Read and Heed – Page 43

The ground-level view

Posted on July 14, 2021July 15, 2021 by Mike

If you’ve noticed that what the people Salena Zito calls “our cultural narrative-makers” are reporting is quite often at odds with your own daily meatspace reality, particularly life as she is lived in small-town and rural America, well, it ain’t just your imagination. Since this is a relatively short piece and there’s no way to do it justice with some niggardly copy ‘n’ pastery, I’m just gonna repost the whole thing, with my apologies to Ms Zito and the good folks at American Greatness for the misappropriation. It’s an important story she’s telling, I think, and deserves to be brought before as wide an audience as possible.

Seeing America from the Ground
OTTAWA, Ohio—This is not a story about politics. Instead, it is a story about America and how sometimes, you can discover something new when you try to absorb the country’s character one mile at a time and when you take in a place on its own terms and not simply the terms of wherever you came from.

A couple of weeks ago, a native Long Islander who has called New York City his home for half a dozen years took his first trip to the Midwest for a news assignment to discuss what he found different about the way of life out here.

He flew to both Chicago and Detroit to learn about this foreign land.

The social media criticism of the resulting story was swift and brutal. The piece wasn’t any worse than the typical story flyover country folk read about themselves. But the oddest thing was that he tried to find the “Midwest” solely in the big cities of Chicago and Detroit. The true measure of the Midwest begins somewhere near the Pennsylvania state line.

Had he driven the 21 hours and 18 minutes it would take on the back roads between New York City and Chicago, he would have had one heck of a story to write about the country and the Midwest.

Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, is a beautiful town surrounded by the mountains of Pisgah Ridge and is dotted with architectural styles that range from Federalist, Greek Revival, Romanesque Revival, and Queen Anne to Richardsonian Romanesque. How the former town of Mauch Chunk was renamed for the Native American sports legend is, in microcosm, the story of this town: the ingenuity of civic leaders who deeply care about preserving a place in a changing world.

Then, at the Ohio-Pennsylvania border, by some measures the official threshold of the Midwest, he would have found himself in Ashtabula, Ohio. There, he could have begun his education as to how the Great Lakes Midwest has struggled and adapted to the tides of progress and technology that have stripped it from its robust industrial past as a major port city and railroad hub.

Deep poverty, crime, and despair, associated with the collapsed inner-city neighborhoods of Chicago and Detroit, would have greeted him in a different form had he driven down Lincoln Highway and found himself in Ford Heights, Illinois. Once a blue-collar, middle-class black suburb, Ford Heights has died so hard, it has been consistently the poorest suburb in America since the beginning of this century.

It’s also one of the most dangerous places in the state. The violent crime rate is so high, it is unimaginable to not be a victim of crime if you live here.

I remember the first time I came through this town nearly a decade ago and found a makeshift altar on the side of an abandoned gas station lined with bottles of hard liquor, candles, a wilted red rose and the word “love” spelled out with decals. I wept for all of the loss that happened here. A visitor here, with his or her eyes open, learns quickly that deindustrialization is colorblind in sowing despair.

For the majority of my career as a journalist, I have had the opportunity to report on this country from the vantage point of taking the back roads to get from point A to point B for whatever assignment I was given.

I found early in my career in covering politics that parachuting into a city for an event or an interview or a rally or an election gave me little understanding of what was happening in the region. Yet if I made my way there, taking the back roads, I was able to see how things were changing—for better or worse.

When I stopped to talk to people, I learned early on that listening was much more important than talking and that my duty was not to report their stories from my perspective or experiences but instead from theirs.

The story of America isn’t exclusively the story that comes from the perspective of larger cities. Unfortunately, it often appears that way because those are the bases of our cultural narrative-makers: news organizations, institutions, academia, think tanks, major-league sports, and entertainment.

They are so disconnected from most places that it would astound them if they took the time to get on the road and ask them how they feel about the issues of the day. They don’t want their police departments defunded. They want their bridges and roads fixed and their water to be clean. They don’t want critical race theory jammed down their children’s throats. They are horrified at how political the military has become and are worried about the long-lasting impact of the crisis at the border.

They are good neighbors. They love God and aren’t ashamed to show it as much as they like pickles in their beer and ranch dressing on everything.

Whether you take a ride for half an hour, half a day, an entire week, or even a month, there is more good than not out here in this country, despite what you may read in the New York Times or the Washington Post; it cannot be seen or smelt or heard or felt with a mask on in an airplane. It can be experienced if you take the time.

As the saying goes, you can’t report on a country you’ve never been to yourself. Zito, bless her heart, has long been doing the job MFM “journalists” just won’t do. Kudos to her for that.

Back in my road-dog days, there was an outfit from Chicago called Three Blue Teardrops. They were briefly label-mates of ours; we played with ’em a bunch, stayed at their house a few times when we were playing Chi-town, and got to be very good friends with the guys. Hell, we even covered some of their songs, one of them being this ‘un:

Another 3BT tune we did:

According to 3BT’s singer/guitarist Dave Sisson, they were once being hollered at during a show to play that one, and Dave flatly refused to do it. When I asked him why he’d done that, since the song had always been one of their most reliable late-night house-bringer-downers, he told me he considered our version so good as to be the very last word on it, and that he now thought of “Long Hard Night” as a Belmont Playboys song. I was flabbergasted by that one.

Now, the reason I bring the Teardrops up at all is that when they were out on the road, they always went with what I considered an ingenius approach: routing and timing everything to allow for taking those side-roads and byways Zito talks about above, rather than the frantic, get-there-quick-as-you-can interstate dash much more common among harried, hungover road warriors. Whenever our paths would cross, Dave and his crew would wax rhapsodic about having visited the Cadillac Ranch in Texas, or seeing the World’s Biggest Ball of Twine, or what have you. They NEVER took the interstate. For the Teardrops, see, touring wasn’t only about doing shows, making money, selling CDs, or getting your music in front of as many disparate audiences as you could. It was also about enjoying the ride—about experiencing as much of Real America as they could squeeze in, between gigs.

That had never occurred to me before Dave told me about their way of doing things, and after he did I was kinda envious. For instance, the BPs drove within shouting distance of Gettysburg I don’t even know how many times…but never did we have enough time to make a stop and tour the battlefield, which every one of us in that van would LOVED to have done. Hell, my brother even drove up there on his own hook once to do the tour. But I’ve never been, and almost certainly never will now.

Three Blue Teardrops had it right, as does Zito. The true American story can’t be found on TeeWee, the internet, or the interstate highways. It’s out there still, but you gotta take the backroads to get there.

South Africa intel

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

If you’re looking for a sitrep on the festivities taking place now on the southern end of the Dark Continent, only not written in Afrikaans, DuToit would be the obvious place to find such.

What I witnessed over the last 48 hours tells us a lot, so let me distill the essence. In the beginning the mob was in control. Yes they were clearly in control as they marched relentlessly forward like an army ant formation advancing through the jungle. They devoured all before them and they were unstoppable. But importantly, they were controlled and focused. There was a clearly defined plan, so command and control is alive and well, but invisible. They knew when to hit designated targets. They knew where the police were absent. They knew where shopping mall security was most vulnerable. They were collectively acting as part of a plan.

Who are those central but invisible command and control people? Will our intelligence services possibly start to figure this out?

But the other thing that was clearly visible was the rapid way that civil society responded to the communal threat. Groups of citizens rapidly formed into militia, and mostly acted with restraint and to great effect. I don’t know the final numbers, but my gut feel is that more arrests were made by citizens acting in well-organized groups, than by the police.

I also note that some of the militia went beyond the act of arrest, and meted out instantaneous justice. Its unclear what the body count it, but certainly there were many. Some shot, some beaten and some even hacked to pieces by machete. I have seen credible video evidence across this entire range.

But the core lesson is that civil society responded by organizing themselves, rapidly and effectively. We will now see the dawn of a new era, where those civil groups become better organized than the government, which has clearly failed. In effect we had no government over the last 48 hours, because while this mayhem was playing out, Jesse Duarte gave a press briefing about an NEC meeting pretending to still be in control.

The Ruling Party has simply lost control. The civil service is so dysfunctional as to be a liability now easily bypassed by an increasingly confident and effective civil society.

Clearly attempts by government to disarm civilians will fail. Of this I am certain. Just as certain as I am about the emergence of self-organized militia centered on credible leadership and existing networks of security force personnel that have been sidelined by government purges.

This is the real New Dawn. Not the feeble message spewed out by the now embattled and increasingly illegitimate Ruling Party. Their days are numbered.

That’s not actually Kim talking there, but a former military intelligence guy he excerpted. As for Kim his own self, he sees things the same way I do.

Anyone who thinks this can’t or won’t happen here is deluding himself. The only reason that this hasn’t happened in the U.S. so far is that unlike South Africa, Blacks are in the minority; but it means that where they are a significant proportion of the population, this will happen — think Minneapolis and Ferguson, times ten.

I see burned-out city centers, and rampant poverty and lawlessness therein. After that, I’d really rather not speculate.

No point in it anyway. Historically, once balls of this type have dropped, there’s simply no way to know which way they’re going to roll or where they’ll end up coming to rest. Predictions are no more than a way for idle hands to pass the time until the tsunami of violence and anarchy washes over their own personal doorsteps.

More useful analysis from DuToit here.

Pay heed or die

Posted on July 14, 2021July 14, 2021 by Mike

Some serious sagacity from one of contemporary America’s most perspicacious, sober, and capable writers: Claire Wolf.

Over the years, when people have asked me, “Is it time yet, Claire?” my response has always been something like this: It may be moral to ‘shoot the bastards’ who kill freedom, but this isn’t the time. It doesn’t make tactical or strategic sense. Violence now will only make things much, much worse.

That’s still my strong conviction. To any members of the Deep State trolling the ‘Net desperately searching for those elusive “domestic terrorists” they’re so determined to ~~locate~~ invent: I’m a useless target for you. I don’t advocate violence except in self-defense and I dread seeing anybody, especially freedomistas, start a shooting war.

My hope is, as always, that a bloated, overreaching government will ultimately undermine itself and fall non-violently, as the Soviet Union did. It already seems well on its way.

But lately I’ve been asking myself if perhaps I’m in denial about the depth and urgency — and the possibilities — of our situation.

—-

I’ve been reading the book Comrade X sent me, American Insurgents, American Patriots by T.H. Breen. It focuses on the way ordinary citizens drove the colonies toward revolution, ultimately forcing the more famous leaders to step up and lead.

A large part of it so far concerns the Intolerable Acts and public outrage over them.

Many histories of the Revolution, IIRC, trace a steady growth of resistance from the Stamp Act through the Townshend Acts through the Boston Massacre through the Boston Tea Party through the Intolerable Acts to Lexington and Concord and on to the Declaration of Independence. Maybe so, but Breen positions the Intolerable Acts as the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. What Britain accurately but inadequately called the Coercive Acts turned ordinary, respectable farmers, lawyers, craftsmen, and housewives from angry — but loyal! — British colonists into an outraged force of active, uncompromising, and sometimes ruthless American insurgents.

One thing that struck me as I read was that both sides labored under delusions in the months leading up to the passage of the Acts in the spring of 1774. After the Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773, American colonists, especially in Massachusetts, held their breath. They knew punishment would come, but not what form it would take. Because most information about British politics arrived in the form of imported and re-posted newspaper articles, colonists believed the British people were sympathetic to their cause and therefore that punishment would be limited and probably focused only on the guilty.

That was their delusion. Or one of them. They also held a long-cherished a belief that they were the legal, intellectual, and moral equal of any Englishmen, and that their fellow Englishmen saw them in the same light as they saw themselves.

They didn’t realize how implacably — if ineptly — British power brokers were against them. They didn’t realize that much of the English public, and especially the elite, looked down on them as being barely steps above the “savages” they lived among. They were, in short, viewed as the “deplorables,” “bitter clingers,” and “neanderthals” of their day.

While colonists waited and held high hopes, the government of King George III and Lord North decided to crush Boston by closing its harbor and place all of proud, self-governing Massachusetts under the direct supervision of agents of the crown. Listening only to their own self-interested contacts, parliament, lords, and king concluded that a) the ignorant rabble of Boston could be easily starved into submission and that b) nobody outside of Boston would step up in defense.

British authorities assumed the citizens of rural Massachusetts would blame Boston troublemakers, not the British government, for any problems that befell them as a result of the Coercive Acts (which the short-sighted British never considered might be intolerable, because subjects would be forced at gunpoint to tolerate them). Furthermore, and fatally, they assumed residents of the other 12 forever-squabbling colonies would regard the whole mess as a local New England matter and wouldn’t defend their neighbors or, heaven forbid, any general principles of liberty.

Those were their delusions.

While the colonists quickly realized how wrongly they’d judged the British government, the British government never did quite get A Clue about how it had misjudged the colonists.

From the moment the Intolerable Acts were brought across the Atlantic, the colonists were roused into such radical action that British authority was virtually demolished outside of cities, at least in New England. From late spring 1774 to April 19, 1775, resistance was fierce, spreading, and increasingly organized. Yet even once the shooting war began on that fateful spring day, some British officials and loyalists were shocked, truly shocked, that mere colonists had the temerity to shoot at British soldiers. (I saw statements in evidence of this stunned cluelessness at Minuteman National Park during my visit.)

British authorities and functionaries had been warned. They had been subjected to years of mostly polite resistance, followed by a year of decidedly impolite resistance. Yet many simply couldn’t believe it when Americans not only stood their ground against the greatest army in the world, but crouched behind stone walls and emerged from boulder-strewn hillsides to wage a new kind of — unsporting! unfair! — warfare against their smug, conventional, and “superior” masters.

Both sides began in denial. One side rapidly shook off denial and acted accordingly. The other — hidebound in its conventionality, its authority, and its certainty of rightness — couldn’t get over its delusions.

—-

Ours is very unlike the situation of our colonial forebears. They knew each other. They were neighbors, fellow parishioners, fellow militiamen, fellow small-town residents, sharers of mutual interests. They hugely outnumbered their would-be rulers, who had to cross an ocean to impose their will. They shared pride in self-government, in self-sufficiency (yet also in their economic contributions to the British homeland), in their historic rights. They aimed to be beholden to nobody. They eschewed debt. They would have found government handouts repellent, if they thought of them at all.

Unlike moderns, the insurgent colonists had more spies operating within British ranks than the British ever managed to insert into their ranks. Before the shooting began, they faced a limited number of British government officials in their midst and were able to intimidate and unseat them with sheer force of numbers that seem incredible to us, looking back on the sizes of the towns and villages of the day. They knew who the ardent loyalists and traitors in their midst were and were able to keep an eye on them as crises heated up.

We have no such advantages. We have the disadvantages of being under an extreme authoritarian — now wannabe totalitarian — government that is not only thick in our midst, but which oppresses with overwhelming numbers, with bevvies of armed agents from random agencies, and with unthinkable surveillance and control capabilities. And this coercive monstrosity is abetted by a populace that it has largely custom-schooled, propagandized, and above all bought off with virtually limitless supplies of funny money. This is a populace highly disinclined to bite the hand that feeds.

Anybody who imagines they can rise up and “shoot the bastards” now and gain the widespread public support any insurgency needs to succeed is delusional.

Yet…sometimes the “wrong” time to rise up turns by fate into the exact right time to rise up. And its hard to tell when the wrong time is truly, disastrously wrong and simply brings more oppression and when the wrong time is ripe to become right.

Out of so many lessons from the history of our Founding that Real Americans would benefit from studying closely, Claire has just spelled out the most vital one of all. We ignore it, and the others, at our mortal peril.

(Via WRSA)

You’ll LOVE him when he’s annoyed

Posted on July 13, 2021July 13, 2021 by Mike

Our pestilential victim classes have Francis waxing…annoyed.

Perhaps we should go in the other direction: toward individual aspects of nuisance that can be identified and fought on the micro level. Everyone has a few he’s particularly un-fond of. Just now, at the top of my list is a huge (150 lb.) Newfoundland puppy named Joy who sheds continuously and frequently demands that I put one or both of my hands in her mouth. Unfortunately, she’s too cute to remain annoyed with for very long.

But slightly above the level of Joy we have the great American Panoply of Victims. Great God in heaven, how I despise people who seek attention, fortune, and privileges by claiming to be victims of this or that. Yet these days they seem to be everywhere.

Women: “victims” of a bio-social arrangement that has led to them being protected, cared for, even pampered by the male half of Mankind. (Shut up about the word Mankind, bitch; you can use whatever words you prefer at your next hen party.) Meanwhile, men do all the dirty, unpleasant, and life-threatening jobs while you whine about being “oppressed” by the “patriarchy.”

Negroes: “victims” of a society that has bent itself into a pretzel – not one of those Philadelphia-style straight pretzel sticks; the twisty ones – striving to improve the economic, political, and social conditions of the melanin-oversupplied. “Structural racism,” you say? Damned right – structured in your favor, DeShawn and LaShondra. You’ve tested our patience to the limit. Go just a little further, why dontcha?

Homosexuals: “victims” of a society that has awarded them above-average incomes, high places in the arts and entertainment fields, and innumerable perches from which to claim – simultaneously! – that “we’re born that way” and “we’re proud to be ‘gay.’” All the while evangelizing to young boys that “you’ve got to try it before saying you don’t like it.” One more “Gay Pride” parade that features nudity and public sex acts, and I might just unpack the Barrett M82 and the emergency package of Oreo Double-Stufs®. There’s this really nice clock tower I’ve been meaning to climb…

Muslims: Viktor Orban, where are you when we need you?

I could go on. Be grateful that I’ve stopped here.

Grateful? The hell you say. Frankly, I’d rather you hadn’t, but can readily understand why you would need to. No sense putting oneself at risk of a stroke or fit of apoplexy, after all. They ain’t worth it.

I could add a few more to Fran’s list, and maybe I will at some point. But it strikes me that—excepting the Mooselimbs, who are a big ol’ basket of primordial, full-strength Hopeless—the aforementioned groups all have something in common, as would any candidates I might come up with to expand the list. This commonality also happens to be the selfsame trait that makes them so witheringly tiresome: they’re all liberals, Leftists, whatthehellever you prefer to call them. As I’ve often insisted regarding Da Joooze, the real problem with these head lice isn’t so much their gender, their ethnicity, or their sexual orientation; it’s the gawddamned Leftism.

Which unsavory trait, unsurprisingly, is also what drives them to make human afflictions of themselves, instead of just leaving everybody else alone and tending to their own knitting like decent, civilized non-Leftists usually do. Just fix the Leftism, and viola! We can all get back to living together in relative comity again, and won’t be nearly so miserable.

They ARE coming for us

Posted on July 12, 2021July 12, 2021 by Mike

As Francis notes, via a Glenn Beck quote: First they nudge, then they shove, then they shoot.

Why is this administration so insanely anxious to get everyone vaccinated, even children and people who had COV?

More and more, we hear people demanding unconstitutional and mandatory vaccinations. They are just parroting what they hear. Americans have been terrorized into thinking this is appropriate.

Will the government come after us over the flu and pneumonia next?

As has already been demonstrated to at least my own satisfaction, they will use whatever pretext they feel they need to to put you securely, completely, and permanently under the FederalGovCo thumb. Count on it, people.

A CNN medical analyst, Dr. Jonathan Reiner said on Thursday that it’s time has come for private industry to demand that employees take “the jab” or face the economic ruination of themselves and their families.

In other words, you’re a murderer if you don’t do what they say.

CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Reiner about it on “OutFront.”

“Given where things are going, is it time to move on from saying please to mandating?” Burnett asked.

Reiner responded, “I do think it’s time to start mandating vaccines. And I think that the private industry and private organizations will do that. At GW university, where I work, starting in fall, you can’t be on campus unless you’re fully vaccinated.”

“We’re at the part of the pandemic now where the problem in this country is that 150 million Americans are not vaccinated. Half of that number is less than 18 years of age. But let’s look at the adults. Seventy-five-million adults have chosen not to get vaccinated.”

He added, “That choice has consequences. Now, we can’t force you to take a jab in the arm. But there are many jobs, perhaps, that can prevent you from working if you decide not to get vaccinated. So I think we need to be more proactive, and we will see industry take the lead in this.”

To quote Porretto again, the hour of decision is upon us. I can only speak for myself, but I repeat: when the Gestapo swine come to force their Mark Of The Beast injection on me, they better make goddamned sure to bring help along. I do NOT intend to go gently into that good night, and anyone reading this shouldn’t either.

Oh, and speaking of using any pretext they can conjure, no matter how ludicrous, to pimp the 666 Shot.

President Joe Biden’s administration responded to protests in Cuba against the Communist regime on Sunday by issuing a statement through a minor official commending protests “about rising COVID cases/deaths & medicine shortages.”

On Sunday, protests broke out in Havana and several other Cuban cities, during which people chanted “Freedom!” and “Down with the dictatorship!” while marching against Communist Party institutions. The New York Times noted that while the demonstrations were triggered by “food and medicine shortages,” they also “openly protested against the Communist government” for the first time in nearly 30 years. Some activists called it the largest spontaneous popular protest since Fidel Castro took power in 1959, with protesters openly denouncing the regime of Miguel Diaz-Canel.

The administration’s statement ignored democracy and freedom altogether.

Well, of course it did. Why on earth would it not? Both of those are total irrelevancies in the FUSA now, not even worthy of making jokes about.

Cubans do not have the “right to peaceful assembly”; like many rights in the Cuban Constitution, it exists only in theory.

Yeah, well, hate to bust your bubble and all pal, but that applies equally well to certain other toilet-paper Constitutions I could name.

But let’s not beat around any bushes regarding why the clumsily-handled marionette Biden might make such a ridiculous statement. Our Mordor On The Potomac overlords fell short of their July 4 target badly; “vaccination” rates have slowly ground to a halt since; and the Shadow Men are perfectly willing to humiliate both themselves and their witless sock-puppet so as to keep the skeer on us as best they can, for as long as they can make it last.

I will say this in no uncertain terms, so there’s no mistake about it:

I WILL NOT SUBMIT to being injected with the phony, dangerous “vaccine” under ANY circumstances, and
I WILL NOT willingly, peaceably just sit back and starve because of that perfectly lawful, reasonable, and personal choice; there WILL be repercussions for any such demand, mandate or expectation, whether governmental or corporate, and you WILL NOT like them

Period. Fucking. DOT. I’m happy to take as my inspiration one of the best scenes from one of the greatest movies ever:

‘Nuff said. Bring it, motherfuckers. Just you try.

Words of wisdom

Posted on July 11, 2021July 11, 2021 by Mike

Glenn uncorks a great one: DON’T BE AFRAID OF THE ROBOT THAT PASSES THE TURING TEST. BE AFRAID OF THE ONE THAT DELIBERATELY FAILS IT.

Heh. Indeed.

Great Recession redux

Posted on July 11, 2021July 11, 2021 by Mike

Arthur Sido says it ain’t gonna reset itself, y’know.

Something I return to again and again is that most of our fellow Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, view politics in a deeply skewed manner. Most garden variety liberals think that Big Business is bad and we need more government to restrain it. Most NormieCons think Big Government is bad and we need more free markets to prosper. What neither side gets is that Big Business and Big Government are the same damn thing. Big Government loves Big Business because Big Business enriches politicians. Big Business loves Big Government because the dot gov types help Big Business to be more profitable. The last thing Big Business wants are free markets. They want state controlled markets that give them advantages in return for political donations. At Executive Board meetings for the National Housing Conference, non-profit types and corporate shills sit side by side and figure out ways to loot the American tax payer.

We are told that initiatives like using Freddie and Fannie to “help” low income Americans is a matter of “justice” and “equity”. The article twice mentions the “the racial wealth gap” as if giving blacks mortgages they can’t or won’t repay will make them wealthier. How exactly does it increase wealth to have blacks and mestizos getting mortgages that they end up defaulting on, thus making their poor credit even worse? Encouraging them to be responsible with credit? That would help. This won’t do anything to help them and in most respects will make things worse.

What it will do is vastly improve the profit of the major banks and mortgage lenders who will make shitty loans and then dump them onto Freddie and Fannie, and ultimately the American tax payer. In return, these banks and businesses will shower contributions on the politicians who made this windfall possible. As I pointed out before in Everyone Else Should Pay For My Poor Decision Making!, the top leaders in both parties tend to have a lot of campaign cash coming from the financial services sector. If you think that banks and investment firms are giving Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell alike millions in campaign contributions without a firm understanding that no matter which party is in power, the banks are protected, then you are kidding yourself.

You can see the end result of this from where we stand today. It doesn’t take a crystal ball, just a modicum of awareness. Lots and lots of crappy mortgages being issued to people who can’t handle them. Many or most of those will go into default and the tax-payers will be on the hook, which will be wrapped up into more make-believe money. Of course since “low-income” is often code for “not White”, there will be Congressional hearings and legislation to bail out these good folk who got in over their heads through no fault of their own. More money will flow to help keep them in their homes, magical bullshit money printed up out of thin air.

With a finite supply of homes and skyrocketing lumber prices making new home construction very expensive, we will have a bunch of new buyers in the marketplace looking to purchase homes. This increases demand and that will in turn cause prices to rise even faster. Next will come pressure to intervene in the home construction business to encourage faster construction. We already saw that in the quote from the article: “…expanding investment that supports the construction of multifamily rental properties”. “Investment” in this case is a fancy way of saying “tax breaks and government subsidies to build apartments and housing”. Groups like the National Association Of Home Builders will certainly support making “investments” as well as making it easier for people to get mortgages. That is where the real power moves are happening. Biden eating ice cream or empty blustering from politicians on C-SPAN? That is meaningless. Where things are really getting done are behind the scenes with regulators, congressional committee staff and lobbyists jockeying for position at the Fed Gov trough, all trying to stick their snouts in the sweet, sweet magical money flow.

Getting screwed in the deal? Us. Housing prices skyrocketing, inflation spiking. Housing is a huge part of the economy. Not everyone has an iPhone but just about everyone has to have a place to live.

This is all part of the plan. To enact the Great Reset, things have to be a widespread dumpster fire. People living in a decent society aren’t going to live in the pod. What better way to throw a society into chaos than to mess with the housing market that impacts everyone? Not to mention inflation being another tool for the Powers That Be to accelerate the Great Reset, there will be more on that later.

While sane people look at this move, which not only seeks to replicate the disaster of the Great Recession but to double down, and wonder what the hell they are thinking, it is critical to understand that torpedoing the economy is not an unforeseen effect, it is the whole point.

Annnnd bingo. In fact, that’s true of so many things happening to and around us these days it’s hard to keep track of them all. But if you still think these nefarious shitweasels aren’t working a Plan here, you need to think again.

Carpe De Nation

Posted on July 10, 2021July 10, 2021 by Mike

Kunstler would kind of like his country back.

Something tells me there are still too many sane people with a sense of humor left in this tormented land for the flunkies of “progressive” Wokery to achieve the total control they seek over the hundred-million, give or take, who are starting to think: Y’know, I’d kind of like my country back. And what country was that? It was the country we were before the Intel “Community” took over, in the service of an utterly corrupt political elite running the system like it was their personal cash register.

About that country I would like back… for starters, the country that valued the rule-of-law. Yes, I know, that’s awfully high-toned — the rule of law — as if one is invoking some clichéd bronze blindfolded babe in a negligee, hoisting a scale in one hand and a sword in the other. I’m thinking, rather, of a flesh-and-blood judge, perhaps a corpulent fellow with bad knees, of, say, the DC federal court, who would dare to throw out the malicious political prosecution of figures like General Flynn or the journalist Julian Assange… or an FBI that would make a criminal referral for sedition against Senator Mark Warner… or a newspaper editor who might be interested in the connection between Marc Elias’s Lawfare outfit at Perkins Coie and the Central Intelligence Agency. One could go on endlessly with the pungent hypotheticals. So much evil mischief has not been seen in one polity since Berlin, 1938.

Anyway, the country we live in now no longer observes the rule of law because it has become a security state like the former Soviet bloc states, with a rogue Intel “Community” that has hijacked the truck that the wheels of justice run on. Here’s a thought: do we know for sure whether the CIA might have been involved in the late, lamentable 2020 election? Wow, that’s outside the box! But, hey, why not? Think of all the fakery they are so capable of engineering, and consider how avid they were to get rid of that pain-in-the-ass Donald Trump (who wanted to get rid of them!), and also consider that there is really no check on their activities whatsoever because the supervising authorities are 1) Adam Schiff’s House Intel Committee (bwaha!), and 2) the aforementioned seditious scoundrel Mark Warner’s Senate Intel Committee. These two are so owned by the CIA that they must have a standing weekly TGIF session to peel grapes for the C-suite at Langley.

Some savvy 2020 election skeptics are pointing at China as possibly having interfered in the election that installed their pre-paid errand-boy “Joe Biden” in the White House — but what if the real action was actually closer to home? And why wouldn’t the CIA queer the election and then set up China to take the blame, since China is already in America’s dog-house for gifting the world with SARS-Covid-19 and its lovely variants? Just wondering… just asking… maybe the thought has crossed your mind, too.

Have you groked that the virus affords such wonderful opportunities for exercising state coercion over a spooked public? Just yesterday, Sec’y of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra declared that it is, “absolutely the government’s business to know who’s been vaccinated.” Of course, it’s as much the public’s business to know what the correct figure is for Covid cases and deaths, as well as adverse mRNA reactions and deaths. And, just for instance, two counties in California recently revised down their overall case numbers for the whole virus melodrama by 20 percent — so many cases were just hospitals gaming the federal bureaucracy for higher subsidy pay-outs keyed to the virus. And, after a month of getting bashed around for lying about this and that, America’s chief Covid-19 health officer, Anthony Fauci (“The Science”) has gone back on cable TV telling the country to “get over it.” Their vax “hesitancy,” he means. Why would anyone besides the sebaceous Chris Hayes on MSNBC believe him?

Another feature about the country I would like back is the freedom to live without the harassment of Woked-up useful idiots working day and night to destroy the very meaning of language while hustling American culture, tradition, and heritage into its “anti-racist” gas chamber.

Yeah, well, hate to have to bring it up and all, but there’s only one way THAT is ever going to happen; as has been demonstrated for us time and again, ad infinitum ad nauseum, they’re never going to stop. Which brings us back around once more to the ultimate question: exactly how much DO we want our country back, anyways?

The whole enchilada

Posted on July 9, 2021July 9, 2021 by Mike

Ace links to an absolutely brilliant theory-of-everything thread, which I ran through ThreadReader so you don’t have to. CAUTION: excessively lengthy excerpt follows, for which I make no apology because there was just no way around it.

I think I’ve had discussions w/enough Boomer-tier Trump supporters who believe the 2020 election was fraudulent to extract a general theory about their perspective. It is also the perspective of most of the people at the Capitol on 1/6, and probably even Trump himself.

Most believe some or all of the theories involving midnight ballots, voting machines, etc, but what you find when you talk to them is that, while they’ll defend those positions w/info they got from Hannity or Breitbart or whatever, they’re not particularly attached to them.

Here are the facts – actual, confirmed facts – that shape their perspective: 1) The FBI/etc spied on the 2016 Trump campaign using evidence manufactured by the Clinton campaign. We now know that all involved knew it was fake from Day 1 (see: Brennan’s July 2016 memo, etc).

These are Tea Party people. The types who give their kids a pocket Constitution for their birthday and have Founding Fathers memes in their bios. The intel community spying on a presidential campaign using fake evidence (incl forged documents) is a big deal to them.

Trump supporters know the collusion case front and back. They went from worrying the collusion must be real, to suspecting it might be fake, to realizing it was a scam, then watched as every institution – agencies, the press, Congress, academia – gaslit them for another year.

Worse, collusion was used to scare people away from working in the administration. They knew their entire lives would be investigated. Many quit because they were being bankrupted by legal fees. The DoJ, press, & gov’t destroyed lives and actively subverted an elected admin.

This is where people whose political identity was largely defined by a naive belief in what they learned in Civics class began to see the outline of a Regime that crossed all institutional boundaries. Because it had stepped out of the shadows to unite against an interloper.

It’s hard to describe to people on the left (who are used to thinking of gov’t as a conspiracy… Watergate, COINTELPRO, WMD, etc) how shocking & disillusioning this was for people who encourage their sons to enlist in the Army, and hate ppl who don’t stand for the Anthem.

They could have managed the shock if it only involved the government. But the behavior of the corporate press is really what radicalized them. They hate journalists more than they hate any politician or gov’t official, because they feel most betrayed by them.

The idea that the press is driven by ratings/sensationalism became untenable. If that were true, they’d be all over the Epstein story. The corporate press is the propaganda arm of the Regime they now see in outline. Nothing anyone says will ever make them unsee that, period.

This is profoundly disorienting. Many of them don’t know for certain whether ballots were faked in November 2020, but they know for absolute certain that the press, the FBI, etc would lie to them if there was. They have every reason to believe that, and it’s probably true.

Time Mag told us that during the 2020 riots, there were weekly conference calls involving, among others, leaders of the protests, the local officials who refused to stop them, and media people who framed them for political effect. In Ukraine we call that a color revolution.

Throughout the summer, Democrat governors took advantage of COVID to change voting procedures. It wasn’t just the mail-ins (they lowered signature matching standards, etc). After the collusion scam, the fake impeachment, Trump ppl expected shenanigans by now.

Think back: Stories about Trump being pissed on by Russian prostitutes and blackmailed by Putin were promoted as fact, and the only evidence was a document paid for by his opposition and disavowed by its source. The NY Post was banned for reporting on true information.

The reaction of Trump ppl to all this was not, “no fair!” That’s how they felt about Romney’s “binders of women” in 2012. This is different. Now they see, correctly, that every institution is captured by ppl who will use any means to exclude them from the political process.

And yet they showed up in record numbers to vote. He got 13m more votes than in 2016, 10m more than Clinton got! As election night dragged on, they allowed themselves some hope. But when the four critical swing states (and only those states) went dark at midnight, they knew.

a) The entrenched bureaucracy & security state subverted Trump from Day 1, b) The press is part of the operation, c) Election rules were changed, d) Big Tech censors opposition, e) Political violence is legitimized & encouraged, f) Trump is banned from social media.

They were led down some rabbit holes, but they are absolutely right that their gov’t is monopolized by a Regime that believes they are beneath representation, and will observe no limits to keep them (from) getting it. Trump fans should be happy he lost; it might’ve kept him alive.

Believe it or not, there’s still a lot I left out, of which you should read the all. If anybody has done a better job of pulling together all, and I do mean ALL, of the events of the last five years than this, I’ve yet to run across it. Bravo, MartyrMade, and a humble tip of the ol’ chapeau to you for this most excellent work. In the end, it all boils down to Ace’s closer:

It’s time to start talking seriously about the crisis of illegitimacy in the former America republic, and what exactly the subjects of the Ruling Class — not the citizens, we’re not that, we’re subjects, and we will pretend no longer — will do about it.

Actually, it’s way PAST time. We’ve been doing precisely that here at CF for quite a while now.

Update! JD Rucker picks up on this masterpiece, correctly identifying it as a must-read.

Must-Read Twitter Thread: Here’s Why We KNOW the 2020 Election Was Stolen
Twitter is general(ly) a cesspool of bad ideas argued by people with even worse takes on those ideas. The days of being entertained by Twitter disappeared when Donald Trump and tens of thousands of conservative Twitter accounts were banned in January. Occasionally, a gem still pops up.

This is one of them. Darryl Cooper, AKA @MartyrMade, is a podcaster who had a Twitter thread go viral with 13k retweets and 20k likes of the first Tweet alone. Normally I post the thread in its original form, but this one is 36-Tweets long. There’s also a good chance it will be deleted because it makes very cogent arguments of not only why millions of Trump supporters believe the 2020 election was stolen, but also why we are justified to believe it.

Did massive, widespread voter fraud happen? Yes, we believe it did. But even those who do not believe so should read this thread to understand why our perspectives on the election will not be swayed by those who have made lying to us their profession.

Indeed we won’t, nor should we be. At this late date, anyone gullible enough to place the tiniest iota of trust in anything coming from the maw of FederalGovCo is too damned stupid to figure out how to tie their own shoes. Even if they have Velcro straps instead of laces on ’em.

Updated update! I already knew that Rucker is the proprietor of the NOQReport portal blog, which I’ve had in my bookmarks since, like, forever. What I didn’t realize until just now was that I hadn’t installed NOQR in the Portal category in Ye Olde Blogrolle yet. Oversight duly addressed, with a big fat mea culpa and most humble apologies to JD.

Get off my lawn porch!

Posted on July 7, 2021July 8, 2021 by Mike

How to legally, non-violently respond to Biden’s “vaccine” Armtwister Psych Squads when they come a-knocking.

If a government agent or assignee comes to your property, it will be important to those who wish to protect their privacy and property to KNOW THEIR RIGHTS.

You do not have to answer ANY QUESTIONS or make ANY STATEMENTS to ANY GOVERNMENT AGENT or assignee. (5th Amendment of the US Constitution and corresponding section of your State Constitution)

Simply asking an agent to identify themselves does not waive your Rights.

You have the Right to be free from any government agent or assignee entering your property, your home, or your business without a properly obtained warrant. (4th and 5th Amendments of the US Constitution and corresponding sections of your State Constitution.)

Simply demanding a copy of that warrant does not waive your Rights.

You have the Right to tell any government agent or assignee to leave your property if they cannot produce a properly obtained warrant. (4th and 5th Amendments of the US Constitution and corresponding sections of your State Constitution.)

Simply demanding an agent or assignee of the government to leave your property does not waive your Rights.

If a government agent or assignee refuses to leave your property or returns to your property after being warned against entering or returning, that agent or assignee has committed the crime of Trespass and is subject to arrest. (State Law, 4th & 5th Amendments to the US Constitution and corresponding sections of State Constitution as confirmed by Supreme Court Opinions).

You have the Right to record through audio, video, or photographic recording of any government agent or assignee on your property, either with or without consent of that agent or assignee. (Multiple Federal Court Opinions recognize that the First Amendment plainly protects the filming of officers and public agents.)

I like the next-to-last one best, myself. KrisAnne also helpfully provides a link to a printable “trespass warning form” that you can hand out to any and all government goons intruding on your personal space like candy on Halloween, which you should. As she says: HAND THE COMPLETED FORM DIRECTLY TO THE AGENT OR ASSIGNEE WHILE TELLING THEM THEY MUST NOW LEAVE THE PROPERTY AND YOU WILL NOT BE ANSWERING ANY QUESTIONS. Which you shouldn’t. Tell ’em to peddle their little shot someplace else, thanks, ain’t no market for it around here.

Although I greatly prefer Wes’s idea myself.

Update! This. This right here.

"Biden pledges vaccination campaign will go 'door to door' after falling short of July Fourth goal" pic.twitter.com/78q6yphg1C

— Being Libertarian (@beinlibertarian) July 6, 2021

And that’s what we call balling the fucking jack, folks.

Final stages

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

Or, if you want to be a bit more prosaic about it: death throes.

The events at the spa were bad enough. The attack by AntiFa, and the subsequent actions of the police in 1) refusing to defend the peaceable protestors and 2) arresting a man who dared to defend himself make it plain that Los Angeles, California is about to collapse into complete chaos – and it might take the whole state with it.

The Golden State is the chief “produce cart” of these United States. Imagine it as a “failed state” in which there is no order and no safety. Be quick about it; soon you won’t need to imagine.

The lesson in this “should” be “obvious.” Sadly, it isn’t.

Throughout the nation, public order is breaking down. I can hardly name a city of significant size where Black Lives Matter and AntiFa don’t run rampant. Municipal police departments are either indifferent or impotent. Though there haven’t yet been many, reports of home invasions by those forces are making honest, peaceable Americans fearful about their own homes. As for urban commercial districts, I hardly think I need comment.

Los Angeles may be the forerunner of a complete social collapse from coast to coast. The consequences will include food shortages, loss of electrical power, unavailability of fuels, disruption of the roads, open gang violence, and many other things. If you think having the kids confined to the house this past year was bad, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet – and I hope you never do, though in my view the portents are grim.

The following is from a novel-under-construction:

“Public order is a matter of public will,” Merrell said in his most famous first-term address. “We have lacked the will. We dislike to compel immigrants and the young to conform to the norms of public decorum. We dislike to demand that public charges aim for self-sufficiency and make an honest effort to achieve it. We dislike to budget for law enforcement. We dislike to see armed men who embody the authority of the law patrolling our streets. We dislike to erect and staff prisons. We especially dislike to clear the streets of vagrants and idlers by force, or to hold parents responsible for the deeds of their miscreant children. Yet these measures, not ‘tolerance,’ nor ‘leniency,’ nor ‘understanding,’ nor ‘compassion,’ nor ‘community service,’ are the ones that will mitigate our problems with poverty, vagrancy, vandalism, and more serious crimes.”

Would anyone care to argue with John Merrell?

Remember the immense improvement in the condition of New York City when Mayor Rudy Giuliani sent forth its police to enforce all the laws, including the ones pertinent to “quality of life?” You don’t have to be that old to recall those years. Giuliani’s success in making the Big Apple a pleasant place to live, work, and shop was why he acquired the sobriquet “America’s Mayor.” Contrast the Giuliani years with those of the odious crypto-Communist Bill de Blasio.

I remember it quite well; as it happens, I moved to NYC for the very last thrashing about of the Dinkins mis-administration, and the difference when Giuliani took the City Hall reins was impossible to miss. There’s really no credible way to deny that the man singlehandedly saved NYC from itself, although certainly there are plenty of fools who tried then and still do today.

Of course, since I lived on the LES the professionally designed and printed posters plastered all over downtown featuring a pic of Rudy with a Hitler-style brush moustache and thinning combover, denouncing him as a “Nazi” and “literally Hitler,” were equally impossible to miss. Alas, New Yorkers have for many years been people who simply don’t understand what’s good for them; like a child balking at the taste of his medicine, they’d just as soon stay sick, thanks.

There is only one issue that matters in the elections of the years before us: law and order. No candidate who refuses to make that his one and only priority should receive even a single vote. Unless and until peaceable Americans are once more able to go about their lives without fear, this nation will come ever closer to chaos and disintegration. Whether anything could be reclaimed from the wreckage is dubious.

The traditional norms of public deportment, from the prohibition of violence all the way to standards of decency, must be enforced humorlessly and without exception. Nothing else will serve. What people choose to do in the privacy of their homes is of no moment.

Agreed, wholeheartedly. But nobody should be laying down any significant sum betting that it’s at all likely to happen. The chaos, division, and strife sown by the Evil Left has been working way too well for them to expect they’d dream of tolerating such a thing. There’s only one effective way to deal with their recalcitrance, a macabre last resort that we’re all perfectly well aware of. They seem bound and determined to leave us with no other choice but to kill them off in job lots—and with every passing day, I grow more convinced that they ought to get their wish.

Privilege is…

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

Not what we’re being told. Not. At. ALL.

Privilege is wearing $300 sneakers when you’ve never had a job. Privilege is wearing $200 Apple Airpods while living on public assistance. Privilege is having a Smartphone with a Data plan which you receive no bill for. Privilege is living in public subsidized housing where you don’t have a utility bill and where rising property taxes and rents and energy costs have absolutely no effect on the amount of food you can put on your table. Privilege is having free health insurance for you and your family that’s paid for by working people who can’t afford health insurance for their families. Privilege is having multiple national organizations promoting and protecting your race that’s subsidized by federal tax dollars. Privilege is having access to a national college fund that supports only your race. Privilege is having a television network that supports only your race. Privilege is the ability to go march against, and protest against anything that triggers you, without worrying about calling out of work and the consequences that accompany such. Privilege is having as many children as you want, regardless of your employment status, and be able to send them off to daycare or school you don’t pay for. Still waiting for this “privilege” I’m supposed to have…

According to Nemo, this was a commenter response to a racist Tweet from DC twat Muriel “Bow-wow” Bowser. I’d call it a real howler, but maybe that’s a bad-joke bridge too far even for me.

Patience will out

Posted on July 6, 2021July 6, 2021 by Mike

An (eventually, ultimately) optimistic take from Robert Gore.

The trial for Derek Chauvin and the lack of one for the Capitol Hill policeman (name still unknown) are another reminder—not that any are needed—that savages aren’t fair. It’s pathetic and ludicrous to expect an appellate court to grant Chauvin a new trial, although it would have ample grounds to do so in anything resembling a fair judicial system.

It’s like saying, “Wait until 22 and 24!” or, “Wait until the Arizona vote audit!” after last year’s blatant election theft. The savages have instituted corrupt arrangements that will enshrine their power in perpetuity. Expecting them to tolerate anything that would jeopardize those arrangements is like expecting water to run uphill. Fair or even quasi-fair elections would threaten their power. They are, like fair trials, but a memory.

Savages beget savagery and nothing else, until they are stopped or they stop themselves. Don’t count on them recognizing the production—a civilized and thereby forbidden act—and the producers—civilized and thereby forbidden people—that keep them fed and alive. And don’t count on them not making your weaponry, your last line of defense, a use it or lose it proposition.

They recognize no limits, certainly not the constraints imposed by reality. They may have to lay waste to the world before whomever remains of the honest and productive realize that their lives are a defend them or die proposition. For decades, America’s rulers and their accomplices have said about the enemies of the day: they only understand force. It’s projection, ascribing to others one’s own motivations. They’ve dressed it up in all sorts of verbiage, from Make the World Safe for Democracy to We’re All In This Together, but force is what they understand and to which they’ll always resort. The only thing that will stop them is superior force more competently wielded.

Government of the savages, by the savages, and for the savages doesn’t have much to draw on, and decades of propaganda have told savages to look to the government for every need. Vegetarian stew in every pot, two Teslas in every garage, paid for diplomas on every wall, a band-aid for every scratch, and a kiss for every boo-boo are just the minimum of what they’ve been told to expect. If they don’t get them it’s the selfish civilized’s fault. But who will they blame when the selfish civilized skip town or quit? And who will feed them?

The separatists will have the productive capabilities. Many of the country’s honest entrepreneurs (as opposed to its crony socialists) have already migrated. They will also have military expertise, especially after the savages eliminate retrograde rightwingerism and transform the US military into the most diverse, empathetic, and politically correct conflict resolution force the world has ever seen. (Oh, how the world trembles!) Notwithstanding the many thanks they’ve received for their service to the savages’ government, many veterans will join the civilized.

After last year’s mostly peaceful riots and the January 6 Insurrection That Nearly Overthrew The Most Exceptional Government In History, many savages bought firearms for the first time. Unfortunately for them, there’s a big difference between buying a firearm and knowing what to do with it, and most of that knowledge (and millions of firearms) are on the side of the vets and the civilized.

Many of the vets have also received on-the-job training in guerrilla warfare, against which the US government is batting zero. The government has many scary weapons, but it has repeatedly demonstrated an inability to keep such weapons out of the hands of its adversaries. Perhaps the separatists will prove as clever and capable as the Vietnamese, al Qaeda, ISIS, Taliban, and Iraqis and other groups have been at capturing US government weaponry. Notwithstanding their diversity, empathy, and political correctness, the conflict resolution forces would then find their weapons turned against them.

At this point, imagination is far more important than a deer-in-the-headlights’ fixation on present realities, because those realities are changing so quickly and chaotically. When the ground is continuously shifting under your feet, you can’t know where you are with any certainty. Your chance of saving yourself depends on knowing where you want to go and having an idea of how to get there.

Skepticism about imminent revolutionary change is understandable, but often betrays a misunderstanding of how revolutions in politics, science, culture, art, philosophy, learning, and all other fields of productive human endeavor work. The explosion visible to all is almost always preceded by a long, burning fuse visible to few and understood by fewer, only generally apprehended after the explosion.

The burning fuse in this case is the awesome force of decentralization sweeping the planet; the revolution is actually well underway. Centralization is a legacy idea and government is its legacy institution. After centuries of centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government failures, and after the failure of the most centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical government in history, legions of intellectuals of impaired intellect and infinitesimal imagination still hail or fear a centralized, resource-devouring, and tyrannical global government. That’s not to say there aren’t plenty of people out there trying to institute such a government, but they’re building a three-foot-high wall of beach mud and sand against a tidal wave.

That wave will arrive, of that there can be no doubt. Afterwards people will point to some contemporaneous event as the catalyst, but the catalysts have been accumulating for decades, their leitmotif decentralization. Multi-volume sets could be written about them all.

Don’t get too attached to today; tomorrow it’s gone. The questions that will emerge from the chaotic maelstrom: Freedom or tyranny? Civilization or savagery? Anyone who chooses civilized freedom is going to have to fight for it, but it’s a fight that can and will be won.

We can but hope…and prepare, plan, and load magazines.

“Suffer Not the Communist”

Posted on July 5, 2021July 5, 2021 by Mike

Gerard expertly channels Kipling.

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—
This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—
Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law.

Lance and torch and tumult, steel and grey-goose wing
Wrenched it, inch and ell and all, from the Communist.

Till our fathers ‘stablished, after bloody years,
How our Communist is one with us, first among his peers.

So they bought us freedom—not at little cost
Wherefore must we kill the Communist, lest our gain be lost,

Over all things certain, this is sure indeed,
Suffer not the Communist: for we know the breed.

Amen. Read it all; it only gets more powerful from there. Gerard, although it’s decent and honorable of you to offer an apology to the peerless Rudyard Kipling, I see no need for it. I’m sure that wherever he may be, the shade of Kipling is smiling and nodding his head at this in full agreement. Fantastic job, my friend.

(Via WRSA)

Update! In case you didn’t already know, the Kipling poem GVDL was working from is The Old Issue, which near the end includes this deathless stanza: All the right they promise—all the wrong they bring. Sheesh. It would seem that, even back in 1899, Kipling knew his Commies pretty damned well, no? The man wasn’t just one of the most gifted writers Western Civ ever has or ever will produce; from this, it appears he was a prophet as well.

I preminisce no return of the salad days

Posted on July 3, 2021July 3, 2021 by Mike

Another Ironbear masterpiece of commentry that needs to be moved out front here.

There is no going back. We live in post-America now, and have for quite some time. We can’t go back to the America of the Founding any more than we can go back to the bright, shiny, thriving, hopeful and optimistic America of the ’50s. There is no time machine that will take us there.

Conservative thinkers like Smith, Codevilla, and the rest err in thinking that there is somehow some way to dismantle and excise the degeneracy of Progressivism while keeping the worthwhile parts of what Codevilla calls “Republican America”.

There is not.

Post-America is not going to somehow revitalize and go back to being America. We’re in the degenerate phase of a decadent civilization, and, to date, to the best of my knowledge, there has never been a degenerate civilization that has reversed course and revitalized into a thriving, growing, and vital civilization.

Breakup and partition is inevitable at this point. Empires always fall apart.

What grows out of that is no more going to resemble the America of George Washington than the Western Civilization that grew out of the breakup of the Roman Empire resembled Classical Rome.

The primary question at this point, and the one that thinkers like Smith and Codevilla refuse to face squarely – because that would require admitting that they’re spinning their wheels – is whether the breakup and collapse will be slow and gradual over centuries like Rome, or fast and bloody like Yugoslavia.

I don’t believe that quick and peaceful like Czechoslovakia or even the Soviet Union is in the cards for us.

The secondary question is: What comes next? What grows out of rubble?

Smith and Codevilla can’t answer that for the same reason I can’t: the caterpillar can’t envision the butterfly.

Yup, that’s about the size of it. I myself am frequently guilty of using phrases like “restoring America” and the like, despite knowing that such a thing not only won’t happen, it in fact CAN’T happen. We’re walking on uncharted and extremely dangerous ground now, and the destination is uncertain at best.

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