cut down on the number of refills people get as well.

But that’s life in the modern world. You have to place your own order because they can’t afford cashiers, and you can’t fill up your own drink because there are too many thieves around.

Ain’t life in Amerika v2.0 grand?

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The Over the (Capitol) Hill gang

Posted on September 7, 2023September 7, 2023 by Mike

Ron Hart has way too much fun making sport of our enfeebled gerontocracy.

Even though Joe Biden could throw himself a successful surprise party, he is not the only one aging out in Washington. Senators Mitch McConnell and Dianne Feinstein are on their last legs. They have too much power for their parties to let them step down. Along with Biden, they have become Weekend at Bernie’s politicians.

Propped up by their lobbyists, staff and benefactors to perpetuate their power for the benefit of those who bought and paid for them, our gerontocracy shuffles on.

Maybe I am too hard on lobbyists. We need them. Who else would pay $550,000 for Hunter Biden’s artwork? “Three Dogs Playing Poker while Smoking Crack” art is in the eye of the beholder.

It probably does not matter how mentally impaired those in Congress are (Senator John Fetterman of PA comes to mind). With votes dictated by their party leaders, D.C. is shirts and skins; everyone votes as they are told along party lines. For years now, there has been no real debate or intellectual swaying of opinions.

Yet it seems none of these folks will let go. Power is too seductive and too compelling. When I worked in Washington while attending Georgetown, folks called Washington “Hollywood for Ugly People.” I did not get the joke until troll Alan Greenspan married NBC reporter Andrea Mitchell.

Henry Kissinger said it best: “Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.”

Let’s face it, few politicians have any other marketable skills. The difference between a prostitute and a politician? No one would walk up three flights of stairs at one in the morning to spend time with a politician.

Biden has the ability to hide his own Easter eggs, which then begs the question: who is running our government? Elected politicians or this permanent political class in Washington, D.C.? Clearly, with the actions of the DOJ, FBI, DOD and the medical/industrial complex, it is our unelected Deep State.

Forget term limits, what we need are hard and fast AGE limits for all Mordor on the Potomac ProPols. It’s no more than fair; if Americans in certain occupations other than politics can be required to retire at (usually) 70, then why shouldn’t politicians be subject to same? Say, forcible retirement at 65 and, for any who have been roosting in DC for a period of more than ten (10) years, a mandatory spend-more-time-at-home-with-your-constituents age of no more than 50.

As Insty quips: “Caligula sent a horse to the Senate. We just send part of the horse.” Myself, I think Caligula was really onto something there, although Glenn’s imputation would suit me just fine also. I mean, could it really be any worse than what we have now?

The real solution, of course, is to remove the excess of power, prestige, and bribe-money from the current seat of national government: disperse the federal bureaucracy entire out to various locations in the once-again-Sovereign States, then shrink FederalGovCo itself drastically, thereby removing the source of all temptation for the diseased, power-and-control-obsessed fucksticks who scramble to get themselves into position to succumb to it. But alas, that’s just another item on the long, long list of things that ain’t ever gonna happen, I’m afraid.

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America That Was: what happened?

Posted on September 7, 2023September 7, 2023 by Mike

From Dream Factory to Dystopian Nightmare.

America was once the world’s dream factory. We turned imagination into reality, from curing polio to landing on the Moon to creating the internet. And we were confident that more wonders lay just over the horizon: clean and infinite energy, a cure for cancer, computers and robots as humanity’s great helpers, and space colonies. (Also, of course, flying cars.) Science fiction, from The Jetsons to Star Trek, would become fact.

But as we moved into the late 20th century, we grew cautious, even cynical, about what the future held and our ability to shape it. Too many of us saw only the threats from rapid change. The year 2023 marks the 50th anniversary of the start of the Great Downshift in technological progress and economic growth, followed by decades of economic stagnation, downsized dreams, and a popular culture fixated on catastrophe: AI that will take all our jobs if it doesn’t kill us first, nuclear war, climate chaos, plague and the zombie apocalypse. We are now at risk of another half-century of making the same mistakes and pushing a pro-progress future into the realm of impossibility.

As with almost every problem in the Western world, if you want to find the roots of what Pethokoukis calls the Great Downshift there’s but one place you need to look: cherchez le shitlib, mon frere. Sounds like another likely candidate for Mike’s Iron Laws, I believe.

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Missive from the Valley of the Shadow

Posted on September 4, 2023September 4, 2023 by Mike

When it comes to writing about politics, Mark Steyn reminds us he’s still the baddest mutha in the Valley.

So no, I haven’t been reading a lot of Trump indictment analysis by Andrew McCarthy, Jonathan Turley, Alan Dershowitz… They’re all great legal minds, but how naïve do you have to be still to think that America has anything recognizable as a “justice” system? I have the advantage of Andy et al in that I’m a Canadian who has been in a mere civil lawsuit in the District of Columbia that is now entering its twelfth year. When you turn the calendar on Year Twelve, you know it’s a racket – and all that’s happened over the last decade or so is that the racket’s gotten more shameless and cocksure.

My DC rubbish is a First Amendment case, so you can imagine how impressed I am, eleven years on, by my so-called rights under that Amendment. Trump’s is also a First Amendment case, and perhaps a more consequential one – because there won’t be a First Amendment if a politician can be charged with conspiracy for disputing the results of American elections, which objectively are among the crappest in the world, by comparison with Norway, Bostwana and most other functioning or even semi-functioning polities.

“More shameless and cocksure”? Perish the thought, Mark! Why, everyone knows they’re afraid of us, literally pissing themselves with terror at us! Right? RIGHT?

In a pig’s eye. Which is all the more reason not to take their shit, but to spit defiantly in their fucking faces at any and every opportunity, lest they turn out to have been perfectly correct in their assessment of whether or not they ought to fear us…because we ourselves proved them to be.

Indeed, if you think the central issue is not Ukraine or the next variant but the suffocating corruption in which the most powerful agencies in the land behave ever more openly as organs of a one-party state, you’re sticking with Trump because the permanent state’s weekly indictments of him are the most outrageous embodiment of the problem.

These are not normal times: in the years ahead, ever greater corruption – political, judicial, bureaucratic, technological – will be necessary to constrain the people’s choices to the shriveled offerings of the Uniparty. So, if you reckon it’s bad now, wait till next time. GOP primary voters seem to get that at least. The real GOP “suicide mission” (to use John Hinderaker’s phrase) is pretending that any of what’s happening right now is part and parcel of politics in a long-settled society of self-governing citizens.

Whatever their “suicidal” inclinations, the base seems to get that – and they’re disinclined to be told by their betters to pretend otherwise.

From his lips to God’s etc, and may it ever be thus.

Tons more rich, buttery goodness in between the excerpted passages—TONS—every last word of it vital, must-read material, as has always been Steyn’s wont. Thankfully, despite his recent health issues, Mark is still with us, for the nonce. Alas, though, as is true of all of us, someday he won’t be. No matter when it might come, that blackest of days will be upon us far too soon. For Mark Steyn’s is a truly irreplaceable voice, and the righteous cause of human liberty will suffer a staggering blow thereupon.

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Lies, damned lies, and government statistics

Posted on September 1, 2023September 1, 2023 by Mike

The Biden Economic MIRACLE!™ continues apace, God help us all.

Warning, this link is to CNN, and it is pure regime-promoting propaganda, discussing how a major downward revision in new job creations is actually good news, because it beat expectations on how badly the Bureau of Labor was going to have to adjust its previously published fabrications. Or something to that effect.

”America Added 306,000 Fewer Jobs Last Year Than We Thought” [CNN Business – 8/23/2023]

Link not transcribed, of course, because fuck CNN, that’s why. Onwards.

Despite the spin, there are a few hard numbers I’d like to extract:

US job growth during much of the past year was weaker than previously projected by a little more than 300,000 jobs, according to new federal data released Wednesday.

As part of the agency’s annual benchmark review of payroll data, the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised down March 2023’s employment gains by 306,000 positions.

This means that 306,000 fewer jobs were created over the 12 months ending March 2023. How significantly was the data overstated?

When spread through the prior year, that amounts to about 25,000 fewer net jobs added per month, meaning that the average monthly job gain for the 12 months ended in March 2023 was nearly 312,000 versus 337,000, BLS data shows.

Let me do the math. The BLS overstated new job creation by 8.0%. That is not a rounding error or a minor miss, it’s a significant and deliberate government lie. And of course, since it is policy at BLS to publish false, inflated figures to help Democrat administrations, it is safe to assume that the revisions are also false. The Bureau of Labor Statistics is simply trying to adjust their falsified data reports enough so that they can somehow, sort of reconcile to surveys of actual employment. They have to do this to set the benchmark before the next round of completely bogus jobs reports is released.

How persistent is the jobs report fraud? Take a look at this graph from Zero Hedge, which shows that every month so far in 2023 the BLS publishes an overstated jobs report, which the regime media dutifully touts as a sign of great economic progress under President Biden, and then that same monthly report is later adjusted downward without media fanfare.

The July report was the first one this year to report under 200,000 new jobs, which means that the actual number is going to be even lower than the already disappointing 187,000 jobs reported.

Damned seditious violent treasonous MAGAT bastige, spreading all those damnable lies about our fine government and media establishments. Where’s our fine, upstanding FBI and their paramilitary SWAT teams when you need ‘em for another of their patented late-night, home invasion-style raids, anyway?

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Chevy’s in the Driveway, and Oliver Has a New Song

Posted on August 22, 2023August 25, 2023 by Barry

Another good one, mixed with dogs and Chevrolet’s. The man is the real deal.

Via: Gateway Pundit

Controversy! My wife informs me that some places call the song “Brink of War”.

I have checked his youtube channel and “I Want To Go Home” is correct.

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Power failure

Posted on August 16, 2023 by Mike

Coming all too soon to an aging, overburdened, decrepit electric grid near you.

A Silent Threat to the Energy Transition: America’s Broken Infrastructure Policy
So much of the conversation focuses on the tired and misleading narrative about Oil & Gas villains vs. Renewable heroes. The true enemy of our sustainable energy future is the nation’s broken infrastructure policy. We could greenlight every renewable project in development today and innovate every piece of technology needed to meet our climate goals, and it wouldn’t matter because we lack the ability to utilize and store the energy we create.

Infrastructure isn’t top of mind for most people, but it has gotten more attention in recent years, particularly after Congress passed the massive $1 trillion infrastructure bill in 2021. The legislation included funding for everything from airport repairs to clean drinking water. It also contained the largest investment in clean energy transmission and the electric grid in U.S. history – $65 billion – to be used for new transmission lines for renewable energy, advanced transmission and distribution technologies, and research hubs for next-generation technologies, including carbon capture and clean hydrogen.

But what good are new transmission lines and next-gen technologies if they never make it past the black hole of red tape, interminable delays, supply-chain problems, and exploding costs that derail so many energy projects?

Much of the U.S. grid was built in the 1960s and 1970s, and over 70% of it is currently more than a quarter-century old. But age isn’t the grid’s only problem. The U.S. power infrastructure was built to bring energy from where fossil fuels are burned to where the energy will be used. The nation’s electricity industry, meanwhile, grew via a patchwork of local utility companies whose targets were to meet local demand and maintain grid reliability.

Emissions-free energy sources like sun and wind are, by nature, intermittent. They’re abundant only in places where the sun is shining or the wind is blowing, and therefore need to be stored and transmitted to other locations where there is demand for power.

Along with the need for new ways to transmit and store sustainable energy, the existing grid will need a major upgrade as demand for electricity rises to meet the needs of electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other replacements for conventional energy sources. A modernized and expanded grid “will be the backbone of the energy transition – and a requirement of any realistic decarbonization pathway,” according to a 2022 report by McKinsey & Company.

There is no silver bullet to fix this complex set of issues. But it’s clear we need a strategic approach to infrastructure investment, and fast. Part of that investment needs to come from Washington in the form of comprehensive policy and regulatory reform, which is the single biggest blocker to private investment and healthy competition in the energy sector.

Simply put, building energy projects is complicated. Who pays for what is even more complicated, as processes, permitting, payment, and incentivization are all misaligned. Current policy doesn’t support the buildout we need; in fact, it slows it down and exacerbates the problem. Without policy and regulatory reform, we’ll continue to pay more and more to maintain our quality of life. Even worse, we’ll never reach the finish line in the race to a sustainable energy future.

I’ll say it yet again: funny, innit, how almost all of our contemporary woes have their origins in the same place: a greedy, grasping, over-powerful central goobermint?

(Via Bayou Peter)

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Dissing the franchise

Posted on August 12, 2023August 12, 2023 by Mike

In his latest Substack post Glenn suggests something I’ve been in favor of myself for years now.

Vivek Ramaswamy Channels Robert Heinlein, and Me
Raising the voting age, and demanding a commitment

So Vivek Ramaswamy is channeling a weird mix of me and Robert Heinlein with his new voting age proposal. (Hey, he could do worse).

The proposal is that the voting age should be raised to 25 by constitutional amendment (necessary to overcome the 26th Amendment, passed in 1971, which set the voting age at 18). Younger people could vote, but only if they had served in the military or as first responders, or if they could pass the same test given to foreigners applying for U.S. citizenship.

The first part of the proposal echoes a column I wrote some years ago about raising the voting age. After some unfortunate events at Yale and the University of Missouri, I wrote:

To be a voter, one must be able to participate in adult political discussions. It’s necessary to be able to listen to opposing arguments and even — as I’m doing right here in this column — to change your mind in response to new evidence.

This evidence suggests that, whatever one might say about the 18-year-olds of 1971, the 18-year-olds of today aren’t up to that task. And even the 21-year-olds aren’t looking so good.

We tend to treat voting as an act of self-expression, but it is also, in a sense, an act of violence. It is both a sort of proxy for violence, measuring the size of the forces on either side of an issue, and it leads, eventually, to real violence, since voting establishes the mechanism for passing and instituting laws that will eventually be enforced with violence. (As my old law professor Stephen Carter says, when you want a law passed, you say that you’d be willing to kill the people who don’t obey your wishes. That it’s at second hand, through the institution of government, doesn’t make it less violent, just less obvious.)

So we want voters to be reasonably informed, and capable of mature judgment. (At present it looks as if a college education may often actually make them less capable of mature judgment).

Science fiction writer Robert Heinlein, in his famous novel Starship Troopers, envisioned a society where voters, too, had to demonstrate their patriotism before being allowed to vote. In his fictional society, the right to vote came only after some kind of dangerous public service — in the military, as a volunteer in dangerous medical experiments, or in other ways that demonstrated a willingness to sacrifice personally for the common good. The thought was that such voters would be more careful, and less selfish, in their voting.

That seems to be at the core of Ramaswamy’s proposal for letting people with military or first responder service vote sooner. Military service is a sort of “expensive signaling” of one’s willingness to serve the nation even at high personal cost. Such people are, on average, likely to be more public spirited.

The part of Ramaswamy’s proposal that I’m least enthusiastic about is the citizenship test. America had those sorts of tests before, and in the abstract they sound fine, even laudable. But historically they were applied/graded very unfairly, so as to disadvantage marginalized groups (chiefly, but by no means exclusively, blacks) and keep them from voting. I have no faith in the institutions that would apply and grade such tests today.

In the days following our Founding the franchise was limited to landowners, based on the idea that, pace Heinlein, they’d earned the right to vote via having what one might call skin in the game. After reading Starship Troopers about, oh, a dozen times, the relentless drumbeat advocating endless expansion of the franchise started to clang quite discordantly in my ear. The problem we have, it seemed to me, isn’t that not enough Americans vote, but that way too many of them do.

And most of them do so ignorantly, almost blindly, without even the most cursory of nods towards researching the candidates, the relevant issues, and the positions on said issues espoused by a given candidate. They pull the lever for the name that’s most familiar to them—or the incumbent, depending on the particular voter’s level of awareness—and go home congratulating themselves on having done their civic duty so nobly, so selflessly. Then, they forget the whole ordeal until another four years have flown by.

Well, bollocks to all that rot. With millions upon millions of complete stupes voting not their convictions or the issues they care most about, but based entirely on who they’ve seen on TeeWee the most during the month or so they’ve actually been paying any attention to politics whatsoever, is it any wonder the Republic is in the dire shape it now is?

Bottom line: Limbaugh used to rail about “Low Information Voters,” but it’s my carefully-considered opinion that no healthy polity ought to allow those Low-Infornation types to vote in the first place. If it does, it won’t BE healthy for very long. Most of these LIVs couldn’t tell you who James Madison or John Jay was, much less what the guy running for their State House or Senate thinks about anything.

But hey, he’s the one with the nice hair and smile, right?

WelpLostMyJob

Pshaw. I know, I know, just another of the myriad things that ain’t ever gonna happen, not a snowball’s chance of it. But still—I’m right just the same, and you damned well know I am too.

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Music for Mike

Posted on August 12, 2023August 14, 2023 by Barry

When I finished high school in 1971 a young man could get a job, get married, have children, and with some hard work and showing up to the job on time every day have a nice life. I have friends that did just that.

It’s not likely anymore, as most of us probably know. And this song which is going viral as they say makes the point pretty damn well.

Hat tip – Sundance at the Treehouse

And a nice update –
1) now the #1 song on US iTunes charts
2) In just four days, the video of Anthony singing Rich Men North of Virginia has amassed more than 20 million views on Twitter, and millions more across other social media platforms.

Oliver played in NC today

Rich Men North of Richmond

Update 2:
Oliver has 9 spots in the iTunes top 20, including #1, and 4 of the top 5
Resonates. There are more of us than there are of them

Oliver ITunes Sensation

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