America that was, America that is, America that shall be
As James Ellroy always says: Off the record, on the QT, and very hush-hush.
Always has right @JoeBiden #HuntersCocaine https://t.co/11uOcDYPcZ pic.twitter.com/rYKMNK8WZ8
— Stephen Richardson (@richirich1968)
That’s some truly hellacious sleuthing right there, Stephen. Great job! “Unlikely to be found,” according to the “authorities”? That’s because they’re unlikely to be looking, or not very hard at least.
1Remember that 800 pound gorilla in the room I mentioned the other day in the Eyrie post? Well, in the way of all 800 pound gorillas, he’s still there, and isn’t going anywhere until he’s captured the undivided attention those pesky, implacable 800 pound gorillas always tend to seek…and, sooner or later, one way or another, get.
California Can Either Charge Its EV Fleet Or Keep The Lights On
Can California transition to a portfolio of 100% renewable energy sources and still generate enough electricity to meet the state’s future needs, including the addition of millions of electric cars on the road?
A: No. Next question. For that matter, neither can any other state. Turns out, there’s a reason why the human race abandoned “renewable” (read: inadequate to meet the demands of a modern industrial civilization) energy for more reliable, productive sources several centuries ago, see. UNEXPECTED!™
California is already incapable of generating enough electricity, importing 30% of its current electricity needs from other states. With respect to current generation sources, nearly 60% of California’s in-state electricity generation is produced by natural gas and nuclear power plants. Including conventional hydroelectric generation, which does not count as a renewable source for purposes of California’s policies, nearly two-thirds of the state’s current electricity comes from disfavored generation sources.
It is doubtful that California will be able to generate sufficient electricity to meet future energy needs using only the favored generation sources; and it is not even close.
Overall, total electricity generated will be 21.1% below the amount of electricity demanded — and this does not even account for the impacts from all the likely future mandates. Beyond the electric vehicle mandates evaluated above, officials are rapidly prohibiting connections for stoves, furnaces, hot water heaters, and dryers in new construction projects.
There are reasons to be exceptionally skeptical that California’s current energy policy environment is achievable. Either the policies will cause extreme energy shortages and jeopardize quality of life or the state’s political leaders will need to repeal the current suite of mandates.
“Reasons to be skeptical”? Oh, you just bet there are at that. But since, as every good “liberal” knows, electricity is something that happens when you flip a light switch—just as food is something that comes from the grocery store—there really isn’t a problem here at all. It’s just a damnable lie made up by those godawful MAGA H8RRRZZZ to oppress them, that’s all.
2Delusional, or visionary? I report, Stephen Green derides.
Biden Wants to Build an 8,000-Mile Ocean Train, and I Say Let’s Do This!
Me too, whatever “this” may turn out to be.
On today’s installment of “What the Hell Did Biden Actually Just Say?” we have the alleged president of the most powerful country in the world announcing his plan to build, and I quote, “a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean.”
Seriously.
Those are his own words. This isn’t some Deep Fake video; it’s Presidentish Joe Biden speaking Wednesday night at the League of Conservation Voters’ annual Capital Dinner, whatever that is.
The icing on the Ocean Train cake is that massive solar farm in Angola that Biden is going to build just because those jerks next door in Namibia said it couldn’t be done.
Imagine the convenience and savings of boarding a train in Los Angeles bound for Honolulu, where you could spend the first night of your rail voyage stuffing your face with poi before heading off to your final destination: beautiful downtown Kochi, India.
Not that there isn’t a kink or two in Biden’s Ocean Train.
Aww. Party pooper. Spoilsport. Wet blanket. Naysayer. Dream-killer. I say we’ll never get anywhere as a nation if we don’t indulge every demented fantasy our beloved, got-it-together pRetend ***”pResident”*** can weave out of whole cloth, no matter how self-evidently preposterous it might be. DID YOUR HARD-NOSED PRAGMATIC REALISM PUT A MAN ON MARS YET, SMART GUY?!? Yeh, I didn’t THINK so. So, y’know, there.
Update! Ace speculates on what might really be going on with this arrant horseshit.
So what is Biden talking about?
A friend tells me we’re missing the real story. He says Biden is there vowing…to help China complete its “Belt and Road Initiative,” its bid to secure a big chunk of the world’s resources by building highways and railroads through Asia and Africa.
Here are his fuller remarks:
“China has their Belt and Road Initiative. It turned out to be their debt and destruction initiative. No, I’m serious. Not a joke. Well, we’re going to win, and we’re going to help.
We have plans to build a railroad from the Pacific all the way across the Indian Ocean. We have plans to build in — in Angola one of the largest solar plants in the world. I can go on, but I’m not. I’m going off-script. I’m going to get in trouble. (Laughter.)”
“We’re going to help” — we’re going to build the road network to feed China with mineral resources, because they’ve bankrupted themselves doing so. So we’re going to help and build that for them.
Makes perfect sense to me—insofar as anything Blibberin’ Biden ever says or does can be said to make sense, that is.
11Enviro-nuts, that’s why.
ENVIRONMENTALISTS ARE WHY WE CAN’T HAVE INFRASTRUCTURE
California’s high-speed electric train has burned through nearly $10 billion, far more than its original $9 billion bond, without building a single mile of track.Where did that money go?
$1.3 billion was spent on environmental impact clearances.
After over a decade, Brian Kelly, the CEO of the California High-Speed Rail Authority, cheerfully announced that, “we’re making true progress on nearing full environmental clearance for the entire Phase 1 high-speed rail project.” By the summer, the high-speed rail which hasn’t even begun construction might finally get its full environmental impact clearance. Perhaps.
California’s infamous high-speed train to nowhere, which began in 2009 and whose budget already tops $100 billion, financed by corrupt environmental cap-and-trade robbery that makes cryptocurrency seem legitimate by comparison, may seem like an outlier, but it’s not.
Every time presidents make a pitch for an infrastructure bill, they visit the Brent Spence Bridge over the Ohio River for a photo op.
“Mr. McConnell, help us rebuild this bridge,” Obama declared with his back to the bridge. “Help us rebuild America.
After Obama, Trump came to the bridge, and more recently Biden claimed that his infrastructure bill, which spent nearly three quarters of a billion on electric cars, and little on infrastructure, would finally fix the bridge. Over $10 million has been spent on environmental impact studies going back 18 years to explain why nothing much was being done about the bridge.
But why spend money on bridges when you can instead spend it on environmental reviews of hypothetical bridges? People can cross the former, but the politically connected get rich off the latter.
In Baton Rouge, Louisiana, $5 million was needed to fund an environmental impact study to build a new bridge, another $5 million to consider building a bridge in Mission, Texas. The current status of that bridge is unclear. After wasting millions and years on environmental impact studies, projects often never move forward due to changing finances or circumstances.
The endless environmental studies drain massive amounts of taxpayer money. For example, the Yeager Airport in Central West Virginia needed a $5.6 million grant for its environmental impact study. And the sheer scale of taxpayer money stolen by the green industry is not being tracked.
Why, it’s almost as if the whole Green Weenie, EnviroTard, Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ thing was nothing but a scam right from the start or something. But no, that can’t be right, the very idea is just completely absurd.
Isn’t it?
(Via Brother Bob)
5Life in a time of monsters ascendant.
Three Cheers for Tommy Robinson
The backbone of Britain.The last time we heard from Tommy Robinson was early last year. In a revealing documentary called The Rape of Britain, he took us to the town of Telford, England (population 142,000), where Muslim gang members had raped innumerable white girls while local police had refused not only to arrest the perpetrators but also to protect the victims. Now he’s back with an equally illuminating documentary entitled Silenced.
It begins with a minor incident that took place in 2018 on the playground of the Almondbury School in Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. According to the mainstream media version, Bailey McLaren, a racist white boy in his early teens, had “waterboarded” Jamal Hijazi, an innocent refugee from Syria of about the same age, and had acted utterly without provocation.
The story spread quickly around the globe. There was just one problem: it wasn’t remotely true. Bailey hadn’t waterboarded Jamal. He’d thrown a cup of water at him. It was on video. It wasn’t about race, and it certainly wasn’t unprovoked. In fact, Jamal had threatened to rape Bailey’s sisters. And, as Tommy discovered by doing the kind of footwork on the case that no other reporter bothered to do, Jamal had done much else besides. He’d knocked one classmate unconscious. He’d caused a boy to bleed by sticking him in the leg with a compass (presumably the kind used in math classes, not in navigation).
He’d threatened to stab a boy. He’d beaten up girls. He hit one girl with a hockey stick and bit another one so viciously that it caused a horrible wound. He routinely called female teachers “bitches.” He’d been caught carrying a knife and screwdriver at school. Adults who’d worked there described him as rude, nasty, a “little bastard,” a “horrible boy” with “no respect for women at all.” “He started on everyone,” recalled one school worker.
And they denied that Jamal was the victim of racism on anybody’s part. There’d been several other Syrian kids in the school at the same time, and none of them had experienced – or caused – any problems. Much was made by the media of a photo of Jamal with his arm in a cast; though the injury was blamed on Bailey, it turned out to be the result of another incident in which Jamal attacked a much younger boy only to be pulled forcefully off the child by a kid his own age.
As for Bailey, school staff agreed he was no bully. And no racist, either. “He had two half-caste sisters,” one of them pointed out. The man who’d been head teacher at the time of the incident said that Bailey was a “very articulate lad” who, if he hadn’t ended up at the center of this international firestorm, would likely have been looking forward to a “great future…I could see him being a lawyer or something.” He was also a decent kid who “would stand up for his peers.” Another school staffer agreed: “The way they treated poor Bailey was disgusting.” The audio of the playground incident makes it clear that when Bailey threw water at Jamal, he didn’t say anything racist; he said something like: “What are you going to say now?” In short, he was responding to something Jamal had said – namely, Jamal’s threat to rape Bailey’s sisters.
But nobody in the mainstream media reported any of this. Commentators around the world spoke about Bailey as if he was a monster and about Jamal – well, they spoke about Jamal in pretty much the same way that millions of ideologues spoke about George Floyd in the summer of 2020, or, if you prefer, in the way they’re now speaking about New York subway criminal-turned-martyr Jordan Neely. The execrable Piers Morgan, who likes to posture from time to time as a brave opponent of political correctness but who’s always prepared to virtue-signal about Islam, was quick to refer to Bailey as a “thug,” as a “lowlife,” and as “vermin,” and even to call for “severe retribution” against the child. (“Never,” notes Tommy in Silencing, “have I labeled Muslim children as vermin or called for violence against them.”)
Piers must’ve been pleased by what happened next. Bailey received thousands of online messages – threats to kill him, to firebomb his family’s home, to shoot his mother, to rape his sisters. Gangs prowled the streets of Huddersfield looking for him. Savages wandered the corridors of his school with machetes, ready to slice him up. Police drove Bailey and his family to what was supposedly meant as a safe place – a shabby little pay-by-the-hour fleabag hotel owned by Muslims and within spitting distance of three mosques. Rejecting this insulting offer, Bailey’s mother took matters into her own hands and quickly found a better hiding place for herself and her kids.
Utterly disgusting. I think it safe to say that the Second Battle of Britain hasn’t worked out nearly as salutarily as the first, probably owing at least in part to the absence of anything like a contemporary Winston Churchill on the current scene. Mucho kudos to Robinson for giving it the old college try anyhow, though. Read on for the ugly, ugly denouement, which is…well, ugly. This isn’t going to end well, not for Muzzrat “Great” Britain, not for Bailey or Robinson (who, disappointingly, even Elon Musk fucked over for no good reason), not for anybody.
Okay, so I finally finished reading the Frontpage mag article referenced earlier in my “Eyrie up” post, which was the subject of today’s Substack thangamabobber. It really does merit another mention and a further excerpt here on the CF main page, I think, which is a totally unprecedented occurrence around these h’yar parts.
Some amorphous “system” did not fail and could never rescue Neely. Neely’s family failed Neely, and then Neely failed himself. So many of his relatives have reported to the press that his mother’s murder, when he was only fourteen years old, devastated him. Where were they? Did they feed him, house him, teach him a narrative that enabled him to survive and thrive? If so, Neely listened to other narratives. Narratives that approved of dropping out of society and using an illegal drug that may have contributed to his violent behavior.
The “system,” and rotten old capitalist white supremacist Amerikkka, tried, again and again, to help Neely. Neely resisted help. “Mr. Neely was on what outreach workers refer to as the ‘Top 50’ list — a roster maintained by the city of the homeless people living on the street whom officials consider most urgently in need of assistance and treatment. He was taken to hospitals numerous times, both voluntarily and involuntarily.”
After one arrest for beating an elderly woman, Neely was treated with kid gloves. The Times reports, “He was to go from court to live at a treatment facility in the Bronx, and stay clean for 15 months. In return, his felony conviction would be reduced. He promised to take his medication and to avoid drugs, and not to leave the facility without permission. ‘This is a wonderful opportunity to turn things around, and we’re glad to give it to you,’ Mary Weisgerber, a prosecutor, said. ‘Thank you so much,’ Mr. Neely replied. But just 13 days later, he abandoned the facility. Judge Biben issued a warrant for his arrest.”
Jordan Neely was living his life by a narrative that facilitated violence and human decay. Living on the street, begging and threatening those who didn’t give, taking drugs, hurting, rather than contributing to society, were all acceptable plot points in that narrative. Those who give money to homeless panhandlers subsidize this narrative. Leftists who denigrate America and despise those of us who “work hard and play by the rules” advance this narrative.
Neely was not the only New Yorker living with trauma. On January 15, 2022, Michelle Go, an Asian-American woman “who did everything right,” was pushed in front of a subway train by an assailant sharing significant demographic details with Neely. Martial Simon was a homeless black man and said to be mentally ill. The subway murder of a good woman, Michelle Go, received a fraction of the attention allotted to Neely.
In April, 2022, Frank James mounted a terror attack in a subway car. He shot ten people. James was also black. On April 11, 2023, a teenager was shot dead on the subway; authorities say his death is most likely related to gang violence in a largely black housing project. On or before December 10, 2022, a man was stabbed to death on the subway. On October 23, 2022, video was released showing a black man shoving a man onto a subway track.
The New York City subway system is a deadly place. Crimes are disproportionately committed by black men. Passengers take that information with them when they enter the subway. When Neely, as reports indicate, began shouting in an irrational and threatening manner, passengers went into “fight or flight” mode. The three men who restrained Neely worked to keep him immobilized until police arrived.
Yeah, well, the dead giveaway as to what’s really going on here is that, when I lived in NYC back in the 90s—during Rudy Giuliani’s miraculous, unlooked-for, and continually-maligned-by-shitlibs resuscitation of the beleagured city, thank goodness—the subway was no such thing at all. It has been made that way, so as to reinforce a narrative and bolster The Plan even now being implemented by the Evil Left.
In truth, America’s major cities don’t have to be dangerous, anarchic, eternally-blighted nightmares unfit for human habitation. NYC, Detroit, Chicago, SF: once garden spots, eminently desirable places to live and/or work which were the envy of the Western world, all of them have been made the way they now are—on purpose, by nefarious villeins who assuredly do NOT have anyone’s best interests in mind other than their own.
Ought to be some way of thanking the Left properly for that, I just can’t think of what it might be. Well, other than the one hinted at in my post title, I mean.
4Molly and Mark Hemingway offer a counter-revolutionary counterproposal.
Unrigging Our Elections
Republicans need a serious counter-offensive if they want to stand a chance.It might not matter whom Republicans run for president in 2024.
MIGHT not? You funny, girl. Git on witcha bad self.
America’s propaganda press traffics in disinformation. Its Big Tech oligarchs censor news and information helpful to conservatives, while elevating biased news and information that helps the Left. And its election systems have been overrun by privately funded groups that run Democratic “get out the vote” campaigns to traffic ballots into ballot boxes. We catalogued this particularly complex problem in Rigged: How the Media, Big Tech, and the Democrats Seized Our Elections.
Instead of election day, we now have an “election season”—during which, over a period of months, we flood homes across the country with tens of millions of mail-in ballots, regardless of whether secretaries of state or local registrars have any idea if those ballots are being sent to the correct addresses. This in a country where 11% of residents move every year. We then wait for sophisticated partisan turnout operations funded by activist billionaires and run by ideological statisticians to round up those ballots in entirely selective ways.
In this world, concerns about candidate quality are irrelevant. If we don’t fix this complete capture of election infrastructure, it might be impossible for anyone with a sincere desire to prioritize the interests of voters over the ruling class to win a national election.
AGAIN, with that “might” bushwa. Mark and Molly go on to offer serious proposals for unfucking this seriously fucked-up mess, at least some of which might actually have merit. But honestly, I couldn’t get interested enough to finish reading ‘em. For my money, even Buck Throckmorton’s not-quite-despairing cynicism only barely begins to express it.
There is a vicious smear campaign going on by Democrats and their media allies against conservative Supreme Court justices, especially Clarence Thomas. The purpose of these attacks, of course, is to neutralize the authority of the conservative majority on the Supreme Court, and perhaps to even remove a member or two by impeachment. Others in conservative media have done a great job covering this coordinated media attack, so that is not what I am writing about today.
Beyond removing justices, the left has made it clear that if it has lost its iron-fisted control of the judiciary, then the judiciary’s role in governing the country is henceforth illegitimate.
Good. I agree. The judiciary’s role in governing our lives is illegitimate, and has been for a very long time.
A country that considers itself a “democracy” (or a “representative republic,” or whatever term indicates that the people elect their government) cannot have an unelected, unaccountable, and unreplaceable judiciary that has arrogated unto itself the power to govern, irrespective of laws and lawmakers.
Don’t misunderstand, wherever the right has gained control of the courts, we should use the courts to advance our agenda, just like the left did. There is nothing principled about judicial restraint if only one side employs it. But any control we currently have over a subset of the nation’s courts is itself fleeting, since the left conquers all unelected institutions.
Bottom line, for me at least: despite whatever fleeting and temporary inroads we might have made during Trump’s one and only term as PoTUS, the simple fact remains: Amerika v2.0 is clearly not a country that is capable of self-government. Not in any meaningful sense, it ain’t. As such, it is also no longer deserving of the opportunity.
There are many, many other issues more immediately in need of addressing before whatever emerges from the existential conflict against the Evil Left can renew any claim to be capable of self-government. Which doesn’t mean that any and all avenues such as those suggested by the esteemed Hemingways aren’t worth attempting, at least; they probably are. That said, though, I can’t say I expect much from ’em.
As I’ve so often said, I’d be happy indeed to be proven wrong about this. Alas for us all, I won’t be. In my view, any “counterrevolutionary” movement that preemptively rules out the very means by which America That Was itself was founded—ie, revolt by force of arms, violence, and bloodshed—is preemptively doomed to failure. Until sufficient numbers of us have confronted that fundamental truth and made their peace with it, all else is no more than futile head-shedding. The Left is now too firmly entrenched, the institutions it has co-opted too massive and powerful, for it to be otherwise. No amount of optimism and misplaced “hope” can overcome that.
Update! My longtime chum and compatriot Aesop spells it out frankly and explicitly, with nary a punch pulled, as is his usual wont.
You believe in individual responsibility? Great. Stop looking for Fearless Leader to hold your hand, wipe your butt, and tell you what to do, when, where, or to whom.
I’m not telling you to do or not do anything.
I’m telling you to figure it out for yourself. And do what seems best in your own mind. Nobody can hack that, nobody can read that, and nobody else can ever predict that. If in any one month 1000 Leftards randomly selected had themselves an accident, by the month after that, the species would be on the Endangered List.
And that could no more be stopped – by anyone – than you could command the waves to cease crashing ashore.
And the minute any thousand people on one side decide it’s time to dish out their own version of a cut apiece, the Death Of A Thousand Cuts stops from the other side. With all the suddenness of Moldylocks getting punched in the face, or Trayvon becoming a good little criminal, or a BLM rioter or two getting Rittenhoused.
Without any plan per se, no video, no trials, just a sudden surplus number of casualties of what has been, thus far, a largely casualty-free operation: the destruction of civil society.
When egregious civilizational destruction needs skin in the game, the lemon will rapidly become not worth the squeeze.
As an added bonus, the other side is suddenly 1000 Useful Idiots lighter on the scales.
Excellent advice, seems to me. His closing line is nothing short of priceless, IMNSHO. Bravo, my friend.
3Lesson 1: make sure you have plenty of Whypeepuh around, just to maintain it and keep it running smoothly.
Southern Pacific passenger train, 1940’s pic.twitter.com/BmGhqPmeSd
— Americana Aesthetics (@AmericanaAesth)
Man, how could you not just HATE everything about that picture, and everyone in it? Dunno myself, asking for a “liberal” friend.
41
1An Army of one none, a Navy of the Village People.
The military has a huge recruiting/retention crisis because they went woke. How did they try to fix it? By going more woke. Meet Joshua Kelley. Drag name Harpy Daniels. U.S. Navy named him Digital Ambassador to recruit new demos to join the Navy. Insane. pic.twitter.com/2DWOAIgWr4
— Robby Starbuck (@robbystarbuck)
Story:
Baffling, that recruiting shortfall, innit? As with the FBI regarding the opaque, unknowable motivation behind each new jihadist terror attack, I just can’t imagine why it should be, I really can’t. Why, one would think ALL red-blooded American young men would fairly well leap at the chance to scrape barnacles, swab decks, spend long months at sea away from their loved ones, and prance about on the main deck in spike heels and a little black cocktail dress amongst their similarly-fabulous fellow swabbies. All in the course of Defending Freedumb, right? Of course it is.
The United States Navy has turned to a drag performer in its efforts to reach younger recruits on digital platforms and social media.
Yeoman 2nd Class Joshua Kelley, whose stage name is Harpy Daniels, announced on TikTok in November that he would be the Navy’s first ‘digital ambassador,’ highlighting his journey from performing on board beginning in 2018 and growing to become an ‘advocate’ for those who ‘were oppressed for years in the service.’
Kelley, who identifies as non-binary, was one of just five active sailors to participate as ‘digital ambassadors’ for the Navy in its ‘efforts to reach a wide range of potential candidates,’ a spokesperson told Daily Caller.
None of the digital ambassadors were paid, the spokesperson said, and no promotional or recruiting materials with the ambassadors exist.
The campaign is reminiscent of Bud Light’s partnership with trans-star Dylan Mulvaney which led to an immediate backlash, cost billions and caused the brand’s sales to plummet.
Anybody remember the Olden Thymes, when we were sternly and constantly admonished that nearly all transvestites were actually straight men who got no sexual charge at all from dressing up as their great-aunt Tilly? Nah, me neither. Musta dreamed it, I reckon.
Update! Meanwhile, the Woke Model Army isn’t interested in retaining guys like this admirable young man.
What made your military career unexpectedly short?
Can I comment for my son, please?Kenny’s dream was to become a helicopter pilot for the US Army. So after 4 years of JROTC in high school it was off to Fort Jackson for basic combat training. He then completed AIT as an AH-64 Apache mechanic. He had told me, “Dad, if I’m going to fly the silly things I figure I ought to know how they work!”
Thankfully, Kenny was assigned to Fort Hood, only a 2 hour drive from home, where he perfected his abilities as an Apache wrench.
He was deployed to Iraq with the 4th ID in November 2005 to one of Saddam’s big helicopter bases, Camp Taji. (I was in theater teaching Iraqi Police Service cadets in Baghdad, but took a position at the Iraqi Highway Patrol Academy at Camp Taji about a week after the 4th Infantry arrived, but that’s a story for another posting.). He did his year, and came home to Fort Hood.
4 months after his redeployment Kenny started working on a helicopter that everyone had told him was all set to go, and that the batteries had been turned off. Unfortunately, he trusted his coworkers and didn’t double check. He managed to touch a metal tool to a positive connection. It was only about 24 volts, but was around 1,500 amps, and the electric shock blew him across the hangar. When he woke up in the hospital the electric conduction system of his heart was screwed up, causing him to have upwards of 14,000 extra heartbeats a day. Needless to say, he was removed from deployable status, and was sent to a medical rehab unit.
The Army futzed around with him for two years, sending him to civilian cardiologists and the Brooke Medical Center in San Antonio. But they never did anything to correct his malady. Personally, I haven’t been an active paramedic since 1990, but even I knew that a 23 year old US Army soldier with no other resident health problems presenting with 14,000 extra heartbeats a day means you have an injury to the Purkinje conduction system of the heart, which can be easily corrected.
Finally the Army called him in. “Specialist Rogers, we have good news and bad news for you. The good news is that you are being promoted to E-5. Congratulations, Sergeant Rogers! The bad news is that we are done here. You’re being medically discharged. We’re going to let the VA Hospital fix you. Have a nice life.”
Kenny was crushed. He had all his paperwork ready to enter the Warrant Officer program and begin his pilot training at Fort Rucker, Alabama. He was going to spend the next 30 years flying for the Army, and now they didn’t want him.
About 6 months after first contacting the Dallas VA Hospital they called him up. “Sergeant Rogers, we don’t know why the Army didn’t correct your issues, but if you’ll show up at oh-dark:thirty on Monday next we’ll fix your little problem.”
And they did! Kenny had about 3 extra heartbeats since they did the cardiophoresis procedure, and it happened while he was in recovery at the VA.
He eventually found a civilian helicopter training school, and is currently about two weeks from receiving his commercial rating as a private helicopter pilot. The next step will be completion of the certified flight instructor school, where he can log enough hours as pilot in command to find work. He will probably end up flying for a large city’s police department, or maybe the DEA or Border Patrol.
The fun thing is, because of his Army training and experience, he is able to spot problems with the Robinson R44 he trains in well before even his flight instructor does. His school gets frustrated at him when he “Red Tags” (takes out of service) any of their birds, but they know he’s always been proven to be right. Safety first, you know!
But he would have been much, much happier flying for his beloved Army Aviation.
Included is a photo of the proud papa pinning on his intrepid, entirely honorable son’s new rank insignia before his final promotion to SGT, after which the Green Machine unceremoniously hustled the boy out—one assumes because he just wasn’t Fake or Ghey enough to meet rigorous, exacting Army standards for such.
When we get our heads handed to us by a bunch of tribal, 4th-century savages in our next Forever War, remember: it’s because we deserved to. Far as I’m concerned, both Kenny and his old man can be happy indeed that they’re no longer associated with Amerika v2.0’s PC dot-mil dickheads.
Bearing in mind my longstanding dictum that there is simply no way of knowing how it will all shake out, that the one sure thing is that such things hardly ever go exactly like anyone thinks beforetimes that they will, Simplicius takes a stab at a little prognostication.
On Secession and Civil War
Will there be breakup by 2030?I often mention my long-held forecast that I predict the United States will either devolve into civil war or secession by the year 2030. Hearing this, many have asked me to expound at length about my thoughts on this, why and how I see it unfolding. So I’ve decided to finally treat the topic in a more in depth manner than the usual comment reply allows.
Particularly in today’s cultural climate, when they conjure up ‘civil war’, many people are subconsciously referring to some sort of Rwandan Genocide-style conflict between the two opposing sides of Liberals and Conservatives, where the actual civilians have taken up arms and are battling it out in the streets. This notion of a ‘civil war’ is driven by endless memes posted by both sides which depict things like armed antifa leftists against conservative militiamen rifling it out in some dystopian suburban battlefield, perhaps akin to Seattle’s CHAZ ‘Autonomous Zone’.
The Rwandan-style one has the least chance of happening because it presupposes some sort of de-centralized, stochastic ‘free-for-all’ where people just happen to take up arms against the fellow man. Sure, there will be sporadic armed conflicts occurring regionally, owing to the growing racial and political divides in the country. But there exists no real formalized mechanism by which the two sides can even cohere into some semblance of organized, opposing armies with a central command, staff structures, etc. This is mostly a juvenile consideration, at least for any time in the semi-near future, of which we’re speaking. One could perhaps envision such a scenario much farther down the line than is possible to predict: some sort of weird, lawless, dystopian post-apocalyptic Mad-Max-style future in the year 2100, or something like that. But for our purposes, this is unrealistic and unworthy of serious deliberation.
There is a third option some people refer to when invoking civil war: that of ‘people vs. the government’. I’ll treat this one briefly on its own, because there are a few important considerations here.
Firstly, this idea has gained traction as numerous American politicians have wielded this cudgel as a threat against upstart Americans who might like their chances in an uprising. Biden himself has remarked on at least two or three different occasions that ‘Americans need F-15s not AR15s to fight against the government’, implying that U.S. citizens can never defeat the government unless they’re armed with high level strategic weaponry, as opposed to mere small arms.
In short, the government and its ‘mighty military force’ wouldn’t last in a true prolonged conflict against the population of the U.S. Of course, it all depends how many people would be on the revolting side in this hypothetical scenario. But let’s not forget that the U.S. has an estimated 400 million guns, and 393 million of those are in civilian hands. There are reportedly something like 70-100+ million gun owners. The U.S. military has about 800k total ground troops. Even with all the planes and tanks in the world, can 800,000 go against 100,000,000? You could argue they couldn’t even defeat the Vietcong’s less than 1 million, much less 100m. Not to mention that most Americans are far heavier armed than the typical Vietcong and their bolt-action rifles.
But like I said, those are just slightly absurd hypotheticals to put some things in perspective; in reality, this is not the type of scenario I expect to occur. It’s simply a quick two cents thrown into the debate to refute the typical leftist canard that the U.S. military is invincible, when in fact they entirely rely on the civilian sector to even function.
Lots, lots more to this one—which, despite my opening admonishment regarding the ultimate futility of assuming that we can make any predictions here with any realistic expectation of accuracy, I nonetheless consider to be well worth a read. One more thing I feel I ought to address:
Professor Barbara Walter explains she’s studied civil wars for thirty years and has spent the last few of them working for a CIA taskforce which uses such metrics to prognosticate ‘where the next civil war will occur’ in the globe.
Professor Walter explains, when turned against the U.S. itself, these same proprietary calculations reveal that the U.S. is at the edge of what the CIA would deem the cusp of the “RISK” to “HIGH RISK” categories. Normally, a country at ‘high risk’ would be placed on a special CIA watchlist, as upheaval there would be considered imminent.
Walter, the Post said, concludes that the US has passed through stages of “pre-insurgency” and “incipient conflict” and may now be in “open conflict”, beginning with the Capitol riot.
Citing analytics used by the Center for Systemic Peace, Walter also says the US has become an “anocracy” – “somewhere between a democracy and an autocratic state”.
Walter’s second point is indisputably true. The first, though? Meh, not so much; the notion that we may be in a state of “open conflict” is seriously undercut by A) the simple fact that what she blithely refers to as a “riot” was no such thing; and B) excepting the ever-escalating incidents of mostly black-on-black violence in the nation’s urban jungles, all most Normals need to do to disprove the idea that we’ve arrived at “open conflict” is to just take a look around. Any conflict we might be in is certainly not “open,” and for the vast majority of us, there sure doesn’t seem to be very much of it to be seen.
That said, Simplicius sounds a cautionary note here:
These findings, however, are already more than a year old, and the country has likely slipped even further into the danger zone.
Fair enough, no argument. Even so, the danger zone isn’t quite the actual thing; they’re very different animules—as I suspect we’ll soon be finding out, to our great chagrin and injury.
As I said, there’s much more to this deep-dive examination of every facet of this issue, so do read it all.
(Via WRSA)
2Howie Carr isn’t quite all in, but he might be headed in that direction.
RFK Jr., the outcast Kennedy, has Dems reeling
The more state-run media call Robert F. Kennedy Jr. a crackpot and a lunatic and an “anti-vaccine quack,” the more I’m thinking I like this guy.Bobby Jr. is coming to Boston next week to formally announce his candidacy for the 2024 Democrat nomination for president.
At age 69, he’s the youngster on the Democrat side, after incumbent president Dementia Joe Biden (80) and spiritual nut Marianne Williamson (71 in July).
It tells you something about modern politics that for most of his dissipated life, despite the most appalling sorts of behavior – hard drugs, booze, philandering to the max — Bobby Junior was a well-respected member in good standing of the Democrat party.
He began slowly drifting off the Democrat plantation years ago, but he always had that Kennedy thing going for him, especially the famous name of his martyred father.
But then he committed the ultimate blasphemy – he profaned the sainted Dr. Anthony Fauci, wrote a best-selling expose about him. And after that he was, well, unclean. He was shunned by all the Beautiful People.
Yesterday, the New York Post ran another story about how the rest of the Kennedys are “disgusted” with his campaign.
Well of course they are. You may have noticed that Kennedys can’t get elected to political office anymore. They are now in the ambassadorial class – appointees, supplicants. Cousin Caroline is the ambassador to Australia, nephew JoJoJo is the special envoy to something or other in Northern Ireland.
If you’re an ambassador, you’re supposed to stick with the president who gave you the gig. That was Grampy Joe’s problem with FDR back before World War II, you may recall from history books.
But whatever you say about RFK Jr., he never drowned a woman, like his uncle. He never crippled one, like his brother. He never raped an underage babysitter, like another of his brothers. He’s never been accused of raping a woman, like one of his cousins, or beating a teenaged neighbor girl to death with a golf club, like another of his cousins.
Come to think of it, his opponent for the Democratic nomination, Joe Biden, has been accused of rape, by his former aide Tara Reade. And unlike Biden, none of Bobby’s daughters have ever written in their diaries that Daddy used to take long showers with them when they were 11 years old.
Compared to Joe Biden, in fact, Bobby Kennedy Jr. is a paragon of virtue.
The Democrats are the party of no-info voters, but even for them, Biden’s senescence is getting hard to overlook. Kennedy may be a quack and a lunatic and a nut, but who would you take in a one-one debate – Brandon or Bobby Jr.
A no-brainer for sure, quite literally so with the Rhutabaga In Thief. One thing I gotta admit I do like about him: his candidacy is going to jack the entertainment value of our next fraudulent “election” right through the friggin’ roof.
2No “transgender” lunatics, Allahu Akhbar-yodeling Mooselimb jihadists, sub-literate Ubangi tribesmen, nor Chinese peasant-villagers were invited along for NASA’s next little shindig. For shame!
NASA unveils Artemis II crew including first woman, person of color to orbit moon
April 3 (UPI) — NASA officials Monday revealed the four names that will make up a team astronauts from the United States and Canada that will journey around the moon next year as part of the first crewed flight of the Artemis mission.The four include a woman and a person of color, NASA and the Canadian Space Agency confirmed during the joint announcement at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.
The 2024 launch date gives NASA at least a full year to test the Orion capsule and analyze further data from the Artemis I mission.
No word on where simple competence fits into NASA’s criteria for selection, as you would expect. Hey, here’s a thought: maybe the “Muslim-outreach” purveyors of PC at our once-admired and capable space agency should consider seeking advice and counsel from Elon Musk on this h’yar venture, no?
(Via Glenn)
It’s a simple, easy binary choice, strictly a One From Column A, One From Column B Type of deal. No others available, sorry.
Trans activism is sexist and delusional (By Jordan Peterson)
By denying science, the medical profession is committing some of the worst moral crimes in modern times. It must end.What is a woman?
A defining question of our times, and the title of a now infamous documentary indicating the breadth of the political chasm dividing us here in the West.
Here is an answer, summarising current scientific understanding and coming from a research psychologist and clinician.
Let’s start with the basics. Sexual differentiation, on the biological front – where the whole woman/man dichotomy originates, after all – happened two billion years in the past, long before nervous systems developed a mere 600 million years ago. The brute fact of sexual dichotomy was already a constant before even the basics of our perceptual, motivational, emotional and cognitive systems made their appearance on the cosmic stage. Thus, it could be argued that sexual differentiation is more ‘real’ than even ‘up’ or ‘down’, ‘forward’ or ‘back’– more so than pain or pleasure – and, as well, that its perception (given the necessity of that perception to successful reproduction) is key to the successful propagation of life itself.
The fact that such perception and sex-linked action was possible even before nervous systems themselves evolved should provide proof to anyone willing to think that the sexual binary is both fundamental objective fact and primary psychological axiom.
There’s more: sexual differentiation is observable at every level of biological function. Sperm and egg are sexually differentiated; the 40 trillion cells that make up the human body each have a nucleus containing 23 paired chromosomes. Every single cell (with some minor exceptions) in a woman is female, and every single cell in a man male.
Physiological differences between the sexes, in addition to those that obtain at the cellular level, are manifold. Human males and females differ, on average, in hormonal function, brain organisation, height, weight, strength, endurance, facial features and patterns of bodily hair, to take some obvious examples. But the differences are not limited to the physical. Men and women differ enough in temperament so that they can be distinguished with about 75% accuracy on that basis alone. If differences in interest are taken into account, that distinction becomes even more accurate. Such temperamental and interest differences are also larger, not smaller, in more gender-neutral societies, a strong indication of their biological basis.
The claim of the so-called “progressives”, however, is that feelings alone are sufficient to define personhood. This claim is simultaneously ignorant, preposterous and malevolent. Even if biology was ignored entirely, identity is not and cannot be deemed merely subjective – not least because the environment to which each individual must adapt is social, as well as natural, and not solipsistic. This means that every person must, by the very nature of being human, adopt a way of being that he or she cannot entirely choose. The blatant fact of the existence of others and the brute realities of the objective natural world require careful adaptation: the careful negotiation of identity.
…Enough truly is enough – and there has already been plenty more than enough.
There’s a lot between my ellipses—by which I mean, a LOT—but it’s important stuff. Which is truly sad, that we’ve allowed ourselves to sink so low, or more correctly to be dragged, that obvious reality has now become the stuff of debate and discord. The cost? We are now on the fourth (4th) murder of innocent schoolkids by some deranged, murderous “transgender” lunatic. How many more such will be tolerated before saner sorts will finally rise up and say, pace Peterson, ENOUGH ALREADY?!? Bayou Pete says:
I think we owe Dr. Peterson a debt of thanks for daring to speak out against the politically correct perspectives surrounding “trans activism”, and laying out the factual, biological, medical truth of the matter. I strongly suggest that you pass on the link to this article, and/or the link to the full version (provided above), to your friends and relatives. We need to make sure that the truth is heard.
Dittos from here. But honestly, how sad is it that we’ve slid so far down this slipperiest of all slopes to land at a nadir of declination and depravity wherein even the most fundamental, perspicuous, and patently incontrovertible of truths must now be carefully disseminated instead of just openly acknowledged right from the git-go? At long last, how much of this utter shitwit imbecility will finally prove to be too much?
Or is this pit truly bottomless?
The implicit question: how much does it cost if it’s free?
An American System for America Prosperity
The ideology of global free trade is not American—nor is it the free market system. America had the highest tariff rates in history at the same time we saw the greatest economic expansion in history.Our founders understood that America could not be independent and strong if we relied on other nations for our manufactured goods. They understood the United States had the natural resources, the technology, the labor force, and ample customers at home to support domestic industry and be largely self-sufficient.
As an example to his countrymen to “Buy American,” George Washington wore a suit of American-made cloth at his inauguration in 1789. “I hope it will not be a great while before it will be unfashionable for a gentleman to appear in any other dress. Indeed, we have already been too long subject to British prejudices,” he wrote. Washington believed the United States could manufacture as well as farm, and he instructed Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton to come up with a plan to develop industry on these shores.
Hamilton’s plan, detailed in his 1791 Report on the Subject of Manufactures, called for tariffs that would raise revenues and protect infant American industries against predatory competition, and government procurement contracts to encourage American manufacturers.
The American System, also called the American School of economics, guided U.S. national economic development from the earliest days of the republic, through the Civil War, and into the better part of the 20th century. It built the United States from an agrarian frontier society into the world’s largest economy and greatest industrial power.
The American System had three basic tenets to promote domestic industry. The government would:
- use tariffs to discourage imports, and leverage the purchasing power of government to give preference to domestic producers;
- invest in roads, ports, dams, canals, and turnpikes—then called “internal improvements,” now called infrastructure—to facilitate commerce; and
- regulate credit to spur economic development and deter speculation.
Congress passed the Tariff Act of 1789 as its second piece of legislation. The opening section reads, “It is necessary for the support of the government, the discharge of the debts of the United States, and for the encouragement and protection of manufactures that a duty be laid on goods and merchandise imported.”
The tax on imports raised revenue to fund the government and prevented foreign goods from smothering our own infant industries. Tariffs were the nation’s primary source of revenue for its first 150 years. Consider: we taxed foreign industries, not our own.
In 1791, Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton delivered his Report on the Subject of Manufactures to President Washington. It laid out the plan for the federal government to nurture the growth of domestic manufacturing industries in the United States rather than allow the new nation to depend on manufactured goods from abroad.
Hamilton declared: “Not only the wealth; the independence and security of a Country, appear to be materially connected with the prosperity of manufactures. Every nation…ought to endeavor to possess within itself all the essentials of national supply. These comprise the means to Subsistence habitation clothing and defence.”
A diversified economy of agriculture, merchants, and manufacturing would provide opportunities for Americans of all skills, “furnishing greater scope for the diversity of talents and dispositions which discriminate men from each other,” Hamilton wrote.
Hamilton’s report stood in contrast to “free traders” who believed America should confine itself to farming, export raw materials, and buy manufactured goods from Great Britain.
NOTE: I am not an economist, nor have I ever played one on TeeWee. That said, I hadn’t realized before just how recent the Neocon obssession with “free trade” really was until I read this fascinating piece, nor had I known just how adamantly most if not all of the Founders were opposed to any such notion, ditto for several of our later Presidents such as Lincoln and McKinley. Buck Throckmorton, via whom etc, has this to say about it:
Principled Free Traders™ have often been the target of my writing, not because of my having a deep ideological hostility to free trade, but because they have used the term “free trade” as a false-flag for their globalist hostility to US sovereignty, and for their open contempt for working-class Americans.
Unlike 1990s-era free trade, which was promoted as being about reciprocal, barrier-free trade, America’s 21st Century Principled Free Traders™ have advocated for unilateral surrender to foreign mercantilism. (Mercantilism is the economic theory that a country’s wealth increases by having a surplus balance of trade, using protectionism as necessary to ensure the favorable trade imbalance.) Principled Free Traders™ favor unrestricted access to the US market for products made in hostile, authoritarian countries, while gladly accepting that those countries maintain tariffs and prohibitions on importing products from the US.
After doing a learn-to-code grave dance on those working class Americans who lost their middle-class lifestyle, Principled Free Traders™ argued that it was all cool, because products made by cheap foreign labor (and slaves) gave Americans more spending power.
As for me, the reality is that I’ve historically been more of a reciprocal free trader – what many of us called “fair trade” – than a protectionist, thus my contempt for the globalists who actively sought to harm America in the name of free trade.
Our founders and our greatest Presidents agreed that that the US must never be dependent on foreign countries for food, provisions, or the ability to secure our national defense. And even the Father of Capitalism stood for economic nationalism.
I’m proud to be an economic nationalist if the alternative is “free trade” that is designed to harm Americans.
Amen to all that, my friend. Funny, innit, how very much of the Vichy GOPe/Uniparty/Neocon agenda does indeed seem designed to damage AINO rather than to help, their indignant protestations to the contrary notwithstanding.
1It’s a good question, for Mickey D’s and Detroit both.
Seriously though, what were they thinking? pic.twitter.com/MTC8UqpMHM
— Culture Critic (@Culture_Crit) March 27, 2023
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