Category: The Almighty State

American totalitarianism

Laying blame where it belongs

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What’d I tell you people.

This is not news; this national driver shortage is no shock to businessmen or policymakers. Our driver shortage contributes to empty store shelves, idled assembly lines, retail price inflation, a reduced Gross Domestic Product, and the global supply chain crisis.

This is not just one industry’s problem; it’s everybody’s problem. What is odd, however, is that so many people believe the trucker shortage is caused entirely by not enough people choosing the profession of truck driving as a career.  While that is certainly a part of it, it’s not our real problem.

In fact, our truck driver shortage is caused primarily by a series of destructive government policies at every level.

…And these are just (a few of) the reasons we need so many more drivers than we should. We could also look at issues like the double-hit of the federal payroll tax that attacks owner-operators so hard. We could consider the complexities of federal Hours of Service (HoS) regulations that make every log sheet and fleet schedule a math project. We could review the federal fuel efficiency standards that have left common sense behind, chasing after ever-more-expensive, ever-less-worthwhile gains in efficiency, pricing rigs beyond the reach of entrepreneurial individuals, all contributing to the end result: making truck driving less appealing to the next generation of workers.

We could also look at, say, exorbitant license and accreditation fees, permits innumerable, and unnecessarily burdensome and costly “safety” regulations. Back when I was running the road in a big rig, I usually ran from CLT out to a small-town furniture factory in eastern Tennessee, hauling uncut blocks of foam for sofa and chair cushions. At 0-dark-thirty each morning I bobtailed up to Cumulus Fibers in Stateville to pick up a pre-loaded 53′ trailer stuffed with the material, a light load which only weighed in at four or five thousand pounds (max weight for your typical 53 footer is usually between 40 to 45 thousand pounds). I’d then head on out for the remote, decrepit old factory in Nowhere, Tn, spend an hour getting unloaded, and then come back to CF to drop off the trailer at Cumulus. Next morning: lather, rinse, repeat.

The only variation of this routine was that, about twice a week, the DMV lawdoggies at the I-40 weigh station in Statesville would wave me off to the side for yet another “safety” inspection. That would add another hour or so to my daily round, as Smokey crawled around underneath my trailer on a mechanic’s creeper filling out a list of “infractions” that would end up being about five-six pages’ worth.

There’s a reason for this, but I never thought of it as a good reason. What it was, was daylight fucking robbery by the Heat-o Banditos, raising vital revenue for the Almighty State. I swear, those po-lice should have been wearing a bandana across the bottom of their faces, and maybe an eye-mask, just to properly identify themselves.

See, those CF trailers were all ramshackly, rusted-out pieces of shit. Shabby as they were, though, the Cumulus bossheads knew they would easily hold up under the negligible load. Long as I made sure I got the trailer doors well secured—a sometimes tricky job, rasslin’ those wobbly, rusty, crooked-ass things together so that the latch hasp would mate with the cam bar lock well enough to keep the doors from flopping open on those rough mountain backroads—my tired old follow-on rig presented no real hazard to anybody.

Problem was, the Staties and DMV cops knew about the sad, sorry state of those Cumulus trailers same as I did. So a couple days a week, each and every week, I’d be honored as the selectee for a gimlet-eyed going over, after which I’d be presented with a stack of paper more closely resembling a Dostoevsky novel than a mere citation for violating “safety” regulations.

The funny part is, back then the fines were handled differently than now. All I had to do was hand the paperwork over to my boss, who would then mail it off to Cumulus Fibers, who would just pay ’em all off. There was never any thought of fixing the crappy trailers, much less buying new ones. The State got its pound of flesh, Cumulus could keep operating on the cheap, and I could keep my job. The fines were no more than a cost of doing business, that’s all. Nowadays, however, fines for almost anything at all are levied against the shipper and/or recipient involved, as well as the trucking company, as well as the poor old truck driver.

If he’s a company driver, and depending on who he works for, he may or may not get partially reimbursed. Although not usually; the company he works for will almost always, as a matter of policy, require their drivers to inspect their ride before leaving the hub; report any problems via a printed checklist and verbally; and demand a truck that’s up to snuff while the faulty rig gets down-checked for a trip to the shop to be repaired. This, in Cubical Land’s view, leaves Night Crawler, the Road Roller, or Ratchet Jaw ultimately responsible, so he gets to pay for his lax standards of professional conduct his own self. Just never anybody mind that he’s probably been writing up that same burned-out tail light, broken horn, or bald retread for weeks if not months, with all his paper shuffled, passed around, filed, and duly forgotten by the bossheads at Corporate. Trust me, it happens all the time, then and now.

If he’s an owner operator—a righteous entrepreneur working hard to grab himself a piece of the American Dream—well, he’s just screwed, basically.

As anybody who knows anything at all about the nature of government knows, said fines are way, WAY higher now, too.

We do need more truck drivers. Transportation is at the heart of everything in our economy, from food prices to energy, from necessities to the little luxuries that make for a modern, first-world standard of living. It’s government actions and government choices that hamstring the industry, drive up costs and drive down efficiency.

It’s government that makes us need so many more drivers than we should, and dissuades the young from going into it as a career.

We can hardly be blamed if we are reminded of the late President Reagan’s dictum: The nine scariest words in the English language are “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Smart man, that Gipper was. It should be noted by one and all that the further we’ve strayed from that wise maxim, the worse our situation has become. Which is why today we struggle to get by under the less-than-capable hand of a fraudulently-installed “president” with obvious mental degradation and severe integrity issues—an inarguably untrustworthy mountebank wholly unfit for the position he finally swindled his way into, after decades of scrabbling after it so desperately. Throw ruinous taxation, crippling overregulation, and an indifferent, inflexible, and out of control bureaucracy into the pot, and the rank fetor of one hellacious stew to be finding oneself in suddenly wafts up, strong and unmistakable.

At the start of a long, dark road

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As I keep saying.

Two Years After Lockdowns, The West’s Troubles Aren’t Ending — They’re Just Beginning
Two years ago this week, the United States shut down. Churches, schools and businesses went dark. Weddings, funerals, and birthdays went silent. City streets stood empty, with an eeriness closer resembling occupied Paris than the bustling hubs they’d been just days before.

Two years later, as the last of the mask mandates for school children falter and crack, it’s tempting to believe our nightmare is finally over. Just as the disease is going to haunt us a long while, however, so too will the effects of how we tried to fight it.

Americans’ relationships with our politicians, bureaucrats, schools, media, police, and churches are fundamentally altered. Indeed, the entire West’s relationships with these major segments of society are forever remade. As we look out on the wreckage of two years of Covid policies, as well as our spiking fuel prices, rocketing inflation, a contested election, a Chinese Olympics, and a land war in Europe, it’s increasingly clear that, far from standing at the end of a dark era, our civilization teeters unsteadily at the very beginning of one.

It’s hard to notice at first. The modern West has become so accustomed to a slow, steady decline — the kind Merle Haggard sang about, and Ronald Reagan ran against — that complaining about it has become cliché; like the angry old man waving his cane.

More than that, it’s very tempting to view the past two years as separate from our other major problems. But just as Black Tuesday began an era marked by the Depression, the Dust Bowl, the New Deal, the Second World War, and a fundamental reshaping of the American life, so too will the Lockdowns mark the start of a ride we can’t get off.

Even in states that have long since shrugged off the bureaucrats’ Covid demands, trust is broken. The people had believed in March 2020 that if they did their parts, all would soon be well. As President Calvin Coolidge famously said, “The chief ideal of the American people is idealism…[and] the chief business of the American people is business.”

Neither Americans’ idealism nor our industry were rewarded, however. From March 2020 on, ours was rule not by people, but by bureaucratic diktat.

Our politicians betrayed us: flying abroad, getting haircuts, going maskless, holding parties, and dining out while also closing schools, forbidding gatherings, banning amenities, and demonizing all who resisted — or even questioned — their orders.

Our corporate media betrayed us: propping up liars and fools, tearing down all who spoke against their champions, and spreading fear and hatred of dissent as far and wide as their words would carry.

Our teachers betrayed us: using Covid to gain a grab bag of vacation time, control over parents, wage hikes, and other unrelated perks, all while punishing school children with years of masks, separation — and the educational and developmental retardation those rules cost.

Even our much-vaunted hospital workers betrayed us: keeping dying husbands from their dying wives, grown children from their elderly parents, brothers from their sisters, and babies from their mothers — all to ensure “Covid safety.”

As hard as it seems, much of this might be good. Not that our politicians, media, teachers, and health care are broken — as the most important essay of 2021 laid bare — but that Americans now recognize just how broken they all are.

A most excellent essay, one I can’t recommend to you CF scapegraces highly enough. I don’t really have anything to add myself in the way of commentary; Bedford pretty much said it all, and said it quite damned well, too. Most of it we’ve already covered here anyway, enough so that I’m starting to feel like Chris’s “angry old man waving his cane.” Although I admit that could also possibly be due to my being…well, an angry old man. No cane at the moment—although with the fake leg coming along in the next several days (or so I’ve been told), I’m going to have to get myself one soon.

Tilting at windmills

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An idea whose time has come—but will never arrive.

It is time to impeach and convict Joe Biden.

The nation and the West cannot take another two-three years of this criminally corrupt and inept disaster.

They’re gonna have to, alas. The chances of the House actually sending articles of impeachment to the Senate, even moreso the Senate voting to convict, hover somewhere between “Zip, zero, nada” and outright “Laughable.” That sad fact notwithstanding, there’s an airtight case to be made in favor of it.

Every day it seems, despite the censorship and the fake de-bunking, we get more and more evidence of Biden’s criminality. He and his family, of course, have been long known as crooks and liars in the pockets of Delaware-based credit card companies.

The lies told by Joe are legion. His brother is a well-known and unsavory character as is his son, Hunter; and they have dealings with Joe, the “big guy” who gets ten percent.

We now suffer the worst presidency in our history; none other comes close.

Biden moved into the White House thanks not only to massive electoral fraud, but to an unprecedented support by big tech and media firms who carefully edited and suppressed information hurtful to Biden. In addition, Biden, and many of those around him, e.g., Jake Sullivan, helped created the fake Trump-Putin hoax, which not only almost brought down the Trump presidency, but made it impossible to have normal relations with Russia–and we are paying for that now as we face the possibility of a major war in Europe. The DNC, with the active participation of Joe Biden, FBI, CIA, and the media engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy against a sitting president.

Let us not forget that Trump’s great “crime” in the second impeachment was to ask too many questions about the Biden-Ukraine link. That, my friends, was the great driver of that most fake of fake impeachments. Trump was getting close to upsetting the whole cart of rotten apples. He was asking dangerous questions.

Which reveals the main reason impeaching Biden is the real-world embodiment of Don Quixote’s Impossible Dream: it ain’t just Biden that should be impeached; in fact, removing him from office would do little or no good. It’s the federal government entire that needs to be removed. Until it is, we’re doing no more than shuffling deck chairs on the Titanic. Biden is merely the frontman for the true source of our problems, the Invisible Ones who cannot be touched.



The banality of evil update! Is unleashing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse an impeachable offense?

The four horses and four afflictions, conquest, war, famine, and pestilence, neatly encapsulate the administration of Joe Biden. Old Joe himself is to a great degree responsible for this impression, as he seems to like to sound apocalyptic notes. He certainly has done so more than once, particularly when he declared on Dec. 16, 2021, “For unvaccinated, we are looking at a winter of severe illness and death — if you’re unvaccinated — for themselves, their families, and the hospitals they’ll soon overwhelm.” There’s the Biden pestilence. Yes, COVID-19 came upon us during the Trump years, but Biden promised to end it, and that turned out to be yet another of his empty promises. With Anthony Fauci threatening that “more rigid” restrictions are in the offing, pestilence looks as if it’s going to be a permanent feature of the Biden era.

The Biden famine is more of a threat than reality as of yet, but it could come to us any day now. As PJM’s Athena Thorne noted, Biden said Thursday, “With regard to food shortage, yes, we did sss- re- re- s- talk about food shortages. And, uh, and it’s gonna be real. The price of these sanctions, ahem, is not just imposed upon Russia, it’s imposed upon an awful lot of countries as well, including European countries and our country as well.”

Biden’s war is obvious: it is happening in Ukraine now. However much the establishment media tries to blame Trump for Putin invading Ukraine, and pretend that Trump would be applauding his move if he were still president, the ineluctable fact remains that Putin moved against Ukraine and occupied Crimea while Barack Obama was president, did nothing while Donald Trump was president, and launched the present invasion while Old Joe Biden was pretending to be president. And conquest? Look at the people streaming into the country across what is officially known as the Southern border. If they keep coming at the rate they came in 2021, Biden’s threat to transform America fundamentally will be a reality.

Joe Biden has not just unleashed the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. His entire political career as a serial liar of marginal (at best) competence, cheerfully savaging Clarence Thomas and others for political gain, parading his religiosity while going to war against actual religion, presents us once again with the age-old theological problem: why do the wicked prosper? Whatever the answer may be, Joe does prosper, and that means we don’t.

The entire premise driving Mordor On The Potomac could be put thusly: Here, the Wicked shall prosper, to the enormous cost of those they falsely purport to “serve.” So Uncle Gropey didn’t have to unleash the Four Horsemen; that was done long, long ago, a preexisting condition he merely inherited, that’s all. Which, naturally, would never stop him from claiming credit for it anyhow, as we already know.

Alternate reality update! For God’s sake, this man cannot remain in power.

Last week, Joe Biden made three serious gaffes, forcing the White House to “clarify” or walk back his statements. But when he was called out on them on Monday by Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy, he denied that any of his remarks were ever walked back.

“Are you worried that other leaders in the world are going to start to doubt that America is back if some of these big things that you say on the world stage keep getting walked back?” Doocy asked?

“What getting walked back?” Biden demanded, apparently seriously.

“It may sound like, just in the last couple days—it sounded like you told U.S. troops they were going Ukraine. It sounded like you said it was possible the U.S. would use a chemical weapon. And it sounded like you were calling for regime change in Russia and we know—”

“None of the three occurred,” Biden insisted.

“None of the three occurred?” Doocy asked, shocked.

“None of the three,” Biden insisted again. “You interpret the language that way.”

Wow. I mean, just…WOW. Just when I think this duplicitous clown can no longer surprise me with shit like this, the bar gets raised yet again, leaving me speechless with stupefaction and disbelief.

From my cold, dead hands,

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Keep talking, bitch. You just keep right on talking.

Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen Says Nothing Will Deter Biden Administration from Eliminating Fossil Fuels
s more people become aware of the Build Back Better agenda, or as some would say “The Great Reset,” and its direct connection to the dreams and aspirations of the climate change ideologues in the elitist class, it is worth paying attention when Yellen says nothing will deter the Biden administration from eliminating fossil fuels; and it is her role to make that objective financially possible.

Yellen emphasizes the Biden administration position about how the conflict in Ukraine and the sanctions against Russia are an example of why the global energy resources need to fundamentally change to renewable resources.  Her strength of advocacy, in alignment with the Davos/WEF position, is yet another data-point to highlight the predictable cleaving of the world economies into two distinctly differing groups of nations.

It doesn’t matter how economically painful it is to chase these energy policies, the elitists who operate western government are all-in on the same program.  The same western governments who used totalitarian emergency powers to destroy liberty and freedom under the guise of COVID-19 mitigation, are the same western governments now aligned to use the crisis in Ukraine to advance their energy ideology.

They’re almost there, actually, with sky-high gas prices inflicting slow-motion financial ruin on working-class American families—very soon now, on tens of millions of Americans. If our tormentors are not stopped, we’ll soon see entire industries wiped out by the Biden catastrophe. Next body-blow coming at us is a nascent food crisis: severe shortages; exorbitant prices for the little food available; irrepairable supply-chain snags and snarl-ups which will make things much, much worse, all culminating in something never seen in the US before: widespread hunger, famine, malnutrition and even death by starvation.

Although it’s no longer possible to avert this runaway man-caused disaster, it may not be too late to prevent it from getting even worse than it’s going to be. That, however, is going to mean rounds sent downrange in the direction of the criminals who caused this, from great distances off, followed by a rapid exfil when today’s target has been successfully neutralized. It’s going to mean laying low so as to evade capture until it’s time to begin planning, intel-gathering, and gearing up for the next mission. It’s going to mean a solid support network in your AO, noncombatants willing and able to provide you and your team with materiel, provisions, intel, maybe a secure hide for emergency E&E purposes should the need arise. It’s going to mean adapting yourself to a totally new way of thinking, of moving, of how you relate to others—a new way of life, in fact.

When and where Liberty’s Legion decides to go active and begin servicing targets will be for them to decide. Those of us who aren’t capable of functioning effectively as shooters will need to stand ready to fill other roles, of which there will be no shortage: medical, logistics, loading mags, staff, making coffee, etc etc. Anything we can do, we must do—ALL of the liberty-minded, no exceptions. Our freedom, our Constitution, and our way of life will require every last Real American to step up and do his part if our precious heritage is to be reclaimed. There will never be enough of us; I think it’s abundantly clear by now that we’re outnumbered, and badly. Contra Rush Limbaugh’s oft-stated contention, this is NOT a “majority conservative” nation anymore. I don’t think it’s been one since the mid-1960s.

But our minority status doesn’t mean we have no hope of defeating them. The Yellens, the Obamas, the Pelosis, the Comeys and Soroses, the whole filthy vermins’ nest of them—they can NOT be allowed to prevail. We know their intentions for us, and we know their Grand Plan means only suffering, deprivation, and injustice for us. They must be resisted; they must be fought; they must be eliminated, if that’s what it takes to lift their iron-shod jackboots from off our necks for good. All their works, their towers and edifices, their strongholds—ALL must be cast down to the earth alongside those who built them. We can afford no flinching, no quarter, no mercy. Our hearts must be hardened, our eyes wide open, our hand swift, sure, and steel-strong. They have a dark, cruel future planned for us. We must destroy them utterly, lest that future become cold, hard reality for us. We can beat them, outnumbered or not. We just have to go the right way about it, the smart way. We have to be firm as a bar of billet steel in our resolve; we have to be patient, we have to use every advantage, every edge, every tool available to us.

So yeah, Janet, you just bring it on. You and yours go ahead and do your damnedest to “eliminate” fossil fuels. Old-school greasemonkeys like myself and untold millions like me might have a little surprise waiting for you, concerning who and what might wind up “eliminated.” You want to come confiscate MY ICE lead sled from me and force me into one of your gay-ass little Shamebuggies, you better bring help.

Real Americans desperately need to face up squarely to the harsh realities of our situation, which is indeed a desperate one. First and foremost among those realities: We cannot vote our way around these people. They will never give up or give in. Whatever we offer them in exchange for just leaving us alone, they will take the offer now, then come back for another bite later. We know from long, bitter years of experience, that no bargain or agreement with them is worth a fart in a whirlwind. Knowing this, we simply cannot fail to do our duty, both to ourselves and our future generations. I am deadly, deadly serious about what I’m saying, people. We play now for the highest imaginable stakes. This one’s for all the marbles—winner take all, no prizes for second place.

Be it hereby resolved: no more lethargy, no more dissembling, no more evasion. This is war we’ve been dragged kicking and screaming into—real war, not figurative or rhetorical or pretend. REAL war, the kind with lots of blood and death and horror and mutilation in it. Kill them all, then, God will surely know his own. Kill them, and keep on killing them, until the survivors have grown so sick of killing they just wrefuse to do any more of it. Or, in the wise words of the great Curtis LeMay: You’ve got to kill people, and when you’ve killed enough they stop fighting.

If he pulls a knife, you pull a gun

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It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two, Master Warden, and those who have not swords can still die upon them.

Imagine if, following the disputed 2016 presidential election, the recently sworn-in President Donald Trump had sicced his Justice Department, hand-in-hand with allies in Congress and state governments throughout the country, after his Democratic political opponents who maintained that his election was the work of Russian interference.

Although the claim that Trump was a Russian asset was laughably false, and the subsequent investigation into those spurious claims damaged the federal government’s credibility in immense and perhaps irreparable ways domestically and internationally, applying criminal penalties to the promulgation of that theory would have been wrong, anti-American, and contrary to the First Amendment. In keeping with his stalwart defense of American values, President Trump made no directive to the Justice Department to pursue criminal charges against these Democrats.

Similarly, his Republican predecessor allowed Democrats to freely “challenge an election”: Democrats had previously contested the 2000 election by claiming that George W. Bush was “selected, not elected” as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore. A smaller minority contested Bush’s reelection in 2004, alleging irregularities in Ohio and elsewhere.

Reasonable concerns deserve a good-faith examination, not prosecution and persecution. But that is not what the sitting regime has offered when examining the 2020 election and its aftermath. Joe Biden’s goal (and that of his underlings) is to harass and silence politicians, journalists, dissidents, and political donors. Unfortunately, these tactics are working.

Pace the more delicate and effete among us, fluttering their hands in front of their faces, lapsing into a swooning collapse at the hideous gaucheness of the very idea, that should NOT to come as any big surprise. Why wouldn’t these bare-knuckle, objectionable, and bruising tactics be working, prithee tell? Fighting dirty usually does, especially when the dirty fighter sallies forth with ironclad confidence that his dainty opponent is far too self-righteous and smarmy to stoop to hurling everything he’s got, no holds barred, at his enemy. The dirty fighter knows his opponent never fights to win; he “fights” only to preen and strut, his superior morality on display for all to be awed by. When shitlibs do this, our soft-Right Fauntleroys sneer at it as “virtue signaling,” and recoil in disgust from it. But it’s a distinction without a difference, really. Now we come to the juicy part.

Despite the media’s insistence that the 2020 election was anything but corrupt, the voting systems in every jurisdiction of the United States are designed to render them incapable of being thoroughly reviewed by any independent third party. The system cannot be audited and requires putting blind faith in “experts” who build and run these systems.

Time and continuing analysis of circumstantial evidence have proven initial concerns and suspicions on the election results to be correct. An upcoming documentary, “2000 Mules,” produced by Dinesh D’Souza and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, presents concrete evidence of a coordinated nationwide campaign whereby ballot harvesters were paid to deliver ballots without any identification to drop-boxes funded by billionaires who run corporations staffed with left-wing ideologues. Mail-in ballot rules were ignored and disregarded under the pretense of COVID-19, which opened the 2020 election to an enormous amount of potential fraud.

Plenty bad enough, certainly. Yet even these, as well as the numerous other examples listed here are but a small part of the story. Bayou Peter hips us to an even more egregious example, and there’s more dirt out there to be dug.

The same lying media and their leftist ideologue elites who brought you the Russia collusion hoax and the Ukraine phone call hoax, who have been wrong about everything for at least two generations, now want to demonize the majority of independents and Republican voters as potential terrorists because they believe for good reason that there was systemic voter fraud in the 2020 election. Reasonable concerns and documented witnesses deserve a good-faith investigation and examination, not politically motivated prosecution and persecution. What we have experienced since 2020 is perhaps the most diabolical cover-up in American political history.

While the “Trump Won” movement undoubtedly has been overzealous and—in its patriotic exuberance—perhaps has run with information that has been less than credible at times,

Give me three examples, please. Hell, I’ll settle for two.

history will nevertheless remember them fondly. They were the individuals brave enough to stand up against the odds, defy the ubiquitous information warfare propaganda, and withstand ostracism from friends and family for refusing to let the truth be memory-holed.

Even though the 2020 presidential election was taken from the people, the stars are aligning for American patriots to avenge what happened in the midterm elections this year and then again in 2024.

Uh huh. Because, even though The Great Election Swindle of 2020 was a smashing success, why, those gosh darn Democrats wouldn’t DARE try any such thing again! They know we’d all rise up in righteous rage and…and…and think about maybe writing a strongly-worded letter of protest to our local liberal newspaper or something!! THAT’LL show those dirty dogs!!!

All that pointless foofaraw aside, I do enjoy seeing Trump staying all up in their face the way he has. His recent lawsuit is almost certainly doomed, but I just love that he’s filed it, and I hope he keeps it up. Of all the supposed “leaders” on the Right who say they’re sick and tired of being force-fed the Libtard shit sandwich and are good and ready to BY GOD DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT—right before folding like a cheap accordion the first time some rubber-room refugee in a dress publicly shouts “Transphobe! Hater! RACIST” at him—Trump’s the only guy I see out there who refuses to curl up into the usual defensive crouch, preferring instead to stay constantly on the offensive. As Grant said: he didn’t want his officers thinking about what Lee might do to them; he wanted them to concentrate exclusively on what they were going to do to Lee.

When all you’re doing is reacting to your enemy, you’re locking yourself into a position from which victory is impossible. Every military strategist knows that you have to make your adversary react to you. Trump appears to know that too; for the last five-six years, he’s put on the only political show worth watching. Trump is the only shit-talking, glove-throwing, naturally-obstreperous pug we have going for us, and you can’t help but love him for that.

What’s theirs is theirs. Also, what’s yours is theirs

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What I’d like to know is, how did goobermint get so all-fired high and mighty that it arrogates unto itself the authority to seize your car and destroy it, without your having done a damned thing wrong?

The thought of crushing a freshly restored 1959 Corvette is heartbreaking. Then, add in that the reason for doing so centers on the condition of two very specific rivets. Luckily for Richard Martinez, Kansas lawmakers have finally come through and passed a law that frees his beloved hardtop from the clutches of the impound lot.

Say, Richard, don’t you think it’s high time you seriously considered getting yourself a safe, economical, dependable electric car, hmmm? For your family, for the climate, for The Future™?

The center of this debate has been the VIN plate on Martinez’s Corvette. He bought the car in 2016, a beloved ride that got a full restoration some years ago and as part of the repainting process had the VIN plate removed. Upon presenting it for routine state inspection, the Kansas Highway Patrol seized the Corvette. Unknown to the Martinez, the car ran afoul of a Kansas law which stated any vehicle with a “destroyed, removed, altered, or defaced” VIN plate must be crushed. That’s a harsh reality for a historic car that wasn’t party to any nefarious intent. Early on, authorities declared Martinez innocent of any wrongdoing, but the car was still being targeted for destruction.

With the car sitting in an impound lot, a push developed revise the Kansas law, largely thanks to the non-profit Kansas Justice Institute. The revision that resulted from this advocacy (House Bill 2594) aims to exempt classic vehicles undergoing repair or restoration and would additionally exempt classic car owners who didn’t know or had no reason to believe their car was involved in a crime. This is a big step forward and removes a significant bit of hesitation from owners in Kansas who feared their vehicles might get them in legal hot water when they went to register it.

A “big step forward”? If so, it’s a step away from a dark, dismal place we never should have allowed ourselves to be led into in the first place. Hats off to those Kansas lawmakers for doing the right thing in the end; a big Bronx cheer for the Kansas lawmakers for the original “We Will We Will ROB YOU!” Act from whence all the hassle sprang. Question: who does Mr Marinez see to get those lost years of angst and anxiety back?

Push-button tyranny

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A new form of power evolves.

What happens when a government is no longer required to do the very difficult, friction-filled work of finding people, writing tickets, arresting them, charging them, granting them due process, obtaining convictions, and jailing the guilty? When the government can bring a person’s practical participation in society to a standstill with the push of a button, it becomes silly to even talk about individual rights or due process. In the face of this new kind of push-button power, exercised at the whim of the governing party with zero legal oversight, individuals can simply be deleted from the system—even if, technically speaking, they are never charged with or convicted of a crime.

In the case of government action, this is bad enough—but at least in the case of elected officials, the people will still have their say, and the government will be held accountable for abuses of power in the next round of elections, as Trudeau may have feared when he revoked the government’s emergency powers at the end of February.

A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.

Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.

This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.

It’s also nothing less than terrifying—the kind of paralyzing, free-floating terror that keeps one up into the wee small hours of the night, all a-tremble. The whole thing makes decoupling from society look a lot less like a somewhat-drastic lifestyle choice, and more like an absolute imperative.

The clamorous eagerness of transnational corporations—as demonstrated during the Scamdemic, Big Tech especially—to assist FederalGovCo in the enslavement and oppression of We the People en masse was a harbinger most grim, looking back on it. This ugly collaboration is a well-established hallmark of economic fascism, which can’t come as any surprise to anybody here. It never should have been allowed to happen, although I can’t see how it might have been prevented right offhand. We’re stuck with it now, and nothing good will come of that.

(Via Francis)

The future is FemiNazi

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And it ain’t pretty.

The long march through the institutions has been not only of the Left but also of women taking over key positions in the West’s governments, courts and public prosecutor’s offices, police and the military, media and entertainment, schools and universities – with long term results, I aver, that do not bode well for Western Civilization. The leap on the Left has been from the male-run orthodox Marxism to the female-driven, “compassionate” Cultural Marxism of “Social Justice.” Conservatives, as usual, just got played.
 
The American military has unveiled new pregnancy uniforms while the Chinese military has unveiled new exoskeleton uniforms that allow a soldier to carry more gear into combat. A few years ago, a composite photo composite below circulated on the Internet. It showed Europe’s five female Ministers of Defense versus the martial machos in charge of China’s and Russia’s militaries, the phalanx of bemedaled men-generals standing behind every successive ruler of North Korea or the ruling mullahs of Iran. And that picture of Yin-sickened West did not even include socialist Spain’s very pregnant Minister of Defense Carme Chacon in a billowing maternity dress, reviewing a lineup of erect soldiers.

Metrosexual Obama, stamped from the same mold that would soon disgorge Canada’s Justin Trudeau, delighted in placing the most unsuitable women in the most improbable and important positions. Consider “Team Obama”: Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power, Susan Rice, and Obama’s grey eminence Valerie Jarrett huddling at the UN General Assembly Hall. At least three of them were architects of the string of catastrophes that Obamerica’s support of the “Arab Spring” and betrayal of friendly tyrants Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt proved to be for their country, for the world, for tens of thousands of Arab dead, and for millions of Arab refugees.

Consider Obama’s declaration of contempt for reality and for his country by making of Janet Napolitano the U.S. Secretary of Homeland Security. Merkel-like, Napolitano was more concerned with “rightwing extremists” than with Muslim terrorists. She greatly “improved” homeland security by replacing references to acts of terrorism with the term “man-caused disasters” and sabotaging the enforcement of US immigration laws in any way she could. However, she worked toward the female future by passing over qualified men to place women in key security and immigration enforcement roles, including ICE chief of staff, Suzanne Barr who created a working environment “targeted to humiliate and intimidate male employees.”(3) That proved such a smashing success that Nancy Faeser, a Socialist who supports Antifa, is now the head of the Federal Police and Homeland Security of Germany and obsessed, of course, with “rightwing extremism.”

Is there NO modern disaster, failure, or crisis that the jug-eared, slope-shouldered specter of Obama doesn’tfloat phantasmagorically behind?

In June, 2019 Theresa May ended her pitiful time as Britain’s Prime Minister, having applied in a typically upside-down manner the mailed fist to Britons protesting the multiculti destruction of their country but the powder puff to disdainful Angela Merkel and the blackmailing EU in Brexit negotiations. May knew only one way against Britain’s enemies: surrender. Before she was forced by enraged Britons to resign, she had agreed to pay the EU a ransom of 39 billion pounds for the privilege of ending the UK’s vassalage to the Spinellian behemoth in Brussels. Her way of dealing with Muslim terrorism was to wear the hijab as often as a photo-op availed and to avoid dealing with Muslim terrorism or even naming it as such. (5)

All too many dismaying examples follow, leading to a depressing denouement.

America’s and Europe’s top levels in politics and governance are filled with highly educated women who seemingly cannot think and have no idea what human reality is—though it’s as elementary as Newton’s laws of motion applied to human affairs. They are zealously fanatic in their quest to remake the world according to their impulses of estrogenic social justice. They are also aggressively totalitarian and respond to criticism with hysterical hyperbole.

The European Union’s and all of Western Europe’s rule by Cultural Marxist women and their properly tamed and trained male subordinates is virtually sewn up. Barring violent upheavals by man or nature, America’s is locked in similarly, though the Trump bump obscured it for a while. The consequences can be projected too.

Quite a bleak projection it is, too. Here’s the most crucial, telling bit:

Eighty-nine percent of teachers in US public primary schools and 64% in secondary education are female. (29) 50% of college and university faculty are female (30) and it’s much more than that in the chief brainwash disciplines like psychology, English literature, gender studies, feminist studies, and all other Critical Theory areas. 82.8% of Social Work PhD students are female (31). 71% of psychology PhDs are women (32). It’s 61.3% in Social and Behavioral “Sciences” in general, 67.8% in Education, and 76.2% – God help us – in Public Administration. (32) To understand what a Doctor of Public Administration is let’s visit the web page of one such program, at Walden University: “Drive positive social change with a top-level degree,” “Learn to better serve diverse populations” (33) – you see where this is going.

America’s teachers’ unions: National Education Teachers’ Association (NEA) and American Federation of Teachers (AFT), filled with women, are perhaps the most powerful far-Left political force in the country; their members are directly responsible for training the last two generations of woke Zombies who are destroying the United States.

These are the places where our battle will be won or lost. I’ve been pounding my shoe on the tabletop and yelling about this very thing for many years now. Something else I’ve ruefully maintained along with it: Antonio Gramsci was a fucking GENIUS. If you don’t know who he is, educate thyself, young ‘un. There’s simply no way to fully understand Amerika v2.0 unless you understand himfirst.

(Via WRSA)

Give it to me straight, Doc

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Schlichter runs down the problems that afflict us, not one punch pulled.

There’s this thing called multitasking and we GOP voters expect the Republicans to try it out. Democrats? Nah, because we expect nothing from Democrats. But the Dems are good at multi-tasking. Even as they pretend to be butch about Ukraine – such fakery is rivaled only by the bride’s performance on a Bulwark staffer’s wedding night – they simultaneously embrace such initiatives as schoolhouse kiddie grooming and women’s sports champions who are dudes. They can focus on more than just Ukraine. Of course, we actually expect nothing from Republicans either, but at least with them we normals have a chance to influence their behavior, even if only by threatening them with a primary by someone based who will drag them back to America from their DC estates and make them campaign amongst the unwashed.

There are a lot of miserable things going on here at home in addition to the Disney-approved kindergarten perversion propaganda and girl athletes who are boys crises. We have an elite treating the idea of free speech like Bill Clinton treated his wedding vows, gas prices higher than Cheech & Chong hanging at Seth Rogan’s place, and a border that is open wider than Ana Navarro’s pie-hole at Golden Corral’s Endless Fountain of Ham. We have a potential Supreme Court justice who thinks kiddie porn pervs should get a slap on the wrist and an election system that is a slap in the face to democracy. Burger is $7 a pound and Jussie Smollett is free – and don’t be surprised if his double jeopardy argument works on appeal! 

Yeah, there are a lot of bad things going on here in the US of A thanks to that desiccated old pervert in the White House, but we’re not hearing enough about them from Republican poobahs. We are hearing a lot about Ukraine though. It’s an important issue, but we’re approaching a month of war and the tough Ukes have not given in yet. The nimrods pulling Biden’s puppet strings are still slow-walking the delivery of anti-tank missiles, which is bad. Reports say that they are refusing to give over real-time intel to the Ukrainians, lest the plucky defenders use it to target Russian units, which would seem to be the point. The MiG thing is still a thing, though it’s kind of useless in the sense that a couple of dozen Bad News Bears jets from the 80s are essentially irrelevant. So yeah, there’s stuff to be upset about regarding Ukraine. Biden’s as good a commander-in-chief as he is a father, and we need to be all over him so our military doesn’t continue to figuratively impregnate strippers even as our State Department, more or less figuratively, does blow off a foreign hooker’s fourth point of contact.

But Ukraine’s not the only thing going on. Republicans, you need to talk about other things, like the things I listed above. Not all the time, but a lot of the time. Because, here’s the thing. Our voters generally like the Ukrainians and admire such things as their toughness, patriotism, and their innovative program of handing assault rifles out to citizens. But we are getting beaten to a pulp here at home. Every Third Worlder with a bindle and a dream is hiking to the border. Hobos litter our streets with used hobo dinners. Criminals run rampant, and it just cost me 100 bucks to fill up my sedan. Look, we care about Ukraine in the sense that we wish bad things were not happening on the other side of the globe, and many of us are willing to kick in the bucks to buy some rockets to pop the top on a battalion of uninvited T-80s. But Republican congress-creatures, we’re hurting, and we keep seeing many of the biggest names in DC on TV talking about sending our kids to fight the Ukrainian’s war by prattling on about “no-fly” zones as if that is somehow merely putting Putin in time-out and not the first shot in a hot war with a crazy/stupid/evil guy with more hot rocks than Kamala has shady ex-boyfriends.

Schlichter is a skilled enough writer to wring some laughter from a buttload of painful, depressing topics. But in the end, he’s got it right: a country as fucked up and out of order as this one has become should leave off all meddling in the affairs of other nations straightaway, to concentrate exclusively on getting its own shit straightened out. Every American, be he elected official, bureau-rat, or ordinary citizen needs to admit to himself that this country is not in any condition to carry on acting as World Policeman. Actually, standing astride the Earth like some God-like colossus, throwing our weight around and lording it over the entire world, was probably a mistake to begin with. Certainly the Founders strongly and unequivocally advised against it, and their advice was always worth heeding.

The US is a decaying, dysfunctional husk in desperate need of restoration and repair; we should withdraw our nose from the business of others and get to it. Let Ukraine, Europe, and all the others deal with their own problems. We have too many of our own to be elbowing in on theirs, no matter how hard certain misguided people here push exactly that, no matter how many other nations insist we do it. We have enemies aplenty within our own borders, enough and to spare; there’s no need to go looking in faraway places for them, and precious little support—outside the salons of the self-styled “elite,” natch—for going around doing it.

The road to serfdom

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We’re well along on it, very nearly to its terminus at the junction of Tyranny Circle, Despot Street, and Banana Republic Way.

On Jan. 6, 2021, a protestor, 40-year-old Brady Knowlton, says that an officer at the Capitol told “You can go in, as long as you don’t break anything.” At 2:35 p.m., Knowlton did, entering through the Upper West Terrace doors. He looked around inside the building, walked through the Rotunda, lobby, and Senate chamber gallery, obeyed the officer’s injunction not to break anything, and left the building at 2:53 p.m. For that, Knowlton now faces twenty years in prison in Old Joe Biden’s vengeful banana republic.

On top of the possibility of being behind bars until 2042, Knowlton, a law student, has suffered numerous other consequences already. According to the Daily Wire, “his law degree has been withheld, his lawyers say, Airbnb has banned him and his wife, and, for reasons that remain undisclosed, the U.S. Customs and Border Protection has stripped his Global Entry access.”

Unbelievable, disgusting, infuriating, intolerable—these and so many more adjectives and epithets come instantly to mind. I’m just gonna give my FBI/DHS/DEA/USSS readers a heads up before I come right out and say it: These people MUST be stopped. They must be stripped of all power, driven from office, and dealt with harshly. If it comes to killing, and it’s going to…well, best be getting on with it then, before these monstrous thugs wantonly destroy many more lives based entirely on moonshine, propaganda, and lies. We The People must see to it that every last one of them is persecuted in measure at the very least commensurate to, preferably surpassing, the petty abuse they’ve dealt out themselves—measure for measure and drop for drop.

The self-defeating folly which speaks of “taking the high road” and “that’s not who we are,” that recoils in dread and horror of “beoming like them,” must be abandoned. This is no chess match, no sporting contest between respectful and gentlemanly combatants. It isn’t a mannerly, highminded way to resolve our dispute, because there ISN’T one; our dispute cannot be resolved. What this is is a vulgar brawl—no holds barred, no referee, no pretentions to an impossible politesse. No tapping out of this one, no clean, civilized capitulation. Only total submission, in a dirty, eye-gouging, ear-biting melee which only ends when one combatant lies bleeding, unconscious, or dead in the gutter.

According to the charges filed against him in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, Knowlton “did unlawfully and knowingly enter and remain in a restricted building and grounds.” He also “did knowingly, and with intent to impede and disrupt the orderly conduct of Government business and official functions, engage in disorderly and disruptive conduct in and within such proximity to, a restricted building and grounds, that is, any posted, cordoned-off, and otherwise restricted area within the United States Capitol and its grounds, where the Vice President and Vice President-elect were temporarily visiting.” He “willfully and knowingly engaged in disorderly and disruptive conduct within the United States Capitol Grounds.

Y’know, exactly as their like-minded ancestors did back in 1775-6, the obstreperous brutes. The similarities between THEIR terrorists, insurrectionists, and lawless brigands and OURS are striking.

In short, America was a huge underground economy. Here trade was free and enterprise unrestricted. Taxes were so often evaded that for all practical purposes there were none; a person could keep everything he earned. He could save, and invest, and eventually have his own thriving business or farm that would provide jobs for the next wave of immigrants.

Inhabited by rebellious, individualistic smugglers and tax evaders, America quickly became the most prosperous place on earth.

You may have seen pictures of the Pine Tree Flag flown by American warships during the Revolution. Why would the colonists put a pine tree on their battle flag?

The (British) government had enacted a regulation saying no colonist could cut down tall, straight trees; these trees were to be reserved for masts on Navy ships. This meant the best, most valuable trees on a person’s land had, in effect, been confiscated by the government.

When a government tree inspector would come through the forest to select and mark the best trees, colonists would follow him. These inspectors were highly trained experts, good at identifying the best trees for Navy ships – the Navy ships that were constantly pursuing smuggling ships.

When the government’s lumberjacks then came through the forest to collect the marked trees, they would find the trees had already been cut and sold – for use on the smuggling ships.

One of these ships was THE LIBERTY, owned by John Hancock. Hancock was a successful wine merchant known throughout the colonies as “The Prince of Smugglers.”  His reputation eventually earned him the honor of being the first to sign the Declaration of Independence.

Unfortunately, as the story of the Pine Tree illustrates, America did not remain beyond the reach of government. As the colonists’ wealth increased, politicians began making more and more efforts to steal – “tax” – this wealth.  More and more bureaucrats and troops were sent to the colonies to enforce laws and shut down down the underground economy.

The colonists’ reaction was dramatic. The infamous Stamp Tax, for instance, was greeted by armed rebellion; tax collectors were tarred and feathered, a procedure which usually resulted in death. When John Hancock was arrested, the people rioted and the government’s agents barely escaped with their lives.

As I’m sure you all know, these examples are only the tip of a very large iceberg of criminality and treason. Read all of this one; the discussion which follows—of Jonathan Mayhew’s 1750 “Higher Law” sermon, which would become the intellectual lynchpin of the American Revolution—is well worth the price of admission itself. Now back to our own lawless brigands.

If Knowlton’s contention that a police officer said he could go in is true, it vitiates all these charges, and Knowlton’s claim is certainly corroborated by photographic and video evidence of cops at the Capitol opening gates, holding the doors open for protestors, and reports that police even posed for selfies with protestors.

Oh, it does far more than vitiate them; it refutes them utterly, revealing for all to see contra-Constitutional of the illegitimacy of the US Superstate. Also, when the FBI raided Knowlton’s home, they found no evidence whatsoever “concerning the breach and unlawful entry” of the Capitol, or “of any conspiracy, planning, or preparation,” or “maps or diagrams” of the Capitol, or of any “materials, devices, or tools” that Knowlton might have planned to use to get inside.

So why is the government pursuing Knowlton with such ferocity?

Because the Ruling Class of any dictatorship simply cannot afford to let dissent and protest flourish unmolested; it must be ruthlessly crushed without delay, lest it become widespread enough to eventually be a credible threat to them. Increasing (and increasingly strident) political dissent, then a Resistance movement to the tyrannous government, resulting in the immediate, excessive response from the tyrants, are markers indicating progress along History’s path. Team Liberty today is farther along that path than it may think, but definitely not nearly as far as we probably should be.

The most bitter irony of our time is two-fold: first, the ugly spectacle of government officials making a show of solemnly swearing an oath they have no intention of honoring, to protect and defend a Constitution they have no affection for or allegiance to. Second, the irksome annual midsummer orgy of seal-like barking, peacock-like strutting, and self-congratulatory “celebration of Muh Freedumbs!” by the same clueless ignorami who mindlessly assist in the forging of the very chains that bind and subdue them—chains whose loud clanking they mulishly refuse to hear.

Imagine a country that imprisons peaceful protestors on false charges of participating in an attempt to overthrow the government, as part of efforts to discredit and ultimately criminalize all opposition to the ruling party’s agenda.

Don’t need to “imagine,” Robert; we’re living in one. Amerika v2.0 today evinces nearly every telltale characteristic and/or condition that, taken altogether, explicitly define the word tyranny. There are but a steadily-dwindling few of those boxes left to be ticked off. As far as we know, I mean.

People who entered a public building when police held the door open for them are being held in solitary confinement and given draconian punishments far out of proportion to what they actually did. This is the sort of thing that happens in Third World countries, right? This is the sort of thing tinpot dictators do in banana republics, where the rulers gained power by underhanded means and have no respect for due process, the rule of law, or the rights of their citizens — right?

Well, yes, of course it is. It all has an extremely familiar ring to it, like the chorus of an old favorite song you haven’t heard in years and whose lyrics you can’t quite retrieve from the mists of memory, as well it should.

In America, we no longer have a single justice system for all people, regardless of race, or of power, or privilege, or the protected victimhood status they may have among the Leftist intelligentsia. We no longer have a justice system that is indifferent to and independent of political pressure. The politically and culturally dominant Left is not content with the massive power and influence it wields now; it is determined to silence all opposition and destroy it utterly.

And they’re very near now to successful realization of ALL their ambition, in full. Which is why the people must very soon rise up to bring them down utterly, using any and all means. We long ago failed to acknowledge the deadly threat they represent; for a long age, we averted our gaze as the cancer metastasized, undermined, and doubled and redoubled its deadly power. Now, thanks to our own sloth and self-deception, instead of swatting a mosquito in order to remove a mere nuisance, we must destroy an overgrown, hulking monster—a fearful Juggernaut whose strength and capabilities have waxed to the full, while our own have waned.

If this be treason, make the most of it. And may God grant that we prove able to live up to our forebears’ example.

System of spoilage

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How to drain a Swamp.

Virtually all Americans believed, until the inauguration of Donald Trump as president on January 20, 2017, that when someone became president, he could begin to implement his agenda. Certainly Old Joe Biden’s handlers have done so with a vengeance since they took over; but when Trump became president, he immediately began to encounter resistance from entrenched members of the government bureaucracy who refused to do as he ordered. Some worked actively against Trump, while the establishment media assured us that these self-appointed “deep state” saboteurs were the courageous guardians of “our democracy.” At his South Carolina rally Saturday night, Trump continued to tease a 2024 run and made a new promise about how he would break the power of the unelected “deep state.”

“We will pass critical reforms,” Trump said, “making every executive branch employee fireable by the president of the United States. The deep state must and will be brought to heel.”

It’s a commonsensical solution, as Ohio Senate candidate J.D. Vance pointed out. “Everyone is losing their mind about this, but I’ve been calling for it at every town hall I do. Either the president controls the executive branch or he doesn’t. If he doesn’t, we don’t live in a Republic, we live in a civil service driven oligarchy.”

Ummm, hate to be the one to have to tell ya and all, JD, but…

Quite so. And although the “deep state” only came to the attention of most Americans over the last few years, the controversy over the hiring and firing of civil service employees is one of the oldest controversies of the republic. As Rating America’s Presidents explains, Andrew Jackson was elected president in 1828 on promises to end the hegemony of a privileged aristocracy, and, to drain that swamp, he would need his own men in key positions. He removed a large number of civil service employees and replaced them with men of his own faction, which came to be known as the Democracy, or Democratic Party. This came to be known as the spoils system, after the old adage “To the victor belong the spoils.”

The spoils system essentially died with the assassination of President James A. Garfield in 1881. Garfield believed that the spoils system was an unending source of government corruption and pushed for measures that would end it, only to be shot by a man who publicly proclaimed that he was doing so because he belonged to the faction of the Republican party, the Stalwarts, that supported the spoils system. Garfield’s successor, Chester Arthur, was a Stalwart, but he demonstrated immense personal courage and honor in choosing to carry out the wishes of his slain predecessor rather than implement his own contrary agenda. His decision to do this effectively ended his political career, as he almost certainly knew it would, and yet he stood firm.

Can anyone even imagine a modern ProPol sacrificing his almighty DC sinecure solely on principle? Oh HELL no. America was indeed a very different country then, and Americans were very different people.

The proponents of civil service reform never envisioned a situation in which unelected and unaccountable opponents of a sitting president in the FBI, the Justice Department, and elsewhere would be determined to destroy the president — or at the very least make it impossible for him to carry out his policies — and could not be removed from their jobs because of civil service regulations.

Wouldn’t government work more smoothly, and the executive branch be able to operate more effectively in the way the Founding Fathers envisioned it would, if the president were able to clear out the employees of these agencies who opposed him and replace them with people more in line with his vision?

The spoils system has no defenders today, and has had none for over a century. It should have more. Trump is on the right track.

Perhaps, perhaps. However, that Swamp creatures were willing to do murder to preserve their spoils-system perks and privileges all thE way back in 1881 probably tells you all you need to know about just how likely Trump’s proposal really is to ever see the light of day today. There’s no indication that Swamp critters have moderated their determination to defend their prized Ruling Class status, not that I’ve ever seen. Anybody truly serious about ending the spoils system of legalized graft and corruption had best be prepared to commit violence in the attempt; it’s a lead-pipe cinch they’ll have plenty of it visited upon them by those who hope to thwart any meaningful reform.

Corn for food, not for fuel

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An idea whose time has come, gone, and circled all the way back ’round again.

Typically, when supply disruptions roil markets, political leaders can’t do much about it. But in the coming food crisis, the U.S. actually has a powerful policy lever. With a single bold move, the Biden administration could free up food supplies while also reversing a policy blunder that hurts consumers, increases greenhouse-gas emissions, and damages ecosystems across the U.S. It would require some political courage, but Biden could move to suspend—and push ultimately to repeal—the Renewable Fuel Standard.

nacted as part of the Energy Policy Act of 2005, the RFS program was meant to increase U.S. fuel supplies and promote green-energy innovation by requiring that transportation fuel, heating oil, and jet fuel contain growing portions of renewable biofuels. In 2007, Congress expanded the program and set even more ambitious targets.

But problems emerged from the start. For one, the program is mind-bendingly complex, delineating four types of biofuels, setting annual targets for each, and awarding refiners various credits for meeting their “Renewable Volume Obligation.” The EPA has the authority to change or waive these rules at whim, making the program “unpredictable and arbitrary,” writes Competitive Enterprise Institute senior fellow Mario Loyola in The Atlantic. According to one estimate, RFS “compliance alone is adding about 14 cents to refiners’ cost per gallon of gasoline and diesel.”

Though mostly invisible to the public, the RFS program affects the lives and pocketbooks of all U.S. consumers and has remade the face of American agriculture. Today, roughly one-third of U.S. soybean oil production is used to make biofuels. Corn-based ethanol has an even bigger footprint. Virtually every gallon of gasoline sold in this country contains 10 percent ethanol, the maximum allowed by law. (A small number of gas stations also sell E85, an 85 percent ethanol blend that can only be used in specially designed engines.) Growing the corn to make all that ethanol requires a staggering 38 million acres, an area larger than the state of Illinois. If used to grow food for human consumption, Loyola writes, that acreage could feed 150 million people.

By diverting about 40 percent of the U.S. corn crop to ethanol production, the RFS program drives up food prices across the board. Since corn is a critical livestock feed, higher corn prices have inflated meat prices. The cost of ground beef has climbed almost 100 percent since the program began. Wheat and rice prices have also gone up as many farmers shifted to growing corn instead. As Loyola concludes, “The ethanol program functions as a hidden food tax—the most regressive of all taxes.” Those effects are felt not just in the U.S., but around the world.

So, just your typical Big Government dumpster fire, then— unforeseen consequences strewn extravagantly across the landscape; costs far outstripping any meager benefits; the whole disastrous burden plopped squarely onto the usual shoulders: those of the Normie schlubs who will be required to pay for it all, of course and as always.

Get the sugar out of our gas tanks and back onto the dinner table where it belongs, I say. Just think of the engine damage that will be averted by ditching this piss-water fuel, if nothing else. As for those costs I mentioned, well…

Given all those costs, one would assume the RFS program must have some powerful benefits that justify its continued existence. But recent research shows the mandates don’t even achieve the two things they were meant to accomplish: reducing fossil-fuel use and cutting greenhouse-gas emissions. If anything, it worsens these problems. Planting, fertilizing, and harvesting corn and then processing it into ethanol requires lots of energy. Researchers debate whether the resulting gallon of ethanol contains a bit more energy than went into it or a bit less, but the balance appears to be a wash at best. Rather than replacing fossil fuels, then, the RFS program simply converts those fuels into a more expensive form. Corn ethanol also backfires when it comes to reducing emissions. According to the new DOE study, “the carbon intensity of corn ethanol produced under the RFS is no less than gasoline and likely at least 24 percent higher.”

I repeat: your typical, Mark 1 Mod 0 Big Goobermint boondoggle. No less, no more.

Whatever the political challenges, reforming the RFS program is the right thing to do.

Damned skippy it is…which is another reason why it ain’t happening.

“RFS is a misuse of hyper-productive American agricultural land,” Smith says. “Food inflation domestically and the potential for food shortages in other countries should make it obvious that agricultural lands should be used to produce food.” This would be a good time for President Biden and his team to remember that Obama-era mantra: never let a crisis go to waste.

Okay, you’re just being silly now. Biden’s minders are perfectly happy to keep the ethanol, and for them, what’s not to like about it? It damages internal combustion engines both large and small; its various detriments subtly discourage automobile ownership and use; it helps keep the price of gasoline artificially inflated; and it serves as a properly-bended knee to demonstrate a becoming fealty to the Enviro-nuts, who are much too useful to risk giving offense to. Somewhat related:

The average price of one gallon of regular gasoline in the United States rose by a dollar, to $3.31, during Joe Biden’s first year in the White House. Now, supercharged by war in Ukraine, the price has soared to $4.27 per gallon. That average, though, is misleading. The actual price of gas at the pump varies widely by state, with nearly a $2-per-gallon difference between the costliest and the least expensive states. While some of those differences have to do with geographic factors that affect distribution costs, state policies—including taxes and regulations—also play a significant role in the vastly different burden consumers face around the country.

The highest gas prices are found disproportionately in high-tax, heavily regulated Democratic states, while the lowest gas prices show up in so-called red or purple states. California leads the way at a whopping $5.78 per gallon, followed by Nevada, Washington, Oregon, Arizona, Illinois, Connecticut, and New York among the lower 48 states (Hawaiian and Alaskan geography make any comparisons with the rest of the country difficult). At the bottom sits Kansas, at $3.81 per gallon, followed by Missouri, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, and Iowa.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of assholes.

The price of a barrel of oil accounts for about 56 percent of the cost of this gas. Taxes on average compose about 15 percent of the price, and distribution and marketing costs amount to the rest. State gas taxes are an obvious culprit, but extraordinary fuel standards beyond the national level force up prices, too—as do regulatory constraints on building pipelines and refineries, which inflate distribution costs.

There are several ways we might think of all this:

  • Just deserts
  • Getting what you voted for—good and hard
  • Reaping what you’ve sown
  • What goes around, comes around
  • Hoist on your own (enviro-nut) petard

Now isn’t that FUN? Feel free to post your own in the comments. Don’t be shy, you’ll enjoy it. Meanwhile, who’s really behind this latest spurt of fuel-ish frenzy, anyway? Take a wild guess.

President Joe Biden and prominent Democrats blame Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, alleged oil-company collusion and even COVID-19 for today’s sky-high gas prices. They refuse to take responsibility for this monumental mess of their own design.

Revealing either an Olympic-grade lack of self-awareness or a perjury-strength talent for lying, President Biden said: “It’s simply not true that my administration or policies are holding back domestic energy production.”

While running for president, Biden repeatedly promised to do exactly this.

“I guarantee you,” Biden told New Hampshire voters on Sept. 16, 2019. “We’re going to end fossil fuels.”

Follows, a long timeline of shitlib quotes vowing to kill off the fossil fuel industry, each item with the price per gallon at the time it was excreted parenthetically appended at the end. It’s a handy, helpful reminder that can be printed out and waved under their noses whenever they start in lying about it again.

Broke, scraggly, and hongry

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The price of going Green is multifarious, untethered to any kind of reality, and utterly ruinous.

The issue is that farmland without fertilizer is vastly less productive. Without fertilizer, corn and wheat yields in the United States would decline by more than 40%. But as prices promise to go much higher, farmers will either have to skimp on fertilizer or raise prices of their own products a lot.

Then, too, there are skyrocketing prices for gasoline and diesel, which are essential for today’s mechanized farming and for getting food to consumers. Add these increases in cost and decreases in production to the shortages likely to come from the Ukraine invasion, and we’re looking at really dramatic increases in food prices. In the West this will mean discomfort. Elsewhere it will mean starvation. Bureaucrats aren’t helping.

Some people want to put more land under cultivation. Scottish farmers and planners have asked the government to allow farmland programmed for “rewilding” to be put back into production in response to anticipated food shortages. But that’s too sensible for our green elites. Scotland’s Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity Lorna Slater — yes, that’s her full title — has flatly refused. According to Slater, “We are still in a nature emergency that hasn’t gone away…so it’s a no.”

Nature emergencies outrank human emergencies in the green world, so that’s not a surprise. Voters may feel differently as prices skyrocket.The island nation of Sri Lanka offers a stark warning. A green experiment in abandoning artificial fertilizer there — encouraged by the Rockefeller Foundation — was a “brutal and swift” economic and humanitarian disaster, Foreign Policy reports.

“Against claims that organic methods can produce comparable yields to conventional farming, domestic rice production fell 20 percent in just the first six months. Sri Lanka, long self-sufficient in rice production, has been forced to import $450 million worth of rice even as domestic prices for this staple of the national diet surged by around 50 percent. The ban also devastated the nation’s tea crop, its primary export and source of foreign exchange.”

FP continues: “Human costs have been even greater. Prior to the pandemic’s outbreak, the country had proudly achieved upper-middle-income status. Today, half a million people have sunk back into poverty.”

Sri Lanka’s policy, which FP describes as a “farrago of magical thinking, technocratic hubris, ideological delusion, self-dealing and sheer shortsightedness,” imposed enormous human damage on the nation. But don’t worry — the government and NGO officials behind it won’t miss any meals. Consequences are for the little people.

With the triple-barreled threat of inflation, soaring fuel prices and shrunken food supplies, the world faces something like the same fate, and once again those responsible are unlikely to pay the price. (But maybe some will. After all, food shortages led to the Arab Spring riots and the overturning of governments.)

Regardless, the world’s policymakers need to take a less casual approach to the well-being of the world’s population. That very much includes those in the Biden administration. Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack’s response to concerns about fertilizer and food shortages: “Maybe sacrifices are necessary.” You can rest assured Vilsack won’t be the one making them.

And that right there is PRECISELY what must be changed. Right across the board we see that politicians and bureaucrats have stood the natural order of things right on its head; a proper balance must be restored , forcefully and without further delay.

Update! Divemedic unearths more enviro-folly.

The Federal government has rescinded the license extension of the Turkey Point nuclear power plant, located near Miami. The stated reason is that global climate change will cause sea levels to rise, and the plant’s environmental impact statement didn’t take that into account.

So instead, we will continue to rely upon coal plants. There is no way that wind and solar can make up for the loss of this plant. That plant produces 12 gigawatt hours of electric power per year.

In comparison, every solar panel in the state of Florida produces 7.5 gigawatt hours each year, combined.

The aforementioned price isn’t paid in dollars and cents alone, not by a long yard. But no matter the currency, human misery and deprivation is always what we’re buying.

TruckerDoom followup

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So in phone consultation with BCE earlier, he mentioned that Bayou Pete had taken notice of one of my earlier posts wherein I quoted my brother’s dire warning that, if diesel prices rise much more (which, they’re gonna), thousands of drivers will be giving up and getting out of the business. Here’s a portion of Pete’s lament:

What does that mean in raw figures?

  • Owner-Operators primarily operate Class 8 Trucks (33,001 pounds and greater). There were approximately 2.9 million registered combination trucks (tractor-trailers) in 2018.
  • There are approximately 350,000 owner operators driving in the United States today…Owner Operators make up 9% of the truckers on the road today.
  • Nearly 1.5 million people work for the 124,320 employer businesses in this industry, and another 587,000 are self-employed, or “nonemployers” … These nonemployers (assuming one person per business) make up nearly 29% of the workers in the industry.

So, if independent owner-operators have to park their trucks because they can’t recover their fuel costs from their customers, we’re talking about a 10% reduction in the number of trucks available to haul freight – this on top of an existing supply chain crunch that’s got every truck running as hard as it can, all day, every day, just to try to keep pace. We’re also talking about a quarter to a third of those involved in the trucking industry being out of work.

Our supply chain simply can’t handle such losses. It’ll be crippled.

Yep, t’will…along with just about everything else. Remember the trucker’s mantra: If you have it, a truck brought it. Sorry to say, but today my brother had more bad tidings. His current rig, a Freightliner Classic XL with rebuilt engine and tranny, a new clutch, and some other goodies, to include oversize 150 gallon fuel tanks (those big chrome drums you can see on most all trucks under the doors on eah side, unless they’re hidden behind some plastic covers). This afternoon on the way back from Charleston it cost him nearly 700 smackers to fill just halfway up.

As of about a half hour ago, Little Bro hasn’t decided whether he’s gonna work tomorrow yet.

Be sure to click through to catch Peter’s closing ‘graphs. It’s just as he says: all these things—trucker shortages, bare store shelves, absurdly high fuel costs, systemic Bidenflation—have a common root cause, which can be found in Mordor On The Potomac.

Blowback for Brandon

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Hey, if the shoe fits…which, y’know, it does.

BREAKING: Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers BLAST Joe Biden for LYING about American oil production

Laid-off Keystone XL pipeline workers had choice words for President Joe Biden in a Fox News segment Saturday. Focusing on soaring gas prices across America, the segment included interviews with a group of laid-off workers.

“We should be able to sustain ourselves and not depend on other nations raising their price and then affect us. That shouldn’t even be in the question,” one worker told Fox News.

The Fox News reporter then asked: “If we want to get the price of gas down right now, we want to drop the price of gas, what do we need to do right now?”

“Put us to work right now. And you will see not only the fuel prices go down, but you will see the price of everything else go down with it,” the worker replied.

Workers then turned attention to Biden. “He’s pushing for solar and wind power, but it’s been proven over and over, that’s just not as efficient as burning natural gas, refining crude.” Another worked continued, saying: “We are sick of hearing, ‘This is Putin’s price hike.'”

Plenty more where that came from—every word a gem, every word the plain and simple 24-karat truth, the most salient insight helpfully emphasized above by moi. Brandon and his co-conspirators should be made to own their intentional sabotage of American energy independence, though. After all, it’s not as if they haven’t lectured, hectored, and pimped their silly, emasculated electric toy “cars”—along with the whole kit and kaboodle of their obsolete and unworkable “sustainable energy” folderol—long enough for everyone to know their true colors by now: Green, and Red.

It’s not as if they don’t realize the damage their lunatic jihad against fossil fuels—the most efficient, reliable, easily-gleaned and -managed energy source there is as of right this minute, the only one even remotely capable of powering a robust industrial economy—has and will do to the US, its economy, and ordinary Americans, mind. They know full well. It’s just that they don’t give a flying fuck at a plate-glass window about it, that’s all. At this point, they appear to have lost all patience, abandoned the gauzy illusion of logical persuasion and fair debate, and have moved on to openly waging economic war against the legitimate interests of the nation and her people—a most cruel and abominable war indeed.

Alas, but this is who they are. This iswhat they do. For the Left, the Almighty Agenda—raw, untrammeled power and control—always and forever comes first, overriding all other concerns. T’was ever thus, or nearly so. The last honest, honorable, and sincerely patriotic Democrat expired along with JFK or thereabouts, leaving us with the bizarre degenerates we’re saddled with at present. The modern bumper crop of amoral, hedonistic Democrats are an affliction, a cancer, one that must be excised completely, by whatever means necessary, if the body politic is ever to be restored to some semblance of health. Mike Walsh knows the score…mostly.

A specter is haunting America—the specter of the Democrat Party. Like an evil spirit that cannot be exorcised, the Democrats have been plaguing the United States since Aaron Burr shot and killed Alexander Hamilton in 1804. Ferociously pro-slavery, the Democrats divided the country practically from its inception, blocked the path to abolition and eventually took up arms against the nation after the election of the first Republican president, firing on Fort Sumter and seceding en masse from the Union. And, a week after they had lost that war, one of them assassinated Abraham Lincoln, elevating a Democrat from a Confederate state to the presidency, and plunging the country into more needless turmoil.

With a track record like this it’s a wonder the party is even still legal.

It really shouldn’t oughta be, and I mean that with every fibre of my being, literally and sincerely. No nation-state with the least regard for its own legitimacy is in any way obligated to tolerate the existence of a powerful political party flatly sworn to undermine, weaken, and injure said nation-state, even as it is diligently beavering away at that self-same project. As for the tyrannies, look to history to provide numerous examples of just how forgiving a dictator and/or ruling cabal usually is when it comes to clutching national parties fomenting unrest and insurrection fondly to its bosom, allowing them to carry on unmolested.

Hell, in those places you’re liable to the get the chop merely for walking around in public view with the smallest, most respectful and innocuous protest sign conceivable hoisted over your shoulder. Anything more radical than the most obsequious and Milquetoast-ian dissent, and the State’s bullyboys will fall on your doomed head like a crap-ton of sizeable rocks. Won’t be no dragging of the feet about the matter, either. The absolute least such an igner’nt fool can anticipate is to wake up next morning chained to a wall of a damp, noisome cell enjoying a ferocious headache; a seriously split lip; a whole passel of fresh new aches, pains, and deep-purple bruising scattered about his body; and little to no memory of how he got himself into this sorry state.

Make no mistake: rhe more strident you wax in your political agitation, the worse things are going to get for you. Count on it. Far better to just keep your lip zipped; walk with a bit of a stoop and a shuffle, no hint of any confident strut showing through; accept whatever Authority gives you without question or complaint; and make sure you’re always securely tucked into the middle of a crowd of other people, safely out of easy sight whenever you’re out and about, and you’ll be all right. Probably. Think “grey, ordinary, bland” so hard you actually project that image bodily, so that the aura of your shy, harmless nature rises off of you in visible waves.

For more on this, you want to take a leisurely stroll through the indispensable Julie Kelly’s AmGreat Jan 6 “riot” archive. These columns are an unflinching examination at the mid-to-late stages of America’s godawful descent from more-or-less proper governance into Tyranny Most Dire, vital material for anyone with a stomach strong enough to handle them. It’s dismal, ugly stuff, trust me it is—achingly painful reading for any poor naif still clinging to the battered belief in the ongoing existence of his cherished but long-extinct Republic, however far afield it may have strayed from the golden dreams of its Founders. Be sure you have a fifth of something stout handy when you do this. Trust me, you’re going to need it.

And yet, after the bloodiest war in our history—and with a sizable component of “peace Democrats” in the North actively rooting and voting against Lincoln in the election of 1864 while supporting his opponent: the failed Union general George McClellan—they’re still around to plague us. It wasn’t until the arrival of Ulysses S. Grant as commander of all the Union armies in 1864 that Honest Abe found the right man for the job: someone who would mercilessly crush the life out of the Democrats and their armies, destroy slavery, and reunite the states.

The midterms are still eight months away but Real America is crying out for succor right now.

Well, DUH. They’re worried, they’re out of work, the grocery-store pickin’s are mighty slim. Which is no real issue anyhow: even if there WAS food on those shelves like in the Goode Olde Days of yore, they couldn’t afford to buy any thanks to Bidenflation. Certainly, a few gallons of gas for the drive over is WAY out of reach. For the first time since the Great Depression, Americans are confronting real deprivation and want, after long luxuriating in the plenitude created by the system they passively watched being ruined a-purpose, when they weren’t actively helping destroy it. Worse, as I’ve said before, this is only the beginning of our national nightmare. When it will end, IF it will end, is known only to God Himself.

I only wish I could believe that this planned disaster, with its concomitant needless suffering, would be enough for Americans to finally and fully understand what the bitter, toxic fruits of Demonrat rule have been for nigh on a century, and to firmly decide they don’t want anything more to do with the lousy bastards. If the howling hell-storm now unfurling all around us finishes the criminal conspiracy masquerading as a political party for good, erasing all traces of their malignant misrule forever, I’d consider it well worth the suffering. Sorry, but I can’t.

Hoping that their Uniparty partners-in-crime might be taken down along with the Dems is just bugfiucknuts. Oh, I suppose it’s barely&mdas;BARELY—possible, sure. But it’s wildly, grotesquely improbable. Nobody should waste any time fantasizing about it, lest such useless woolgathering obscure or distract us from the arduous real-world work required to actually get the thing done.

Gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, natural gas—the prices continue to soar, already past the point of recent plausibility and heading into economic terra incognita. Millions of illegal aliens pour across the nearly erased southern border. A befuddled Joe Biden threatens to sleepwalk us into an armed conflict with the ghost of the old Soviet Union in the form of Vladimir Putin’s Russia, and disinformation is rife on both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine. In a parliamentary system, Biden’s government would have fallen right after the debacle in Afghanistan—but barring a miracle we’ve got another three years to suffer.

For just over a year, Americans have watched with admirable patience as their economy collapsed, their legal system was perverted to serve the interests of a few, their nation’s military degraded, and their freedom of speech subverted via the government’s fascistic and unconstitutional co-opting of the social media sites. Meanwhile, woke corporations and a thoroughly compromised media crack down on the commercial and personal privacy of anybody that runs afoul of the New Normal while manic Greens demand a return to the days of three-masted schooners and windmills. Such relentless cultural and economic sabotage would be considered an act of war if done by anyone else—but here it goes by the fellow-traveler names of “dissent,” “patriotism,” and “progressivism.”

Walsh goes on from there to lob a few undeserved stinkbombs at Trump as if he was still at all relevant, and then this:

The other is Florida governor Ron DeSantis. Smart, pugnacious, and unflappable, DeSantis has emerged as the chief thorn in Joe Biden and the Left’s side. After his narrow win over a guy who was later found dead drunk in a Miami Beach hotel room he was sharing with a gay porn producer who had overdosed on crystal meth, DeSantis has cemented his hold on the former swing state, turning it solid red. Unlike Trump, who at the moment is powerless, the squeaky-clean DeSantis upstages Biden and the Democrats on a regular basis; his canny and unflappable handling of the “pandemic” has given rise to a new nickname for the Sunshine State: the Free State of Florida.

DeSantis, 43, can make no public noises about seeking the presidency at this point. He must get past his re-election for governor in the fall first and hope the voters rally to take back control of Congress from the narrowest-of-narrow Democrat majorities. With his wife, Casey, now seemingly recovered from a bout with cancer, he is sitting pretty.

It’s widely thought that if Trump declares, DeSantis will wait his turn in 2028. But why should he spend four years on ice behind a lightning rod with no further political future? Polls already show him creeping up on Trump and a smashing re-election victory will only gain him more prominence. Lots can happen in three years, especially when his possible primary opponent is getting on in years. After Biden, will America want another geriatric president? Or will the voters prefer a guy 32 years younger, with nothing but upside?

I hope and pray he stays on in Florida instead. DeSantis can render the remaining handful of non-authoritarian fragments of what was once the great American republic far greater service there than in Mordor On The Potomac, where the Deep State’s legions of orcs, trolls, and winged Nazgul will rip him to bloody gobbets of raw meat as they did Trump.

Sorry, Mike, but there really, truly is no voting our way out of this. However it comes about, something far more direct, proactive, and potent than toodling on over to the local polling place to cast a meaningless ballot in a systemically corrupt “election” is gonna be required of us. Possibly, a way may yet be found short of actual, violent revolution against the bloated, evil Federal Leviathan. We should all pray for that. But it WILL involve some level of violent upheaval, of that I’m certain. The yawning divide between us is simply unbridgeable to allow for anything less, and unless and until the Left’s marrow-deep megalomania is well and truly extinguished the conflict will rage on, even intensify.

For my own part, I find myself losing interest more and more in national politics and the DC doings. After all we’ve witnessed since Inauguration Day 2016, the DC charade and rot so gallantly exposed by Trump has left me largely indifferent as to who might be installed in the now-tainted White House as figurehead-of-state, beyond whatever entertainment value one can derive from it. Our self-declared Masters are gonna do what they’re gonna do regardless, leaving the workaday schlubs to pay the freight for their disastrously inept folly as per usual. Until they’ve been thrown off, by hook or by crook, there really isn’t a whole lot for the little guy to do other than just grin and bear it.

Update! More on Brandon’s wholly-intentional and pre-planned fuel-price assault on America.

Nonprofit food deliveries concerned cost of gas could price out volunteer drivers
It’s never been more expensive for volunteer food drivers to make deliveries for nonprofits. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high.

Meals on Wheels volunteer driver Sal Depasquale brings food to 89-year-old Frances Crowder once a week.

“He’s always on time,” Crowder said. “Oh boy, I don’t know what we’d do without Mr. Sal.”

Inserted betwixt the above paragraph and the next one, we find one of those ubiquitous clickbait links to another related article, which I found modestly amusing:

BIDEN: ‘CAN’T DO MUCH RIGHT NOW’ TO LOWER SOARING GAS PRICES, ‘RUSSIA’S RESPONSIBLE’

Gratifying to see this hapless liar floundering so desperately, innit? Allow me to translate Dopey Gropey’s usual ham-fisted prevarication into Truth:

  • Say not “can’t,” Gropey. Say “won’t,” or if that doesn’t suffice to keep the risible, pathetic attempt at deception semi-viable and your lying ass covered, try “have no desire to” instead.
      • Okay, the closing schnauzer-slodder is getting quite damned stale at this point. After so many years watching you blaggards fellate your beloved USSR, all dewy-eyed and face lovingly aflush as you were gratingly demanding the US hew closely to its horrid example, later compounded by your latest beloved candidate for Token First Female President’s use of the Rooskies to underhandedly, illegally, even treasonously slither her way into the White House, your sudden volte face into frothing hatred for all things Russia and/or Putin has a distinctly malodorous aroma wafting from it. As for Putin himself, I just can’t make myself jump into those waters along with everybody and his sister’s cat’s grandmother, seemingly. Yes, yes, yes: dictator, strongman, warlord, thug—got it, granted, so stipulated. So what the bloody deuce did y’all expect from Russia, anyway? I mean, it’s Russia, ferchrissake. Throughout its history, whenever they’ve slipped up and allowed somebody who really WASN’T one or all of those things to take power as head of state, they’ve bestirred themselves to correct the error toot sweet. I do heartily disapprove of his jumping poor Poland, yes; I would much prefer the valiant, indomitable, and admirable Poles to remain free and independent. But is there a soul so innocent and/or oblivious as to have been at all surprised by it?

      His deplorable Ukraine incursion aside, though, which I’m confident will be undone sooner rather than later, I must confess I’m just a wee mite fond of Putin. His sneering, openly-expressed contempt for President Mommy Jeans I thoroughly enjoyed; his proud basking in traditional masculinity and its multitude of related sins, with none of the obllgatory genuflecting and fashionable groveling towards the LGBTQIXN39Whatthefuckever herd-orthodoxy I find refreshing. He’s something of a throwback to an earlier era, a more clear, natural, and honest age. I must say, if the choice was offered of either Putin or the decrepit bleeding hemorrhoid we’re suffering under now as the US president, I’d take the unevolved Rooskie trog any day of the week, and twice on Sundays. We could use a strong, no-bullshit leader like ol’ Vlad right about now, I think.

In any event, Brandon’s odd reflex to blame anything and everything on Russia has not a thing to do with reality and everything to do with Gropey’s will to somehow survive politically, to stanch the copious bleeding of his innumerable self-inflicted wounds. But enough of that, back to the original topic we go.

Meals on Wheels is a nonprofit food delivery service. Depasquale has been a volunteer driver for more than 10 years. 

“It’s a valuable service, and it helps people who need help,” Depasquale said.

It’s never been more expensive for drivers to make deliveries. The cost of gas in Georgia is more than $4 per gallon, an all-time high. Depasquale makes three or four deliveries every week. He’s concerned if prices continue to skyrocket, volunteer drivers like him will drop out. This could dramatically increase his workload and pain at the pump.

Cross Services, Meals on Wheels’s parent company, is watching gas prices around the country. The company still has enough drivers to make deliveries, but are afraid that could change if prices stay this high.

“Hopefully we’ll retain them,” said Cross Services Senior Services Coordinator Mary Jo Buettner. “But, again it depends on how long that price of gas stays up so high and keeps going up.”

As long as Democrats are in charge, be assured that that is precisely what they’ll do. For them, this situation is no disaster, no terrible problem that must be remedied. It represehts the successful implementation of a long-standing policy goal—a win, not a loss or mistake. The misery will not just continue, but increase…until they have been removed from power. Far from being complex or difficult to understand, it really is just that simple, folks.

Want to Make America Great Again, Heritage Americans in flyover country, small towns, and suburban enclaves? You have to Make Democrats Afraid Again, then see to it they stay that way. Like it or not, it’s the only way; nothing less will do the trick.

A final note: my brother tells me that his conversations with other truckers indicate that, should diesel passe the five-dollar/gallon mark, a large number of his fellow independents and owner/operators intend to shut ’em down. They’ll do it too; they’ll have to, they won’t have any choice in the matter. My brother his own self is near that point already; he told me the other day that his every-other-day fillup, formerly around 250 to 300 dollars, cost him well over eight hundred bucks last time. No business can go on hemorrhaging that kind of money for very long before quickly bleeding out. Think the huge truck-driver shortage, a genuinely dangerous situation, couldn’t possibly get much worse than it already is? Think the price of every good, every commodity, can’t keep rising so insanely? Think this is a crisis we’re in now? Just you wait until thousands more trucks, the lifeblood of our economy, have been taken off the road for good.

Again: only the beginning, now unstoppable, needless and nonsensical. All of it, every last bit, a man-caused disaster created entirely and intentionally by Leftard Democrats, for nefarious purposes. That’s the long and the short of it. I won’t be lending my endorsement by participating further in American “elections,” as if they were above-board and credible, thereby granting tacit, open-ended license to my oppressors to do as they please, rather than the bread-and-circuses theatrical distraction they in fact are. But I do wish someone who feels differently about it would sit down and explain to me how ANY decent, reasonably intelligent and informed adult—seeing all that we’ve seen, knowing all that we know, at least nominally awake and of sound mind generally—could even hypothetically justify voting for a Democrat, ever.

And yet.

Where such people are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes, when I’m in a twee coffee bar or near a spontaneous drum circle, I can feel them.

The mind, it boggles.

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CF Glossary

ProPol: Professional Politician

Vichy GOPe: Putative "Republicans" who talk a great game but never can seem to find a hill they consider worth dying on; Quislings, Petains, Benedicts, backstabbers, fake phony frauds

Fake Phony Fraud(s), S'faccim: two excellent descriptors coined by the late great WABC host Bob Grant which are interchangeable, both meaning as they do pretty much the same thing

Mordor On The Potomac: Washington, DC

The Enemy: shitlibs, Progtards, Leftards, Swamp critters, et al ad nauseum

Burn, Loot, Murder: what the misleading acronym BLM really stands for

pAntiFa: an alternative spelling of "fascist scum"

"Mike Hendrix is, without a doubt, the greatest one-legged blogger in the world." ‐Henry Chinaski

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Correspondence

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Allied territory

Alternatives to shitlib social media: A few people worth following on Gab:

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Notable Quotes

"America is at that awkward stage. It's too late to work within the system, but too early to shoot the bastards."
—Claire Wolfe, 101 Things to Do 'Til the Revolution

Claire's Cabal—The Freedom Forums

FREEDOM!!!

"There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters."
—Daniel Webster

“When I was young I was depressed all the time. But suicide no longer seemed a possibility in my life. At my age there was very little left to kill.”
—Charles Bukowski

“A slave is one who waits for someone to come and free him.”
—Ezra Pound

“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it’s profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.”
—Frank Zappa

“The right of a nation to kill a tyrant in case of necessity can no more be doubted than to hang a robber, or kill a flea.”
—John Adams

"A society of sheep must in time beget a government of wolves."
—Bertrand de Jouvenel

"It is terrible to contemplate how few politicians are hanged."
—GK Chesterton

"I predict that the Bush administration will be seen by freedom-wishing Americans a generation or two hence as the hinge on the cell door locking up our freedom. When my children are my age, they will not be free in any recognizably traditional American meaning of the word. I’d tell them to emigrate, but there’s nowhere left to go. I am left with nauseating near-conviction that I am a member of the last generation in the history of the world that is minimally truly free."
—Donald Sensing

"The only way to live free is to live unobserved."
—Etienne de la Boiete

"History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid."
—Dwight D. Eisenhower

"To put it simply, the Left is the stupid and the insane, led by the evil. You can’t persuade the stupid or the insane and you had damn well better fight the evil."
—Skeptic

"There is no better way to stamp your power on people than through the dead hand of bureaucracy. You cannot reason with paperwork."
—David Black, from Turn Left For Gibraltar

"If the laws of God and men, are therefore of no effect, when the magistracy is left at liberty to break them; and if the lusts of those who are too strong for the tribunals of justice, cannot be otherwise restrained than by sedition, tumults and war, those seditions, tumults and wars, are justified by the laws of God and man."
—John Adams

"The limits of tyranny are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress."
—Frederick Douglass

"Give me the media and I will make of any nation a herd of swine."
—Joseph Goebbels

“I hope we once again have reminded people that man is not free unless government is limited. There’s a clear cause and effect here that is as neat and predictable as a law of physics: As government expands, liberty contracts.”
—Ronald Reagan

"Ain't no misunderstanding this war. They want to rule us and aim to do it. We aim not to allow it. All there is to it."
—NC Reed, from Parno's Peril

"I just want a government that fits in the box it originally came in."
—Bill Whittle

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