Read and Heed – Page 6

From bad to worse

Posted on February 25, 2025February 25, 2025 by Mike

Stephen Green shares some deeply disturbing news.

I Could Live With the Egg Shortage, but NOT THIS… NOT THIS
We can argue all day and all night over whether the massive poultry cull was necessary or not, but two things are 100% certain. The first is that fewer birds producing fewer eggs gave us yet another massive spike in the price of eggs, typically an affordable and easy-to-prepare protein depended upon by jillions of people. The second is that I just learned of something worse.

Actually, let’s talk about that bird cull for just a moment. I did a little research on that a couple of weeks ago, thinking I might get a column out of it. I gave up on the column because half the reports I read indicated that the bird flu test is subject to false positives and that massive numbers of egg hens were unnecessarily slaughtered. The other half indicated no such problem. So I threw up my hands and abandoned the column.

But on reflection, since the cull was an act of the Biden administration, and since everything it did was either wrongheaded, spiteful, or both, I’m going to ignore half my research and just tell you that it was the wrong call. “I was going to buy eggs, but then escrow fell through” is the fault of the Biden administration, and it didn’t have to be that way.

I feel better now. But we’re both about to feel worse — if, like me, you have a minimum two-cup-a-day coffee habit.

As consumers, we’ve been lucky so far. Coffee, I learned today, is the second-most traded commodity after oil. If you want to know what the planet really runs on, it’s two very different kinds of black liquid, both packed full of energy. What it means for coffee drinkers is that the source and price of the cup you’re sipping right now were locked in months ago, maybe longer. What it also means is that as those futures expire and traders lock the new ones in, higher prices get locked in, too. Maybe much higher. Maybe double.

It’s already happening.

As Stephen goes on to detail, it is indeed—and for some of us, that’s terrifying. Personally, I share our old friend Steve’s view on the matter: eggs I can live without, coffee…ehh, not so much. I never have much enjoyed eggs unless they were scrambled, covered in shredded cheddar, and doused liberally with Tabasco, usually sharing a platter alongside a double order of hash browns scattered, smothered, covered, peppered, and diced at Waffle House during one of those bleary-eyed noontime “breakfast” stops as the band was heading out for the next town.

Denny’s, you ask? Don’t make me laugh.

Ever since eggs went from Source Of All Bad Things Including But Not Limited To Heart Attacks, Climate Change, and Raycissismism to Nature’s Perfect Food practically overnight, I’ve taken to hard-boiling the yucky things (NO runny yolks, not EVER), slicing them in half, and then sprinkling each half with Tony Chachere’s Creole seasoning before sending them down the hatch, one per day strictly to keep the doctor away. Go messing around with my beloved Luzianne w/ chicory, though, and me and you gon’ FIGHT.

Talking sense

Posted on February 24, 2025 by Mike

JD Vance is truly a national treasure.

JD Vance to Young Men: Don’t Let Them Turn You Into ‘Androgynous Idiots’
Not too long ago, I decided to try a bold experiment. I returned to the University of Georgia to take some agriculture classes. The reason I considered it bold is that I was old enough to be many of the students’ mothers (had I been an extremely young teen mom, of course). I learned a lot of lessons about this current generation of teens and twenty-somethings and how college has changed since my first go-round two decades prior, but what really threw me was when a professor asked for my pronouns.

My class was given a virtual assignment to upload a video introduction of ourselves to a school website. “Tell us your name, your major, your hobbies and interests, and your pronouns so your classmates can gain a better understanding of who you are.” I’d never been asked to provide my pronouns in my life and had no interest in starting now. Before I uploaded my video, I watched through some of the others, shocked as these young men and women offered up their “hes” and “shes” and “theys” as if this was all perfectly normal.

But there was one guy, let’s call him Tyler, who gave us his name, his major, and his hobbies and interests, but instead of pronouns, he ended the video with “I’m a dude” and a slight eye roll, obviously mocking the pronoun situation. Let me tell you, he’s the only person from that class I even remember, much less ever gained any sort of understanding of who he was.

Well, JD Vance just gave all the other Tylers of the world permission to crawl out from under their rocks of submission and embrace their God-given masculinity.

On behalf of women — well, the ones who enjoy being women — I would like to say thank you to our vice president.

Vance spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Monday and said a lot of great things, some of which even earned him a standing ovation. But it was his message to young people, especially young men, that really stood out.

My message to young men is don’t allow this broken culture to send you a message that you’re a bad person because you’re a man, because you like to tell a joke, because you like to have a beer with your friends, or because you’re competitive. The cultural message…wants to turn everybody, whether male or female, into androgynous idiots who think the same, talk the same, and act the same. We actually think God made male and female for a purpose, and we want you guys to thrive as young men, and as young women. And we’re going to help with our public policy to make it possible to do that.

I don’t know about you, but I could listen to that over and over again. There’s a reason why Donald Trump won 49% of the vote from young men (ages 18 to 29) in November and 54% from men overall. Vance touched on that too.

I think this is why young men in particular are so, you know, they’re so inspired by President Trump is because he doesn’t allow the media to tell him he can’t make a joke or he can’t have an original thought. President Trump just says what’s on his mind; that’s a damn good thing.

Amen to that. “We’re fighting for you,” was Vance’s overall message to young people, and it was refreshing to hear. Our country doesn’t just face international enemies — we’re under attack from enemies within who want to debase and degrade our culture.

They’re the ones who want to tell young men that they can’t be masculine and tell women they can’t be feminine. They’re the ones who demand that boys play girls’ sports, who insist that teachers force gender ideology on elementary school students, and who truly believe there are 72 genders.

Well, yeah. Nice thing is, they’re all complete and total psychopaths, so we got that going for us at least.

Yeah, let’s don’t and say we did

Posted on February 6, 2025February 6, 2025 by Mike

I have to say, on this one I hope he IS just bluffing.

Trump is ‘not bluffing’ on Gaza takeover, will do ‘what it takes,’ sources close to prez say
WASHINGTON — President Trump’s threat to take over the Gaza Strip is not a “bluff,” sources close to the White House told The Post Thursday.

“The president is absolutely serious,” one White House official stressed.

The conversations have been in the works for months, meaning Trump was negotiating a solution for the Hamas-controlled land strip at war with Israel before his term began.

Steve Witkoff — Trump’s Middle East envoy — has played an influential part in the planning, a second source familiar with the internal discussions on the matter said, and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt confirmed.

Witkoff developed his longtime friendship with Trump making billions in real estate investing and development in New York City. He traveled to Israel to meet with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in the final days of the Biden administration, which the Trump administration says played a key part in securing a hostage release deal between Israel and Hamas.

“Absolutely” Trump would be willing to take US control of Gaza, the source said.

“If that’s what it takes. He’s also creating a sense of urgency to end the status quo. And if Gulf States don’t like his plan then they should come up with their own and take more ownership of the situation. But the fact is that the status quo is a disaster,” the source added.

It IS a disaster, has always BEEN a disaster, and, unless and until some Western leader somehow scrapes up the stones to say “enough already” and start in killing Paleosimian Mooselimbs in job lots, will always BE a disaster. In the wise words of Gen Curtis LeMay, albeit in a different context: “if you kill enough of them, they stop fighting.” Truer words were never spoken.

That said, no way can I see OMB’s proposal turning out to be anything but a YUUUUGE mistake and an enormous catastrophe for the US all around. All Trump really needs to do at this point is to just step back, keep his mouth shut, and let Netanyahu get on with the business at hand. The only thing Trump can conceivably accomplish by interjecting himself and his nation into “Palestine” will be to set the stage for an encoure of 1983’s Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, if not something even worse. I’m sure he means well, but this next bit underlines how hopelessly misguided Trump’s thinking is on this whole rotten deal.

Some Republicans have raised eyebrows at the possibility of getting entangled in a foreign conflict and putting American troops in harm’s way in the Middle East. Trump first said he would not rule out putting US boots on the ground, but then said, “no soldiers by the US would be needed.”

“The Gaza Strip would be turned over to the United States by Israel at the conclusion of fighting. The Palestinians, people like Chuck Schumer, would have already been resettled in far safer and more beautiful communities, with new and modern homes, in the region,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

“No soldiers by the US would be needed?” It is to laugh, sorry. By “in the region,” natch, Trump means Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia—all of whom have for decades now been steadfastly, flatly rejecting any notion of permitting those poor, put-upon Paleosimians to be “resettled” anywhere within their borders, in no uncertain terms. Which, y’know, they still are. Clearly, they and their fellow Arab Moslem nations want no part of them, haven’t the least intention of taking them in, and have never pussyfooted around about saying so, either.

Unless his plan involves a wing of A10 Thunderbolt IIs saturation-bombing the hellhole until not one brick is left standing on another, the best thing Trump can possibly offer is a shrug, a rueful smile, a palms-up hand gesture wordlessly expressing to one and all, “Hey, I tried, whatcha gonna do,” then a blanket endorsement for Netanyahu to finish the bloody job at long last. A final pertinent quote which spells out exactly what it is we’re dealing with here:

Judgement Day will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews. The Jews will hide behind the stones and the trees, and the stones and the trees will say, oh Muslim, oh servant of Allah, there is a Jew hiding behind me — come and kill him.

That, of course, is one of the more unpleasantly blood-curdling Hadiths culled from the Muzzrats’ hateful little murder-book, the subject of innumerable sermons in mosques scattered across the West, an uncompromisingly vicious mindset ubiquitous throughout not only “Palestine” but the Middle East entire. Which ought to tell any sentient being all he needs to know about this eternal conflict, and whence it really springs.

Just a bluff? A mere opening gambit to clear the decks for purposes of implementing a broader agenda, mayhap, to be cast aside with alacrity the instant its usefulness as a bargaining chip has expired? I pray that it is, but fear that it is not. If it isn’t, hopefully some trusted personage in Trump’s inner circle who has the Boss’s ear will step up and persuade the President that he needs to just quietly let this profoundly bad idea go by the wayside without further ado.

Update! A “pact with the devil,” John Hale calls the misbegotten ceasefire agreement with Hamas, and I couldn’t agree more.

THE world waited to see who would be the first three hostages Hamas released to Israel. Would they be alive, or already dead? Would they include the baby Kfir Bibas, whose second birthday was on Saturday, the day before the start of phase one of the ceasefire agreement and hostage/prisoner exchange?

Hamas are playing despicable and cruel mind games with the population of Israel in general, and the families of the hostages in particular – in how they release those poor abused souls who are still living, and the cold bodies of those they have murdered. And as the next six weeks of prolonged, drawn-out releases continue, the greater that psychological torture will be for the families still awaiting the release of their loved ones. It is expected that the living will be released first. My guess is that the Bibas family will be among the last, if not the last, hostages to be handed over.

The first hostages released were Emily Damari, Doron Steinbrecher and Romi Gonen, three young women who have spent a year and three months suffering in the dank, dark, suffocating terror tunnels beneath Gaza. Abused and assaulted, not knowing what their fate would be, clinging to life. Emily is British, yet the British government were barely interested in her plight as they were too concerned about appeasing the Muslim vote in the UK rather than being seen to support a Jew above the cause of the ‘Palestinian resistance’.

Hamas made a spectacle of the release. Heavily armed terrorists in full Hamas uniform kept the handover under control for the cameras while Palestinian civilians crowded in, shouting abuse and spitting at the young hostages.

After the six long weeks of phase one have elapsed, will there still be a ceasefire and further hostage releases possible, or will Hamas have violated the agreement forced on both Israel and Hamas by Donald Trump, eager to make a big impact on day one of his second presidency? Can a second phase be negotiated at all? There is much more work to be done before all hostages are released, and a permanent ceasefire attained.

The next phase of negotiations will take place during this phase one hostage release, where in exchange for 33 hostages of unknown status (dead or alive), Israel is to release nearly 2,000 terrorists and detainees, including more than 700 prisoners who between them are responsible for the murders of around 2,500 Israeli men, women and children.

In the meantime, rest assured that Hamas will keep pushing the boundaries of the current phase one agreement, flexing their propaganda muscles to keep their worldwide fan base enthused by their ‘resistance’. Just 12 hours before the ceasefire was supposed to begin, Hamas broke the terms of the agreement by not naming the first three hostages to be released. They did eventually give the names, well after the cut-off time, and after Benjamin Netanyahu halted the start of the agreement in response.

There are celebrations in Gaza and elsewhere, proclaiming this agreement as a victory for Hamas, and as a signal that murder and hostage-taking works and will be repeated. This deal is a pact with the Devil; any deal with Islamic terrorists is such. It encourages further terror, putting innocent people at risk worldwide – because this Islamic ‘struggle’ is for world domination, for a global Caliphate and the imposition of Islam and Sharia on every living soul.

Indeed so, right down the line. Again: I couldn’t agree more with Hale’s astute, clear-eyed evaluation of this patently raw deal.

The concealed core of the Deep State itself

Posted on February 5, 2025February 5, 2025 by Mike

Looks as if Trump, Musk, and Co have tripped ass-backwards over the Überstadt motherlode.

DOGE and the budget audit of doom
the commanding heights of the unravelling to come

meet the new boss, nothing whatsoever like the old boss.

not this time. maybe never again.

welcome to “dismantle leviathan” the fun new game that all the cool kids are playing.

i warned you about how these people were not going to act like the gormless opposition party of old. they will understand the system better than you do. and they’re going to tear it down.

DC is finally starting to see how much trouble it is in and people are freaking out. the moves are coming too fast for the news cycle to even keep up with. and DC has mostly already lost. all the high ground has been taken and now it’s just going to be about squeezing.

DOGE grabbed the OMB and the treasury payments system.

that’s it. lights out, game over.

from ukraine to climate science to NIH to 100 different agencies like USAID, money is being funneled everywhere and stolen in wholesale quantities.

USAID and who knows who else were all out meddling for decades in foreign elections. they have probably been meddling in ours.

suddenly, these agencies are losing their minds about “declassification efforts.”

it certainly does make on wonder: why were they classifying anything at all? wasn’t this supposed to be aid?

and DC is finally realizing how much trouble they are in and leviathan is shrilling in terror and rage, but it’s already way too late.

threads are exposed, they will be pulled, and this is going to, for the first time in generations, tear the covers off these boxes and let us see what’s inside. and it’s not gonna be pretty friends. i’m telling you point blank: however bad you fear this was – it’s worse.

the middle of the american overton is about to see that government is 80% money laundering and unaccountable tyranny and theft by weight.

More, much more at the link, every word of it seriously edifying reading. The predicament now being screeched about by scabrous vermin like Schumer, Pelosi, AOC, et al reminds me strongly of a fine old Dead Boys tune.

If, as has been said so very many times, the D卐M☭CRAT Party is in actual fact a criminal organization masquerading as a political party (PRO TIP: it is), then FederalGovCo itself is the officially-sanctioned analog of La Cosa Nostra, only one step higher up on the Big Government ladder, with more fingers in bigger pies grubbing for ever-greater power, wealth, and authority.

What fun it’s been since Jan 20, watching Trump and his wrecking crew turn over the Deep State rocks one after another and seeing the cockroaches underneath crawl for their very lives in abject terror of the simple, cleansing light of day.

Epic moments in total lack of self-awareness

Posted on February 4, 2025 by Mike

They can retire the prize with this one, I believe.

You people doxxed a minor for awkwardly smiling. You told the entire world where he went to school. A Disney producer said he wanted to shove him and his friends into a wood chipper.

Trump isn’t going to make the left “start to be cruel”

He’s going to make you stop. https://t.co/kKfC9WfQwt pic.twitter.com/ul1QgAswJv

— Seamus (FreedomToons) (@seamus_coughlin)

February 3, 2025

Via Insty.

Civics 101

Posted on January 29, 2025January 29, 2025 by Mike

As I always say, there’s a reason this sort of thing isn’t taught in the government schools anymore.

There cannot be a “hostile takeover of the civil service.” The civil service is not a check on the Executive Branch- it IS the Executive Branch. If a Department, Office, Bureau, program, or individual is doing something counter to the will of the Executive, it’s well within the… https://t.co/9UsT93H9Q6

— Where are we? Nowhere (@nowhere_nh)

January 29, 2025

Your obligatory “Show more” workaround:

There cannot be a “hostile takeover of the civil service.” The civil service is not a check on the Executive Branch- it IS the Executive Branch. If a Department, Office, Bureau, program, or individual is doing something counter to the will of the Executive, it’s well within the Executive’s right to nip such behavior in the bud. Because the Executive was elected by the will of the people. The bureaucracy was not.

“Prevent the civil service from becoming the President’s henchmen.” What absolute drivel.

Left-wing ideals have been left to fester and seep into every aspect of the so-called civil service, to the point it feels emboldened to act as an unelected, unvetted check on the President. Nonsense. There are three branches of gov’t that are intended to check and balance each other: Executive, Legislative, and Judicial. There is no fourth branch called “The Bureuacracy” that has the right to check or balance the other three.

The bureaucracy in DC is as entrenched as a tumor grown in the bone, sucking the life force out of this country. It will take a lot of surgery – some of it messy – to fix all that damage.

Messy indeed—with the majority of said “mess” consisting of spilled blood, buckets and buckets of it.

(Via Stephen Green)

The guilty flee where no man pursueth

Posted on January 28, 2025 by Mike

Pardons? We don’ need no steenkin’ pardons.

There are those who have argued that the offenses of January 6th are “unreasonable” to pardon and that Trump’s pardon and commutations for persons prosecuted due to January 6th 2020’s actions are outrageous.

That assertion is false.

The issuance of a pardon imputes guilt and acceptance of one, which is voluntary, confesses guilt (Burdick .v. United States, 1915.) The reason you must voluntarily accept a pardon is that once pardoned you cannot assert 5th Amendment protections as the risk of criminal sanction has been removed. Thus you must accept it voluntarily in that you are giving up Constitutional Rights, but in doing so you also confess to the truth of the offense(s) in question.

There is no means to expunge a federal offense. Once convicted the only way to remove it from your record is to prevail on appeal in which case the offense itself is voided. Many states have a process for expungement, which is a formal and legal removal of a conviction; no such thing exists for federal crimes.

A pardon does not erase an offense — that is, the offense of “parading” or whatever have you that a person was convicted of from Jan 6 is not “gone”, however, it is undisputed, because Biden pardoned all of the Jan 6 committee members, that the government and members of Congress obstructed justice which was used to deny said persons a fair trial. That issuance of the pardon by Joe Biden imputed said guilt and the acceptance thereof confessed to same by the committee members.

That doesn’t make the actions of those who paraded (or stole and destroyed, for that matter) into “not occurred.” They did take those actions, and they were charged or convicted as the case may be. But the trials were not fair as justice was obstructed so whether the original sentences were reasonable (or whether, for example, probation or a modest fine under misdemeanor penalties was a more-appropriate penalty in the case of someone who’s crime was mere presence in the Capitol building) was never lawfully and fairly adjudicated.

Trump’s pardons and commutations thus might objectively be considered “wrong” except for Biden’s action on the way out of office, in which he pardoned obstruction of justice, witness tampering and willful destruction of evidence by persons who led to those prosecutions, all of which were part and parcel of the original charges and trials and due to the acceptance of Biden’s pardons by those committee members is in fact a confession of guilt to those federal offenses.

As a direct result Biden’s preemptive pardons make the Jan 6 pardons by Trump not only objectively reasonable they became, at the moment Biden issued them, mandatory.

It’s the esteemed Karl Denninger, so of course there’s a hefty surplusage of italics, boldfaces, and underscores scattered throughout which I’m just too damned lazy to bother transcribing. Also, having been “pardoned” by ***”President”*** Bribem, if some enterprising soul in Congress doesn’t have Herr Fauci’s (at the very least) miserable, lying ass in the hot seat toot fucking sweet, then that notable omission will in turn serve to highlight the shambolic theater production the whole sordid FederalGovCo mess is, has been for years, and likely always will remain.

On reality

Posted on January 11, 2025January 11, 2025 by Mike

And, y’know, NOT.

No, you aren’t
So I saw a dude (and yes, it had the adam’s apple, so a dude) wearing a skirt with leggings (and really nice heels) and a shirt that said “Everyone is entitled to their own view of reality” I couldn’t help but tell him: “No, reality is what it is, denying it makes you a fool and an idiot.” He got mad and pouted. No matter, he’s still a man, in a skirt. Not a chick. “Don’t call me Stupid!” say he. “Then don’t act stupid or say stupid shit, says I”…He flounced off in a huff. I laughed out loud at his back.

Just because a woman wants to think “Big is Beautiful” doesn’t mean that fat girls are as pretty or attractive as women who take care of themselves. Shy’s lying to herself or to her fat friend. Trans people (I.E. Men that pretend to be women or women who pretend to be men) are not the opposite sex just because they put on a skirt or pants. To believe otherwise is stupid. Trans men can’t have babies or nurse, and trans women are not strong men, even with supplements of Testosterone. Saying otherwise is stupid.

I can believe I can fly all I want, right up ’til I step off that cliff. Being upset when reality (and the ground) smacks me in the face is stupid….Stepping off the cliff is stupid. Don’t like the truth? Reality and the world just don’t care. Being upset that you can’t fly is also stupid.

Man or woman (and those are the only choices), to deny reality is stupid and it really is stupid to think otherwise. Reality is what it is. Deal with it. Stop being foolish.

We, as a society, need to stop pandering to people, be they straight or trans or gay, men or women, old or young, that feel that their alternate view of reality is just as valid.

Seems simple enough, no? Obvious; beyond argument; plain for all with eyes to see; as fair as fair ever gets in this life—none but a fool, a madman, or a stubborn, spoiled child would think to object. So readily apparent is it, in fact, that it shouldn’t have to be said at all; even the most rudimentary powers of observation will confirm that to contend otherwise is a pointless waste of time and/or energy.

And yet, somehow…well, here we all are nonetheless.

Via Bayou Peter, who adds:

This blatant falsehood manifests itself particularly in the “You can’t criticize me! You can’t judge me! You can’t say I’m wrong!” crowd. Look, if what you’re believing, or preaching, or doing, flies in the face of objective fact and natural reality, I can judge you (your actions, at any rate – not your soul, that’s God’s business) and I can say you’re wrong. I will. Loudly and frequently. To indulge your false fantasy would make me as guilty of ignoring reality as you are!

I saw this particularly as a prison chaplain. We had psychologists on staff whose job was to help inmates figure out where they’d gone wrong, and help them to change. The problem is that far too many of those psychologists tried to lead the inmate to come to the right conclusions on his or her own, without actually telling them they were wrong. In many cases, those inmates had never been taught how to think, and had none of the normal frame of reference (morality, civics, etc.) used in our society. To expect them to come to the “right” conclusions when they were filled with the “wrong” personal history, information (or the lack thereof), relationships, etc. was nonsensical – yet those psychologists persisted in that approach. They had to. That’s what the “system” demanded – and that’s why we have a 70%+ recidivism rate among US prison inmates over the first five years after they’re released.

Plenty more at both links, all of it well worth reading.

Carbon fact vs fiction

Posted on January 7, 2025January 7, 2025 by Mike

Originally intended to run this meme in tomorrow’s Memezapoppin’ edition, but it merits its own main-page post, I think.

Telling, no? Now, I just happen to know right offhand what the amount of CO₂ in Earth’s mostly nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere is: a whopping .03 percent. Or .04%, depending on who or what the source is. That being so, the contention that even quadrupling or quintupling it would have any noticeable affect on life as we know it looks even more absurd than it already did. Therefore I commend to your attention another of Mike’s Iron Laws, #149 this time.

Update! Man oh man, those MILs sure have come in mighty useful, haven’t they? Makes me damned pleased and proud I came up with the idea, I must say. The way things are going, looks like I’ll have reasons aplenty to add a bunch of new ones in the days ahead. Reminds me that I have another post I’ve been working on that I really need to finish and get up which in its way reinforces the notion of this websty being a fairly decent resource.

Ask a stupid question

Posted on January 6, 2025 by Mike

Get an obvious answer.

Could the Feds Have Been Involved in the New Orleans Jihad Massacre?
Would they do such a thing?

Robert, Robert, Robert. You know the answer to that as well as I do, as well as everybody who’s been paying any attention at all does: OF COURSE they would. And, y’know, did, in all likelihood.

Trust in our government has lowered to the point that some people are suggesting that the New Orleans jihad massacre was aided and abetted, or even concocted, by the feds in order to stir up unrest as Trump prepares to return to the presidency, or to create a pretext for some other action. Some of those who are making suggestions of this kind, such as Candace Owens, just want to find some plausible way to blame Jews, or to claim that it’s all in the service of trying to get the U.S. involved in a war in the Middle East on behalf of Israel. Those types, including Owens herself, tend to downplay or deny outright the reality of Islamic jihad, preferring to see virtually all the workings of the wide world as the puppet show of the all-powerful and ever-unseen Zionists. Still, would the feds really get involved in a jihad plot to kill Americans? Sure.

No one really knows for sure, except the conspirators, if there are any, whether or not the feds are involved. And jihad is real, as the news out of Africa, Asia and Europe shows daily. Still, the question must be asked: would the feds really aid and abet a jihad terror attack? Have they really become that corrupt and compromised? And the answer is: yes. Of course they would, and yes, they’re that corrupt. The evidence for this fact lies in their behavior at the Muhammad Art Exhibit and Cartoon Contest that Pamela Geller and I organized in May, 2015.

The Daily Beast wrote in August 2016 about how this undercover FBI agent encouraged the jihadis. The Beast’s Katie Zavadski wrote: “Days before an ISIS sympathizer attacked a cartoon contest in Garland, Texas, he received a text from an undercover FBI agent. ‘Tear up Texas,’ the agent messaged Elton Simpson days before he opened fire at the Draw Muhammad event, according to an affidavit (pdf) filed in federal court Thursday.”

This was not entrapment. Simpson and his partner Nadir Soofiwere determined jihadis who had scouted out other targets. Simpson, along with Soofi and another jihadi, Abdul Malik Abdul Kareem, who supplied weapons to the pair and helped train them, sought information about pipe bombs and plotted to attack the Super Bowl, and planned to go to Syria to join the Islamic State (ISIS), long before anyone told him to “tear up Texas.”

But what was the FBI’s game in telling them to do that? Why didn’t they have a phalanx of agents in place, ready to stop the attack? Or did they want the attack to succeed, so that Barack Obama’s vow that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam” would be vividly illustrated, and intimidate any other Americans who might be contemplating defending the freedom of speech into silence?

We twice asked the FBI for an investigation into this matter. They ignored us, of course.

One mo’ time ag’in: OF COURSE they did. Anybody surprised by that at this late date is a pluperfect five-star fucking moron.

There’ll always be an England?

Posted on January 5, 2025January 5, 2025 by Mike

Perhaps. Then again, perhaps not.

BrokenBritain 1.

BrokenBritain 2.

Lest any of us get to feeling smug from the cozy “couldn’t happen here” cope, may I remind you that, for the last five-six decades at least, the FUSA has tended to lag no more than five to ten years behind the Mother Country in such matters. As Bracken says, this is but the force-assembly phase of a thousand-year campaign of civilizational conquest and subjugation the decadent West can’t be arsed to concern itself about nowadays, much less prevent, still less reverse.

In the course of re-skimming through some of my favorite speculative-fiction works over lo, the past year or thereabouts—Peter Hamilton in particular, although there are others—I’ve noticed a thing that amuses me greatly. Namely, the unfounded assumption that Once-Great Britain will somehow project the cultural dominance it enjoyed several hundred years ago across the spacefaring worlds of the 30th-31st-32nd Century and beyond. Offhand references to obscure London neighborhoods, linguistic tics, architectural styles, even such prosaic artifacts as steak and kidney pie, bangers & mash, and baked beans for breakfast (?!?) get tossed around liberally, betraying the quaint, vanity-inspired notion that anybody in the far-distant future will even know what those things are…or, y’know, were.

For the matter of it, many of them are barely even remembered in present-day Londonistan, let alone Proxima Centauri in 3426; already, they are no longer traditions to be cherished and preserved, but irrelevant antiquities to be discarded. Will cookies still be known far and wide as “biscuits”? Will a yobbo still be a yobbo, a wog still a wog, a Frenchman still a Frog?

More to the point: will a Moslem-overrun England be capable of engineering and developing a wormhole drive, FTL communications, colony arkships, artificial-gravity generators? Will the Abdul-Abdel-Abdullahs, Saddiqs, and Achmeds in charge of the New British Caliphate be at all interested in undertaking such ambitious, multi-generational projects?

Not bloody likely, mate.

Not to beat up too much on Hamilton and his confreres, mind. Hey, nobody gets everything right every time; foresighted as he was, even Heinlein never saw touch screens coming, and his futuristic computer gizmos printed their output on actual paper, ferchrissakes—a long, laborious process which usually took not just hours but days. Also, Heinlein’s transtellar-flight helmsmen operated their ships’ version of “warp drive” via clunky levers, knobs, and pushbuttons; his navigators (astrogators?) plotted their course not with a holographic projection or main-viewscreen star chart, but boring old No 2 pencil and paper.

No energy weapons; no personal force-fields; no magnetized grav-boots for use in micro-gee environments or EVA. No antimatter propulsion; no mass-to-energy converters; no inertial dampeners; no starships capable of atmospheric flight and/or landing. No malmetal, glassteel, or plascrete. Heinlein and his fellow visionaries came up with lots of cool stuff in their day, sure, but their vision didn’t extend quite that far.

Rule of thumb which ought to be remembered but is too often forgotten: just because even our finest minds can’t see it on the horizon doesn’t mean it ain’t coming all the same.

(Via WRSA)

The “organic” scam

Posted on January 1, 2025January 1, 2025 by Mike

Gee, color me shocked, I did NOT see this coming.

Factory Farming is Better Than Organic Farming
Some narratives are simply ubiquitous in our culture (every culture has its universal narratives). Sometimes these narratives emerge out of shared values, like liberty and freedom. Sometimes they emerge out of foundational beliefs (the US still has a puritanical bent). And sometimes they are the product of decades of marketing. Marketing-based narratives deserve incredible scrutiny because they are crafted to alter the commercial decision-making of people in society, not for the benefit of society or the public, but for the benefit of an industry. For example, I have tried to expose the fallacy of the “natural is always good, and chemicals are always bad” narrative. Nature, actually, is quite indifferent to humanity, and everything is made of chemicals.

Another narrative that is based entirely on propaganda meant to favor one industry and demonize its competition is the notion that organic farming is better for health and better for the environment. Actually, there is no evidence of any nutritional or health advantage from consuming organic produce. Further – and most people I talk to find this claim shocking – organic farming is worse for the environment than conventional or even “factory” farming. Stick with me and I will explain why this is the case.

A recent article in the NYT by Michael Grunwald nicely summarizes what I have been saying for years. First let me explain why I think there is such a disconnect between reality and public perception. This gets back to the narrative idea – people tend to view especially complex situations through simplistic narratives that give them a sense of understanding. We all do this because the world is complicated and we have to break it down. There is nothing inherently wrong with this – we use schematic, categories, and diagrams to simplify complex reality and chunk it into digestible bits. But we have to understand this is what we are doing, and how this may distort our understanding of reality. There are also better and worse ways to do this.

One of my verymost favorite John Ringo novels, The Last Centurion, gets waaaaay into the weeds on the “organic” versus factory-farm tussle, which lovingly detailed digressions I found completely fascinating, as well as highly educational. So no, the above in-depth expose doesn’t surprise me all that much.

I may or may not have brought this up here before, but for quite a few years there my good friend Al and his ol’ lady Lisa (one of my former NYC roomies who moved down to CLT for good after a disastrous romantic entanglement with another old friend of mine, Joe) made an astonishing wad of on-the-side extra coin peddling “free range” eggs to one of the local yuppie-puppie grocery stores. Al and Lisa live way out in the boonies near Concord, on a big farm passed down to him by his grandmother through his mom, both long deceased. Once, when I was up at their place on one of my regular visits, Al walked me out to the “free range” chicken coop to help him collect those upscale eggs.

Al explained the whole “free range egg” dodge to me on the trudge out there from the century-plus-old farmhouse, and it struck me as just funny as all get-out. See, the coop was the familiar wood-and-wire structure roomy enough to comfortably house about ten-fifteen yardbirds and keep them safe from snakes, coons, foxes, and such-like critters, the distinction which made it “free range” being that this one had wheels. There was a beat-down circular track along which, every other day, either Al or Lisa had to roll the ramshackle rig a minimum of three (3) feet so as to maintain its “free range” status. Once in a while they’d let the chickens out to peck, cluck, and scratch around in the tall grass and dirt for an hour or so, after which brief spell of liberation they’d all be bunged back into the hen-itentiary again.

All in all, the whole setup was about as “free range” as every other garden-variety, stationary henhouse any country boy has seen a blue million of—ie, NOT. As with practically every other goobermint-mandated system, “free range eggs” is nothing but a pure-dee grift, designed from jump for one purpose and one purpose only: to fleece the sucker hordes out of as much of their hard-earned as can be managed without donning a bandanna and sticking a hog-leg Colt in their faces outright

Now that you know the score, feel perfectly free to amble right on past your grocery store’s “free range” and/or “organic” section wearing a knowing smile and head directly for the more reasonably priced but every bit as nutritious and/or healthy aisle with a clear conscience. Let the smarmy yuppie urbanites and/or hippie-dippie doofi waste their gelt on fraudulence and PC hype.

You’re in the Big House now

Posted on December 31, 2024December 31, 2024 by Mike

Contra all odds and expectations, Democrook Rod Blagojevich DOES appear capable of learning, when he just has to.

Wanna Know the Downside of Diversity? Look at the Prison System.
Disgraced Illinois governor-turned-felon Rod Blagojevich recently appeared on “The Joe Rogan Experience,” detailing his experience behind bars. It’s a fascinating interview. But this clip in particular is especially worth your time…

Keep in mind, that Blagojevich was a blue-state Democrat. He cruised to victory in his last congressional election with a whopping 87% of the popular vote and won his final gubernatorial race with a 10-plus point edge. Until his downfall, he enjoyed vast support from minorities throughout the state.

But according to him, after his first full day in a maximum-security prison, the correctional officers called him in and told him to join an Aryan prison gang ASAP. He had committed the faux pas of socializing with black inmates out on the yard and was told point-blank that he needed to “ride” with the whites.

Otherwise, he was gonna get killed.

Prison is a deeply segregated environment. It’s expected that the whites stay with the whites, the blacks with the blacks, the Latinos with the Latinos, and never should they mix.

So Blagojevich met with the leaders of the Aryan prison gang and ceded to some of their demands: He wouldn’t sit with the blacks or Latinos anymore and agreed to hang with the whites. He didn’t like it, but he did it.

“And then they told me something which I respected,” Blagojevich told Rogan. “They said, look, you’re not in the real world anymore. This is not a place where you could be a civil rights advocate or a civil rights activist. This is a prison. You don’t have the same rights here that you have out there. …So, if you’re gonna sit with somebody outside your race in the chow hall, that’s a direct affront to us and there are measures that we can take to make sure that you don’t do those sorts of things. And I respected the fact that they said it was to keep order, and it was the culture, and pretty much everybody in the prison system accepts it anyway.”

According to the Aryan gang leader, segregation is what kept people safe.

It’s curious, isn’t it? Outside of prison, we keep hearing that diversity is our greatest strength — and to be fair, sometimes it is. Sometimes, when diverse skill sets converge, the sum total is exponentially greater than all the individual parts.

But sometimes, diversity leads to wars, violence, hatred, and death. Even in a tightly controlled, highly regimented place like a prison.

Diversity is a luxury. It’s the icing on the cake of a stable, successful political system. But it’s not a luxury every country can afford. The consequences of getting it wrong are corruption, crime, social disintegration, and a cataclysmic civil war. Look at Afghanistan and remember the haunting quote from P.J. O’Rourke: “The Afghans themselves say that if you put two Afghans in a room, you get three factions.”

That’s not a recipe for stability.

Ahh, but there you go again, assuming that D卐M☭CRATs actually want stability, when they demonstrably do not. Their preference is for chaos, destruction, impoverishment, and immiseration generally. As their heroic icon Lenin is reputed to have said, the worse the better, don’tchaknow. Calls for an update of the old Jimmie Rodgers classic, I do believe.

Update! Worth noting, too, is that when D卐M☭CRATs prattle of “diversity,” they mean not diversity of, as mentioned above, skills and abilities, or of thought, or background, or any other worthwhile things. No, for them, it’s always and exclusively about skin color, and nothing whatsoever else.

Sympathy for the devil

Posted on December 28, 2024December 28, 2024 by Mike

Gee, wonder why his grandson turned out to be the oxygen-thieving little predator he was. Why, one might almost conclude that Grampa’s attitude might have been the REAL problem whence the whole mishegas derived.

Still Baffling: AR-15 Provides Homeowners with Unfair Advantage Over Intruders?
Sometimes in researching stories to share with TTAG’s audience you come across an old one that still makes you shake your head. Sometimes you come across an old one that makes you shake your head so much you just have to share it. After all these years, what this grandfather says, in spite of his obvious grief, is still a head scratcher. So here’s the story:

Years ago, Massad Ayoob once told me, “In a fight for your life, if it’s a fair fight, your tactics suck.” Like many of us, I’ve heard (and used) that same expression countless times. However, a grandfather in Oklahoma apparently thought it should be a fair fight between home invaders like his grandson and innocent homeowners.

Leroy Schumacher told media outlets that the homeowner’s use of an AR-15 gave him an “unfair advantage” against the gaggle of armed thugs who broke into his home. In the end, three of the thugs assumed room temperature.

Don’t you love it when the family members of violent criminals speak out to the media, trying to paint their misguided scholar kin as the true victims.

Grandpa Schumacher brought a big shovel to continue diggin’.

“What these three boys did was stupid,” said Leroy Schumacher.

Schumacher agrees his grandson and his friends made a bad decision, but not one worthy of deadly consequences.

“They knew they could be punished for it but they did not deserve to die,” said Schumacher.

Schumacher says his grandson didn’t have a chance. The 17-year old, he says, never got into trouble.

“Brass knuckles against an AR-15, come on, who was afraid for their life,” Schumacher told the station at the time.

Don’t give a shit, Gramps. Your worthless spawn, happily for all of his future intended victims, has now assumed room temperature, so who was or was not “afraid for their life” is no longer relevant. “Unfair”? Cry me a river, asswipe; your precious “good boy” is dead purely because he made the fatal mistake of breaking into the wrong house, no other reason. If you can’t do the time, then don’t do the crime, as the old saying goes. May he, his hapless partners, and especially you, burn in Hell for a thousand years—a lengthy stretch which should afford the whole sorry lot of you ample time to figure it out for yourselves.

Bottom line, the stupid wannabe-thug brought brass knuckles to a gunfight. The most satisfying part of this story would have to be its decidedly happy ending (bold mine):

Authorities didn’t agree with Schumacher’s sentiments, however, and Zach Peters was not charged with any crimes because police say he acted in self-defense. Schumacher was not convinced that the shooting was justified, though, and reiterated his belief that the consequences didn’t fit the crime. “There’s got to be a limit to that law, I mean he shot all three of them — there was no need for that,” he said.

No, he should’ve probably just shot one of them and hoped the others ran off instead of taking charging at him and using his own gun to kill him. You can’t make this stuff up!

To think those three teens apparently committed that violent home invasion under the leadership of their criminal mastermind friend Elizabeth Rodriguez, who eventually pled guilty to reduced charges and was sentenced to 45 years for each of her criminal partners killed. All three sentences were to be servied concurrently. As for her associates Jacob Redfearn, Jake Woodruff and Max Cook, they will for eternity pay the price for a very stupid decision that they learned too late has very real, long-term consequences. While this incident took place in 2017, it’s a lesson that is still valid today.

You don’t go in a person’s home unless invited. It’s as simple as that.

Annnnd BINGO! ‘Nuff said.

Grandpa’s grief is of course understandable. Which only makes it all the more crucial that the arrant horseshit said grief has led him to espouse be quashed immediately and vehemently, lest such destructive “thinking” gain a toehold via misplaced sympathy and metastasize throughout society entire, to all our great detriment. Decent folks tolerate nonsense like this at their own dire peril. Denounce it or die, sayeth I.

Final positive aspect? Just this: Grampa’s inept thug of a grandson and his criminal ex-confreres will never break into someone else’s house with intent to victimize a homeowner guilty only of minding his own business again, guar-on-TEED. Curmudgeon nonpareil HL Mencken, a/k/a the Sage of Baltimore, expressed the core principle thusly: “Hanging one scoundrel, it appears, does not deter the next. Well, what of it? The first one is at least disposed of.” A-fuggin’ MEN, podnah.

Off-topic update! Speaking of happy endings, MarsEdit 5.3 is still choogling merrily away, to my tremendous relief. YAAAAY!

ON-topic update! Via Lakeside Joe: Another lesson learned too late, another goblin DRT.

Florida Man Shoots at Two Migrants in Alleged Home Invasion, One Died
A Florida homeowner shot at two migrants who allegedly broke into his home Thursday night. One of the migrants, a Mexican national, died from multiple gunshot wounds.

Manatee County Sheriff Rick Wells told reporters his deputies responded to a call about a shooting connected to an alleged home invasion burglary. The homeowner said his home surveillance camera alerted him to the two masked men who were about to break into his home, Fox 13 reported.

“He [the homeowner] knew something bad was about to happen, and he didn’t stall. He grabbed his firearm, told his wife to get into a safe spot,” the sheriff said. “This is the state of Florida. If you want to break into someone’s home, you should expect to be shot.”

The homeowner reportedly told his wife to find a safe place in the house as he grabbed his firearm to defend his home and family. Florida is a Castle Doctrine state that allows a homeowner to use deadly force to defend himself or others.

Bold mine again, and utterly delightful.

The Great State Of Florida and a handful of other localities notwithstanding, it shows how very far shitlibs have dragged the Overton window towards Leftist tyranny, that the once nearly universal assumption that defending the sanctity of one’s home and the safety of one’s family using deadly force was reasonable and appropriate—in fact, was every self-respecting Man of the House’s solemn duty—should now be questionable, even outrageous, for a great many so-called “Americans.”

Time was, getting shot and/or killed was held to be an occupational hazard for housebreakers, thieves, and other such vermin, far from being unheard of; even said vermin realized that the longer he plied his nefarious trade, his odds of being shot would rise from “Highly Likely” all the way up to “Dead Certain.” The idea that a law-abiding citizen would someday be arrested, tried, and incarcerated for the “crime” of ventilating a marauding armed robber or robbers would have drawn gales of scornful laughter from all and sundry in those days—preposterous, absurd, manifestly Unpossible© here in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave!

Today, alas, this upending of the very concept of Law And Order itself is taken as read, a given. Even amongst 2A absolutists, the too-real prospect of imprisonment, persecution, and personal ruin based on the most threadbare pretext—when The Enemy bothers to justify Himself at all, mind—is now accepted as the stuff of everyday life in Amerika v2.0. Again with the Eternal Truth: no matter how much you hate Them, you don’t hate Them enough.

All in all, the newly-controversial God-given right to effectively defend one’s home, loved ones, belongings, and bodily self is yet another Founding principle which has been flung down and danced upon by the Leftist wrecking crew. Having grown up in a very different America than the one I see all around me in my dotage—its exact opposite, in fact; the Disney-reboot version of it, written, produced, and directed by Bearded Spock—I can only wonder how the hell it ever came to this. We’ve come a long way, baby—every step of it in precisely the wrong direction.

Kaczynski Vs Luigi Babe: a comparison

Posted on December 20, 2024December 20, 2024 by Mike

An intriguing idea, one I hadn’t ever thought of myself before. From the NYT, of all unlikely places.

The Unabomber’s Influence Is Deeper and More Dangerous Than We Know
I published a novel about the Unabomber this year, and during a book tour stop in Seattle, a high school teacher raised his hand and asked me what he could tell his students about Ted Kaczynski, because he was a hero to so many of them. The question stopped me cold, reminding me that Mr. Kaczynski’s influence is deeper and more widespread than most people realize.

The same feeling of cold unease returned this week when I read news reports that Luigi Mangione, the suspect charged in the killing of UnitedHealthcare’s chief executive, Brian Thompson, had posted a favorable review of the Unabomber’s manifesto online. The similarities didn’t end there. The meticulous planning and use of symbolism in the crime reminded me of Mr. Kaczynski, who spent years choosing his targets, designing disguises (even gluing false soles to the bottoms of his shoes) and leaving messages for investigators. The words “deny,” “defend” and “depose” written on the bullet casings found by Mr. Thompson’s body were an eerie echo of the “FC” for Freedom Club that Mr. Kaczynski carved into his bombs. The fact that Mr. Mangione allegedly made his own gun and carried a copy of his own manifesto reinforced the similarities.

There is, of course, still much we don’t know about Mr. Mangione: a full picture of who he is, and what factors shaped him and motivated him. But the teacher’s suggestion that the Unabomber was a hero to some of his students pointed to a larger truth. To many young people living in a system of extreme economic disparity, in a world they believe is on the verge of ecological collapse, the Unabomber represents a dark, growing ideological desperation. To them, his ruthlessly intellectualized turn to violence can seem justified.

At some point before much more time has passed, Our Side will have to get over its girlish squeamishness regarding this purported “ruthlessly intellectualized turn to violence” being utterly unthinkable, amoral, and completely out of bounds, I’m afraid. That’s owing to one very simple reason which ought to be obvious: if we don’t rise to the challenge and match the Leftist enemy blow for blow and then some, then we must inevitably lose to them. And as all of us should know full well by now, losing to the Left means losing absolutely everything.

You definitely want to read all of this one, it’s quite good. Never thought I’d hear myself say that about a NYT article, but there you are. Strange days indeed, sure to get stranger still as time marches ever on.

Oh yeah, almost forgot: the “Luigi Babe” reference in the post title hails from my own voluminous memory archive—just another of my ceaseless attempts to amuse myself which constitute one of the primary reasons this h’yar blog exists in the first place. Hey, even if none of y’all get a laugh out of it, I do. As is said of the Hokey Pokey, that’s what it’s all about.

See, Luigi Babe (as he insisted everyone call him) was this irritatingly ubiquitious show promoter, self-styled raconteur, and all-around hipster douchebag back in my NYC days. He was unfailingly chatty, touchy-feely, faux friendly, cloying, and utterly oblivious as to how vanishingly few, if any, of his fellow scenesters actually liked him even just a little bit.

When I was host/DJ/barman of a popular weekly rockabilly night* at what was bona fide Downtown scene-maker Deb Parker’s arguably least-successful venture, Babyland, Luigi Babe would show up every Thursday night, to everyone else’s profound chagrin.

If I’m lying, I’m flying: the minute Luigi Babe made his Grande Entrance into Babyland (or anyplace else, really)—clad in his trademark vintage gabardine suit with matching fedora and ascot, an immaculately-drawn pencil-thin moustache adorning his upper lip, flourishing his affected cigarette-holder in one hand like a scepter, carrying himself as if he were the dashing reincarnation of Clark Gable and/or Errol Flynn, the fleshly exemplar of what people mean by the word smarm—you’d see ten or twenty other regulars get up from their booths and beat feet for the exit with alacrity, often as not abandoning a table-full of overly pricy cocktails untouched in the urgency of making good their post-haste escape. Jackets, handsome cardigan sweaters, gloves, purses, you name it, who cares? These were but material objects, no more; unlike the precious time lost enduring the dread Luigi Babe’s presence, they could be replaced.

No shit, the dust cloud those fleeing bar patrons left in their wake would’ve shamed even the Roadrunner speeding away from Wile E Coyote. MEEP MEEP!

* Yclept the Chicken Shack, which moniker would go on to earn me a subtly cheeky nod from no less august a personage than the great Max Weinberg, at a Conan O’Brien show taping—yet another of those incredible stories I really gotta tell y’all sometime

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