Category: Meltdown? What Meltdown?

Supply chain SNAFU

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An industry insider outlines the multifarious problem.

Yesterday I rented a boat and took the leader of one of Flexport’s partners in Long Beach on a 3 hour of the port complex. Here’s a thread about what I learned.

First off, the boat captain said we were the first company to ever rent his boat to tour the port to see how everything was working up close. His usual business is doing memorial services at sea. He said we were a lot more fun than his regular customers.

The ports of LA/Long Beach are at a standstill. In a full 3 hour loop through the port complex, passing every single terminal, we saw less than a dozen containers get unloaded.

There are hundreds of cranes. I counted only ~7 that were even operating and those that were seemed to be going pretty slow.

It seems that everyone now agrees that the bottleneck is yard space at the container terminals. The terminals are simply overflowing with containers, which means they no longer have space to take in new containers either from ships or land. It’s a true traffic jam.

Right now if you have a chassis with no empty container on it, you can go pick up containers at any port terminal. However, if you have an empty container on that chassis, they’re not allowing you to return it except on highly restricted basis.

If you can’t get the empty off the chassis, you don’t have a chassis to go pick up the next container. And if nobody goes to pick up the next container, the port remains jammed.

WIth the yards so full, carriers / terminals are being highly restrictive in where and when they will accept empties.

Also containers are not fungible between carriers, so the truckers have to drop their empty off at the right terminal. This is causing empty containers to pile up. This one trucking partner alone has 450 containers sitting on chassis right now (as of 10/21) at his yards.

This is a trucking company with 6 yards that represents 153 owner operator drivers, so he has almost 3 containers sitting on chassis at his yard for every driver on the team.

He can’t take the containers off the chassis because he’s not allowed by the city of Long Beach zoning code to store empty containers more than 2 high in his truck yard. If he violates this code they’ll shut down his yard altogether.

With the chassis all tied up storing empties that can’t be returned to the port, there are no chassis available to pick up containers at the port.

And with all the containers piling up in the terminal yard, the longshoremen can’t unload the ships. And so the queue grows longer, with now over 70 ships containing 500,000 containers are waiting off shore. This line is going to get longer not shorter.

This is a negative feedback loop that is rapidly cycling out of control that if it continues unabated will destroy the global economy.

Alright how do we fix this, you ask? Simple. And we can do it fast now,

When you’re designing an operation you must choose your bottleneck. If the bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t choose it, you aren’t running an operation. It’s running you.

You should always choose the most capital intensive part of the line to be your bottleneck. In a port that’s the ship to shore cranes. The cranes should never be unable to run because they’re waiting for another part of the operation to catch up.

The bottleneck right now is not the cranes. It’s yard space at the container terminals. And it’s empty chassis to come clear those containers out.

In operations when a bottleneck appears somewhere that you didn’t design for it to appear, you must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK!

Miscellaneous side angles I haven’t seen or heard mention of anywhere other than in casual conversations with my brother and several of his coworkers at Horizon Freight:

  • Chassis are extremely scarce currently; my brother has been working only two-three days/week over the last two weeks because there are just too few chassis in Charleston available for use—no chassis, no haulee containers
  • Amazon has taken to reserving way more container space than they need, then offering to resell it to shippers at eight to ten times the usual rate, which adds up to a lot of empty space in a lot of containers
  • Horizon has two dispatchers responsible for assigning chassis and containers to specific drivers who are charged with hauling them out of the Charelston and Savannah ports. These dispatchers are absolutely worn to a frazzle, working frantically to get these containers out of the ports and on the road to their destinations, for a damned good reason: there’s a firm deadline by which each container MUST be removed from the port, usually only two-three days after arrival. After the deadline, the dispatcher her own self gets whacked with a several-thousand dollar fine…compounded EACH AND EVERY DAY said container doesn’t move, applicable to EACH INDIVIDUAL CONTAINER

I repeat: in shutting down entire national economies on a pretext that grows more threadbare each and every day, politicians and bureauweasels have meddled in affairs much too big for them. Contrary to their personal God Complex delusions, the extremely complicated, intricately interdependent, and fragile systems they wilfully fucked up are FAR beyond their meager ability to restart or repair. The unbridled arrogance and conceit of ProPols have created a catastrophe that the entire world can only watch unfold with horror and dread. There is no power on Earth capable of stopping what’s coming now.

Here’s a simple plan that @POTUS and @GavinNewsom partnered with the private sector, labor, truckers, and everyone else in the chain must implement TODAY to overwhelm the bottleneck and create yard space at the ports so we can operate again.

Not one proposal of which plan is ever going to happen.

This is not a comprehensive list. Please add to it. We don’t need to do the best ideas. We need to do ALL the ideas.

We must OVERWHELM THE BOTTLENECK and get these ports working again. I can’t stress enough how bad it is for the world economy if the ports don’t work. Every company selling physical goods bought or sold internationally will fail.

The circulatory system our globalized economy depends has collapsed. And thanks to the negative feedback loops involved, it’s getting worse not better every day that goes by.

I’d be happy to lead this effort for the federal or state government if asked. Leadership is the missing ingredient at this point.

Nope, nope, nope. One of BRM Peter’s commenters says it concisely and correctly.

government diddling caused this crap storm.

More government diddling will not fix it.

Nailed it. The one positive contribution federal and/or state governments might make here is also the one they’re wholly incapable of making: get the hell out of the way and allow the innumerable moving parts of the system of supply and logistics freely begin the slow and painful process of healing itself. Sadly, tragically for all of us, the self-styled Superior Beings who made this mess will never go along with it; such a thing is constitutionally beyond them, and goes against their nature. Their vanity, their bloated sense of their own importance, their every belief stands in direct opposition to the very concept. Indeed, they would resist any attempt at relaxing their grip on our throats to their dying breath. Which, y’know, can be easily arranged for them, and in fact ought to be.

Elsewhere, Karl digs down to unearth one of the deepest roots of our sorry situation.

I get it that everyone would like to just wave a magic wand and make the problem go away. There are people out there who claim they can — and have. They’re wrong. I may not be the CEO of Flexport but you shall see that going from a 2-stack to either 4 or 6 (depending on approvals) in the trucking company yards will solve nothing; the problem simply does not lie there.

The problem is that all the constraints have produced a labor shortage end to end in various places, including in warehouses, transportation hubs, drivers and similar. As a result the freight is not being unloaded and the empties not being returned on schedule.

When the ship gets here and unloads its several thousand containers those containers must ultimately return to the source to be loaded again. If the cycle is interrupted and there are none to load for the return trip then the source will run out. Unloading more containers into a chain of events that is constrained all the way through does not accelerate the rate of return for the journey back to the source!

You have to return the cycle from unload time to the return of the empty to the port to its expected rate and time in-transit or you do nothing. That means getting rid of the reasons that problem exists – which all revolve around labor and working conditions.

Some of those have been building for quite some time but a hell of a lot of them are external and imposed by governments related to lockdowns, mandates of various sorts and similar. The former ones building for quite some time will take some time to resolve but the others can be removed on an instant basis by the very government entities who placed them.

Phew—transcribing all of Karl’s characteristic bolds, underlines, and italics is hard work. But the man ain’t wrong about the scarcity of willing grunt-workers. Why, one might almost start to wonder whether—after going on two years of lockdowns, business closures, and being paid handsomely to lounge about at home in one’s jammies—this all might possibly be more than happenstance, coincidence, or sheer bad luck. Yeah, I know, I know, excessive paranoia, a ridiculous conspiracy theory, sorry I brought it up.

All the same, though, we might want to ask ourselves: cui bono? Who benefits, that is, from tighter control over individual freedom and mobility; reinforcement of fear, uncertainty, and doubt; making 24-7 surveillance and tracking of the Serf Class much easier; increasing Serf Class dependence and helplessness, among other things? We wonders, yes we wonders.

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Yes, Virginia, there IS a truck-driver shortage

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And it was intrusive government that created it.

After a long cross-country flight, I made it out of LAX and into an Uber. I wasn’t in the mood to talk, but the driver was. And hearing that I was a journalist, he wanted to tell me a story. I’ve heard a lot of stories over the years, but this may have been the most important one I let go.

He hadn’t always been driving an Uber at 11:30 at night. Not all that long ago he used to have his own business with 7 trucks before he was bankrupted by California’s insane regulations.

I listened, but didn’t pay enough attention. The impact of California’s Democrat legislative supermajority on truckers was just another data point alongside what was happening to freelancers of all kinds and a lot of small businesses. Stories like this were everywhere and there was little interest in them even in conservative circles outside the tarnished golden state.

I’m sure California’s meddlesome over-regulation isn’t helping matters any, but the truth is that the bigger, broader hand of FederalGovCo has done more damage by far. The driver shortage has been an issue since back when I was still trucking, and that was over fifteen years ago. I still talk now and then with a good few who are still out there on the job, including my own brother, and so am still more or less up on doin’s. And what’s crystal clear is that, due to numerous factors that all boil down to inept, staggeringly clueless government micromanagement, vanishingly few young guys have any interest at all in getting into the industry. Meanwhile, the increasingly-fed-up old hands are getting out just as quick as they possibly can.

Y’know, pretty much as has happened in every other corner of the economy that has felt the five-thumbed hand of government tightening around its throat for any significant length of time.

The massive supply chain mess that’s leaving stores empty and orders unfulfilled doesn’t have a single point of failure, but dozens of them. China’s energy shortages, the overhyped predictive powers of Big Data, the fragility of the global economy, fuel costs, and welfare state worker shortages are all players. But California’s truck bans are a key link in the great failure chain.

While I was riding home that night, California trucking companies were going bankrupt at a rapid rate. Few outside the industry were paying attention or understood what that might mean.

2019 was described as a “bloodbath” for the trucking industry with 640 trucking companies across the country filing for bankruptcy in just the first half of the year. Thousands of truck drivers were left unemployed. Many went into the expanding last mile delivery business, some as contractors for Amazon. But California truckers and businesses had their own special woes.

Two years ago, Governor Newsom signed the Democrat supermajority’s Assembly Bill 5 into law. While AB5 was billed as a crackdown on Uber and Lyft, forcing the companies to treat freelance contractors as employees, the gig economy companies pushed Proposition 22 so that they were the only ones exempt from the law. (A Democrat judge has since illegally blocked the approved ballot measure while falsely claiming that it was unconstitutional.)

AB5 however was less about Uber than it was about outlawing freelance employees in order to force them into unions. The union power grab inconvenienced Uber and Lyft, but crushed freelance workers in a variety of fields including journalism. One of the fields was trucking.

Over the summer, the California Trucking Association actually went to the Supreme Court to fight AB5 and allow owners and operators to use independent contractors. The CTA listed 70,000 owner operators. In the years since AB5, Ubers have become scarcer and more expensive, which is what the law was actually designed to do, but the consequences to the trucking industry have been far worse albeit invisible to most people until now. While truckers are still protected from AB5, many in the industry are not willing to bet their future on SCOTUS.

AB5 was not only the assault on the trucking industry by California Democrats who were aggressively trying to unionize the industry and to impose environmental regulations on it.

It was not, nor was said assault limited to California or ever more onerous “Save Gaia!” measures. The willful destruction of the trucking industry is multifarious and complex, from the implementation of nearly incomprehensible tangle of hours-worked limitations to electronic-log requirements to the absurd Regen mandate, which is my personal fave. Regen is so pluperfect an encapsulation of FederalGovCo stupidity as to beggar belief. To wit:

There’s no such thing as a good time for downtime, especially when it’s unexpected. And one issue many fleet drivers don’t plan for is forced regens.

If you haven’t experienced this issue yet, consider yourself lucky. A forced regen occurs when soot builds up inside the diesel particulate filter (DPF) to the point that the vehicle is no longer operable. When this happens, a driver has to pull over and initiate a self-cleaning process that can take up to 40 minutes — valuable time that could have been spent on the road.

If that sounds confusing, it really isn’t. The DPF traps the soot; the DPF gets full; driver must pull over IMMEDIATELY for a “forced regen” when the warning light comes on, lest severe damage be done to the engine of a truck he just paid 150k or a good bit more to purchase.

Now, here’s where a sensible person’s head will start to spin like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist. Know what a “forced regen” is? Why, nothing other than the process of ALL THE PARTICULATES AND SOOT THE FILTER REMOVED FROM THE ATMOSPHERE BEING BLOWN BACK OUT INTO THE ATMOSPHERE AGAIN. Only instead of it being done gradually, over a wide area, the gunk is expelled all at once, in a single spot. Whenever you’ve seen a big rig sitting on the side of the highway, a thick column of smoke belching skyward from the stacks, what you’re witnessing is the hand of FederalGovCo in action, just another Superstate Success Story™.

Ahh, but let’s not be offering any congratulations or humble thanks to our Lords and Masters on another Job Well Done quite yet, folks. Because as always, there’s more.

Last year, the California Air Resources Board issued a press release boasting that it had taken a “bold step to reduce truck pollution”. The bold step required switching to electric trucks.

“We are showing the world that we can move goods, grow our economy and finally dump dirty diesel,” Jared Blumenfeld, California’s Secretary for Environmental Protection, sneered.

Oh, is THAT what you think you’re “showing the world”? Because what the world is actually seeing looks not at ALL like what you just said. But hey, you do you, Poindexter. Live your truth, by all means. The snickering you’re hearing only means that we’re mighty impressed by your achievements, that’s all. Awestruck, even. Carry on.

While the ultimate truck ban was scheduled for 2045, an initial phase-in of 5% to 9% begins in 2024. Last year, California’s DMV began refusing to register thousands of trucks with an estimated 100,000 trucks under threat. With “green” trucks costing $70,000 more, this was a non-starter for already troubled independent owner-operators and even larger companies.

That was part of the plan.

Well, of course it was. These oozing chancres are always and forever working a Plan, a trait not limited to just the Califrutopia-localized sub-genus of the Rodentia Bureaucraticus species either. Bad as the worthless parasites have made our national situation already, the one certainty is that things are going to get much, much worse. That’s what they are, it’s what they do.

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WAKE UP, BLACK AMERICA!

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You folks know by now that I am resolutely immune to the bizarre ((((((JOOOOOOOOOOO!!!™)))))) obssessiveness currently fashionable in certain other quarters, for reasons I’ve already gone through here plenty enough times. Being more of a William of Occam devotee, I’ve never really had any truck with conspiracy theorizing of any flavor, which admittedly has become a much more difficult mindset to maintain the last two years. But once in a VERY great while, a conspiracy theory comes along that is so damned compelling, so brilliantly conceived, so clearly beyond argument that no sensible soul could possibly do anything other than embrace it without reservation.

This would be one of those.

San Francisco State University Prof Says Jewish Pot is Making Black Men Gay
“It is Jewish genius that has helped…to weaponize the weed.”

Wesley Muhammad believes that the U.S. government and the Jews are using marijuana to make black men gay. The “Pot Plot” is a popular theory in Muhammad’s Nation of Islam cult.

At the Saviours Day Convention in Chicago, an official Nation of Islam event, Wesley Muhammad claimed that, “It is Jewish genius that has helped… to weaponize the weed so that it may effeminize the black male of America. And be clear, it is Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam that is standing in between the total demasculinization of the black man in America.”

Some years back, Wesley Muhammad’s lecture, “How to Make a Homosexual: The Scientific Assault on Black America” was canceled at a Philly black beauty expo because of its hateful content. But what wasn’t good enough for the 23rd Annual International Locks Conference, a black natural hair expo, is unfortunately all too welcome at San Francisco State University.

It’s not too surprising that a black “wholistic” hair expo has higher standards than the most antisemitic university in America. Or that Muhammad fits in so well at SFSU.

“It is clear that the two most powerful lobbies in America – the Jewish and the Homosexual – are hellbent on the information in this lecture, “How To Make A Homosexualm (sic)” NEVER makes it to the public’s awareness,” Muhammad complained on Facebook.

San Francisco State University has however been happy to provide Muhammad with a platform despite no shortage of ethnically Jewish and gay people on the faculty and in the administration.

Wesley Muhammad’s bio at the taxpayer-funded university notes that he is a lecturer in the Africana Studies Department of SFSU’s College of Ethnic Studies. It mentions his publications in the Final Call newspaper of the Nation of Islam hate group, and his book, “Understanding the Assault on the Black Man, Black Manhood and Black Masculinity” which contains thoughtful chapters such as “Why Saggin is Faggin” and “Birth of the Black Man (God)”. 

This one scores straight A’s all across the board: for creativity; for originality; for weaving widely disparate threads into a wholly incoherent narrative fabric; for entertainment value; for sheer bugfuck lunacy, it tops every category. I must confess that I haven’t read all of it yet, mainly because I can only get another ‘graph or so deeper in before keeling over in helpless laughter and having to start all over again.

Damn pesky JOOOOOZ, getting all the brothas hung up on de weeeit ‘n’ fucking dey shit up ‘n’shit! Nomesay’n? Yup, it takes a nation of millions to hold ’em back. WE WUZ KANGS ‘N’SHIT!!!

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“The training and readiness of the ship’s crew were deficient”

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Gee, ya THINK?!?

A cascade of failures – from a junior enlisted sailor not recognizing a fire at the end of their duty watch to fundamental problems with how the U.S. Navy trains sailors to fight fires in shipyards – are responsible for the five-day blaze that cost the service an amphibious warship, according to an investigation into the July 2020 USS Bonhomme Richard (LHD-6) fire reviewed by USNI News.

The investigation into the fire aboard Bonhomme Richard, overseen by former U.S. 3rd Fleet commander Vice Adm. Scott Conn, found that the two-year-long $249 million maintenance period rendered the ship’s crew unprepared to fight the fire the service says was set by a crew member.

“Although the fire was started by an act of arson, the ship was lost due to an inability to extinguish the fire,” Conn wrote in his investigation, which was completed in April and reviewed by USNI News this week.

“In the 19 months executing the ship’s maintenance availability, repeated failures allowed for the accumulation of significant risk and an inadequately prepared crew, which led to an ineffective fire response.”

Full props to ADM Conn for his desert-dry understatement. Fret not though, Squids, there’s a newly-minted admiral in town who’s SURE to unfuck the USN in a mere trice.

Assistant Secretary of Health Richard Levine, a man who identifies as a woman and goes by the name of Rachel, has been sworn in as the first “transgender” four-star admiral in America, as reported by the New York Post.

On Tuesday, the 63-year-old Levine was named as an admiral in the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, which is not one of the armed forces of the United States military. Following the swearing-in ceremony, Levine tweeted that he was “deeply honored and grateful to join the ranks of men and women across this great nation who have committed to defend the United States against small and large threats, known and unknown.”

Prior to his role at HHS, Levine had served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, where he oversaw a disastrous order to force COVID-positive patients into nursing homes, exposing thousands of vulnerable senior citizens to the virus. Levine himself came under fire when it was discovered that, upon the implementation of the order, he made sure to have his own mother moved out of such a nursing home and into a private facility. During his tenure, Levine also violated lockdown orders by secretly negotiating for a major exclusive car show to take place in Pennsylvania back in August, despite orders at the time banning such large gatherings.

Levine suffers from transgenderism, a mental disorder which leads people to believe that they are the opposite gender from the one they were born.

It remained unclear at presstime exactly how Mrxskkjnnxxx Levine plans to “defend the United States,” as per her HISTORIC!!! COURAGEOUS!!! statement, from her palatial office heading up a bureaucracy with no affiliation whatsoever with the US military. But I’m sure he/she/whatever will do a fine job of it nonetheless. In other news:

Meanwhile, China is expanding its nuclear missile silo field and just launched a new hypersonic nuclear-capable missile that circled the entire globe at low-orbit.

China’s new space nukes could evade the US’s missile defense systems.

While China is flexing its nuclear muscle, the “woke” Biden Admin is focused on white rage, maternity paratrooper suits, French manicures and promoting transgenders.

Levine, who previously served as Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Health, has a horrible track record.

The Coronavirus ravaged nursing homes across the US because of deadly Democrat policies of forcing people infected with COVID-19 back into the long-term care facilities.

Dr. Levine however made sure his 95-year-old mother was removed from the death box and transported safely to a hotel.

Okay, my apologies to ADM Conn for being overly sanguine just now. Actually, this looks like a most apposite time to begin fretting, sir, and to continue fretting away to your heart’s content. Wringing of the hands and gnashing of the teeth remain completely optional at this time, but are nevertheless heartily recommended. Carry on.

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Git hot or go home

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There’s a “new anger” in town, of a sort the ancient Festivus “Airing Of Grievances” tradition isn’t strong enough to overcome.

One thing Americans can presumably all agree on in our current cold civil war is that civility, mutual if grudging respect, and rational if testy debate in our political discourse have all been replaced by a hair-trigger performative outrage, the scorched-earth warfare of cancel culture, and even occasional violence. It’s difficult to remember that there was a time when even acerbic antagonists like William Buckley and Gore Vidal could trade barbs onstage without hurling chairs at each other and inciting nationwide rioting. What has happened to us? How did we come to this point? And is this state of rage destined to be a permanent feature of our cultural and political landscape?

Peter Wood, president of the National Association of Scholars and author of the essential 1620: A Critical Response to the 1619 Project, has addressed these questions incisively in a must-read, brand new book titled Wrath: America Enraged. He agreed to answer some questions about the book.

Mark Tapson: Mr. Wood, what is the “new anger,” and what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?

Peter Wood: “New anger” is show-off anger, the display of someone who expects to be admired for the performance or to boast about it afterwards: anger mixed with self-delight.  New anger contrasts to the older ethic of trying to master your anger and not to let it master you.  Through much of American history, giving free vent to anger was regarded as a sign of weakness and immaturity.  We admired the man or woman who, when provoked, found ways to handle the situation without descending into rage.  Of course, that kind of self-control often failed, at which point brawls erupted.  Those who brawled in public or in private, however, were not regarded as good people.  Those who turned to anger too quickly or too often were shamed.

“New anger” became a recognizable force in American life in the 1950s, though it was at first a trend confined to avant garde parts of society:  the beat generation, early adepts of Freudian psychoanalysis, and people reading French existentialist novels. From these seeds grew the counterculture of the sixties, and then the disillusioned anger of the Big Chill 1970s.  I am collapsing a lot of history into a few sentences.  The breakdown of the older ideals of emotional self-control and their replacement by a new ethic of emotional expressiveness didn’t happen overnight or all at once or equally in all sectors of society.  Fifteen years ago I spent a whole book (A Bee in the Mouth: Anger in America Now) to describe the slow progression of new anger into the position it now has of cultural dominance. I’m mindful that whole generations have grown up for whom there is nothing “new” about “new anger.” It is all they have ever experienced unless they have been immersed in the world of Turner Classic Movies, where you can glimpse a world ruled by different emotional norms.

But you ask me “what is the difference between anger and wrath in a political context?” The political left, going all the way back to the 1950s and even earlier upheld the view that American society is so unjust that people should indeed feel righteous indignation and anger at our institutions. The form of this leftist anger, of course, shifted with other changes in the national temperament. A Woody Guthrie protest song of the Dust Bowl years expressed leftist anger in a vivid way but it was meant to rally people and it had a good-humored element to it. As new anger emerged in the 1950s, leftist anger began to take on a darker tone. The Beat poet Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in 1956 titled “America,” in which he told the country, “Go fuck yourself with your atom bomb.” The shock of a line like that has dissipated over the years as vulgarity has become common, but it was a pretty big step at the time, and it opened a rhetorical arms race on the left. Finding ever newer and more offensive ways to express anger became a competition among leftist artists, intellectuals, and self-styled rebels.  

I’m using the word to capture that moment of emotional impasse in which the person has been angered beyond endurance and sees no way ahead. All the exits have been blocked and the places where emotional expression could be channeled into political or legal action seem to be out of reach. Wrath is collective despair suddenly torn free of all (or at least most) restraints because the other side has chosen to rule by foce and intimidation, not by the consent of the governed.

Which, to me at least, highlights a simple fact: The wrath of Heritage Americans is rational, reasonable, and entirely justified. It is reactive, the just and proper response all citizens of a free republic should feel over the depredations of those who propose to enslave them. The Left’s wrath, in razor-sharp contrast, is none of those things, being no more than the response of overindulged juveniles to the thwarting of their will to absolute power, or the adult rejection of their presumed right to wield it. There is no justification for such unreflective, self-serving rage, nothing reasonable or rational about it. Rather than indulging or even tolerating it, it needs to be punished, and mercilessly.

Sorry, Commie brats, I’m afraid you just don’t get to wave your chubby fists around in inchoate rage because freemen decline to just quietly roll over and let you rule them. That ain’t how it works, I’m afraid. Freedom-oriented folks—being peaceable, mature sorts whose primary wish is to be left alone by the likes of you snotnoses—will put up with a lot, to be sure. But there IS a limit to their forebearance, which limit you are well past, whether you know it or not. To learn more about all this, keep fucking around and find out. I promise you won’t like it.

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“A CONTAGION of COURAGE”

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Not a moment too soon, either. But, human nature being what it is, that’s almost always the way; nornal, sane, peaceable sorts tend to be slow to rile up and get moving, until all of a sudden…they aren’t.

Resistance Is Not Futile
After mass vaccinating the oblivious sheeple (the first 30%), then incentivizing or threatening the easily controlled obedience worshipers (another 30%), the genocidal vaccine pushers have reached the fiercely resisting 40% of the country that refuses to go along with vaccine tyranny.

All across America, pilots, firefighters, police officers, sheriff’s deputies, construction workers, office workers and many other people are saying, “Take this jab and shove it!”

Courage is contagious.

When groups of informed Americans rise up and say, “No!” to the genocidal vaccine tyrants, the tyrants are eventually forced to back down for the simple reason that you can’t run society without workers. And if those workers decide that risking their health and life isn’t worth a measly paycheck in soon-to-be-worthless dollars, society simply cannot function.

The revolt of the workers is best captured in this explicit video by “Old Man Cruz” (not related to Sen. Ted Cruz), a construction worker who explains what happens when workers stand up to vaccine tyranny…

It seems cliché to say that our nation is at the crossroads, but it’s true. The path we choose from here will be the path our nation continues down for the foreseeable future. If we succumb to the medical tyranny staring down at us, then we will beginning our descent on the aforementioned slippery slope with no realistic chance of recovery. If we fight this oppression and declare we are a free people, then our oblivion will be delayed until the next existential threat arises.

If there’s a silver lining to all of this, it’s that the nation needs an infusion of patriotism in action from time to time. Our patriotic muscles are like real muscles. They need to be exercised or the grow weaker. Today is our opportunity to defend the Constitution and the God-given freedoms the Constitution highlights. If we are to be a free people, then we must recognize that our freedoms will not defend themselves. It takes action at times like these. It takes courage.

It takes us. All of us.

Pandemic Panic Theater has turned a large number of Americans into pawns of the powers-that-be. But there are still millions of Americans who can stand up to oppression. Will we?

If history is any guide, some will; most won’t. What remains to be seen is if ENOUGH of us will. I’m inclined to think so, myself. Contra Rucker’s penultimate ‘graph, it DOESN’T take “all of us.” It only takes enough. And happily, once a stalwart handful get the train rolling, we all might be surprised at how many more folks will quickly jump aboard.

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“Your Vote Won’t Count”

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News FLASH from Dan Gelernter. And also, y’know, moi.

We’re coming up on another election of national importance—the Virginia governor’s race is November 2. My friends are hopefully suggesting on social media that this will be the election that turns things around, where the full anger of the common folk at being bossed around by autocratic overlords finally manifests itself and we throw the bums out.

Mind you, they were saying the same thing with the same hope about the California recall election. And I said at the time, weeks before the vote was tallied, there was no point in hoping that patriotic anger would outbalance the massive machinery at work behind the scenes: Your votes didn’t matter in the 2020 presidential election, they didn’t matter in the California recall, they won’t matter in the Virginia gubernatorial election, and they won’t matter next year.

And the national circle-jerk goes right on a-circling, the self-perpetuating wank-a-thon producing the usual tedious and unsatisfying climax at the close of another “Election” Day. After another late-night disappointment, conservative commentators awaken Wednesday morning to feign astonishment that the desperately longed for conservative “wave” petered out on them yet again—UNEXPECTED!™—without ever generating enough kinetic energy to finally curl over at the top and forcefully crash onto the encrusted slime and filth we so desperately hoped might at last be washed away from these shores. Hopefully, the ever-phantasmagorical “wave” election might usher the ugly detritus far out to sea, whence the disgraceful blight would then gradually dissipate into nothingness—the whole sorry mess scrubbed from memory as thoroughly as the incoherent, puzzling nightmare you had two weeks ago, a chaotic brain-jumble brought on by the highly questionable shellfish you optimistically had for dinner before turning in.

The commentariat, rising to the challenge of duty and responsibility, blearily springs into action once more to flog analyses and explanations of how such a befuddling thing could possibly have occurred, against all odds and in contradiction of the very latest polls—or, for the more brazen pundits, peddling the shopworn claim that the latest stinging defeat was in fact a momentous triumph for Repugnican candidates who will never be either sworn into the offices they sought, or be heard from again. EVER.

Dan does a quick fly-by past the 2020 dumbshow before moving on to describe the three crooked legs of the election-fraud stool.

So what’s the situation now? Vastly worse. This huge Time-documented conspiracy only half-expected to get away with stealing the election from Donald Trump. They discovered unexpected allies in three vital places: First, the courts, including the Supreme Court, refused to hear a single case of election fraud on the merits. They dismissed all the cases for lack of evidence or standing, which was much safer than letting the plaintiffs present their evidence in court.

Second, the Department of Justice was happy to say they’d found no evidence of election fraud, without drawing attention to the fact they hadn’t been looking. They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to any investigation at all: How many of you are aware that it was the relentless pressure of private citizens in Yuma, Arizona, who provided photographic evidence that the Justice Department couldn’t ignore, which led to indictments (so far two public) for vote fraud in the 2020 election? But even as the government was forced to charge the little people who were getting paid to collect ballots and cast them illegally, they assiduously refused to investigate where that money came from. Perhaps it came from a well-funded cabal of powerful people?

But third, and most important by far, the thing that ultimately renders our elections meaningless is people like Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp. They are the most important allies in the conspiracy to steal our elections, precisely because we expect them to be fighting on our side. Fraudulent elections cost Republicans seats—cost Republicans the presidency—so why wouldn’t the most powerful people in the Republican Party be fighting just as hard as they could to expose fraud and pass laws requiring in-person voting with ID?

Here’s the secret answer: These people hate you. Sure, they’re willing to pay lip service to America as a great nation, to churchgoing values, and so forth. But they’re really just Democrats with different special interests: They want to funnel all your money to military contractors instead of environmentalists. People like Donald Trump interfere with that. People like you interfere with that. Because you want the government to mind its own goddamned business. And, on that issue, Mitch McConnell is united with Senator Chuck Shumer (D-N.Y.) against you.

These people live for power. They exist for the pleasure of spending your money to retain that power. And, now that they’ve managed to separate that power from public accountability by legalizing mail-in, no-ID, drop-box, multiple-ballot, and similar voting practices, you think they’re going to give all that up?

Of course not. The power, the perks, the ill-gotten gains will all have to be taken from them. Like it or not, that can only be accomplished forcibly. Coming up next: The Flinch.

There is no solution to this problem short of a Constitutional Convention that restores our elections to their original format: Voting on election day, and in-person. Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one. That is precisely what the Mitch McShumer crowd wants you to do: hope. Hope is an excuse not to act. Don’t take it.

After repeated tries, this hail-Mary pass just might take the prize for Worst Play yet. Just who does Gelernter imagine will be in charge of planning, managing, and overseeing this Con-Con, anyway? Why, the very professional politicians who are most endangered by any fair, open, and honestly-conducted one, that’s who. He gets everything perfectly correct, right up until this sentence: “Until we make that happen, there is no point in hoping the next election will be magically less fraudulent than the last one.” He’d have done much better to omit the opening clause, starting instead at “there is no point” etc and continuing from there. Dan starts off nicely, earning himself a solid “A for Effort” only to close out the semester with a failing grade.

I’ve mentioned previously that, while I wouldn’t be so presumptious as to deride or condemn foljks who doesn’t feel the same as I do about it, I absolutely, positively WILL NOT waste my time voting in American “elections” from here on out, no matter who the candidate might be. In my opinion, it’s far more productive to refuse my endorsement and consent via participating in a process I know from the git-go is nothing but theater, a complete fraud. I see no possibility of anything useful or positive resulting from it, with plenty of negatives in the pan of the scale—beginning with my tacit acceptance of the insult to my intelligence that willing complicity in my own disenfranchisement amounts to. Anybody out there who DOES perceive any constructive aspects of continuing to act as if the “election” grift retains a single scrap of credibility is welcome to have at it, and more power to ya. Perhaps you’re right about which is the better approach. Could be I’m full of shit; I have been before, just once or twice. But whether I am or I ain’t, I am fully and firmly OUT.

Don’t hate me ’cause I’m beautiful, as Little Richard used to say.

Bottom line: a deeply corrupt system can never be reformed by resort to the rules, procedures, and bureaucratic entities created and controlled by that very same corrupt system. It’s such a simple, transparently obvious waste of time as to beggar belief that otherwise intelligent people could be oblivious to it. What’s under discussion here is the restoration of order, decency, and rationality using the pointless and wrongheaded expedient of making civil, adult appeals to the malefactors inflicting disorder and insanity a-purpose, using those things and more besides as the weapons to utterly destroy the advocates of civility and rationality they so viscerally loathe.

We’re well past the point where moderate means can be of any use whatsoever. Only radical measures can avail us now. Too many of those able to clearly identify the problem and even recognize the iron-hard seriousness of our plight are nonetheless not yet ready or able to make the final, terrifying leap into full acknowledgment of the one non-negotiable imperative: That Team Liberty MUST prevail, no matter how terrible the measures required to gain ultimate victory over the soulless abominations presently waging all-out war against us.

Update! The view from Oz looks very, very familiar, don’t it?

There was no violent revolution. No overthrow of the government. No military coup. But the results have been as dramatic as the changes that occurred in the past when the communists or the fascists took power.

Prime ministers have come and gone. Elections have been held. Such events no longer seem to have any significance. You cannot point to any of those prime ministers and say, “it was all his fault.” Under each new prime minister both countries have lurched further in the direction of totalitarianism. Whether Labour or the Tories have been in power, or in the case of Australia Labor or the LNP, has made no difference whatsoever. The process of creeping totalitarianism has continued, slowly but inexorably. It’s clear that elections no longer matter at all.

It’s clear that whoever is in charge it’s not our politicians and it’s not our elected governments. You really don’t need to be a crazed conspiracy theorist to have noticed that.

Liberalism has been abolished. The individual has never been less important, and has never had fewer rights. What matters is the state and the corporation. The individual exists to serve the state and the corporation.

If we stubbornly insist on disagreeing with either the state or with the private corporations who rule society in conjunction with the state, our opinions are ignored. If we continue to be stubborn we are silenced. Dissent is not permitted. Individuals do not have the right to act for themselves, speak for themselves or think for themselves. If you try it on the internet you’ll be banned from social media, or (more likely) you will simply be shadow-banned. You’ll be silenced and you won’t even know it’s happened. In Britain you’ll probably be arrested.

And you don’t have to break any actual laws, because social order is now maintained by the state and by corporations to whom the law and legal rights are irrelevant. If you dissent in any way, even in a way that is technically quite legal, you will be silenced.

Liberalism didn’t fail. It was overthrown by a new ideology which for want of a better term we can call neo-fascism. Nothing matters but the state and the corporation. The individual is irrelevant. Individualism is now an anti-social act that will get you into deep trouble. We learn to obey the state and to obey its corporate partners.

1984 is already here but we pretend it isn’t that bad because the reality is too painful to face.

The irony is, the harder we resist facing reality, the more viciously reality will rub our noses in it.

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2

Whole Point: missed, and badly

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What we should be asking is, who the hell cares.

(CNSNews.com) – “Where’s Pete Buttigieg?” a growing number of politicians and pundits are asking.

Buttigieg, President Biden’s transportation secretary, hasn’t had much, if anything, to say about the disruptive, multi-day Southwest Airlines flight cancellations that have stranded thousands of passengers; or the nation’s supply chain logjam, where dozens of container ships wait off the California coast for the opportunity to unload. The backlog is partly blamed on a shortage of trucks/drivers to pick up and return the shipping containers.

“The supply chain disruption is a crisis,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) tweeted on Monday. “This will impact every American, especially those who can least afford it. It’s past time for President Biden and Pete Buttigieg to explain what they’re doing about this.”

In a second tweet, Cotton said: “Pete Buttigieg was completely unqualified to serve as Secretary of Transportation. But Biden still picked him. Now, Pete is absent during a transportation crisis that is hurting working-class Americans.”

Heavens to Murgatroid, is there NO ONE who can save us?

STRONG HINT: If you sincerely consider yourself a Constitutionally-literate conservative, yet your first thought whenever a problem rears its ugly head is to demand that government step in and fix it—particularly when THE FUCKING PROBLEM WAS CREATED ENTIRELY BY GOVERNMENT IN THE FIRST GODDAMNED PLACE—then you are DEFINITELY Doing It Wrong, and should rethink a few things.

Yes, yes, hoisting new mom Pete Buttplug on xhwyrmmzz’s own Big Government petard might offer some small, transitory entertainment value. I get that, I really do. Nonetheless, Cotton’s kneejerk demand to be told “what they’re doing about this” rather than calling attention to the conspicuous absence of any grant of Constitutional authority for FederalGovCo to be micromanaging the supply chain, the trucker shortage, or the economy itself illustrates just how far Left the Overton window has been pushed. The widespread assumption that there’s a proper federal role to be played in addressing each and every issue says a lot about how very far afield we’ve strayed from our Founding ideals, none of it good.

8

Happy Columbus Day Victory Over Indigenous Peoples Day!

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The straight dope about the man, facts they don’t teach in government schools.

The explorer Christopher Columbus made four trips across the Atlantic Ocean from Spain: in 1492, 1493, 1498 and 1502. He was determined to find a direct water route west from Europe to Asia, but he never did. Instead, he stumbled upon the Americas. Though he did not really “discover” the so-called New World—millions of people already lived there—his journeys marked the beginning of centuries of exploration and colonization of North and South America.

Christopher Columbus, the son of a wool merchant, is believed to have been born in Genoa, Italy, in 1451. When he was still a teenager, he got a job on a merchant ship. He remained at sea until 1476, when pirates attacked his ship as it sailed north along the Portuguese coast.

The boat sank, but the young Columbus floated to shore on a scrap of wood and made his way to Lisbon, where he eventually studied mathematics, astronomy, cartography and navigation. He also began to hatch the plan that would change the world forever.

At the end of the 15th century, it was nearly impossible to reach Asia from Europe by land. The route was long and arduous, and encounters with hostile armies were difficult to avoid. Portuguese explorers solved this problem by taking to the sea: They sailed south along the West African coast and around the Cape of Good Hope.

But Columbus had a different idea: Why not sail west across the Atlantic instead of around the massive African continent? The young navigator’s logic was sound, but his math was faulty. He argued (incorrectly) that the circumference of the Earth was much smaller than his contemporaries believed it was; accordingly, he believed that the journey by boat from Europe to Asia should be not only possible, but comparatively easy via an as-yet undiscovered Northwest Passage. 

He presented his plan to officials in Portugal and England, but it was not until 1492 that he found a sympathetic audience: the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile.

Columbus wanted fame and fortune. Ferdinand and Isabella wanted the same, along with the opportunity to export Catholicism to lands across the globe. (Columbus, a devout Catholic, was equally enthusiastic about this possibility.)

Columbus’ contract with the Spanish rulers promised that he could keep 10 percent of whatever riches he found, along with a noble title and the governorship of any lands he should encounter.

Today, Columbus has a controversial legacy—he is remembered as a daring and path-breaking explorer who transformed the New World, yet his actions also unleashed changes that would eventually devastate the native populations he and his fellow explorers encountered.

The consensus view on Columbus the man is, and has been for many years, that he was in fact something of a grubby, treacherous little prick. I like the guy anyway, though, seeing as how the mere mention of his name usually reduces shitlibs to frothing paroxysms of rage, almost all of it centered on the “genocide” he unleashed on “Native Americans,” ie, the Red Injun. But the fact is, Columbus never even set foot on what we today know as American soil, thus never “genocided” any American Injuns, nor even set eyes on one to my knowledge. More little-known facts, randomly plucked from both hither and yon. First, the hither:

3. He Was a Cheapskate
On his famous 1492 voyage, Columbus had promised a reward of gold to whoever saw land first. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana was the first to see land on October 12, 1492: a small island in the present-day Bahamas Columbus named San Salvador. Poor Rodrigo never got the reward, however: Columbus kept it for himself, telling everyone he had seen a hazy sort of light the night before. He had not spoken up because the light was indistinct. Rodrigo may have gotten hosed, but there is a nice statue of him sighting land in a park in Seville.

4. Half of His Voyages Ended in Disaster
On Columbus’ famed 1492 voyage, his flagship the Santa Maria ran aground and sank, causing him to leave 39 men behind at a settlement named La Navidad. He was supposed to return to Spain loaded with spices and other valuable goods and knowledge of an important new trade route. Instead, he returned empty-handed and without the best of the three ships entrusted to him. On his fourth voyage, his ship rotted out from under him and he spent a year with his men marooned on Jamaica.

5. He Was a Terrible Governor
Grateful for the new lands he had found for them, the King and Queen of Spain made Columbus governor in the newly-established settlement of Santo Domingo. Columbus, who was a fine explorer, turned out to be a lousy governor. He and his brothers ruled the settlement like kings, taking most of the profits for themselves and antagonizing the other settlers. Although Columbus instructed his settlers to make sure that the Tainos on Hispaniola be protected, during his frequent absences, the settlers rampaged the villages, robbing, raping, and enslaving. Disciplinary actions by Columbus and his brother were met with open revolt.

It got so bad that the Spanish crown sent an investigator, who took over as governor, arrested Columbus, and sent him back to Spain in chains. The new governor was far worse.

8. He Never Believed He Had Found a New World
Columbus was looking for a new passage to Asia… and that’s just what he found, or so he said until his dying day. In spite of mounting facts that seemed to indicate that he had discovered lands previously unknown, he continued to believe that Japan, China and the court of the Great Khan were very close to the lands he had discovered. Isabella and Ferdinand knew better: the geographers and astronomers they consulted knew the world was spherical and estimated that Japan was 12,000 miles from Spain (correct if you go by ship heading eastward from Bilbao), while Columbus held out for 2,400 miles.

According to biographer Washington Irving (1783–1859), Columbus even proposed a ridiculous theory for the discrepancy: that the Earth was shaped like a pear, and that he had not found Asia because of the part of the pear that bulges out towards the stem. At court, it was the width of the ocean westward that was in question, not the shape of the world. Fortunately for Columbus, the Bahamas was located about the distance he expected to find Japan.

By the end of his life, he was a laughingstock in Europe because of his stubborn refusal to accept the obvious.

Next, the yon:

7. He was stranded in Jamaica
When Columbus sailed for the New World for the last time, shipworms gnawed parts of his fleet, forcing him to abandon two ships and land on modern-day Jamaica. He and his crew were stranded, but the native Arawak Indians welcomed them and fed them for months.

8. A lunar eclipse saved Columbus in Jamaica
As months dragged on, Columbus’ crew mutinied, robbed and murdered some of the Arawaks. To quell the chaos, Columbus pretended to bring down the wrath of God. He had a copy of an astronomical almanac, which predicts a total lunar eclipse. Three days before the celestial event, Columbus requested an audience with the Arawak chief, saying that his God was angry for the lack of provisions for his men and that he would send a sign of his displeasure.

True enough, the moon turned a blood-red colour and terrified the natives. The Arawaks asked Columbus to intercede, promising to provide for them if his God restores the moon. Columbus pretended to pray in his cabin and emerged only when the eclipse has subsided. The Arawaks then provided for them until a caravel from Hispaniola arrived to fetch them.

9. Columbus didn’t prove that the Earth was round
Many credit the discovery of a round Earth to Columbus, but he wasn’t the first to prove it. Humans have known that the Earth was round since ancient Greece, so this wasn’t a surprising fact, even for Christopher Columbus. The Greeks observed the movements of the sun and other planetary properties to conclude that the Earth was a sphere. What he wanted to do was to create a sea route across the Atlantic towards Asia.

11. He miscalculated the Earth’s circumference
It’s a little-known fact that Christopher Columbus had many miscalculations during his journeys. He underestimated the circumference of the Earth by 25%. Also, his estimate of the naval distance to Marco Polo’s great port of Cathay was inaccurate.

12. His famous ships had nicknames
Columbus’ ships are known as Niña, Pinta and Santa Maria, but the first two are likely nicknames. In Columbus’ time, it was custom to name ships after saints and then give them a simpler moniker. The real name of Niña was Santa Clara, while Santa Maria’s nickname was La Gallega, after Galicia, where it was built. Pinta’s real name is unknown.

17. His death caused three decades of legal proceedings
When Columbus died, his heirs filed lawsuits known as the Pleitos colombinos against the Crown of Castile and Leon to assert the rewards for discovering the New World for Spain. Legal proceedings lasted three decades until the Crown granted honorific titles to Columbus’ grandson.

Whatever his personal flaws and failings, Christopher Columbus was inarguably a most intriguing man, as all great explorers tend to be. My own fondness for him dates back to my NYC days, when every Fall the annual controversy over the Columbus Day Parade would predictably erupt like a modern-day Mt Vesuvius. In one corner: Kid Shitlib, spluttering hysterically for all the stale reasons you’d expect. In the other: Dago Red, who had long since adopted Columbus as the symbolic Trevi Fountain from whence springs all Italian-American heritage, history, and pride.

Oh, but the yearly battle over the big Columbus Day Parade was epic, with Kid Shitlib rope-a-doping in hopes of permanently ending this shameful celebration of racism, imperialism, slavery, and genocide through legal and political maneuvering. Meanwhile, the pugnacious Dago Red would charge doggedly straight into the fray, vowing that if the City didn’t fund, manage, and endorse the shindig officially this year, they’d do it all themselves and to hell with everybody. Which, I’m sure they would have at that, if only for spite, and more power to ’em.

On the glorious day itself, the Eyeties would emerge en masse from their Mulberry Street enclave to march alongside the Parade as it wound its way along Fifth Ave, their backs straight and jaws jutting in open challenge to the shitlib pussies to man up and start some shit. The shitlibs, in keeping with their own rich Columbus Day tradition, would limit expression of their disapproval and protest to weeping piteously in terror, pleading for mercy from the intimidating Wop palookas enjoying the parade, flapping their noodle-like arms in frustration, then speedily retiring further uptown to take part in the annual public beat-off contest on the steps of Saint Ignatius Loyola church.

Yep, those were the days alright.

Update! Because OF COURSE he did.

On Monday, Ron DeSantis did something which surely steamed the Left.

Again.

Florida’s governor signed a proclamation honoring Columbus Day.

“Columbus Day commemorates the life and legacy of the Italian explorer who made Europeans conscious of the existence of the New World,” he observed, “and whose travels opened the door for the development of European settlements in the Western Hemisphere, which would ultimately lead to the establishment of the United States of America.”

That ain’t even the half of it, as you will find out when you click on over and read the rest.

4

This time for sure, Charlie Brown

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What, you thought things were gonna be different this time around?

The Fairfax County Board of Supervisors is asking Gov. Ralph Northam to waive the witness signature requirement for absentee ballots cast by mail in this fall’s election.

The board voted 9-1 for the proposal by Chair Jeffrey McKay to send a letter to Northam, with Springfield District Supervisor Pat Herrity, the board’s only Republican, casting the only vote against the motion.

McKay said that waiving the witness signature requirement – as was done during the 2020 election – is necessary due to the continued threat of COVID-19.

Herrity said that waiving the requirement would be a “blow to election integrity.”

Uhh, hate to have to be the one to etc and all, Pat, but “blow(s) to election integrity are the whole fucking point. TTPTB have but one interest when it comes to election integrity, and you can bet your sweet bippy it does NOT involve finding ways to secure and/or maintain it. Bayou Pete has questions.

So, what’s going on here?  Let me ask a not-so-rhetorical question.

Question:  Why would you change the security rules for mail-in ballots in the middle of an election that’s already under way?

Most likely answer:  Because you’ve looked at the ballots that have already been received, and realized that you’re losing.

That’s what I’m sure is going on here.

And you would be correct, sir. Pete backs up his case with a little historical perspective:

Liberals and progressives often try to model the U.S. on Western European countries, but you never hear them arguing that we should adopt their voting rules. There is a reason for that. Banning mail-in voting or requiring people to use photo IDs to obtain a mail-in ballot is quite common in developed countries, especially in Europe.

These countries have learned the hard way what happens when mail-in ballots aren’t secured. They have also discovered how hard it is to detect vote buying when both those buying and selling the votes have an incentive to hide the exchange.

France banned mail-in voting in 1975 because of massive fraud in Corsica, where postal ballots were stolen or bought and voters cast multiple votes. Mail-in ballots were used to cast the votes of dead people.

The U.K., which allows postal voting, has had some notable mail-in ballot fraud cases. Prior to recent photo ID requirements, six Labour Party councilors in Birmingham won office after what the judge described as a “massive, systematic and organized” postal voting fraud campaign. The fraud was apparently carried out with the full knowledge and cooperation of the local Labour Party. There was “widespread theft” of postal votes (possibly around 40,000 ballots) in areas with large Muslim populations, because Labour members were worried that the Iraq War would spur these voters to oppose the incumbent government.

In 1991, Mexico’s election mandated voter photo IDs and banned absentee ballots. The then-governing Institutional Revolutionary Party had long used fraud and intimidation with mail-in ballots in order to win elections. Only in 2006 were absentee ballots again allowed, and then only for those living abroad who requested them at least six months in advance.

If concern about voter fraud with mail-in ballots is delusional, it is a delusion that is shared by most of the world. Even the countries that allow mail-in ballots have protections, such as government-issued photo IDs. But Americans are constantly assured even this step is completely unnecessary. Without basic precautions, our elections are on course to become the laughingstock of the developed world.

“On course to become,” is it? For any forthright, halfway knowledgeable soul, it’s a bit late for indulging such a Pollyanna-ish point of view. This is why the usual late-stage reports of Repugnicans “closing the gap” in the (rigged) polls—thereby “narrowing” and “heating up” the “race”—are so drolly amusing, at least to me. Throw the increasingly common “don’t get cocky” trope into the mix, and the whole charade is just 24-karat comedy gold.


Contrary to received wisdom, establishing a modicum of integrity and trustworthiness in the fraud-rife American “election” system would not be a complex task, neither expensive nor beyond the capability of mere humans. All it would take is a little unambiguous, no-nonsense legislation:

  • Forbid ALL use of electronic voting machines in any US election
  • Forbid ALL mail-in ballots, except perhaps for dot-mil, diplomatic personnel, or other specific goobermint personnel deployed overseas on election day; absolutely NO other exceptions considered
  • Require in person, election-day-only voting, using paper ballots exclusively, proper photo ID to be presented by ALL voters before they’re allowed to enter their local polling place

And then we could…uhh…well, actually, that’s it. Nothing more than just those three little things. All dead simple, low-cost, and totally fair. All comprehensible, all very easily implemented. Take these three easy-peasy steps, which would take little to no time, and you will have un-fucked American “elections” pretty much completely. Congratulations are in order for you; you have just successfully re-installed a quite valuable thing, an essential component that hasn’t been part of the broke-down American electoral machine since before the days of Boss Tweed and Tammany Hall at least: credibility.

Unless and until these common-sense reforms have been effected, voting in American “elections” expecting anything but more of the same shite is a mug’s game, the Founding concept of self-government and the primacy of the expressed will of the people no more than fantasy. There’s a word that pops unbidden into mind:

Definition of gossamer (Entry 1 of 2)
1: a film of cobwebs floating in air in calm clear weather

2: something light, delicate, or insubstantial

And there you have it. Describes the overall situation pretty nicely, I think.

Tinkering around the edges of the current system in trivial ways—the approach favored in those few states where any reform at all has been undertaken so far—is NOT enough to fix this. Simple and obvious as they are, the three options laid out above are in fact revolutionary changes, which partly explains the fierce howls of outrage at any mention of them from the malefactors profiting from the present wretched dysfunction. However unhinged the opposition to it, though—and however devious and dishonest the hidden motives behind it—nothing short of revolutionary measures will get us out of this. Thus, our national kabuki production will creak and totter on, strutting and fretting its hour upon the stage, signifying nothing. Until one day, suddenly—UNEXPECTEDLY!!™—the badly-needed revolutionary reform occurs, after which it will be heard no more.

Speaking strictly for myself, I haven’t the least intention to provide my tacit endorsement via participating in it. But YMMV, as always. Those who choose to continue participating in American election theater, for whatever reason, are perfectly welcome to do so; they can expect no opposition, interference, or condemnation from me. But maybe it would be better for all concerned for those folks to acknowledge, if only to themselves, the shadowy presence of the con artist behind the curtain, director of the whole sorry show. If real reform is ever to take place, such a quiet, internal admission of the unreality and ultimate pointlessness of the whole sham could show us a way forward. In the meantime, I’ll rerun my instant-classic meme.

Immune to absurdity

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Not just immune to it but surrounded by it, immersed in it.

Sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing:

~If you go to a small-town school-board meeting to protest an already crap and globally embarrassing eduction system devolving into toxic anti-white, anti-American propaganda, you are liable to investigation by a dirty, stinking, rotten, corrupt federal “justice” system and its specially appointed “task force”;

~If you are an acclaimed glass-ceiling shatterer, the first “openly bisexual” and “openly non-theist” female senator in the history of the republic, you cannot enter a bathroom stall without being stalked, yelled at and filmed by a law-breaking alien who shouldn’t even be in your country, never mind your toilet;

~If you have contracted Covid-19, survived, and are now possessed of antibodies that provide an immunity all the science (and the chaps at Pfizer) shows to be more effective and longer lasting than the vaccine, you will nevertheless be fired from your job at the local hospital;

~If you’re thinking of buying a Chinese-made refrigerator or dining table, that transaction will now be reported to the United States Government;

I could go on: there are so many trees, but not a lot of agreement on the precise nature of the forest. The biggest-selling book with American conservatives right now argues that the answer to all of the above is “constitutionalism”. On the other hand, the radio host Jesse Kelly says:

We’re not a serious country and we’re not a country that will be around much longer.

I incline to the latter view myself. At this point, conservative complaceniks tend to trot out Adam Smith: “There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.” But not this much – not Covid lockdowns and open borders, Afghan “translators” and Haitian “refugees”, Big Tech and Big Trans, BLM and CRT, ID for the IHOP but not for the voting booth, China as America’s manufacturer and America’s loan shark…

Is the United States Constitution going to save you from the above? No, the Constitution enabled it – or, to put it at its mildest, failed to prevent it. James Kirkpatrick:

‘Constitutionalism’ is flawed because legalism can’t restrain power. Power shapes law. If ‘constitutionalism’ worked, we wouldn’t be here, especially when it comes to immigration. If the ‘rule of law’ meant anything, we wouldn’t have millions of illegals. Adherence to largely symbolic ornaments doesn’t prevent a country from being utterly remade.

Once you abolish the principle of equality before the law, any law – from the Constitution down – is irrelevant. Almost all the examples above are about the replacement of a land of laws with a land of men: antifa are privileged above “insurrectionists” for the purposes of mostly peaceful protests; the vaccinated are privileged above the naturally immune for the purposes of dining in a New York restaurant; illegal aliens are privileged above US citizens for the purposes of the paperwork necessary to enter the country; subscribers to the official narrative are privileged above contrarians for the purposes of access to the monopoly social-media platforms…

If you are willing (as is this country’s constitutional court) to torture language into making constitutional the lack of equality before the law for the purposes of university admission, why would the abandonment of principle not spread?

s I said (okay, last time, I promise) to my friends at the IPA Down Under just last year, in civilized countries arguments about liberty tend to be fairly abstract and thus a minority interest. At the time I ran afoul of the Canadian “Human Rights” Commissions, a well-meaning ally wanted to organize a mass protest on Parliament Hill: We gently dissuaded him on the grounds that you could have put all the likely attendees into a 1984 Honda Civic and still had room for a couple of child seats – because the average citizen’s reaction to my particular predicament was “Well, I have no desire to be rude about imams. So this has nothing to do with me and my life.”

Yet, for the last year and a half, arguments about liberty have not been abstract; they’re about every aspect of normal existence: the right to get a haircut, the right to eat a cheeseburger, the right to go to church, the right to have Gran’ma over for Thanksgiving, the right to spend 623 bucks without having to report it to the government, the right to object to both the brainwashing and all-day masking of your child, the right not to be shoved into the path of an oncoming train at Times Square because a crazy black woman has picked up the idea from even crazier white wokesters that you and your fellow strap-hangers are the very acme of white privilege…

“Land of the free and the home of the brave”? Both are conspicuous by their absence.

An uncharacteristically sprawling Steynpost, this one is, covering all the bases to make a larger point—a bleak but forthright one. Believe it or not, as lengthy as my above excerpt is there’s still plenty of the piece left over, of which you ought to read the all.

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1

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

Posted on      by     

The root of all evils.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is a disaster about to blow up.

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

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

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

4

“The Government Is Not Your Friend, No Matter What Politicians Tell You”

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Any questions?

The dirty little secret about government is that its purpose is not really to make the lives of citizens better but, rather, to accumulate power at the expense of citizens. Not sure about that? Ask yourself, how many government agencies have put themselves out of a job because they succeeded? There’re a few that technology left behind, like the Steamboat Inspection Service; others that served their purpose, like the Defense Homes Corporation; while others were merged into other agencies like the General Land Office, subsumed into the Department of Interior. In our history, there have been fewer than 100 federal agencies that have actually been shuttered, and most of those existed in the early 20th century to deal with the Depression or the two world wars.

According to the Federal Register, the federal government has 457 different agencies. That’s 457 agencies covering virtually every aspect of American’s lives, most of which are staffed by unelected bureaucrats, all of whom spend your money and many of whom write regulations that carry the force of law which the government’s police power enforces. This includes everything from the State Department to the Geographic Names Board to the International Broadcasting Board to the ATF.

And that 457 is misleading. While it includes a dozen organizations tied to Defense, there are dozens more agencies that come under it that are not listed in the Federal Register such as the DoD Education Activity or the Office of Naval Research. Wikipedia lists a more realistic, but still lacking, 1,500.

The American government has become a leviathan. It’s everywhere, involved in virtually every aspect of American’s lives, and it’s perpetual, regardless of its record of dismal failure.

The government spends $30 trillion over half a century and reduces poverty by 1%. The government spends more on education than virtually every nation on the planet yet 85% of the students in its biggest (and most minority-filled) school districts fail basic reading and math, the building blocks for success in our dynamic society. And we’re supposed to believe government works for us?

American governments spend more money on education and social programs than anything else, more than the GDP of most countries. Yet even as they fail, year after year, decade after decade, the funds keep growing, regardless of their catastrophically abysmal track record.

And that tells you everything you need to know about the nature of governments. Their goal isn’t to solve problems. They’re not here to make life better for citizens. Their goal is not to protect the lives and liberties of citizens. No, government is the Borg. Its raison d’etre is simple: Grow revenue and increase power for itself and unions.

Proof? Despite the fact that the United States has 3,143 counties in 50 states spread out over 3,796,742 square miles, nine of the twenty richest counties are in a circle less than 100 miles across with Washington DC at its center. And what is the industry that drives that wealth? Finance? No. Entertainment? No. Steel or autos or high tech? No. One thing: Government power.

Accumulating power is the fundamental nature of government, and our Founding Fathers understood that which is why they gave us the Bill of Rights and particularly the 9th and 10th Amendments. For the first 150 years of our nation, those guardrails stood relatively firm, but today they are simply gone. Sadly, America has become so detached from our Constitution that 90% of what our government does is unconstitutional.

Oh, I wouldn’t say “detached from our Constitution,” exactly. With at least twenty to thirty percent of the country completely in the dark about what it says and what it means; another fifty percent implacably hostile to everything it represents; and fully one hundred percent of the gott-damned goobermint ignoring it—on the rare occasions when they aren’t actively striving to flush it down the toilet altogether—what chance does the poor, dear old thing have, realistically?

3
1

Making their weakness our strength

Posted on      by     

A modest proposal from Brandon that I think we’ll all like.

We Will Not Comply: Red States Should Offer Sanctuary To Businesses, Military And Medical Personnel
The Biden Administration and its corporate partners are now implementing a blitzkrieg against the American citizenry. Biden’s vaccine executive orders are creating a culture of “paper’s please” fascism among larger businesses and Big Box retailers. He has recently announced that part of the mandates will include fines against businesses that refuse to enforce proof of vaccination on their employees. These fines will range from $70,000 to $700,000, which could destroy a medium sized company if they actually had to pay.

Medical personnel, primarily in leftist blue states, are now being fired from their positions because they have refused to comply with the vax. This is leaving massive gaps in medical response in places like New York. The unelected governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, claims she has the right to give herself dictatorial powers through executive order, and that these powers include deploying National Guard troops to take over medical duties. If you are familiar with the sordid history of VA hospitals, then you know that you do not want around 90% of military doctors operating on you in any capacity.

Keep in mind that none of these mandates are actual “laws”. None of them have been voted on by a legislature or the American people. They are color of law violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights and should be defied at every opportunity.

Furthermore, I have to ask that pesky but logical question once again – If the vaccines actually work as governments claim, then how are unvaccinated people any threat to vaccinated people?  Why would they need “protection” from us? (The reality is that the covid vax does not work so there is no reason to take it)  But let’s get back to Biden’s criminal trespasses; the list is growing by the day…

Let’s talk about Biden’s latest efforts to punish US troops that refuse the vaccines with dishonorable discharge. I’m not sure if Biden knows that a dishonorable discharge generally requires a trial by court martial in the military, or maybe this is what he actually wants for every single person that will not take the vax. In any case, the goal here is to terrify military members into submission and into accepting illegal orders. And yes, demanding that a soldier act as a lab rat for an experimental vaccine with no long term data to prove its safety is an illegal order.

It’s hard to say yet what the real stats are, but recent polling suggests that at least 30% of the US military plans to refuse the vaccinations, including many members of special operations units.

All of this over a virus with a tiny median death rate of 0.26%? Just to force people to take a vaccine that has been proven completely ineffective in countries like Israel where vaccination rates are high? When over 60% of people hospitalized with covid are fully vaccinated, then what is the point of the vaccines? It makes no sense unless the purpose was always tyranny and not public safety. So, where does this leave us?

There are larger scale solutions to this problem, there are peaceful short term solutions, and there are more violent long term solutions. I will be discussing the violent options in my next article, but for now I think the best path forward is for red states and maybe even red counties is to offer safe haven or “asylum” to people who are under attack from these mandates.

It is indeed a short one, of which you will want to read the all. There are all kinds of reasons why this audacious idea is a good one, not least among ’em how artery-popping, purple-faced livid its implementation would render Branch Covidians across the entire nation. Throw in a few others, including but not limited to:

  • It draws a bold, indelible line of demarcation between Free America and the Shitlib Shitrapies, one that leaves no room whatsoever for error or misinterpretation
  • It offers a practical means of escape for those in dire need of one
  • It amounts to a direct, healthy cocking of the snook by the Free States at some most deserving recipients
  • It allows for no further dithering or obfuscation concerning who the opposing sides really are, and what they really believe in
  • It encourages a long-needed clarification of how far the Free States might be willing to go in re-asserting their Constitutionally-delineated independence and authority vis a vis the illegitimate federal Überstate, after decades of incremental encroachment
  • It will simultaneously provide a significant boost to Free State military strength as well as bring in always-needed medical personnel and small businesses, all of whom have just received an object lesson on the paramount importance of liberty and self-determination
  • Siphon off trained, experienced, capable professionals in non-trivial numbers, leaving already-faltering Blue states suddenly and significantly weakened in ways even 1st World nations might struggle to cope with
  • Dammit, it’s just the right thing to do

…and we have ourselves a pluperfect no-brainer here. If there’s a downside here, I sure ain’t finding it.

7

No property, no rights

Posted on      by     

And no freedom, either.

In the West, the morality of the state has been determined by how much or how little it respects the basic rights of its citizens. During the Cold War this was a critical measure used to justify foreign policy. The American government claimed it was within its rights to overthrow South American governments that got too chummy with the Soviets because they would endanger the rights of their people. On the other hand, they would back anti-communist dictators because they were better than communists.

There was a lot of lying and dissembling on this issue, but the principle was important to Western governments, so they made a big show of it. In America, for example, this meant protecting property rights from the excesses of the state. As a practical matter, it meant the state had to prove they had good reason for violating your rights before the court would permit them from doing it. They had to get a warrant, for example, before tapping your phone or riffling through your papers.

Government is always a blunt instrument and men are not angels so to avoid office holders and bureaucrats from abusing the rights of the people they first had to demonstrate there was a compelling government interest in declaring your backyard a wetland or banning a certain activity. Put another away, it was the duty of the government to make the affirmative argument. Citizens did not have to justify their rights to exercise them. They were assumed.

Property is a useful metric in this regard because it is simple and the economic basis of Western society. Even in feudalism property rights were respected, because ownership was what made the system possible. The right to speak out or organize are up for debate to some degree, but the right to own the fruits of your labor is the starting point for social organization in the West. It is what makes communism alien and why it has always been the domain of outsiders and subversives.

The general violation of property rights is now the norm. The tech oligarchs, for example, strongly oppose private property. If they don’t like what you are saying on your website, they will steal your domain name. They will collude to limit your ability to hold a job or have a bank account. What used to be a sacred right of all people is now up for debate with an unelected oligarchical class as the judge and jury. What is yours is theirs and what is theirs is theirs and they own everything.

Today, the people in charge have no respect for the law or the concept of law, so their agents just do as they please. In fact, they take pride in trampling the rights of the people, because it pleases their masters. The goons prosecuting the January 6th protestors, for example, take a sadistic pleasure in the torment they are inflicting on the people caught in their trap. Their intentional cruelty has become a positional good, something that elevates them in the eyes of the oligarchs.

The Declaration of Independence is a remarkable document that is mostly remembered for the opening lines. Even though those lines have been abused by the very tyrants that now rule over us, the document is a remarkable expression of Western thought and Anglo-Saxon morality. After the long bill of indictment against the king, a list familiar today, there is this line. “A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.”

The beauty of that line is that it qualifies the moral depravity of the tyrant by juxtaposing it against the nature of a free people. A people who sit idly by as their rulers trample their ancient rights are getting the government they deserve. A free people, in contrast,  must hold their prince to the highest moral standard. It is immoral for them to do otherwise, as it violates that which defines them as free people. Every tyrant issues his own death warrant to the free people he seeks to oppress.

True, dat. Or, as some fool or other recently put it: The bane of all tyrants, sooner or later, is tyranny itself. The thing is, it’s usually up to We The People to see to it that the tyrant’s self-issued death warrant is executed.

2

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