Read and Heed – Page 29

Know thine enemy

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Mike

Our old friend Jeff Goldstein names names.

There’s nothing to be gained by arguing with anarcho-communists

Here’s visual proof. And some harsh words to go along with it.

It’s time we begin thinking of Antifa and those who align with the putative “anti-fascist” movement — themselves the epitome of contemporary fascist brown shirts cosplaying as radical Marxists — as foreign creatures, actual Others whose minds we will not change and whose behavior we should not allow. These people are quite explicitly anti-American in every important sense: they have no regard for the rights of those they oppose; and yet they’d claim every conceivable right for themselves, including their “right” to harm those whose goals don’t comport with theirs. And their true goal — their prime objective — is to cleanse the earth of those who won’t bow to their desires and fill the ranks of their mob.

In the comments to the video from Amagansett Press (link provided in Jeff’s post—M), supporters of the videographer, Jason, laud him for his willingness to stand up to this particular mob, and to argue his case intelligently and thoroughly, with a degree of cultivated calm.

Me, I have a different take — one I may not have had 22 years ago when I started the original protein wisdom website: arguing with committed leftists is useless. They are fixated by ideology, impervious to logic, and dedicated to achieving power any way possible. Grievance politics is just one way of trying to do that, as the victimization gambit has proven profitable to that end.

And so watching this video — watching a sincere citizen committed to the absolute protections of the First Amendment be treated with such disrespect, hostility, belittlement, and utter hatred, no matter how much he pleads his case — at first saddened me, then sickened me, and finally angered me.

But the twist is this: I found myself not angry at the anarcho-communist punks who lie as easily as they breathe. Because I know who and what they are, and I’ve long since learned that those of us who relish our founding ideals cannot peacefully co-exist with them, making some sort of future separation inevitable at this point. Rather, I found myself getting more and more angry at the 1A auditor who so clearly and desperately wants to find common ground with these malicious faux-revolutionaries that he grants them a respect they haven’t earned and gives them plaudits they don’t deserve, however mildly.

It’s admirable that he stood his ground. But as the interaction moved along, it became completely obvious that nothing he argued was going to sway this mob of larping Maoists, who viewed him with utter disdain, and with no intention of considering his positions, however much he pleaded that they intersected with their putative causes. And that’s because violent, committed leftists don’t have any real causes: instead, the causes they adopt at any moment are mere pretexts toward power, control, nihilism, and the complete destruction of the whole of traditional western culture and values.

Annnnd DINGDINGDINGDINGDING we have a winnah, folks!

Read all of it. Provides me with the perfect excuse for re-running one my all-time punk rock faves.

5

The Great Game

Posted on February 14, 2023 by Mike

Lions and tigers and Chinese spy balloons and UFOs and bears, oh my!

I’m a military intelligence insider, and I’m tired of all the bullshit threads clogging up the board, so I’m going to explain exactly what’s happening, and why it’s happening, including some classified secrets. Here you go:

1. NORAD has seen every single one of these well before they even get anywhere near US airspace.

2. We don’t act on them, most of the time, intentionally, because we know (through our own spy channels) that these are just tests of our radar blanket. China is trying to see how much equipment they can sneak into our airspace, and where our “radar gaps” are. (We don’t have any radar gaps.)

3. We were forced to act on the 200 foot wide balloon, because it was naked eye visible. We did not want to. (We really just didn’t want to reveal any information about our radar blanket, AT ALL.)

4. China expects us to react to the other objects because of heightened security, so we were forced to act on those as well.

5. We put on a show of going after the other objects, we explicitly picked some of the larger ones, so that China wouldn’t know exactly how small of an object we really sweep for. (If it’s the size of a bird, but it doesn’t have feathers and is flapping, we know it’s not a bird from NORAD’s passive ground based radar alone, we don’t even have to go look at it with anything actively, not to mention our satellite array can even tell, for objects of that size.)

6. We actually made it seem like we had to use an AWACS for the object over Lake Huron, because it had a bit of stealth coating/shaping design. Truth is, we saw that object as soon as it was within several hundred miles of the US, but was on a course to arrive here. We didn’t need the E6-B at all, the circle search pattern it flew in, and extended time in air, that was so that China thinks we do need something like that to see their payloads.

7. There are many more objects over areas of our airspace RIGHT NOW that we are aware of, and are actively tracking, but we will not act on, unless forced to, so China does not obtain any tangible information about our actual radar blanket.

We actually have this entire situation 100% under our control, but we are making it look like it’s a problem, so China gets comfortable and actually starts to make more clear what their actual plans are.

Kinda tough to swallow, that the USG is actually that competent. But then, I suppose enough residual competence might remain in the military to at least partially compensate, even yet, for the damage creeping Wokeistry is doing. Bill says:

This anon on /pol is entirely unsourced, but at least his explication does at least make sense, and covers most of the bases the official narrative either misses or ignores, especially the idea that NORAD was missing something that large and slow floating through the thousands of miles of air space it constantly surveys.

As I said the other day regarding the Biden Pipeline Bombing, “anonymous sources” is by no means a sure-fire indicator of unreliability. Better than half of what we’ve learned over the years about Shadow State skullduggery and manipulation has come from anonymous sources, and there’s a damned good reason for that. To wit: foolishly attaching one’s name to the public dissemination of secrets FederalGovCo would prefer never to see the light of day is as good a way as any I know of to get yourself dead, dead, DEAD. Or, at best, disappeared, shall we say.

Of COURSE they did it re-redux

Posted on February 13, 2023 by Mike

As I keep saying: Cherchez le cui bono.

Biden’s Bombing

The deeper meaning of the American attack on the Nord Stream pipeline.

On September 26, 2022 Joe Biden unilaterally declared war on both Russia and Germany. This, at least, is the only logical conclusion if the allegations by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Seymour Hersh last week are true. Hersh maintains, based on claims from an anonymous source within the White House, that Joe Biden skirted congressional notification while ordering the U.S. Navy to plant remote-controlled explosives on the Nord Stream 1 and 2 pipelines in the Baltic last year.

The anonymous source business I covered here already, at least to my own satisfaction if no one else’s. So ‘nuff said about that for the nonce.

Now, I’m as distrustful of both Sy Hersh and his erstwhile employer, the execrable NYT, as anybody else. That said, the one thing we can bank on from Hersh is a reflexive, relentless anti-Americanism. Amongst his breed, the America-hate trait is so deeply bred-in-the-bone that it can even override the standard-issue, Mark-1 Mod-0 partisan desire to protect someone like the Biden marionette, so long as genuine damage to America will be the result. I think that’s almost certainly what we’re seeing in this case. Anyways. Onwards.

The Nord Stream undersea pipelines, when fully operational, could supply over a third of Europe’s energy needs by shipping cheap Russian natural gas from the Arctic into the heart of Europe. The mysterious explosions that ripped through both pipelines last fall, forcibly cut off Germany from cheap Russian natural gas—an outcome openly favored by the United States for years. As long as Europe remained dependent on Russian natural gas, the major continental powers had a powerful reason to maintain relatively cordial relations with the Russian government. Nord Stream had been one of Putin’s most potent diplomatic bargaining chips with Europe during his war in Ukraine.

The American foreign policy complex well understood this dynamic. In February 2022, just weeks before the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, Joe Biden told a journalist at the White House that if Russia were to invade, it would mean the “end” of the Nord Stream pipeline. When pressed on how he would accomplish this, Biden simply stated that he “promised” the pipeline would no longer be operable.

Hersh argues that Biden kept his word. The U.S. Navy, working with its Norwegian allies, was able to identify the ideal spots for detonation and then planted explosives under the cover of a large-scale NATO sea exercise in the summer of 2022.

Western journalists in the immediate aftermath of the explosion speculated that it had been the product of a Russian attack. According to this theory, the Russians had, for unknown reasons, blown up their own pipeline. This claim always rang hollow. Why would Moscow destroy its own infrastructure when it could just as easily turn off the flow of natural gas at will while pursuing a strategy of geopolitical flexibility?

The United States, on the other hand, had the motive, the opportunity, and the capability to carry out the attack. Biden and his lackeys openly displayed hostility to the pipeline’s continued existence. Hersh’s reporting simply validates what any common-sense observer could already see: the ostensibly “neutral” United States had launched an economically destructive attack against a geopolitical rival and a major European ally.

Motive, opportunity, and means constitute reason enough, in law enforcement circles, to make an arrest and proceed to the trial phase.

In U.S. criminal law, means, motive, and opportunity is a common summation of the three aspects of a crime that must be established before guilt can possibly be determined in a criminal proceeding. Respectively, they refer to: the ability of the defendant to commit the crime (means), the reason the defendant committed the crime (motive), and whether the defendant had the chance to commit the crime (opportunity).

A reasonable argument can be made that Amerika v2.0’s thoroughly de-boned Woke military, along with its haplessly inept political “leadership,” lacks the means to successfully pull off skullduggery as audacious as this. Nonetheless, I find the Biden junta guilty as charged. As always, though, YMMV. Either way, the author of the AmGreat piece is hunting bigger game here, and it’s pretty intriguing stuff.

There is a deeper truth at the bottom of the Batlic, amidst the Nord Stream wreckage. It isn’t just Germany that is no longer a sovereign power—in fact, the very concept of the nation-state has been destroyed. All of Europe is an American satrapy. France, England, Italy, Austria, Luxembourg—these petty powers have no real existence as independent entities. They are neither economically nor militarily self-reliant. They cannot even secure their needed energy requirements without outside intervention.

Africa and South America, as a whole, are little better. Will anyone pretend Nigeria or Peru are independent nations that could stand up to a concerted American assault? In Asia, the Gulf States are little more than American-sanctioned outposts. Would Bahrain exist without America? Would Kuwait? In the Far East, Japan is still occupied by American forces. India has no meaningful modern military tradition worth mentioning. China became the manufacturing capital of the world because of explicit policy choices made in Washington, D.C.

This is not a new development. The nation-state died in 1945. The mid-20th century Anglo-American-Soviet alliance made sure of it. American liberals and Soviet communists at Tehran, Yalta, and Potsdam marched in complete lockstep on the future of the world order. There were tensions, of course, but there was no doubt in the minds of either Franklin Roosevelt or Josef Stalin that the postwar order would be fundamentally leftist.

Even after my copious excerpting there’s plenty more yet, of which you should read the all.

1

Moar police stories

Posted on February 11, 2023February 11, 2023 by Mike

From today’s Quora Digest email.

As a police officer, have you ever responded to a call and once you got there said to yourself, “Nope, not worth it” and just left?

Once. I pulled up behind a car stopped on the shoulder of the interstate. 5 Hispanic gang banger types standing around it. I ask if they need help. They spoke very little English but they spoke Spanish among themselves. I noticed they kept encircling me. I would step out of their circle and they would encircle me again. Then a guy in the back seat hiding under a blanket appears. Hackles on my neck are standing straight up by now. So…I get back to my squad car and drive away. I don’t know how it would have turned out had I stayed but I am pretty sure I would not be here to write this answer.

Edited to add the following. In rural areas there is no backup. I was the only squad car within 50 miles. Secondly while I thought these guys were acting weird they were not actually doing anything illegal, they were simply stopped along side the interstate and standing beside their car.

I’ve known enough LEOs over the years, and heard enough similar stories from them, to know that the refinement of exactly that sort of sixth-sense intuition can be the difference between life and death, quite literally.

Update! Another one, same source.

What’s something a police officer knows that would scare normal people?

Seeing how quickly and unexpectedly you can die.

Man went to McDonald’s — which was a treat — for his family’s dinner, and on the way back, was broad-sided in the driver’s door. He’s dead in the driver’s seat and his family’s dinner is all over the front of the car. When he didn’t come back, his 10-year-old son went looking for him on his bicycle and came up on the accident scene. The child climbed into the wrecked car and was hugging his dead father. We weren’t going to stop him, and the fire department stayed longer than they normally would have in case there was any unexpected fire.

Another officer took the child home in his police car and informed the wife of what had happened. Prime example of one of those evenings when a cop skips dinner because he has no appetite.

The driver that hit him was a teenager who had just stolen a tank of gas from the local AM/PM Mini Market, and was being chased by the idiot store manager in his own car. We arrested them both, though that did not make the outcome any better.

The only decent thing that came out of it is that the owner of a local McDonald’s franchise read about it, came in the station and we helped him arrange to pay for an elaborate funeral. The owner insisted we not talk about it publicly; he didn’t want his kind act to look like a PR move. That is class.

Indeed it is.

How quickly and unexpectedly any one of us can die is something I unfortunately know all too much about, from my own personal experience losing my late and much-mourned wife. I’ve had occasion to sit down and try to comfort other folks who have had the same bitter, painful experience of losing a loved one unexpectedly and much too soon, particularly my life-long friend Rick, whose 21 year old son died in a car wreck about five years ago.

What I straightaway said to Rick is the same thing I’ve told others: don’t waste a moment of your time trying to make sense of it, casting about for some explanation you’re never going to find. There IS no sense in it; how the hell does a 21 year old’s death make any kind of sense, to his hearbroken father and mother? It’s just something you see on the local evening news shows and automatically think of as one of those things that happens to someone else.

Until suddenly, one day, it isn’t.

Behind the badge

Posted on February 10, 2023February 10, 2023 by Mike

Two from my latest daily Quora email.

As a cop, have you ever pulled over someone who was actually rushing someone in labor to the hospital? What did you do?

Yes. I lit up a couple for doing 95 in a 60. At 2:30 in the morning. They wouldn’t stop. I hit the siren. I hit the howler. I called for backup. I had no idea of the vehicle’s situation. Finally, after 3 miles, they stopped. The driver instantly hopped out of his vehicle and came running back to me. I immediately reversed to gain distance. He screamed that his wife was in extreme labor. And please…please help.

I ran to their vehicle. She was…a mess. I pulled her into the back seat. Short story… her baby delivered into my hands. She was a mess. I was a mess. The baby (a girl) was a mess. Fortunately, a female Deputy responded, and “took charge.”

I’m glad all survived. I truly am. But I hope I never experience that again…

Heh. I imagine so, yeah. This next one is even better.

So this happened in Montana. I’m on my way to go to my interview this morning when I get pulled over by a police officer.

I am native American and my friend that was with me is black. Just saying.

Both brake lights decided to go out this time.

As he walked to the car and I was pulling out my stuff, he quickly said,

“Don’t worry about pulling anything out. I just want you to know that your brake lights are out.”

So I’m immediately upset because I just got them replaced like last month.

So I explained to him how Firestone wants to charge me $600 just to run a test on the wiring of the car.

He looked at me like 😨 and told me to pop the trunk.

He checked the lights in the trunk and tapped them, but they didn’t come on.

So he told me to pop the hood to check the relay box then asked me to get out to check the other one.

Then worked on the wiring under the dash.

He could’ve easily given me a ticket, but Officer Jenkins stepped out of the officer role, and into the mechanic role, and human role to make sure I was straight.

By the way, HE FIXED THEM. Not everyone is racist or a bad cop.

There’s a pic included with the post, to wit:

RighteousCop

It may not be the way the smart money bets these days, but even so, they’re not ALL bad. Difficult as it can be sometimes to remember that, it’s probably better if we all try to, for everyone involved.

10

Another FederalGovCo cash grab

Posted on February 7, 2023February 7, 2023 by Mike

The goobermint is your enemy.

Those 87,000 new IRS agents that you were promised would only target the rich…

They’re coming after waitresses’ tips now: “monitoring of employer compliance based on actual annual tip revenue and charge tip data from an employer’s point-of-sale system.”https://t.co/WAvh0t2cNN

— Mike Palicz (@Mike_Palicz)

February 7, 2023

Hey, no need to fret, it’s a purely “voluntary” program. For now.

3

It’s the only way to be sure

Posted on February 3, 2023February 3, 2023 by Mike

I’ve said this before here myself, but it bears repeating.

Dear Russian MOD,

If there is going to be a nuclear war, please nuke Washington DC first. I know there are a dozen or so real patriots there, but I would call it acceptable collateral damage. The rest of them brought it on themselves. Just to know the scum in DC had been vaporized just before I see my own local mushroom cloud would give me great satisfaction just before I died.

I have my vodka and The Great Patriotic War music cued up for the event. I would say “Cheers”, but I don’t think you are in a mood for British colloquialisms.

Regards to Vlad! General Milley and his running lap dog “yes men” send their regards. The general would add a personal note, but he is on the phone with President Xi talking nuclear stuff.

Thank you for your consideration.

(Tongue in cheek, but not really, Reese’s Cups)

Scipio

Same thing goes for all the big-city Wokester hives: SF, Chicago, LA, NYC, et al. But Mordor On The Potomac has absolutely earned the right to be at the very tippy-top of the to-go list. As the Joker once so memorably said: this town needs an enema; a 50-kiloton one would surely be a good first step towards setting things right again. In fact, it might well be the only way of getting it done effectively.

Ripley knows.

Halp us, Jon Karry Vlad Putin! You’re the only who can save us now.

(Via WRSA)

1

The burning question

Posted on February 2, 2023February 2, 2023 by Mike

TL asks it.

If Not War, Then What?

One cannot be loyal to the United States of America, that government is gone, overthrown, dismissed. The only thing left of it are the documents that rightfully informed the people of their God-given rights and some formative departments and offices that maintain the structure of the government, but without the effectiveness or responsibilities thereof. Our government is performance art, nothing else.

What can be done? What can we do about it? That’s a question that, in truth, has a violent answer. When a people have been stripped of every aspect of privacy; had their wages and incomes (completely different things) subjected to digital confiscation at any moment; are being forcefully injected with poison; watched the past generations being snuffed out in nursing homes and their children and grandchildren either killed outright or chemically altered to prevent reproduction; have come to know that the future is even more oppressive, violent and hostile and that the process of altering that formulation of caustic actions against them is now politically impossible, the only thing left is to recognize the enemy and engage them.

Since I cannot imagine a commission of demonic acts greater than that to which we have already been subjected, I doubt anyone will do anything no matter how vile and vengeful our illegitimate government is. We are stuck in a 1950s frame of mind about America and being subjected to a 1984 dystopian reality without the will or ability to engage in a 1946 Athens, TN response.

So, what’s left?

Fret not, TL. People just have to get good and hungry, that’s all, and there aren’t enough of those people quite yet.

Until then, all we can do is wait…and watch. The concept of Constitutional liberty, as an issue, has faded almost completely from the picture for the majority of Americans (In Name Only); some don’t really care much either way about it, some are actively, openly hostile to it. Many of those who might once have been motivated to action by it have been lulled to sleep by indolence, sloth, and relative comfort and ease. Even those who recognize how truly awful the situation has become nonetheless feel no urgency, no impetus to risk their homes and lives to finally do something about it.

Yet.

Yes, the notion of the Former USA as the Land of the Free and Home of the Brave is now nothing but an obscene joke. But as with all aspects of life on this poor Earth, these things too are by no means permanent. Once their children are going hungry—wailing out loud from the physical anguish that comes along with too-long-empty bellies—and they can no longer find either the means or the ability to put food on the table for them…well, we might all be surprised at just how powerful a wake-up call that is, for all parents with the least shred of dignity and self-respect left to them.

7

Gainless employment

Posted on January 31, 2023January 31, 2023 by Mike

The latest in Mike Walsh’s continuing “To save America…” series.

To Save America, Abolish the Civil Service

I must say, I’m liking it already.

Over the past few months, we’ve been considering the wholly negative history of the so-called “Progressive”-era constitutional amendments, none of which did anything to improve the nation but did much to undermine its founding principles. Until the end of the Civil War, the constitution had only been amended twice since the passage of the Bill of Rights in 1791: the obscure, jurisdictional 11th Amendment, (1795), which had to do with lawsuits involving state and federal courts, and the 12th, (1804), which partially clarified the procedures for presidential elections. Then, between 1865 and 1870, came the three Reconstruction amendments, abolishing slavery (except as a punishment for a crime, such as a prison chain gang) and giving African-Americans citizenship and voting and other rights.

And then after a 43-year break, came the Progressive Era and its assault on Americans’ money and personal freedom, the radical changes in how the Senate is selected, Prohibition of a formerly legal substance, and finally the extension of the franchise to women, in defiance of all historical norms going back to the ancient Greeks, on the theory that it wasn’t “fair.” All have been proven disasters.

It’s not just the constitutional amendments that have contributed to the decline of the Republic, however: it’s also the actions of an ever-burgeoning federal government, which has simultaneously abandoned its core fiscal, executive, judicial, and legislative responsibilities, and extended its intrusive reach into almost every facet of our existence via the creation of the regulatory agencies, which now essentially control every aspect of a citizen’s public and private life.

Created by Congress, often at the urging of the president, these independent, immortal bureaucratic golems are a second form of government that co-exist with the constitutional system most Americans think we have. Being “independent,” they are at once legislative in function but also judicial in essence: their wishes have the force of law (often written by themselves), tried before administrative law judges, and enforced at gunpoint by their private police forces when necessary. They are effectively beyond the direct supervision of all three legitimate branches of government, to the extent that they now form a fourth branch of government.

Like most things involving the feds, they are largely staffed by members of the Civil Service — nearly three million employees and counting. Many, if not most, belong to one of some one hundred civil-service unions, through which they bargain with the IRS-funded government regarding their wages and working conditions; you, the taxpayer, have no say in the matter. So it’s no surprise that over the past hundred years, jobs in the “public” sector now pay better and have greater benefits, including more time off and greater job security, than do jobs in the private sector. So what if it’s become the employer of last resort for a significant portion of the population? They vote, en masse, for the folks who pay them.

I’ve been saying for years now that basically, the federal G amounts to a sort of wink-nudge employment program for Nee-grows who are too stupid, lazy, or just generally incompetent to hold down a job that’s actually, y’know, useful at all.

1

Unworthy world order

Posted on January 28, 2023January 28, 2023 by Mike

If the over-optimistically misnomered “free world” is no longer anything like free, what about it could possibly be worth striving to save?

Why Preserve a ‘World Order’ Without Freedom?

It has become fashionable now for lawmakers to demand accountability for the social media site TikTok because it is finally being correctly acknowledged as both an intelligence-gathering net and propaganda fire hose for the Chinese Communist Party. The irony, though, is that Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Google Search provide the U.S. government with identical tools. The D.C. Deep State does not mind if Americans are spied on and psychologically manipulated by government actors; on the contrary, it seeks a total monopoly on such influence operations.

To enjoy personal liberty free from the arbitrary intrusions of government nosy-bodies, you have to get pretty far away from the shadow of State authority. Even then, because the national security surveillance structure is pervasive, an isolated campfire in a remote wood is still most likely being caught by somebody’s overhead satellite for some unknown reason. If you are unable to escape from the watchful eyes of the government’s complex monitoring system, then the inner mind becomes the last refuge for any freethinker — so long as those personal thoughts are not communicated out loud.

So freedom is chased farther and farther away from hubs of government tracking, farther and farther into the recesses of one’s mind, until it can be exercised only in the silence of one’s imagination. Make no mistake: the imposition of “silence” is intentional. Governments understand that the best way to prevent the spread of ideas that might threaten their grip on power is to prevent those ideas from ever being spoken out loud. To silence dissent is to squash opposition. To criminalize thought is to enslave the mind. That’s the “freedom” enjoyed by a prisoner, not a living, breathing citizen of any “free world.” If you have been corralled into a mental prison against your will, though, then the best question to ask is this: what would you be willing to do to escape?

Cameras, computers, artificial intelligence — there’s just no way out! Do you know that every generation of humans confronted with new technological weapons has said the same thing?Their cannon are too powerful! Their ships are too many! It is futile to resist! Yet people do resist, and over time, they realize that it is ultimately not the technology that threatens their freedom, but rather the governments that would choose to use that technology without respect for human rights or natural liberties.

Precisely, indubitably so. Over the course of my life, I’ve heard the exact same bitching and moaning over the advent of color TV, then cable TV, then VCRs, then the Innarnuts, then cell phones, then smart phones and tablets, etc etc ad infinitum ad nauseam. No, no, and oh hell no. No grumpy comment-section Neo-Luddite screaming “we must get rid of (insert name of new tech here), we must get rid of (insert other new tech here)!” is at any real hazard of being enslaved by said new-tech devices. Not as long as they retain the intestinal fortitude to simply put the blasted thing down, they ain’t.

Bottom-line summation: it’s the government, stupid.

To create and sustain a “free world,” citizens actually have to be willing to stand up to their governments and say, “No, you cannot do that; you do not have that power; now go away.” Usually, governments (which exist purely because they assert a monopoly over the legitimate use of force) then load their cannon and surround rebellious ports with an overwhelming number of ships as a demonstration of how their “legitimate” force somehow justifies the theft of others’ freedoms. For the citizenry on the receiving end of such violence, this translates to nothing more than “might makes right.”

What they learn in the process is that government power untethered from principle is neither righteous nor worth preserving. The harsher and more unjust governments become toward their citizens, the more likely movements for freedom take hold. When scrappy underdogs prevail over unbeatable foes and “turn the world upside-down,” they do so with tremendous help from their tormentors’ hubris.

Lindsey Graham is right about this much: the world order is at stake. Freedom around the world is under attack from those governments sworn to protect it, and their betrayal imperils peace. I saw a headline recently that blared, “Rogue Hog Turns Tables, Kills Butcher.” Imagine my surprise when I discovered that the news had nothing to do with politics. Although, given that the homicidal hog had been repeatedly shocked with a stun gun and kept in a tiny enclosure on his way to becoming BBQ, his story could be a prudent allegory after all.

Freedom ain’t free; never has been, never will be. It is not a gift from some benevolent and wise government; no government in history has been willing to even pay lip service for very long, as ours no longer bothers about doing, to “preserving” and/or “defending” it as it grows ever larger and more intrusive. The priceless jewel of freedom can only be seized and then scrupulously maintained, nearly always by force of arms wielded by strong, determined lovers of individual liberty resolutely unwilling to ever take “no” for an answer.

“Violence is not the answer”? The hell you say. It’s the ONLY answer, once a certain line in the sand has been stepped over. Unfortunately for us all, in Amerika v2.0 that grim threshold was crossed long ago.

This essay is depressing as all hell, but it’s also one of the estimable JB Shurk’s very best yet, of which you’ll surely want to read the all.

4

A coup, if you like

Posted on January 26, 2023 by Mike

Just now noticing it, are ya?

Jeremy Clarkson: We’re in the midst of a coup. Who the hell’s behind it?

Not in the middle of one; it’s long since been over and done with, I’m afraid. As to wondering who’s behind it, you can’t really be serious about that one.

My son came over for a father-and-son pre-football supper the other day, and as he fussed over the Aga, making a particularly fine stir fry, we laughed about what innocuous word had been banned that day and who’d been cancelled. And then, after a pause, he said with a solemn face, “You do know there’s a war going on, don’t you?”

He wasn’t talking about Ukraine. He was talking about a full-on left-wing campaign to unstitch and burn the fabric of Britain. And the genius is that no one really knows that what they’re doing is serious. We laugh as they change the name of the Sir Francis Drake Primary School to something less slavey. We think it’s all a big joke. But it isn’t.

Think about what typically happens in a military operation and then look what the woke left has done here. It’s seized control of our television and radio stations to such an extent that last week Sophie Raworth said, on the BBC News at Six, with a straight face, “And over now to our LGBT and diversity correspondent …”

And TV drama? Unaffected? Right, and when was the last time you saw a fictional police force hunting a gang of Muslim extremists? It’s always the far right. And it’s the same story in comedy. Say anything you like about Boris or Rishi and the laughter track is turned up to 11. Make a joke about she/him pronouns or Greta Thunberg and they’ll blow a piece of tumbleweed across the stage.

You probably think, because you don’t know this war is going on, that when you drop little Johnny off at the school gates he’s going to learn the nine times table that day. No, he isn’t. He’s learning that he might actually be a girl, which is why there are probably tampon dispensers in the boys’ lavatories.

When some young people with green hair glue themselves to the road, large numbers of officers are dispatched to stand around looking at them. And they are only ever removed from the tarmac if they promise to go immediately to the nearest art gallery and throw some soup at a painting.

You’ll definitely want to read all of this one, folks. Even though he’s writing about Jollye Olde, across the pond we’re tailgaiting them down the same sorry road ourselves.

2

Admissions of error

Posted on January 22, 2023 by Mike

They seem to be going around of late.

The Biden Administration Finally Admits Its Mistake in Canceling the Keystone XL Pipeline

At long last, the Biden administration is admitting what experts have always known: reckless energy policies have disastrous consequences. This time, the Department of Energy quietly released a report highlighting the positive economic benefits of developing the Keystone XL pipeline from Canada, an energy project canceled by President Biden in the hours following his inauguration.

But the DOE’s report is a proverbial day late and a dollar short. The cancelation of the Keystone XL pipeline has already cost the United States thousands of jobs and billions in economic growth while families suffer under the weight of record high energy prices. It’s time for lawmakers to make American energy independence a top priority.

Released without a formal announcement, the DOE’s report points out that the pipeline would have created between 16,149 and 59,000 jobs and would have had an economic benefit of between $3.4 and 9.6 billion. That’s no small impact. Yet with one stroke of his pen, Biden slashed the project and instead focused his efforts on costly “green energy” goals. As a result of his executive action, 11,000 pipeline workers were promptly laid off and told to “go to work to make solar panels” instead.

But Biden’s green energy efforts are bound to backfire sooner rather than later. That’s because today, more than 70 percent of the energy produced and consumed in America comes from oil, gas and coal. That’s not likely to substantially change anytime soon. In fact, the International Energy Agency predicts that oil’s share of energy production in the United States will only fall 8 percent in the next two decades, from 31 to 23 percent. And that’s assuming a sustained commitment to green energy policies. The forecast spells bad news for the Biden White House. At his political peril, Biden ignores the lessons of Presidents Jimmy Carter and George H. W. Bush, who both lost elections due to spiked oil prices and accompanying recessions.

Oh, I’m beginning to suspect, strongly, that Old Joe is going to die of Suddenly™ well before the next sham “election” season rolls around. But Joe’s Folly isn’t the only mea culpa to be found out there.

Pro-Vaxx Dilbert Creator Scott Adams Admits Profusely “The Anti-Vaxxers Win”

Mark Twain is often misattributed as saying, “It’s easier to fool people than to convince them that they have been fooled.” The sentiment is definitely Twainesque, but he never said it. Nevertheless, it’s still true and demonstrable time and again in our post-truth society.

As more “normies” have started waking up to the reality that the Covid-19 “vaccines” are ineffective and dangerous, a lot are finding new ways of defending their decisions to get jabbed rather than admitting it was a mistake. Conservative comic Scott Adams, who is most famous for creating the Dilbert comics, is not one of those people. He’s now admitting that “anti-vaxxers won” in regards to their decision.

In fact, he admitted it over and over again.

“All of my fancy analytics got me to a bad place,” he said. “All of your heuristics — ‘don’t trust these guys’ is obvious — totally worked.”

Blindly trusting the US government and its horde of bought and paid-for faux “experts” never does work out too well, not for anybody.

4

Theater of government

Posted on January 16, 2023January 16, 2023 by Mike

Protecting the bureacRats is an old, old tradition in Mordor On The Potomac, going all the way back to Andrew Jackson’s day.

Republicans Are Failing Unless They Are Disrupting, Discrediting, And Destroying The Bureaucracy
For well over a century, we’ve all been told the progressives’ folk tale about the Jacksonian revolution: that he didn’t really get rid of any of the bureaucracy, but what he did do was he brought in a rabble, and created the spoils system. In this telling, the nation is essentially held captive by the crooks, by the cronies, until the heroes arrive: when the progressives ransom democracy for the passage of this little statute called the Pendleton Act.

The Pendleton Act (and all of its progeny that follow up through Jimmy Carter’s 1978 civil service reform), had essentially one goal, which was to insulate the civil bureaucracy from political accountability — to “protect” civil servants. Now, I think in fairness we would all agree that Jackson’s idea did fail. He had a novel concept: what he called a rotation in office, essentially term limits for civil bureaucrats.

We’ve never really come back to that concept. We want to terminate the actual democratically accountable leaders of the nation and leave the permanent Mandarin class (which some folks in this room belong to here in Washington) as an occupying army. The idea was good, and Jackson would say, “I don’t want the civil bureaucracy to remain a species of property for these people.”

But even by the numbers, Jackson only took out about 10 percent of the then-existent civil service, which by even the modest standards of 19th-century America, 10 percent was insufficiently small.

Priority No. 1: Take Out the Bureaucracy
The last thing I’ll just say really quick is for those of you who actually advise members of Congress or senators. There was a recent celebration at the institution which is still called publicly the University of California at Berkeley (which is not really much of a university anymore). Professors Lee Raiford and Ula Taylor gave a presentation on Berkeley’s purchase of a whole tranche of documents from J. Edgar Hoover’s tenure as director of the FBI. The documents are largely focused on the counterintelligence program, which was known as “cointelpro.”

The presentation from the professors in why Berkeley was interested in this tranche of documents was that it supposedly was confirmation of the systemic racism of the FBI from its inception through the duration of Director Hoover’s tenure. For my purposes, I think what’s fascinating is how they highlighted this line from an internal memo that Hoover authored to field agents where he said, “The obligation you have is to disrupt, discredit, and destroy the Black Panther movement.”

The advice I would give any of you who are advising members of Congress when you go to stage what are otherwise meaningless Kabuki-theater hearings [is this]. When you want to exercise oversight by asking the bureaucracy to provide the information that will then allow you to exercise your oversight authorities — unpack that one: The very people you’re supposed to be controlling are the ones you’re dependent upon for information — when all that’s happening, the mantra that you should have in mind is: We are failing unless we are disrupting, discrediting, and destroying these people.

Precisely, indubitably so. Unless and until that happens, it’s all just posturing, preening, and pissing into the wind.

2

Who DIDN’T know this?

Posted on January 14, 2023January 14, 2023 by Mike

I mean, come on now.

General Michael Flynn: There Are Two American Governments, the Visible One and the SECRET One

And of all people, Flynn oughta know better than anybody, having had his life completely destroyed by it, for the unpardonable crime of working for and remaining loyal to President Trump.

You have probably never heard of it, but there is a parallel Supreme Court, of sorts, called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) that General Michael Flynn warns is operating “in almost total secrecy.”

A judicial panel that oversees American intelligence agencies in surveillance matters involving American citizens living in the United States, FISC first came on the public’s radar during the investigation that was launched against the 2016 campaign of former President Donald Trump.

FISC operates as a type of secret police, Flynn further insinuated with a quote from former Sen. Frank Church (D-Id.), who back in the 1970s said that “hiding evil is the trademark of a totalitarian government.” Church further stated that:

“There is no more pernicious threat to a free society than a secret police…operating beyond the law…if these abuses had not been uncovered and had the agencies gone unchecked, we might well have seen a secret police develop in the United States. Once that begins, the Constitution is in very real danger.”

It turns out that Church was right, and his warnings came true. At the dawn of the year 2023, technological advancements, among other things, have allowed the federal bureaucracy to massively expand – its tentacles now reaching into every crevice of American life.

True, observably and beyond all debate. Yet still many of us slumber, seemingly beyond all hope of awakening. New category exclusively for this sort of thing: The Shadow State.

4

Thinking ahead

Posted on January 14, 2023January 15, 2023 by Mike

Make no mistake here, folks: what we just saw with the gas-stove trial balloon is part of a process, a long-range plan.

Progressive cities such as Berkeley, San Francisco and New York City have already banned gas stoves and other appliances in new buildings. New York Gov. Kathy Hochul this week proposed a ban on gas equipment including stoves in new small buildings in 2025 and larger ones in 2028.

Come 2030, New Yorkers won’t be allowed to replace their gas stoves with new ones if they break down. “As you begin making a transition, everyone will have to switch out appliances,” a state official explained. This is how the left’s green-energy “transition” will work for all things. Come 2035, New Yorkers and Californians won’t be able to buy new gasoline-powered cars either.

The Biden Administration is also aiding and abetting the anti-gas stove cause. Last year it filed an amicus brief with the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals supporting a gas ban by Berkeley, Calif. The departments of Justice and Energy argued that cities and states should be able to exercise police powers to prohibit the use of “dangerous or unsafe items.” Why would the federal government weigh in on a local regulatory case, if not for ideological climate solidarity?

Rest assured, it’s not just about Climate Change (formerly Global Warming, formerly Global Cooling, formerly The Weather)™ alone. That’s just cover, a ruse. Rather, the CC agenda itself is part and parcel of the tyrant’s eternal ambition to let nothing escape his gaze or his grasp.

Progressives claim that gas stoves produce pollutants that are harmful to human health. But pollution comes from cooking with poor ventilation, not from natural gas. Electric range-tops have the “hidden hazard” of potential burns, to borrow Mr. Trumka’s words.

There really is a culture war coming over gas stoves, and everything else involving fossil fuels, because climate has become for the left a matter of core cultural identity. Progressives want to impose their values on the lifestyle of everyone else, including in the kitchen. If subsidies don’t work, coercion follows. When they can’t win the political debate, they resort to brute government force. They really are coming for your stove.

Along with everydamned thing else. Remember: there is NOTHING they won’t try to fuck with, take over, control, and ultimately, ban. Nothing. It’s who they are, it’s what they do.

5

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